Foundations of Christianity by Karl Kautsky (1908)

[struggle4progress]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/

Another of my sporadic efforts to notice interesting approaches to religion


In his time, Kautsky was a leading Marxist

In America, of course, one can scarcely mention Marx without being completely misunderstood, partly because Americans reflexively identify Marx with the former Soviet Union, although his political ideas were based on Western Europe, and Marx did not really expect a communist state to emerge in Russia. His writing was alternately philosophical, historical, polemical, moralistic, political, and economic. Exploitation was the fundamental problem Marx confronted, and he confronted it with vigorous pragmatic outrage. One of his key insights was that society is composed of disparate groups with differing interests: what might benefit factory owners did not necessarily coincide with what might benefit office workers, whose own interests could be expected to differ from those of farmers or half-employed day laborers. Left to themselves, each such group would tend to develop a culture and a collection of self-justifications appropriate to their own circumstances: such views would be conditioned by local events and traditions, and real effort was required to escape from the grip of such narrow ideas. In particular, Marx himself was not a economic determinist, and during his own life he sometimes distanced himself from various so-called "Marxists"

To say that Kautsky was a leading Marxist (in 1908 at least) meant (among other things) that Kautsky was an atheist and a materialist, that he was interested in practical class politics and that he was convinced that history was governed by definite and knowable scientific laws. Kautsky attempts here to examine early Christianity in the context of the economies, histories, and politics that existed when Christianity originate

To say that Kautsky's work remains interesting and thought-provoking and worth a glance, does not mean he was completely right or beyond any reproach: we, for example, being separated from him by a century of dreadful history, know things he could not have foreseen and hence have sensitivities and sensibilities that would have been alien to him. And surely an intervening hundred years of scholarship will prove his history and anthropology want correction. Beyond that are inevitable matters of philosophical taste and theological commitments

But Kautsky begins by claiming his insights are based on experience, rather than philosophy -- and by pointing out that is motives are not philosophical

Author’s Foreword

... But perhaps it was just my intensive involvement in the class struggle of the proletariat that made it possible for me to get insights into the essence of primitive Christianity that escape the professors of theology and religious history ... A man never gets far with mere looking-on, without entering into things practically ... A thinker thus equipped who takes up the study of a field in which he is active, is likely to achieve results that would be impossible for him as a spectator ... A practical politician, if he has scholarly training, will understand political history better and find his way around in it better than a library scholar who lacks the least practical acquaintance with what makes politics go ...

... We see that identical words change their meaning over the centuries, that ideas and institutions that resemble each other externally have a different content, because they arise out of the needs of different classes under different conditions ...

In order to bring the proletariat to social insight, to self-consciousness and political maturity, to large-scale thinking, it is indispensable to study the historical process with the aid of the materialist conception of history. In this way the study of the past, far from being mere dilettante antiquarianism, will become a powerful weapon in the struggles of the present, in order to hasten the attainment of a better future ...

After rejecting rejects any literal historical interpretation of the gospels, Kautsky nevertheless views the texts as sources of valuable historical information

Book One: The Person Of Jesus

I. The Pagan Sources

... But even if we leave miracles out of account, it is hard to see how a personality like the Jesus of the gospels, who according to them aroused such excitement in people’s minds, could carry on his work and finally die as a martyr for his cause and yet not have pagan and Jewish contemporaries devote a single word to him ...

The first mention of Jesus by a non-Christian is found in ... Josephus .... Its authenticity was disputed even in the sixteenth century, and today it is agreed that it is a forgery ... Like the mention of Jesus and James, the reference to John the Baptist in Josephus .. is also suspect as an “interpolation” ....

The next mention of Jesus by a non-Christian writer is ... Tacitus .... Suetonius, writing shortly after Tacitus, also speaks ... of a persecution of Christians .... But Suetonius tells us nothing at all of Jesus and Tacitus does not even hand down his name ...

And that is all that we learn about Jesus from non-Christian sources of the first century ...

II. The Christian Sources

... It is certain that almost none of the early Christian writings are by the authors whose names they bear; that most of them were written in later times than the dates given them; and that their original text was often distorted in the crudest way by later revisions and additions. Finally, it is certain that none of the Gospels or other early Christian writings comes from a contemporary of Jesus ...

In a word, there is hardly anything left in the Christian literature that can be said to be a solidly established fact about Jesus.

III. The Dispute Over the Concept of Jesus

... THE factual core of the early Christian reports about Jesus is at best no more than what Tacitus tells us: that in the days of Tiberius a prophet was executed, from whom the sect of Christians took their inspiration ...

Poetical creations are often far more important for understanding a period than the most faithful historical accounts ... And out of the gospels and the acts of the apostles, similarly, we can not learn anything definite as to the life and doctrine of Jesus, but very valuable things about the social character, the ideals and aspirations of the primitive Christian communities ...

In the second book, Kautsky discusses the origin of Roman warfare as a consequence of commercial interests and its continuation as a source of tribute and slaves. The presence of a large slave population changed the Roman economy and political landscape over an extended period: the system naturally tended towards incompetence and corruption, with effects in popular culture

Book Two: Society in the Roman Empire

I. The Slave Economy

Landed Property

The basis of the mode of production of the countries comprising the Roman Empire was agriculture ... All these classes, bigger farmers, merchants, craftsmen live on the surplus created by labor on the land ... Soon the big landowners make use .. of their powerful position .. to take the surpluses of the work of peasants and craftsmen ... So peasants and craftsmen are overtopped by various layers of big exploiters, large landowners and merchants ... Everybody strove to get land ...

Domestic Slavery

But owning land is nothing without labor power to work it ... Only compulsion could supply the necessary labor for the larger landed estates. The answer was slavery ... The position of the slaves was determined by the character of the master and the prosperity of the families they belonged to ... But it changed in aspect when it came to serve moneymaking, as labor on great enterprises distinct from the master’s household.

Slavery in Commodity Production

... As soon as mining had developed at a place where valuable minerals are found, and gone beyond the most primitive surface work, it called for larger and larger working forces ... These slaves no longer produced consumption objects for the limited personal use of their master; they worked to make money for him ... The proprietor of a rich household had no other outlet for his surplus food and consumption-goods than to provide them for his slaves and guests; but now, under commodity production, the more money the enterprise earned, the less the slaves consumed ...

There was only one motive for sparing the slave, the same as for sparing an ox: the cost of buying the slave ... And there were times when their price fell enormously, when unending wars, civil and foreign, brought numerous captives on the market. In the Romans’ third war against Macedonia in 169 B.C. seventy cities in Epirus alone were sacked and 150,000 of their inhabitants sold as slaves ...

The Technological Inferiority of the Slave Economy

... Unintelligent, half-hearted, malicious, glad of any chance to do harm to their hated tormentor, the slave labor of the latifundia produced far less than peasant farms. In the first century A.D. Pliny was already pointing out how fruitful the fields of Italy had been when generals were not ashamed to do their own farming ...

