Efforts to ally religion (and especially Christianity) with Marxism (and other sorts of socialism) built on their converging social criticisms as capitalism achieved global hegemony over the last two centuries. The specific objects of those criticisms included inequalities of wealth, inequalities of income, the fetishism of commodities, the idolatrous worship of material objects (and their accumulation) at the expense of spiritual values, and the calculating treatment of human beings as mere means to economic goals. The general theme of those criticisms from the side of religion has been that religious values fundamentally contradict and clash with those social conditions accompanying capitalism and thus with the capitalism that reproduces them. That theme has been and remains powerfully persuasive in its contemporary expressions.

 

Yet the alliance of Marxism and religion is not as strong as it once was and needs renewal for the twenty-first century. Here I propose to broaden the theme by adding another critique that played only a secondary and implicit role in the Christian-Marxist dialogues so far. This critique is taken from Marx’s analysis of capitalist production and resonates deeply with certain religious values. My goal is significantly to strengthen the alliance of Marxism and religion.

 

Religious criticisms of capitalism over the last century encouraged rich and fruitful dialogues with Marxists and other socialists. Sometimes powerful alliances (e.g. Christian socialist political parties, Liberation Theology and worker priests, etc.) emerged to challenge capitalism on basic ethical and moral grounds alongside the economic, social and cultural challenges. Yet mass interest in such alliances and the criticisms they voiced has risen and fallen repeatedly without yet achieving a breakthrough to yield a sustained anti-capitalist social movement.

 

The cultivated lure of material wealth and its celebration as the point and purpose of each individual’s life have enabled capitalism to evade or undermine religious criticisms. The alternatives to capitalism favored by most socialists failed to be sustained either as long-term goals or as actually existing social systems in the face of relentless counterattacks by capitalism’s supporters. The causes for this failure included idolatrous appeals to the values that sustain and reproduce capitalism, common sense (fetishistic) notions that markets rule people and their social relations, and public campaigns associating inferiority and evil with non-capitalist systems. Together, such social forces combined to outmaneuver those supporting both Marxist and religious criticisms of capitalism.

 

One socially influential form of celebrating and defending capitalism goes back at least as far as Adam Smith and the birth of the discipline then called 'political economy’ and now more commonly called simply 'economics.' Smith was a professor of religious studies in Scotland who sought to understand and celebrate the new economic system (capitalism) that was then displacing the thousand years of European feudalism. He found it to be a wondrously organized engine of growing wealth in which private enterprises interacting in markets should be allowed, free of government intervention, to bring prosperity to mankind. Capitalism would deliver these results if only the state would "laissez-faire.” Smith articulated what thereafter evolved into a kind of secular religion: capitalism would produce the best possible economic and also social results for the human race "as if led by an invisible hand” [of God].

 

The high priests of that secular religion after Smith were first its great writers of the nineteenth century (such as David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill). Their work attracted the intensive study and also criticism of Karl Marx. He viewed their works as mixtures of genuine insight into capitalism’s workings and apologies for the exploitation at its core. In the last third of the 19th century and across the 20th century, a growing Marxist movement of theoretical criticism and anti-capitalist politics prompted the followers of Smith, Ricardo, et al to reformulate their alternative theory of how capitalism works. It came to be called "neoclassical economics.” Its proponents have worked very hard for the last 125 years to displace Marxists from positions of influence over how the public understands the capitalist economic system in which it works and lives.

 

Neoclassical economics has been promoted as the only true, scientific, and efficient theory of how modern capitalism functions. Periodically, when capitalism plunged society into severe depressions (high unemployment, bankruptcy, and producton cutbacks), neoclassical economics was adjusted to allow for state intervention needed, at least temporarily, to reconstruct a socially

acceptable level of economic performance. John Maynard Keynes’s explanations of those depressions and his recommendations for state policies to fix them offered an adjusted way in which capitalism could be understood, celebrated, and managed.

