Love for Life

We Often Get The Terminology Wrong
By Jim Bernard
3rd October 2008

The Senate voted last night to burden the entire nation with Wall Street’s mistakes. Only a handful of Senators dared oppose the measure, among them Bernie Sanders, a socialist from Vermont:

People can spend their whole lives talking about politics and think they are speaking correctly, yet be quite wrong . In the extract above Mr Sanders is described as a socialist, but in the extract from an interview with him below he says that basically he just believes in democracy and the provision of more government funded services. It might be more true to describe him as a social democrat. To be a serious socialist - he would have to be in favor of a serious redistribution of wealth in the US.

AMY GOODMAN: And if people ask, “What do you mean, ‘socialist’?” what would you say?

REP. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, I think it means the government has got to play a very important role in making sure that as a right of citizenship, all of our people have health care; that as a right, all of our kids, regardless of income, have quality childcare, are able to go to college without going deeply into debt; that it means we do not allow large corporations and moneyed interests to destroy our environment; that we create a government in which it is not dominated by big money interest. I mean, to me, it means democracy, frankly. That’s all it means. And we are living in an increasingly undemocratic society in which decisions are made by people who have huge sums of money. And that’s the goal that we have to achieve.

I almost never use those political words which end in ....ism.

Years ago I was handing out how to vote cards for some candidate at an election and some other people who were doing likewise for other candidates, were talking historically about various political systems of government and one man who could have been an estate agent given his smart clothes and confident demeanour, said " Well they are all the same basically I imagine"

He was referring to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and mainland China and a few more.

A pretty laughable statement if you knew that they have been as different as chalk and cheese. But all of them have been described with words ending in ...ism

Fascism, socialism etc.

Karl Marx was many things, a brilliant economist , (who incidentally predicted the very economic turmoil that is about to sweep the world and he was writing more than 150 years ago) a man who was both Jewish and German, but also a man fiercely independent of mind who spent many years trying to make ends meet financially and often being evicted from premises for non payment of rent.

It did not need to be so. If He had taken a conservative stance and written middle of the road articles for newspapers, he could have been a well paid Journalist leading a comfortable lifestyle.

But he was interested in a possibly better economic system than the one we have had for several centuries, so he mostly wrote criticisms of the economic system we have which ironically is officially known by another ....ism word . it is called Capitalism.

Though most ordinary people are told that we live in a free enterprise economic system because it sounds better.

Some observers would say that free enterprise really means wealthy people with money to invest (sometimes unintentionally but nevertheless still) taking advantage of poorer people.

Poor people can't share in the supposed advantages of our free enterprise system because they have little or no money to invest. So they usually have to work long hours for comparatively low wages at jobs they would prefer not to do, while those less numerous members of our society (often somewhere between ten to thirty percent of the population) live well on high incomes and have cushy jobs as well.

One thing that can be clearly stated is that regardless of the type of ism they live under - poorer people generally are disadvantaged around the world.

But Marx was a good scholar who ironically was conversant with the Bible.

He did not like the churches much, because in his times they were often very big owners of land in many countries and they used to ask high rents from poor farmers etc So he could not see much difference between the attitudes of the church and that of greedy Landlords who exploited poor people.

Unfortunately the churches did not like his criticisms and feared losing a lot of their landholdings if his supporters got into government, so they did their best to denigrate him and his followers by saying that they were ' Atheists '

Marx would have been puzzled by this because he would have wondered what his religious beliefs or lack thereof had to do with poor people being exploited.

But for over a hundred years that was a powerful weapon used against him and his followers. "

They are atheists so they must be evil ! " and ordinary people tended to think that might have been true, yet 99 per cent of what Marx wrote was criticism of a financial system that he felt was not run in the interests of ordinary people.

Personally I am a bit annoyed with Marx because while he was a good ' silver dollar ' (a slang expression for scholar) he did something completely unforgivable.

He stole the best passage in the Bible and made it the motto for his political movement !

Now you are wondering what that might have been - right ?

In the section of the Bible called ; The Acts of the Apostles, This is what happened after the death of Jesus

Acts 2:45

All who believed came together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. (from each according to his ability and to each according to his need)

You see Marx was looking for a model for a better society and this seemed like a pretty good alternative. Instead of wealthy people taking advantage of poor people as still happens in our society, Everyone just shares what they have (more or less) and you get a much more fairer pleasant society for everyone.

Where has this happened you ask?

Well over many centuries in the churches, going back to the time of Jesus their have been Christian communities living this kind of common sharing lifestyle.

They tend not to be rich people but they are more comfortable in their lifestyle than if they were living on their own. They grow their own vegetables, often have their own orchards for fruit, and these are shared for free in their community.

Often the houses they live in were built on someone's farm and the only cost was the cost of the building materials, which might have been timber cottages etc.