The Economic Decline

... These men and women had been swept together from all sorts of nations and coarsened and brutalized by constant mistreatment and labor in chains under the crack of the whip. They were embittered, desperate with thirst for revenge and hopelessness, always inclined to violent rebellion; but unable, because of the low intellectual level of the barbarian elements that formed the majority among them, to overthrow the existing order of the state and found a new one, even though some outstanding minds among them looked forward to some such goal. The only kind of liberation they could attain was not the overthrow of society but flight from society, flight either into crime, into the ranks of the bandits, or flight over the borders of the Empire to join its enemies ...

The slave economy .. did not denote a technical advance, but a step backward. Not only did it make the masters impotent and incapable of working, and increase the number of unproductive workers in society, but it also cut down the productivity of the productive workers and checked the progress of technology ...

II. The State

State and Commerce

ALONG WITH slavery there were two other important methods of exploitation in ancient society ... These two were usury and the plunder of the conquered provinces ...

The wealth of goods that the merchant carried along with him compelled him to acquire military power to defend them; this military power in turn became a temptation to use it aggressively. The profit in trade was obtained by getting cheap and selling dear. The cheapest way to get things however was undoubtedly to take without payment what one wanted ... The merchant had need of his skill in arms not merely to procure his goods and gains as cheaply as he could, but also to keep competitors from the markets he frequented ...

Patricians and Plebeians

... The city needed such new citizens all the more as its military burdens rose with the growth of its wealth; for the families of the old citizens no longer sufficed now to supply the needed number of citizen soldiers ... As long as they are almost exclusively peasants, they take the absence of rights more or less calmly ... But the new citizenry does not remain confined to peasants only. Foreigners who come to the city and are useful to it receive citizenship ... As the state grew there came to be more and more of these elements, while the number of old citizens remained more or less the same. The latter gradually became relatively weaker ...

The Roman State

... Rome grew up at a spot where the Tiber .. is flanked by two easily fortifiable hills that afforded security for the goods entering and leaving. The country around was still .. solidly peasant, but north and south of it were economically advanced regions, Etruria and Campania, with strong industries, extensive trade, and an agriculture already based on unfree labor. From Africa came the Carthaginians with their wares ...

As soon as Rome had become strong enough to subdue the Etruscans, it learned what an excellent business war can be ... One city after another, one country after another fell almost of its own weight, to be plundered and put under perpetual tribute ... These conquests however did not give the Roman people mastery in the state, but only the right to choose its masters ...

The newly elected consuls and praetors had to spend their first year of office in Rome. In their second year each of them took over the government of a province, where he tried to get back the money he had spent on getting elected and if possible something over for himself. For he had no salary. The offices were “offices of honor.” On the other hand, the hope of getting rich in the provinces by extortion and bribery, and sometimes even by direct robbery, was one of the reasons for seeking office ...

In the year 53 B.C. the buying of votes caused such a demand for coin that the interest rate rose sharply and there was a money crisis ...

“Democracy,” that is the rule of the population of the whole Roman Empire of about 50 to 60 million people by a few hundred thousand Roman citizens, thus became one of the most powerful means of raising the looting and exploitation of the provinces to an extreme ...

But that was not all; in addition, Roman usury capital was loosed on the provinces

Usury

... Here a division of labor took place. Taking usurious interest from neighbors was not a business that required particular attention. The aristocrats could easily take care of that while farming their lands and governing the state. But it was hard to manage the usurious exploitation of Spain and Syria, Gaul and North Africa, and at the same time carry on the affairs of so enormous a state ... One of the principal ways of plundering the provinces was the farming of the taxes ... It often happened however that single cities or tributary kings could not pay the sums imposed on them. Here again the Roman men of money were prepared to advance the needed sums, naturally at a suitable rate of interest ... They also took interest from their own state itself, when it was caught short of funds ...

Absolutism

Rome killed political life in all the regions it conquered breaking their power of resistance and depriving them of all independence. All the politics of the enormous empire was concentrated in the one city of Rome. But in whom was the political life vested there. Moneyed men, whose only concern was how to pile interest on interest; aristocrats, reeling from one pleasure to another, to whom any regular work or effort, even government or making war, was repulsive; and lumpenproletarians, whose only means of support was selling their political power to the highest bidder ...

The army became more and more the master of the republic ... In this way the foundations were laid for Caesarism, by having the richest man in Rome buy up the republic by purchasing its political power. It was also the basis for having a successful general with an army at his back try to make himself the richest man of Rome; the simplest way to do this was to expropriate his opponents and confiscate their property ... Thus the Roman Empire became the domain, the private property of a single man, the Caesar or Emperor. All political life came to an end. The administration of this domain became the private affair of its proprietor ...

After Caesar’s victory there were only a few spots in the Roman world empire which still retained remnants of a political life ... The last place in which a vigorous political life survived was the capital of Palestine, Jerusalem ... After a long and obstinate siege Jerusalem was razed to the ground in the year 70 A.D., and the Jewish people were robbed of their homeland.

III. Thought and Sentiment in the Age of the Roman Empire

Insecurity

AS WE HAVE seen, the age in which Christianity arose was a time of utter decomposition of traditional forms of production and government. Correspondingly, there was a total breakdown of traditional ways of thinking. There was a general search and groping for new ways of thinking ...

But these moral preachers and father confessors were not enough for this unstable generation. The state was in uncontrollable decline. The barbarians were knocking more and more loudly at the doors of the Empire, which was often torn by the bloody rivalries of its generals. And the misery of the masses grew ... It had lost faith in itself, and the only support that kept it from total desperation was hope in help from a higher power ...

At first this savior was seen in the Caesars ... But the Caesars brought neither lasting peace nor an economic or moral uplift ... People regarded them as gods; even before the doctrine of God’s becoming man arose, the doctrine of a man’s becoming a god was accepted ... Julius Caesar however was the first who dared to demand of the Romans what the hireling Greeks gave him: divine honors ...

Credulity

... Between the supporters of the belief in Christ and those of Apollonius a lively competition in miracles soon arose. Under Diocletian one of his governors, Hierocles, wrote a book against the Christians, in which he maintained that Christ’s miracles were nothing in comparison with those of Apollonius and badly attested into the bargain. Eusebius of Caesarea answered in a refutation which did not express the slightest doubt as to the reality of Apollonius’ miracles, but sought to minimize them as being not God’s work but witchcraft, the work of dark demons ...

Untruthfulness

... Books circulated only in copies made either by the writers themselves or by a slave, if they were rich enough to have competent slaves. There were business men who kept slaves busy copying books, which were then sold at a high profit. How easy it was to falsify such a copy, to leave out a sentence one had no use for or add a sentence one needed, especially when the author was already dead, so that there would be no protest in that negligent and credulous age ...

These countless forgeries are one of the principal factors in making the history of the origin of Christianity so obscure to this day ...

This is not an attractive picture that we have to paint here. Decadence in every nook and corner, economic, political and hence also scientific and moral decay ... That is the picture the Imperial age presents us with and the picture whose features are reflected in Christianity, the product of that time.