 

Neoclassical and Keynesian economists, periodically displacing one another, have come to occupy the key posts in the government, the media, and the schools that shape how economic events are explained and understood. They function in their secular realms much as priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams function in religious realms. Neoclassical and Keynesian economists represent the two denominations committed to celebrating capitalism as the human race’s best possible economic system, denigrating all alternatives, and demonizing proponents of such alternatives.

 

Yet capitalism’s contradictions relentlessly provoke people and reignite challenges to its social injustices and to its costly instabilities (for example, during recurrent crises such as today’s). Capitalism keeps pushing people to find their way to profound religious as well as political critiques and to construct powerful anti-capitalist alliances aiming for socialist alternatives. As Marx argued so poetically, capitalism’s ineluctable contradictions endlessly recreate incentives and opportunities to move societies beyond capitalism even as they also provide its beneficiaries and supporters with means to prevent or destroy such movements. The key point is that the outcome of these contradictions is always contestable; the conflicts engendered by the contradictions are openended.

 

Whether capitalism survives depends in part on how the alliances contesting it evolve their theories and their practices. This intervention proposes a major addition to the range of concerns animating critiques of capitalism by focusing attention on the internal structure of production. I will draw on Marx’s analysis of the production processes inside capitalist enterprises and the relationships among the

people engaged in those processes. That analysis makes clear that fundamental ethical norms shared by many religions are regularly violated in and by the structure of capitalist production. Exposing those violations can reanimate Marxist-religious political alliances and thereby mobilize an ethically grounded opposition to capitalism.

 

This may contribute to tip the balance of forces in the direction of superseding capitalism in favor of alternative structures of production.

 

In Marx’s Capital, great stress is placed upon the analysis of the structure of production inside capitalist enterprises. In particular, Marx focuses on the hired workers whose labors produce the commodities that their employers sell. He begins with the conditions for their labors (his „means of production”): the raw materials, tools, and equipment that their labor presupposes and requires. Those means are commodities purchased by employers in markets. The value expended by the employers to buy raw materials, tools, and equipment used up in production is thereby carried over to the output of that production. Thus, for example, the costs of the lumber, saws, nails and glue used up in a chair-making enterprise are components of the value of the produced chairs. What the chair-making workers do, when they expend brains and muscle to transform means of production into outputs, is thereby add value to those inputs. Workers in capitalism are hired precisely to add value in production. In our example, employers sell the chairs whose value is the sum of (1) the values of used-up means of production plus (2) the value added in production by chair-making workers.  On the basis of this simple analysis, Marx then drives home the critical point. The employer gains (profits) from such production if the value added by the worker exceeds the value paid to the worker for performing the work. In Marx’s language, workers in capitalism must add more value in production than they cost, than the wages employers pay to them. The difference – the excess of value added over wages – accrues to employers in what Marx called "surplus.” The employers pay the costs of (1) means of production and (2) workers’ wages, but the value of the output the workers produce – what employers get when they sell that output - is greater than 1 + 2. Stated bluntly, capitalists „exploit” workers in so far, Marx argues, as the production process delivers to the employers this surplus portion of the value added by workers.

 

To use contemporary language, Marx’s argument might be stated thusly: the only condition under which an employer will hire you to help produce commodities in a capitalist enterprise is if your wage per hour is less than the value your labor adds. You can get 10 dollars per hour if and only if your labor adds more than 10 dollars per hour to the commodities your employer sells. The capitalist employee must produce more than the wages received and the difference – what Marx’s original German labeled mehrwert was translated into English as "surplus value” – accrues to the employers. Employers then utilize that surplus value appropriated from their workers to shape the politics, culture and economics of society in such a way as to secure and, if possible, expand the conditions for exploitation. Capitalists’ surplus-appropriating positions in the economy and their many benefits give them not only the incentive to reproduce that position; their positions also provide them with the means (the surplus) to do so. Thus many capitalists use some of their surpluses to fund campaigns against those values, ethics, and moralities that contradict capitalist exploitation. Likewise, many capitalists use portions of their surpluses to buy the additional inputs needed to expand production, exploit more workers, and - by means of such "capital accumulation” – to extend their social power.

