Capitalism and Communism
The Machine Will Never Triumph, part fifteen
The root of our evil—
The root of our present evil is that we buy and sell.
Ultimately, we are all busy buying and selling one another.
It began with Judas, and goes on in the wage-system.
Men sell themselves for a wage, and employers look out for
a bargain.
And employers are bought by financiers, and financiers are sold to the
devil.
−Get thou behind me, Satan!—
That was just what Satan wanted to do,
for then nobody would have their eye on him.
And Jesus never looked round.
That is the great reproach we have against him.
He was frightened to look round
and see Satan bargaining the world away
and men, and the bread of men
behind his back
with satanically inspired financiers.
If Jesus had kept a sharp eye on Satan,
and refused to let so many things happen behind his back
we shouldn’t be where we are now.
Come Satan, don’t go dodging behind my back any longer.
If you’ve got the goods, come forward boy, and let’s see ’em.
I’m perfectly willing to strike a decent bargain.
But I’m not having any dodging going on behind my back.—
What we want is some sort of communism
not based on wages, nor profits, nor any sort of buying and selling
but on a religion of life.1
Why do we have so much ugliness in the world today, and why do we have so much technology? Egotism, hubris, and avarice are some of the primary answers. Capitalism elevates egotism and avarice to the state of a religion. The roots of capitalism have foundations in perverted forms of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion. As such, the best antidote to capitalism is neither atheistic communism, nor social-democracy, but a renewed religion of life. As Lawrence makes clear above, we want a form of communism, but not the communism of Marx and Lenin. Thomas Merton declares that true Christianity is communistic:
A MAN cannot be a perfect Christian—that is, a saint—unless he is also a communist. This means that he must either absolutely give up all right to possess anything at all, or else only use what he himself needs, of the goods that belong to him, and administer the rest for other men and for the poor: and in his determination of what he needs he must be governed to a great extent by the gravity of the needs of others.
But you will say it is practically impossible for a rich man to put into practice this clear teaching of Scripture and Catholic tradition. You are right. And there is nothing new in that. Christ told everybody the same thing long ago when He said it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
If Christians had lived up to the Church’s teaching about property and poverty there would never have been any occasion for the spurious communism of the Marxists and all the rest—whose communism starts out by denying other men the right to own property.2
Communism existed far before Marx, and in fact was the earliest form of human society. As anthropologists have discovered, primitive tribal groups and the earliest humans had no conception of money, nor of trade. These simple economies were based on the gift. In hunter gatherer societies, life was simple and good; tribes moved around, there were never accumulations of unneeded things, and when one needed help, it was freely given. This is what we need to get back to: no more money, fewer things, and life that is lived freely. Work should be voluntary, and even one who does no work should be given the basic necessities of life. Whether a person has access to food, shelter, or healthcare should never be based on his or her working status. Those who do choose to work, should work at something they find gratifying, and do it for the satisfaction of doing it. In most cases, since most of what we have is superfluous, people would work far less under this kind of system. But, it will never happen until we restore ourselves with a new religion; one based on a love of life, worship of the Gods, a passionate togetherness with the cosmos, and an understanding of the Fire that is the basis of all that is.
As Lawrence makes clear, for real change to happen, people need to wake up and change their inner selves:
I send the message—a bit shyly, for I’m no message-maker, really. Yet my god, it’s time men woke up to themselves, and ceased to go on in industrial somnambulism as they have done. We only live once: and during that once, never to live at all —why it’s monstrous!
One can’t change the world in a minute. But if one has a satisfactory system of values inside oneself, and something of an aim in one’s life, it’s a great deal.
The miners are all right. It’s the industrial system which is wrong. And it’s up to the miners to change it. Not by hating capitalism or anything else: but by just pulling the feathers out of the money bird, and determining, sooner or later, to have something quite different: neither capitalism nor bolshevism, but men. It wouldn’t be very difficult to settle the material part of the problem, once enough sensible men tackled it.
And meanwhile we can all go ahead with the deepening and widening consciousness, which is the great job for each of us.3
We need to deepen our consciousnesses first and foremost, but almost anything is better than the system we have. The metaphysics of the Marxist system are reprehensible, and the atrocities to Mother Earth perpetuated by so-called communist countries should never be forgiven, but at least if there was a communist revolution it may open up a new possibility for a vital relationship between people, which we are lacking now. As Lawrence states:
And perhaps, if the communists did smash the famous “system”, there might emerge a new relationship between men: really not caring about money, really caring for life, and the life-flow with one another. […] Because we know perfectly well we’re all being carried around by the “system”. We’re all of us on a bus, or a merry-go-round, or a train, or a pit-trolley, or in a private car, being conveyed around by the mechanisms of a materialist system. We never meet, because we’ve only just got off some sort of conveyance, and we’re going to get on another in half an hour. And so on, till it’s the hearse.—It’s the system.4
On the other hand, if a communist revolution were to happen, it would mean nothing if it didn’t lead to a new vital relationship between men. More likely than not, any communistic revolution would be a disaster that would further entrench the robot, further empower the Machine, and would neuter the last of the remaining life-loving men. Communism of the Marxist sort would be a disaster, but capitalism is a disaster. Lawrence makes clear below that either choice would be wrong, and the best option is not to choose, but to cultivate the soul:
Supposing all the world passed into communism, what was the good, seeing that the victorious communists became dead-alive men in the process? Automata, with theories. Busy, hideous, automatic communists!
And yet the further spread of the capitalistic exploitation could not be submitted to, not at any price.
A Scylla and Charybdis, with a vengeance. Men all doomed to loose their manhood, one way or the other. Two bottomless pits, down which all real manhood pours. The swirling grudge that is called Liberty, and the vortex of greed and possession. And the tiniest thread of a way out, between the two.
Man is not man for nothing. He does not possess his manhood without the means to preserve it. Nor is he doomed unless he chooses.5
One can always preserve the spiritual majesty he or she was born with, but doing that is hard, and only getting harder. It is a path for the spiritual aristocrats. Though we must not give in to any of the ideologies of the modern world, including communism, we must realize that a new world must do away with money, greed, and possessions. Just as the Soviet system failed, the capitalist system will fail. Then we can come in and pick up the pieces to reignite the flame of Life. As Lawrence writes:
Mastership is based on possessions. To kill mastership you must have communal ownership. Then have it, for this superiority based on possession of money is worse than any of the pretensions of Labour or Bolshevism, strictly. Let the serpent swallow itself. Then we can have a new snake.6
Bibliography
Lawrence, D. H. Kangaroo. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2018.
———. Quetzalcoatl. Edited by Lois L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1998.
———. The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels. Edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, and Gerald M. Lacy. Vol. VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 2007.
D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 418–19.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 178.
D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, and Gerald M. Lacy, vol. VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 266–67.
D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 211.
D. H. Lawrence, Quetzalcoatl, ed. Lois L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1998), 114.
D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2018), 348–49.