Humaneness

... The interest which the Roman proletariat had in slavery is shown by the fact that even in the revolutionary actions they never showed opposition to the principle of property in human beings. Hence we occasionally find even the slaves ready to crush a proletarian uprising. It was slaves, led by aristocrats, that gave the death-blow to the proletarian movement of Caius Gracchus. Fifty years later Roman proletarians under the leadership of Marcus Crassus crushed the rebellious slaves led by Spartacus ...

Here it must be granted that under Christianity the attitude toward slavery became much more humane and the human rights of slaves came to be recognized ... What class claimed the right to unrestricted misuse and murder of slaves? Naturally, the class of rich landholders, above all the aristocracy. But the democracy, the common people, who owned no slaves, did not have the same interest in the right to mistreat slaves ... Gradually a swing in public opinion was built up, not because of the ennoblement of morality but because the composition of the Roman proletariat had changed ...

When the Caesars came to power, their household, like that of every noble Roman, was run by slaves and freedmen ... The slaves and freedmen of the emperor’s court became the rulers of the world ... It is clear what a tremendous effect this must have had on the attitude of the time toward slavery ... The aristocrats may have hated the slaves all the more, the more they had to bow down before some of them; the mass of the people began to respect the slave, and the slave to respect himself ...

The situation was more difficult in the year 61. The city prefect Pedanius Secundus was murdered by one of his slaves. The expiation of such a deed required, according to the old aristocratic law, the execution of all the slaves who were in the house at the time of the murder, in this case no fewer than 400 people, including women and children. Public opinion called for milder treatment. The masses of the people stood firmly for the slaves ... Then Caius Cassius ... warned the Senate not to let itself be cowed ... This agitator’s speech had an overwhelming effect; no one in the Senate contradicted him. Nero himself .. thought it best to remain silent. The slaves were all executed. But when the republican aristocrats, emboldened by this success, introduced a bill in the Senate to have the freedmen who had lived under one roof with the condemned slaves deported from Italy, Nero got up and declared that even if sympathy and pity were not to soften the old custom, at least it should not be made more rigorous; and the bill was defeated ...

The mildness of the imperial court and the proletariat alike toward the slaves must have been strongly supported by the fact that the slave was no longer a cheap commodity ...

Internationalism

... Roman citizenship was now freely given to the provincials. We see them entering the Senate and filling high offices. The Caesars were the first to put the principle of the equality of all men irrespective of origin into practical application: all men were equally their slaves ...

Romans, having ceased to furnish soldiers, soon were unable to furnish competent officials ... The first emperors were still descendants of old Roman aristocratic families ... But by the time the Julian dynasty had come to its third emperor, he was a madman ... Nero’s successor Galba came from a Roman patrician clan, but he was followed by Otho, of a noble Etruscan family and by Vitellius, a plebeian from Apulia. Finally, Vespasian, who founded the Flavin dynasty, was a plebeian of Sabine origin ... Domitian, Vespasian’s son, was followed, after the brief interregnum of Nerva, by the Spaniard Trajan. With him there begins the rule of the Spanish emperors which lasted almost a hundred years ... All the race and class prejudices of pagan antiquity had to disappear ...

Piety

... At the end of the republic the trend to form clubs and associations, mainly for political purposes but also for mutual aid, was conspicuous. The Caesars dissolved them ... In the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan there are letters in which Pliny recounts a conflagration that devastated Nicomedia, and recommends the formation of a voluntary fire company of not more than 150 men; these would be easy to watch. Trajan found this too dangerous however, and refused his assent ...

The only societies that maintained themselves under the Empire were religious ones, but it would be taking a mistaken view of them to let the religious form, the moralistic mysticism obscure the social content underlying all these associations which gave them their strength: the desire for a solution to the hopeless existing conditions, for higher forms of society, for close cooperation and mutual support on the part of the individuals lost in their isolation who drew new joy and courage from their coming together for high purposes ...

Monotheism

But monotheism, the belief in a single god, was not something peculiar to Christianity alone. And here too it is possible to get at the economic roots from which this idea came ...

The gods had originally served to explain what happened in nature, whose laws were not understood. These events were extremely numerous and of all kinds ... In the end, the progress of natural science would have completely done away with them ... The unity of mind in all men seemed explicable only on the hypothesis that it was everywhere a portion of the same mind ... The higher beings that interfered in the course of nature were now no longer sovereign gods, as before ... They were beings intermediate between God and men.

The course of political development gave support to this way of thinking. The downfall of the republic of gods in heaven went hand in hand with the downfall of the republic in Rome; God became the omnipotent emperor of the other world, and like Caesar he had his court, the saints and angels, and his republican opposition, the devil and his legions ...

Kautsky’s third book is somewhat of a mixed bag. Kautsky’s primary audience would have been early 20th Europeans, and his efforts to discuss Judaism frequently seems to incorporates some (but not all) popular anti-Semitic notions of his contemporaries. However, the historical details are often informative, especially the final sections on different social groups

Book Three: The Jews

I. Israel

Migrations of the Semitic Peoples

... The first authentic appearance of the Israelites on the stage of history is their invasion of the land of the Canaanites. All the stories of their nomadic era are either old tribal legends and tales reworked for propaganda purposes, or later fabrications. They come into history as participants in a great Semitic migration ...

The migrations played a role in the ancient world comparable to today’s revolutions ... As the aristocracy became stronger, it was natural for it to attempt to use its military power to increase its revenues ... The oppression of the peasants begins at this point, together with slave-hunting campaigns by the better-armed aristocrats ... Forced labor begins ... The free farmer is ruined and replaced by forced laborers. But that means that the basis of the empire’s military power disappears ... These neighbors see the growing weakness of the rich and tempting prey; they press harder and harder on its borders ... A part of the invaders takes possession of the land and creates a new free peasant class. Others who are stronger form a new military aristocracy ... Once the migration has come to rest, the development of the cycle begins all over again ... not a ten-year cycle, but one that takes many centuries ...

Toward the end of the second millennium before Christ another great Semitic migration sets in, driving toward Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, and coming to an end roughly in the eleventh century BC ...

Palestine

... Palestine was .. a border region, where hostile elements collided ... It lay in a place where on one side the Arabian desert came to an end and the Syrian civilized country began, and on the other the spheres of influence of the two great empires clashed: the Egyptian empire in the valley of the Nile, and the Mesopotamian on the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, with its capital now at Babylon and now at Nineveh ... Palestine was crossed by very important trade routes. It controlled traffic between Egypt on the one side and Syria and Mesopotamia on the other, together with commerce between Phoenicia and Arabia ...

It is already reported of Abraham that he was rich not only in cattle but also in silver and gold (Genesis 13, verse 2). The nomadic herdsmen could obtain these only by trade ...