 

The reality and consequences of capitalist exploitation could provide bases for discussion and collaboration between Marxists and religious communities. Capitalist exploitation entails the exclusion of the producers of surplus value from the appropriation and social distribution of the surplus their labor produces. This is a profoundly undemocratic organization of production. Moreover, workers’ exclusion from appropriating and distributing surpluses limits, constrains, and distorts the development of their skills, capacities, productivity, inter-relationships, and all-round humanity. Exploitation thus poses profound moral as well as economic problems for societies in which capitalist organizations of production prevail.

 

Its exploitative structure situates conflict at the heart of capitalist production. On the one hand, workers could benefit from higher wages and significant influence over the appropriation and distribution of surpluses. On the other, capitalist employers go to great lengths to prevent or undermine workers’ influence over the disposition of surpluses and usually seek lower wages. The conflict between capitalist employers and surplus producing workers systematically subverts the achievement of brotherhood, community, solidarity and the genuine acceptance of human equality.

 

Among workers, that conflict provokes reactions ranging from sabotage to strikes to passive resentments (that often contribute to alcoholism, interpersonal abuse, and other forms of self-destructive behavior). On the side of capital, that conflict prompts automation, the export of jobs to lower-wage sites, the abuse of low-wage immigrant labor, anti-labor union agitation, anti-democratic impulses, and other socially devastating and divisive consequences. The capitalist structure of production entails capital-labor divisions that radiate outward from enterprises to undermine workers’ well-being, social democracy, and widely held moral values.

 

Not surprisingly, the Marxist analysis of the structure of production has been opposed and repressed throughout capitalism’s last 150 years. In schools and universities, in churches, in the mass media, and among politicians, Marxist economic analyses were ignored, denied, ridiculed, repressed, or punished depending on the specific circumstances of time and place. Over the same century and a half, neoclassical and then Keynesian economic analyses disseminated their very different understandings of capitalism. For them, capitalism was a fundamentally harmonious cooperation among workers, capitalists, and landlords. Each contributed something to production inside enterprises: the capitalists their capital, the workers their labor, and thelandlords their land. The revenues from selling the final product were then distributed among them: wages to workers, rents to landlords, and the residual as profits to capitalists. In such theories, there were no surpluses. Instead of the injustice of exploitation, the rewards of production were fairly shared in proportion to each group’s contributions to production. For the neoclassical economists, any occasional unfair distribution or disruption of markets would be best corrected by allowing the "optimal” institutions of private property and free markets to work their magic (as if led, yet again, by Adam Smith’s "invisible hand”). The Keynesians agreed, but they added that God’s invisible hand worked also through the state’s periodic economic interventions to offset temporary "imperfections” in markets and in humans’ economic behaviors. It is worth noting that the admirers of capitalism were as concerned to build bridges to religious communities as have been its critics, albeit with very different agendas and in different ways.

 

Very rarely in capitalism’s history has it been possible for neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxist theories and analyses of capitalism to be equally and fairly presented, discussed and debated. Instead, Marxists have generally been denied opportunities to speak, teach, or run for office. They have often been demonized, jailed, killed, and exiled. Most of those who supported capitalism believed it too dangerous to that system’s hegemony to permit free social circulation of the critical economic analyses developed by Marxists. Nor is it difficult to see why Marxism was repressed. One key reason lay in how its analyses spoke to the moral and ethical standards common to many religious communities. While those communities depended on capitalists for donations, political support, and social approval, their basic values often resonated much more closely with Marxist criticisms of and alternatives to capitalism. One reason for developing non-Marxist analyses of capitalist production and repressing Marxist analyses was then to remove that resonance and thereby the risk of dangerous alliances between Marxists and those religious communities.