But their are other advantages to living this kind of lifestyle. I have known quite wealthy people who live in expensive homes, yet can be fairly lonely.

If you live in a little community of fifty people or more with children, farm animals etc then you tend not to be lonely, there are always people to talk to and joke with. Which is something we all need.

We are social beings - who like to communicate with others.

We sometimes become stressed if we are unable to do so.

So there have been lots of successful christian communities over the centuries and even within the churches there have been christian communities . Usually religious people living in monasteries.

They would live on fairly large properties and grow their own vegetables etc and live quite happily without incomes as we might know them.

Now Marx was aware of the benefits of living in a communal society and that is why he pinched the words " from each according to his ability and to each according to his need " as the motto for his political movement .

Incredibly the word ' Communist ' was intended to refer to people living in a communal society. A society like a christian community on a grand scale.

One of the great Ironies of all time has been that the followers of Marx while being denounced as atheists by the churches, were indirectly trying to set up a basically christian society.

Don't laugh - it was true !

How could they ever misunderstand each other so much ?

Well, you have to appreciate that very wealthy people like being very wealthy and do not like any politician or political movement that might make them less wealthy. So they use their wealth to undermine those they don't like.

You might have heard of the prohibition period in America. What supposedly happened was that some ladies who were upset with the menfolk consuming too much alcohol put pressure on the US politicians to ban the sale of alcohol. This actually happened;

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and importation of intoxicating liquors, was ratified on 16 January 1919. Its provisions went into force a year and a day later, on 17 January 1920.

Prohibition remained in effect until the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment, which was ratified on 5 December 1933 with immediate effect.

But what most people don't know is that John D Rockefeller was a big Oil producer and alcohol was not only consumed as an alcoholic beverage, it was burnt for home lighting in lamps and also in a high percentage of motor vehicles as fuel.

John D R probably did not care about alcohol as a beverage but he liked the idea of it not being used as a fuel in motor vehicles as then people would have to switch to using his Oil and petroleum in their vehicles.

Apparently he paid the temperance ladies four million dollars ( which in todays terms would be something like Eighty million dollars) to put pressure on the politicians to ban the production and sale of alcohol.

Lots of farmers had alcohol producing equipment on their farms making alcohol from vegetable wastes etc ( what is called ethanol these days) and it was a big business.

But the ban on alcohol closed all that down. People still consumed alcohol in secret but Suddenly Rockefeller had the Automobile fuel business almost to himself.

He arranged this undemocratic conspiracy when he was about eighty years of age, and he lived till he was 97 years of age .

But you can imagine how a greedy unprincipled man like him would feel about about any political movement which might have lessened his wealth.

" Off with their heads " would have been his attitude.

So big business would oppose any political movement which was not in their interests. And they always have.

So they would get the newspapers and other media outlets to give a bad image of any politician or political movement that they did not approve of.

So with the churches calling them ' atheistic ' and big business prepared to oppose them at all times including rigging elections across different countries including the US, there were limited democratic options available to the followers of Marx.

Marx got a few things wrong. He thought that what is happening in the US now - was going to happen there at least a hundred years ago. He never thought that followers of his would gain control of Russia and other countries first.

So if his followers actually had good intentions, and were working on installing a basically Communal society in Russia for instance, what went wrong ?

Well some people like extreme wealth and influence, while other people like exercising political power .

You have to be a fairly strong type of person to become a political leader.

These people tend not to spend their time giving sermons in churches.

Joseph Stalin for instance was a very strong personality but not very democratic.

He had a very harsh childhood. Both his mother and father would beat him as a child . This was normal in their society, which was amazingly violent.

On some nights - neighbors would brawl in the streets like as if it was a social event. This was the culture he was born into.

But it is a bit much to expect that he would suddenly turn into a warm open hearted individual just because he became leader of the country.

Some would say that he had good intentions and was interested in creating a better society but he was to become somewhat paranoid and fearful of being replaced by his political rivals , so he was inclined to seek to remove them before they removed him.

I am no apologist for people like Joseph Stalin but there are some people who can show a long list of things that he allowed to happen which were good for the Russian people. He made a mistake in trusting Hitler before the second world war, and it was not necessary to treat people as badly as he did at times within Russia. But it was his cold and calculating personality that was largely the problem.

The point that I am making is that politics can be very different than you think it is.

Karl Marx was inclined to think that the best type of society was one based on the lifestyle and principles of a Christian Community ?

What a laugh, but true.

At one point he was becoming frustrated at being misquoted and misrepresented and he said, " I am not a Marxist " !

He was probably half joking, but it illustrates that it is easy to attribute certain views to people and put labels on them that they do not always accept.

These days I understand a lot of these issues but I feel that the various ...isms create more confusion than necessary so I call myself a radical Christian with a belief in the value of democracy and Christian communal living.

Jim

www.jimbernard.org