The Conception of God in Ancient Israel

... At any rate it is no mere chance that all the monotheistic popular religions came from nations that were still in the nomadic mode of thought and had not developed any notable industry or art: along with the Jews, these were the Persians and later the Arabians of Islam, who adopted monotheism as soon as they came into contact with a higher urban civilization. Not only Islam but the Zend religion is monotheistic; this recognizes only one lord and creator of the world ...

Trade and Philosophy

The producer – peasant, craftsman, artist – is interested in the particular nature of his work, the particular nature of the stuff he has to work on; and he will increase the productivity of his labor power in the measure that he specializes his labor. His specific work ties him down to a specific place, to his land or his workshop. The determinateness of the work that occupies him thus produces a certain narrowness in his way of thinking ...

The activity of the merchant on the other hand has quite a different effect on him. He need not confine himself to the knowledge of a specific branch of production in a specific locality; the wider his view, the more branches of production he takes in, the more regions with their special needs and conditions of production, the sooner he will find out which commodities it is most profitable to deal in at a given time; the sooner he will find the markets where he can buy most profitably and those in which he can sell most profitably ...

Scientific thought could only arise in a class that was influenced by all those traits, experiences and knowledge that trade brought with it, but at the same time was free from the need for earning money and so had time and opportunity for, and joy in unprejudiced research, in solving problems without considering their immediate, practical and personal results ...

Trade and Nationality

... On the other hand it is hard to make out today what we should take to be the historical core in the legends of Joseph, the stay of the Hebrews in Egypt and their exodus under Moses. Equating them to the Hyksos, as Josephus does, is untenable. This much does seem to follow, that, if not all of Israel, at least single families and caravans of Hebrews early came to Egypt, where they were treated more or less well according to changing situations there, gladly received at some times and later harried and hunted as “burdensome” foreigners. That is the typical fate of such settlements of foreign traders from weak nations in powerful empires ...

Canaan, Road of the Nations

... In the struggle against the Hyksos (about 1800 to 1530 B.C.), a military spirit had arisen in Egypt; at the same time the Hyksos had greatly furthered communication between Egypt and Syria. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Egyptians turned to military expansion, above all in the direction of controlling the commercial route to Babylonia. They forced their way as far as the Euphrates, occupying Palestine and Syria. They were soon driven out of Syria by the Hittites; in Palestine they held out longer, from the fifteenth down to the twelfth century. There too they garrisoned a series of fortresses overawing the country, including Jerusalem ...

We are often told of the formation of robber bands in Israel, by Jephtha for example, “and there were gathered vain men to Jephtha, and went out with him,” (Judges 11, verse 3). Robber raids into the land of the Philistines are often spoken of. In the case of Samson, “the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil” to pay a lost bet (Judges 14, verse 19). David is shown beginning as the leader of a robber band, “and every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men” (I Samuel 22, verse 2) ...

David now won domination over the entire trade between Egypt and the north ... This was Israel’s golden age ... And yet it was precisely this position that was its ruin. Its commercial importance was not a secret to the great neighbor states. The more the country flourished under David and Solomon, the more it must have aroused the greed of its neighbors ... It is true the power of Egypt was no longer adequate to the task of permanently conquering Israel: that was so much the worse for Israel. Instead of becoming permanently tributary to a great state whose power would at least have brought it peace and protection from foreign enemies, it became the bone of contention between Egyptians and Syrians ...

The vigorous trade relations with neighboring countries brought their religious ideas, cults and images into the land. Hatred of the foreigner had more and more to become hatred of his gods ...

Class Struggles in Israel

... Previously the struggles of the Israelites had been little local feuds fur the most part, which did not take the peasant militiaman far from his soil or keep him away long; but it was no longer so once Israel was a more important state ... Military service now ruined the peasant anti made him dependent on his moneyed and influential neighbor, who became a usurer, with the choice of driving him from his little farm or leaving him there, only as a debt slave obliged to work out his deb ... For the most part they belonged to those unfortunate peoples that furnished slaves rather than acquired them. All this must have led the owners of the latifundia, who needed cheap and dependent labor forces, to prefer the debt slavery of their own countrymen, a system that has been preferred elsewhere, as for example in Russia after the abolition of serfdom, when the great landowners lack slaves or serfs ...

As a result of this process, there was a serious reduction in the military power of Israel ... The patriots and social reformers and friends of the people .. called the people and the kingdom to battle against the strange gods and the enemies of the peasant within the land. They prophesied the fall of the state if it was not able to put an end to the oppression and impoverishment of the peasantry.

“Woe unto them,” Isaiah cried, “that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth? ..

The fall of the peasantry and hence of the state was as irresistible in Israel as it was later in Rome ...

The Decline of Israel

... The Assyrians hit upon a system that promised greater permanence to their conquests: where they encountered stubborn resistance or experienced repeated rebellions, they crippled the nation by taking away its head, that is by stealing the ruling classes, by exiling the noblest, richest, most intelligent and warlike inhabitants, particularly of the capital, to a distant region, where the deportees were completely powerless without the lower stratum of ruled-over classes. The peasants and small handicraftsmen who were left behind now constituted a disconnected mass incapable of any armed resistance to the conquerors ...

The First Destruction of Jerusalem

... Sennacherib ... marching on Jerusalem (701) was compelled to return home by disorders in Babylon, and Jerusalem was saved ... That however did not save Judah by any means. Babylon now followed in the footsteps of Assyria and at once tried to get control of the road to Egypt ... Judah was handed from one to another, having lost all independence ... Babylon continued the old method of Assyria; but here too it was not the whole people that was deported, but only the royal court, the aristocrats, the military men and the propertied city dwellers, 10,000 men in all ... It would have been senseless to leave the land uninhabited, without people to cultivate it, for then it could have paid no taxes ...

II. The Jews After the Exile

The Exile

... In 538 Babylon was taken by the Persians without a blow being struck ... Cyrus, the Persian king, permitted the Jews to return. Their exile had lasted not quite fifty years ...

A whole series of legends in the Bible are of Babylonian origin: for example, the Creation of the world, Paradise, the Fall, the Tower of Babel, the Deluge ...

In contrast to the naive ideas of God among the Israelites, many of the priests among the civilized peoples that surrounded them had attained monotheism, at least in their secret teachings ... The colleges of priests in Babylon and Egypt had a vital interest in keeping their ultimate monotheistic views from the people, since their entire power and wealth rested on the traditional polytheistic cult; but it was a different matter with the priesthood of the fetish of the covenant at Jerusalem ...

Jewish monotheism ... was ethical in nature ... This introduced .. knotty contradictions into the Jewish religion. As an ethical god Jahveh is God of all mankind, since good and bad are .. valid for all men alike. And as an ethical god, as personification of the moral idea, the one God is everywhere, as morality is considered to be universally valid ... God as the epitome of the moral requirements which are the same for all men now became the God of all men, and yet remained the Jewish tribal god ... The task of the thinkers of Judaism was to combine the new ethics with the old fetishism ... And this reconciliation was to take place on the level .. of traditional beliefs ...

