Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of ViewBrown, William Montgomery
Religion
Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View
Brown, William Montgomery
Christian socialism; Communism; Communism and Christianity
"Said the parson, 'Be content;
Pay your tithes due, pay your rent;
They that earthly things despise
Shall have mansions in the skies,
Though your back with toil be bent,'
Said the parson, 'be content.'
"Then the parson feasting went
With my lord who lives by rent;
And the parson laughed elate
For my lord has livings great,
They that earthly things revere
May get bishop's mansions here.
"Be content! Be content!
Till your dreary life is spent,
Lowly live and lowly die,
All for mansions in the sky!
Castles here are much too rare,
All may have them--in the air!"
III.
According to Marxian socialism, the history of man arose from the need
of his body for food, raiment and shelter. This is the materialistic
explanation of history, and the following is one of the passages in
which Marx clearly shows that it is true and reasonable:
In the social production which men carry on they enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage
of development of their material powers of production. The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society--the real foundations, on which rise legal and
political superstructures and which correspond to definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political and
spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social
existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the
property relations within which they had been at work before. From
forms of development of the forces of production these relations
turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social
revolution.
Marx and his followers are justified in their contention that the
physical necessities of man (not gods or great men) constitute the key
to his history by the fact that there was no mind of man before the
human body nor will there be any mind when the body has been
disintegrated; for the mind was made by the body, for the body, not the
body by the mind, for the mind. This very remarkable fact, when duly
considered, will change nearly all the ideas of most men and women about
almost everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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