Gospel Nonviolence and Class Warfare
February 24, 2020
“I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians)
which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely
greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European
governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law and
community moral restrains act as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere.
Among the latter, European governments, under pretense of governing they
have divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do
not
exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. If once our people
become inattentive to the public affairs, you, Carrington, and I, and
Congress, and judges, and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to
be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions;
experience declares that man is an animal which devours his own kind,
for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the
general prey of the rich on the poor.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington – January 16, 1787
“Class warfare is not, in the first
place, a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. It has very
little to do with what people in England call ‘class distinctions,’
meaning a peculiarly English kind of snobbery. It is not differences of
wealth that cause class differences, but class differences that cause
differences of wealth. The worker by his labor creates a certain amount
of wealth, only part of which is returned to him in the form of wages,
etc. The rest is appropriated by the capitalist, so called because his
function is to accumulate capital in this way. The capitalist receives
from a great many workers the extra wealth which they produce but do not
need for their subsistence and minimal contentment, and bringing all
this wealth together he is able to invest, to provide the conditions
under which more work may be done — and so on. On this fundamental
division between worker and employer the whole class system rests.
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The worker is whoever by productive
work actually creates wealth. The employer is not simply anyone who
makes overall decisions about what work shall be done and how; he is the
one who takes the surplus wealth created by the worker and uses it (in
his own interests of course) as capital. Capitalism is the system in
which capital is accumulated for investment, in their own interests, by a
group of people who own the means of production and employ large
numbers of other people who do not own the mean of production but
produce both the wealth which they receive back in wages and the surplus
wealth which is used for investment by the owners in whatever way they
desire. The wealthy and powerful are wealthy and powerful, they are the
ruling class, in part because they are better at killing; the one thing
they cannot do is carry on forever the fiction that their interests
coincide with the interests of most of the community. They cannot
forever con people into believing that it is in their own interests and
that of their families to work or to die for the profit of the ruling
class
The wealthy and powerful, the ruling
class, are wealthy and powerful in part because they are better at
killing; the one thing they cannot do is carry on forever the fiction
that their interests coincide with the interests of most of the
community. They cannot forever con people into believing that it is in
their own interests and that of their families to work or to die for the
profit of the ruling class.” -Herbert McCabe, OP
Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy [send him mail]
is a priest of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic
Church in communion with the Pope, ordained on 9 August 1981, in
Damascus, Syria. He was a Lawyer, Founder of the Program for the Study
of Nonviolence Conflict Resolution at the University of Notre Dame and
Co-founder of Pax Christi-USA. His vocation for the last forty-eiight
years has been calling the Christian Churches back to fidelity to Jesus'
teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. Find more of his
writing online at www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org.
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