The Jewish Diaspora

... Palestine had lost all the advantages of its central position and kept all the disadvantages ... Since business did not come to them, they were forced to go out after business abroad ... In the year 3 B.C. a Jewish delegation to Augustus included over 8000 ...

The Jewish Propaganda

... Even before Christianity, Judaism manifested the same sort of zeal for instruction, with considerable success ... “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass land and sea to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves” (Matthew 28, verse 15). It is competition that speaks in so Christian a manner ...

Judaism was .. able to offer what was wanted to the minds of the declining ancient world, who doubted their traditional gods but lacked the strength to construct on their account a view of the world without gods or with but a single God; and all the more so because it tied belief in the one primeval ethical force to belief in a savior to come, for whom all the world was thirsting ... It was not superior to the philosophy of the “heathen” but to their religions ...

Anti-Semitism

The large landowners always got along very well with usury capital ... As a rule however they were hostile to trade.... As social discontent rose, anti-Semitism increased. Even then it was already the handiest and safest means of showing exasperation over the decline of state and society. It was too dangerous to attack the aristocrats and owners of latifundia, the usurers and the generals, let alone the despots on the throne ...

Jerusalem

... There were attempts to set up other shrines of Jahveh outside of Jerusalem. A certain Onias, the son of a Jewish High Priest, built a temple of Jahveh in Egypt under Ptolemy Philopator (173-146 B.C.), with the support of the king, who hoped that the Egyptian Jews would be more loyal subjects if they had a temple of their own in his country. But the new temple never amounted to much, precisely because it aimed at affirming the loyalty of the Jews of Egypt. In Egypt they were and remained aliens, a tolerated minority: how could a Messiah arise there to bring their people independence and national greatness? ... There was much more unpleasantness over a rival temple not far from Jerusalem on Mt. Gerizim near Shechem, built by .. Samaritans ...

The Sadducees

... The Sadducees represented the priestly nobility that had got hold of the power in the Jewish state and exercise it first under Persian domination and then under the successors of Alexander the Great. This group had unrestricted sway in the Temple and hence in Jerusalem and over all of Judaism. They received all the taxes that came to the Temple, which were not small. Up to the Exile the revenues of the priesthood were modest and irregular; after it, they grew mightily ... As early as the year too B.C. Josephus writes in his Antiquities: “The rich were on the side of the Sadducees, the mass of the people supported the Pharisees” (XIII, 10, 6) ...

The Pharisees

... The shrewd, worldly-wise Sadducees were perfectly well aware of the power relationships of their time ... The Pharisees however strove all the harder to shake the Roman yoke off by force as it lay heavier on Judea and was driving the people to desperation. The Maccabean insurrection had furnished a brilliant example of how a people .. should defend .. against a tyrant. The expectation of the Messiah had been a strong support for that insurrection ... Without such a miraculous leader even the most fanatical Pharisees considered it impossible to get rid of the oppressors. But they did not count on him alone. They proudly calculated how the number of their supporters was growing .. among the neighboring nations ...

The basis of the Revelation of John is a Jewish agitational pamphlet in the manner of the book of Daniel. It was probably composed during the period when Vespasian and then Titus were besieging Jerusalem. It prophesies a duel between Rome and Jerusalem. Rome is the woman that sitteth on seven mountains ...

The Zealots

... The robbers of Galilee and the proletarians of Jerusalem were in close contact and gave each other mutual support, and finally formed a party in common against the Pharisees, the party of the Zealots ...

During Herod’s last illness (4 B.C.) the people of Jerusalem rose in revolt against his innovations; above all the indignation was directed against a golden eagle that Herod had had put up over the Temple. The riot was put down by arms. But after Herod’s death the people rose again, at Passover, so violently that the troops of Archelaus, Herod’s son, had to spill much blood before the insurrection was quelled. Three thousand Jews were slain. Even that did not quiet the belligerency of the people of Jerusalem. When Archelaus went to Rome to be confirmed there as King, the people rose again. Now the Romans intervened. Varus, the same man who later fell fighting against the Cherusci in Germany, was governor of Syria at the time. He hurried to Jerusalem, suppressed the insurrection, and then returned to Antioch leaving a legion in Jerusalem under the procurator Sabinus. Sabinus had such full confidence in his military power that he pushed the Jews to the wall, plundering and robbing at will. That put the fat in the fire. At Pentecost many people assembled in Jerusalem, especially Galileans. They were strong enough to encircle and besiege the Roman legion together with the mercenaries that Herod had recruited and left as a heritage to his son. The Romans vainly made sorties in which they killed many Jews; the besiegers did not weaken. They succeeded in getting a part of Herod’s troops over to their side ...

When Florus went so far as to try to rob the Temple, in May 66, .. the lower classes in Jerusalem went wild ... The combat morale of the insurgents was so great that they succeeded in routing a relief column of 30,000 men led by the Syrian legate Cestius Gallus ... It was not all the Jews of Jerusalem who continued the hopeless struggle against the overpowering enemy for another three years, until September 70 A.D. in the stoutest, most resolute and resourceful of defenses, covering every inch of ground with corpses before giving up, and finally, weakened by hunger and disease, finding their graves in the burning ruins. The priests, the scribes, the merchant princes had for the most part fled ...

Such was the atmosphere in which the Christian community came into being ...

The Essenes

It must however be conceded that in the midst of the spectacle of woe and blood that constitutes the history of Judea in the epoch of Christ, there is one phenomenon which gives the impression of a peaceful idyll. This is the order of the Essenes or Essaeans, which arose about the year 150 BC ... and lasted until the destruction of Jerusalem. From that point on the order disappears from history ...

Their communism was carried to an extreme. It extended to their clothing ... They rejected slavery. Farming was their chief occupation, but they also engaged in crafts. Only the manufacture of luxury articles and weapons of war was forbidden, along with trade ... They also seem to have clung with especial stubbornness to their associations with meals in common ...

The economic basis of the organization of the Essenes was peasant agriculture ... Such an organization on the land could last only as long as it was tolerated by the state. There was no way in which a productive commune could exist as a secret society, especially in the country. Essenianism was therefore linked up with the preservation of Jewish freedom. When that was lost, it too had to go under ...

Kautsky’s final book provides the object of the foregoing efforts. His comments on different tensions in the early Christian movement, and the ways these tensions reflect larger social realities, are really worth reading

Book Four: The Beginnings of Christianity

I. The Primitive Christian Community

The Proletarian Character of the Community

... The speeches and actions of the persons whom Christians honor as their champions and teachers may have been fantastically adorned or made up out of the whole cloth; at any rate, the first Christian authors wrote in the spirit of the Christian communities in which and for which they lived. They repeated traditions handed down from an earlier period, which they might alter in details, but whose general character was so clearly established that any attempt to alter them noticeably would have met with violent opposition. People might have tried to water down or reinterpret the spirit that prevailed in the beginnings of the Christian community, but they could not completely falsify it. We still can trace such attempts at watering down, and they become bolder as the Christian community loses its originally proletarian character and takes in educated, prosperous and reputable people. But it is precisely from these attempts that the original character can be clearly inferred ...