 

We may conclude with a brief discussion of precisely where the Marxist critique of capitalist production leads: what alternatives to capitalism does it support and what are the ethical and moral dimensions of those alternatives? However, this discussion must first identify its own particularity. Marxism and socialism have each become, in the last 150 years of their development, quite diverse traditions. Having spread into so many different societies across the globe, each tradition was interpreted differently and evolved multiple different theories or tendencies. Most socialists and Marxists across the twentieth century came to define their desired alternative to capitalism in terms of two major social changes that did NOT focus on the structure of production inside enterprises.

 

First, they advocated ending or at least sharply curtailing capitalists’ private property in means of production. The preferred alternative, called the "socialization” of means of production, usually envisioned the state controlling or appropriating private property. The state would then use such socialized factories, offices, stores, and land to produce for citizens’ needs rather than for private capitalists’ profits. Second, most socialist theories and organizations advocated suppressing or at least sharply curtailing markets as means of distributing productive resources and produced outputs. They favored instead centrally planned distributions, usually by the state. The idea here was that resources and outputs should be distributed according the needs of individuals and society’s collective goals rather according to the unequal purchasing powers of private individuals and businesses.

 

However, the focus on the state in traditional Marxism eventuated in actually existing socialisms that proved to be highly problematical and bitterly controversial in terms of traditional socialist and Marxist goals and values. Actually existing socialisms also proved unable to survive by the end of the 1980s. The traditional interpretations of socialism and Marxism in terms of public vs private property and planning vs markets have lost favor among many socialists who increasingly questioned those traditions’ foci on the state and on their exclusively macro-level conceptions of socialism. Consequently, Marxists especially undertook searches for alternative interpretations of a socialist future.

 

Here I deploy one such interpretation; it focuses on adding a crucial micro-level component - the radical reorganization of the internal organization of production - to those macro-level conceptions. In this micro-level concept of a post-capitalist socialist alternative, the basic idea is that the workers who produce surpluses inside enterprises can and should function collectively as their own employers. That is, those workers would together appropriate and distribute the surpluses that they produce. Each of their job descriptions would include both the production and also the appropriation/distribution of surpluses. Schematically, such workers might come to the worksite Mondays through Thursdays and perform their usual specific work tasks, whereas on Fridays they would spend the day in collective deliberations determining what, how, and where to produce and where to distribute the surpluses they produce.

 

This socialist structure of production inside enterprises would replace the existing capitalist structure in which, most typically, a board of directors (15-20 individuals) selected by and accountable to the major shareholders (often a similar or smaller number) do the appropriating and distributing of the surplusesas well as decided the what, how, who, and where of production. The socialist structure of production sketched briefly above would overcome and avoid the injustices, inequalities, and conflicts associated with capitalist enterprises. Such socialist enterprises would institutionalize an economic democracy at the base of society that would go a long way toward converting the merely formal, electoral democracies of many capitalist countries into much more substantive democracies.

 

Socialized enterprises disposing of their surpluses would also provide major decentralized counterweights to the state and thereby limit the chances of its abusing central powers. Socialized enterprises would help overcome the traditional socialist fallacies of state "idolatry” Brigitte has been talking about. They would overcome the undemocratic and socially costly divisions between producers and appropriators/distributors of the surplus that characterized capitalist organizations of production. They would correspondingly be much more consistent with the values and morality of many religious communities.

 

Marxists and other socialists sharing this critique of the capitalist organization of production could construct a powerful alliance with religious communities advocating change at the basic worksites of society. An alliance that made the micro-level reorganization of production a centerpiece, a key part, of its agenda for social change, could thereby balance the other more traditional components of that agenda (socialization of property and planning instead of markets). Such an alliance could dramatically enhance the prospects for a successful twenty first century socialism, one that had learned from and corrected its twentieth century, imbalanced focus on macro-level components.