Class Hatred

... It appears clearly in the Gospel according to St. Luke, a composition of the beginning of the second century, especially in the story of Lazarus, which is found only in this gospel (16, verses 19f.). The rich man goes to hell and the poor man to Abraham’s bosom, and not because the rich man was a sinner and the poor man just: nothing is said about that. The rich man is damned just because he was rich. Abraham says to him: “Remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.” The thirst of the oppressed for vengeance is gloating here. The same gospel has Jesus say: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (18, verses 24f.). Here too the rich man is damned for his wealth, not for his sinfulness ...

The Gospel according to St. Matthew is some decades later than that of Luke. In the interval prosperous and educated people had begun to come close to Christianity. Many Christian propagandists felt the need of giving the Christian doctrine a form which would be more attractive to these people. The uncompromising tradition of primitive Christianity became inconvenient ... It is really amusing to find the hungry transformed into those that hunger after righteousness, who are assured that they shall be filled; the Greek word used here (chorazein – have their fill) is used of beasts for the most part, and applied to men humorously or in contempt. Having the word used in the Sermon on the Mount is another indication of the proletarian origin of Christianity. The expression was current in the circles from which it sprang, to indicate the complete quenching of their bodily hunger. It is ludicrous to apply it to quenching the hunger for righteousness. The counterpart to these blessings, the cursing of the rich, has disappeared in Matthew ...

Communism

In view of the strong proletarian imprint on the community, it was likely that it should strive toward a communistic form of organization ... We all know that Ananias and Sapphira, who withheld some of their money from the community were immediately punished by death, by a divine visitation. Saint John, called Chrysostom (Golden Mouth) because of his fiery eloquence, a fearless critic of his time (347 to 407), attached to the above description of primitive Christian communism a discussion of its advantages which sounds very realistically economic and not at all ecstatic and ascetic ...

In the Gospel according to St. John (dating, it is true, only from the middle of the second century) the communistic life of Jesus and the apostles is taken for granted. They had only one purse among them ...

Objections to the Existence of Communism

... Today communism in the primitive Christian sense .. is irreconcilable with the progress of production .. Today economic conditions .. require .. the concentration of wealth in a small number of places ... At the time of Christ matters were different. Apart from mining, what industry there was was on a petty scale. There was extensive production on a large scale in agriculture, but being worked by slaves it was not technically superior to the small farms and could sustain itself only in those cases where merciless predatory exploitation was possible, based on the labor power of hordes of cheap slaves ... Hence the concentration of wealth in a few hands did not by any means signify increased productivity of labor ... Instead of constituting a development of the productive forces, it meant nothing more than accumulation of the means of pleasure in such quantity that the individual was simply unable to consume them all himself, and had no alternative to sharing them with others. The wealthy did this on a large scale, in part willingly ... It was a means of winning supporters and friends, and thus of increasing one’s power ...

Contempt for Labor

The communism to which primitive Christianity aspired, in accord with the conditions of its period, was a communism of the means of consumption, a communism of sharing them and eating them in common. Applied to agriculture, this communism could have led to a communism of production, planned work in common. In the metropolis under the conditions of production at that time, the proletarians were kept apart by their occupations, whether those were handicrafts or begging. Urban communism could not aim any higher than intensifying the process of bleeding the rich by the poor, which the proletariat had developed to such a pitch of perfection in the cities where it had achieved political power, as in Athens and Rome. The communalism it aimed at could not go beyond common consumption of the victuals thus obtained, a communism of housekeeping, a family community ...

Destruction of the Family

If communism does not rest on community of production, but of consumption, it tries to convert its community into a new family, for the presence of the traditional family tie is felt as a disturbing influence. We have seen this in the case of the Essenes, and it is repeated in Christianity, which often voices its hostility to the family in harsh terms ...

A closely related theme is the aversion to marriage, which primitive Christianity required as did the Essenians. The resemblance goes so far that it seems to have developed both forms of being unmarried: celibacy, abstinence from all marital practices, and unbridled extra-marital sexual intercourse, which is also described as community of women. There is a noteworthy passage in Campanella’s City of the Sun. A critic says: “St. Clement of Rome says that by apostolic institutions wives too should be in common, and praises Plato and Socrates for having also said that this must be done. But the commentary takes this to mean community of obedience towards all, not the community of the couch. And Tertullian confirms the gloss, and says that the first Christians had everything in common, excepting the women, who were in common only in obedience” ...

II. The Christian Idea of the Messiah

The Coming of the Kingdom of God

... Thus it was not at all necessary to have died in order to enter into the kingdom of God. The living could count on seeing its coming. And it was thought of as a kingdom in which both those who lived through it and those who arose from the dead would rejoice in full-bodied existence. There are still traces of it in the gospels, although the later conception of the church dropped the earthly state of the future and replaced it by a heavenly one ... Jesus tells a Pharisee in whose house he is eating that he should not invite his friends nor kinsmen to table, but the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind ...

The resurrection of Jesus is the model for the resurrection of his disciples. The gospels expressly stress Jesus’ corporeality after the resurrection. He meets two of his disciples then near the village of Emmaus. He sups with them and vanishes ... Jesus shows not only corporeality after his resurrection, but a healthy appetite ...

The Lineage of Jesus

The original Christian idea of the Messiah is so completely in accord with the Judaism of its time that the Gospels attach the greatest value to showing Jesus as a descendant of David ... This is why it was necessary to show that Jesus’ father, Joseph, had a long pedigree going back to David, and to have Jesus the Nazarene born in Bethlehem, the city of David ... The author or authors of Luke had heard an echo of some thing, and in their ignorance made complete nonsense of it ... Augustus never ordered a general census of the empire. What is referred to is obviously the census that Quirinius had taken in Judaea in the year 7 A.D., Judaea being then a Roman province. This was the first census of the sort there ... As a matter of fact every one registered in his dwelling-place in a Roman census also, and only men had to do so in person ...

Jesus as a Rebel

... From the second century on Christianity was more and more dominated by patient obedience. The Judaism of the previous century had been something quite different. We have seen how rebellious those strata of Jews were who were expecting the Messiah at that time, especially the proletarians of Jerusalem and the bands of Galilee, the same elements from which Christianity arose. The obvious assumption is that Christianity was violent in its beginnings. This assumption becomes a certainty when we see that the gospels still have traces of it despite the fact that their later revisers tried most desperately to eliminate everything from them that might give offense to the powerful.

Although Jesus usually appears as gentle and submissive, occasionally he says something of a quite different nature which suggests that whether he really existed or is only an imaginary, ideal figure, he lived as a rebel in the original tradition, one who was crucified for his unsuccessful uprising ... Arriving in Jerusalem at Eastertide, he drives the moneychangers out of the temple, something that is inconceivable without the forcible action of a large mob excited by him ...

In the version that has come down to us, Judas betrays Jesus by his kiss, which points him out to the police as the man to arrest. Now that is a senseless way to act. According to the Gospels, Jesus was well known in Jerusalem; he preached in public day in and day out, and was received by the masses with jubilation; and now he is to have been so unknown that he had to be pointed out by Judas to be distinguished from the crowd of his supporters! ... It would be an entirely different matter if it was a question of a plotted coup d’etat. In that case there would be something to betray, a secret worth paying for ...

That was a period in which even the peaceful Essenes, who were against any struggle, were carried away by the general patriotism. We find Essenes among the Jewish generals in the last great war against the Romans ... The conjecture that the execution of Jesus was brought about by his rebellion is therefore not merely the only assumption that makes the allusions in the Gospels intelligible, but it is also completely in accordance with the nature of the time and the place. From the time in which the death of Jesus is set down to the destruction of Jerusalem, disorders never ceased there. Street fighting was something quite usual, and so was the execution of individual insurgents ...

The Resurrection of the Crucified

There was no shortage of Messiahs at the time of Christ, especially not in Galilee, where prophets and leaders of bands were constantly springing up, proclaiming themselves to be saviors and anointed of the Lord. But if one of them was defeated by the power of the Romans, was taken, crucified or slain, that put an end to his role as the Messiah, for in that case he was regarded as a false prophet and false Messiah. The real one was still to come ...

The traditional assumption has been that the community of Christ was not organized by the apostles until after his death. But nothing compels us to make this improbable assumption ... The Acts of the Apostles nowhere states that the apostles first organized the community after the death of Jesus; we find it already organized at that time, holding meetings of its members and performing its functions. The first mention of communism in the Acts of the Apostles runs as follows: “And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (2, verse 42). That is, they continued their previous common meals and other communistic practices ...

It was not belief in the resurrection of him who was crucified that created the Christian community and lent it strength, but the converse: the vitality of the community created the belief in the continued life of their Messiah ...

The International Savior

... Messianic hope that extended to the salvation of the poor must have been listened to eagerly by the poor of all nations ... On the other hand, the only place in the Roman Empire in which a communist organization could maintain itself would be where it was reinforced by faith in the Messiah to come and his deliverance of all the oppressed and mistreated. In practice, these communistic organizations, as we shall see, did not come to more than mutual aid societies ... But the suspicious despotism put an end to all societies; we have seen how Trajan was afraid even of volunteer fire companies ... The only way in which the mutual aid societies could continue to exist was as secret leagues. But who would risk his life for the chance of getting mere subsistence, or from a feeling of solidarity in a period when public spirit had all but died out? ...

III. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians

Agitation among the Pagans

There the apostles found along with the members of the Jewish community and in closest relationship with them the “God-fearing” Gentiles (sebomenoi), who worshipped the Jewish God and went to the synagogue, but could not make up their minds to conform to all the Jewish practices ... The social content of the Gospel must have found a willing reception in the proletarian groups of such “God-fearing Gentiles”. They in turn carried it on to other non-Jewish proletarian circles, which were fertile soil for the doctrine of the crucified Messiah in so far as that doctrine looked forward to a social overturn and immediate organization of mutual aid institutions ...The further the new doctrine spread in the Jewish communities outside of Palestine, the clearer it must have been that it would gain tremendously in propaganda power if it abandoned its Jewish peculiarities, ceased to be national and became exclusively social ...

.. Saul .. first recognized this and took vigorous measures in that direction. He was a Jew .. not of Palestinian origin, according to tradition, but from the Jewish community of a Greek city, Tarsus in Cilicia. An ardent spirit, he flung himself first wholeheartedly into Phariseeism, and as a Pharisee fought the Christian community, which was so close to Zealotism, until finally .. a vision undeceived him in a flash and sent him to the opposite extreme. He joined the Christian community, but in it he was a subverter of the traditional conception, by insisting on propagandizing the new doctrine among non-Jews and abandoning their conversion to Judaism ...

The Opposition between Jews and Christians

... The longer the opposition lasted and the more points of friction there were, the more hostile the two trends must have been toward each other. This was made still worse by the intensification of the contrast between Judaism and the peoples it lived among during the last decades before the destruction of Jerusalem ...

The destruction of Jerusalem had still other consequences for Christian thought ... The Romans ruled in the Empire, and the primary task was to show oneself obsequious to them. The first Christians had been Jewish patriots and enemies of all alien rule and exploitation; the Gentile Christians added to their anti-Semitism devotion to Rome and the imperial throne ...

The basic theme of Acts is emphasis on the hostility of Judaism to the doctrine of the crucified Messiah, and on an alleged receptiveness to this doctrine on the part of the Romans. Something that Christianity either desired or imagined after the fail of Jerusalem is represented as a fact in Acts ...

<edit: the remaining sections will be posted as a reply to this post, due to some posting limitation>

[struggle4progress]

1. Book Four: The Beginnings of Christianity (Remaining Sections)

Book Four: The Beginnings of Christianity (Remaining Sections)

IV. The History of Christ’s Passion

... Jesus’ Galilean origin .... was highly inconvenient for his Davidian-Messianic pretensions. The Messiah had at least to come from David’s city ... If Jesus had been nothing more than the product of the imagination of a community bemused by the Messiah belief, they would never have thought of making a Galilean of him. His Galilean origin and hence his existence may therefore be taken as at least highly probable. His death on the cross, too. We have seen that passages may still be found in the Gospels that suggest the belief that he had planned an armed uprising and had been crucified for it. This too was so embarrassing a fact that it could hardly have been invented. It was too strongly in contradiction to the spirit that prevailed in Christianity at the time when it began to reflect upon itself and write the history of its origin ... The crucifixion of the Messiah was an idea so alien to Jewish thought, which could only imagine the Messiah in all the glory of a conquering hero, that it would require an actual occurrence .. to make the idea of the crucified Messiah at all acceptable ...

A strange sort of trial procedure, indeed! The court convenes immediately after the arrest of the prisoner, in the night time, and not in the court building ... Now false witnesses testify against Jesus, but although nobody cross-examines them, and Jesus is silent at their charges, they produce no evidence that incriminates him ... Now what is the purpose of all the apparatus of the false witnesses if this admission is enough to condemn Jesus? Their only purpose is to show the wickedness of the Jews. The death sentence is immediately pronounced ... Was the Sanhedrin still allowed to pronounce death sentences at that time? The Talmud says: “Forty years before the destruction of the Temple the power of life and death was taken from Israel.” A confirmation of this is to be found in the fact that the Sanhedrin does not inflict the punishment of Jesus, but after finishing his trial turns him over to Pilate for a new trial, this time on the charge of high treason towards the Romans, the charge that he had tried to make himself king of the Jews, that is, free Judea from the Roman rule. A fine accusation on the part of a court of Jewish patriots! ...

V. The Development of the Christian Community

Proletarians and Slaves

... Hope for the revolution, for the coming of the Messiah, for social change permeated all the first Christian organizations in Judaism at any rate. Care for the present, that is practical work on a small scale, was far in the background. This state of affairs changed after the destruction of Jerusalem. The elements that had given the Messianic community a rebellious character had lost, and the Messianic community became more and more an anti-Jewish community within the non-Jewish proletariat, which neither could nor wanted to fight ... Confidence in the coming of the “Kingdom of God” here below faded; the Kingdom of God, that was to have descended from heaven to earth, was transferred more and more to heaven; the resurrection of the body was transformed into immortality of the soul, for which the bliss of heaven or the tortures of hell were reserved ...

Christianity, at least after it had ceased to be revolutionary, no longer held out the prospect of emancipation to the slave ... The only thing that still might attract him was equality “before God,” that is within the community, where every comrade was to be of equal value, where the slave could come to sit at the common love-feast alongside his master ... Callixtus, Christian slave of a Christian freedman, even became bishop of Rome (217-222). But this kind of equality too no longer had much meaning ... The fact that Christianity, for all its communism and all its proletarian feeling, could not do away with slavery even within its own ranks shows how deep its roots were in “pagan” antiquity, and how much ethics stands under the influence of the mode of production ...

The Decline of Communism

... The number of the comrades that owned anything that would have been worth selling and distributing, was very small at the beginnings of the community ... The only way they could get a steady income was for each member to turn in his daily earnings to the community ... Since, under the existing conditions, the community could not do like the Essenes and set up common workshops to produce what they required for themselves, since, that is, they could not emerge from the domain of commodity production and individual production, their communism had to adjust to private property in means of production and trading stocks. Acceptance of the individual enterprise necessarily entailed acceptance of the separate household connected with it, the separate family and marriage, despite their common meals. Here we come once more to meals in common as the practical upshot of their communistic tendencies ...

If a comrade came in from some other point, the community got him work, if he wanted to stay, or gave him travelling expenses, if he wanted to push on. If a comrade fell sick, the community took care of him. If he died, they buried him at their expense and looked after his widow and children; if he got into jail, as was often enough the case, it was once more the community that gave him comfort and help. The Christian proletarian organization thus made a set of functions for itself more or less corresponding to the insurance aspects of a modern trade union. In the Gospels, the practice of this mutual insurance association is what gives one a claim to eternal life ...

The common meal, however, as a meal, had no point for the prosperous comrades. They ate and drank better and more conveniently at home ... What for the others was the satisfaction of a bodily need was for them only the satisfaction of a spiritual need, partaking of bread and wine was a purely symbolic action ...

Apostles, Prophets and Teachers

Originally there were no officers in the community and no distinctions among the comrades. Every man and even every woman could come forward as teacher and agitator upon feeling the capacity to do so. Each one spoke as he thought, from the heart, or as they said then, as the spirit moved him. Most of the members of course continued to practice their trades, but those who won especial prestige gave away what they had and devoted themselves entirely to agitation as apostles or prophets. Out of this arose a new class difference ...

Bishop

... In addition, the maintenance of party discipline, if we may use the term, was something the community itself took care of so long as it was small ... They were the tribunal before which all the complaints of comrades against comrades were to be brought. The Christians distrusted the official courts ... A Christian would have considered it a sin to go before such a man to seek his rights, especially when the dispute was with a fellow Christian. This planted the seed of that special judicial power that the church has always claimed over its believers in the face of the civil courts ...

The appointment of such an official was an obvious necessity. Any society that has property or income must have one. In the societies and unions of Asia Minor their administrative and financial officers bore the title of epimeletes or episcopos ... Hatch, who has studied this development in detail ... cites a Roman jurist, Charisius, who says: "Episcopi <bishops> are those who superintend the bread and the other things to be bought, that serve the people of the city as daily food.”

Monasticism

... After it had become the dominant and official trend of the church, and no other was permitted within the community, new democratic and communistic sects kept arising alongside of the Catholic Church ... When the Church became the State Church, an instrument of despotism and exploitation, on a scale of wealth and power that history had never yet known, the end of all its communistic tendencies seemed to have arrived. And yet these tendencies were to gain new strength precisely out of the state religion ...

When the supply of slaves dwindled, the latifundia had to disappear. The monasteries picked up this large-scale production and developed it further, since free brothers replaced slaves in the work ... The comradely monastic mode of production was eminently suited to rural conditions of production in dying antiquity and the early Middle Ages ... With the consolidation of monastic communism, the wealth of the monastery increased. The monastic latifundia soon furnished the best products at the lowest prices, since their production costs were low, thanks to their common housekeeping ...

[rug]

2. There's a reason Lenin called him a renegade.

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/RK18.html

[struggle4progress]

5. Thanks for the link. There seem to be several issues under discussion there.

One is the actual response of Kautsky and the Second International to WWI, which from Lenin's view was reprehensible. I cannot assess Lenin's view, but there is the following obvious irony: Kautsky, who was entirely aware beforehand that economic interests were likely to plunge Europe into a great war, nevertheless was completely unable to maintain principled opposition to that war when that war came; instead, like the other members of the Second International, he was completely swept away by the pointless patriotism of his own countrymen. In the abstract, he had no difficulty discussing (in regard to the Roman empire, say) how economic conditions produced social classes and how the interests and politics of those classes changed under economic pressure; but he did not have the detachment or character or organizational support to provide or adopt or hold such a view of his own place and time

The other issue concerns Kautsky's opinions about the revolution in Russia and its aftermath. Lenin's attitude here is colored, not only by his perspective on WWI and the effective collapse of the Second International, but by the fact that he had actually organized a revolution and was concerned with its aftermath, whereas Kautsky himself had done no such thing. To evaluate Lenin's remarks presupposes not only a familiarity with the actual movements and political he discusses but equally importantly a familiarity with the actual situation in Russia at the time, neither of which lies within my competence

[DeSwiss]

3. Excellent post!

- K&R!!!



"Prayer is just a way of telling god that his divine plan for
you is flawed -- and shockingly stingy" ~ Betty Bowers

[knitter4democracy]

4. At least he got St. John Chrysostom right.

I have a couple books of his sermons around here somewhere, and I remember his one on wealth and money to be quite fiery. He laid a good case for Christian socialism in there.

As for the rest, he makes the same mistake Bezdomy makes in Master and Margarita.

[struggle4progress]

6. Please forgive my literary ignorance here: what is "the same mistake Bezdomy makes"?

[knitter4democracy]

7. Great novel. In my opinion, best novel of the 20th C.

I don't say that lightly, either. Master and Margarita is a masterpiece.

Bezdomy's a poet who gets in trouble with his editor at the beginning of the novel for his poem on Jesus. He makes the Jesus in his poem a horrible guy, very dark. His editor tells him that his mistake is in acting like Jesus ever existed at all and goes on and on about all of the proof against Jesus's very existence. That's when Woland (Satan) shows up in this Faustian novel who then starts the story of Jesus and Pilate and asks Bezdomy afterwards if he at least believes in Satan. Very interesting scene.