christian-socialists

"Education is considered the peculiar business of women; perhaps for that very reason it is one of the worst-paid business in the world; the salaries of men who engage in it are double those of women, who do better work and more of it."

"People learn from experience. We have learned that in order to be revolutionaries and advance a revolutionary process, it is necessary to have one's feet on the ground."

"...When we talk about the FSLN, we are not talking about something that is just a political party. We're not talking simply about an armed organization. We are talking about a historic response. We are talking about the indivisible reality of the FSLN and the Nicaraguan people. As long as this people is militant and proud, as long as this people is made up of heroic workers, as long as the workers and peasants and all revolutionaries are ready to defend the national sovereignty arms in hand, as long as there are Nicaraguans who love the land where they were born, as long as this people exists, the FSLN will continue to exist."

"We hate war, and our National Directorate has repeated this many times. We haven't organized the defense of our revolution for the purpose of conquering neighboring territories - or distant ones for that matter. We have done it in order to win peace. Our friends and neighbors can rest assured that this revolution was made in order to defend the land of our birth."

"We are creating a new society in which an individual is not a piece of merchandise, a society in which there are no wolves and lambs, when men do not live off the exploitation of other men. We are struggling to create a society in which the workers are the fundamental power driving things forward, but in which other social sectors also play a role, always insofar as they identify with the interests of the country, with the interests of the great majority"

"Either you are in favor of human dignity and respect fir human rights, or you are against human rights. There is no their possibility."

"Our revolution has always been internationalist, ever since Sandino fought in the Segovias. There were internationalists from all over the world who fought alongside Sandino, men from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru. Another who fought alongside Sandino was the great hero of the Salvadoran people named Farabundo Marti. It is not strange that we are internationalists, because this is something we got from Sandino. All the revolutionaries and all the peoples of Latin America especially know that our people's heart is with them, beats alongside theirs. Our heart goes out to Latin America, and we also know that Latin America's heart goes our to the Nicaraguan revolution."

"The sons and daughters of this country are not robots, not mannequins. This is a population every day more conscious, more audacious, and more creative. With this heroic population, we will make it to our goal, we will for all the way. With this heroic population that understands the world around it more clearly every day, it will be easier to come up with the right answers to the questions the revolution poses."

"A man is of no use to this world, of no use to society or the neighborhood in which he lives, who has no other object in view than making a fortune for himself and his family, little caring what becomes of those around him."

"It is not generally considered a crime among intellectual people to be a revolutionist, but it may be made a crime if the revolutionist happens to be poor."

"Maurice is equally opposed to the sacerdotalism which makes the essence of religion consist in a magical removal of penalties instead of a 'regeneration' of the nature. He takes what may be vaguely called the 'subjective' view of religion, and sympathises with Schleiermacher's statement that piety is 'neither a knowing nor a doing, but an inclination and determination of the feeling.'"

"The only possible innocence that remains to me, while I pay forced tribute to the system, while I profit by its corrupting influences and agencies, while I bear my part in the culpable public ignorance and guilty moral apathy, is that of protest and exhaustless effort."

"If we stay at our posts, in order that we may change the system, we are on the backs of our brothers; if we desert our posts, in order that we may get off our brothers' backs, we take bread from their mouths, from the mouths of their children, and add to the army of the workless and hopeless."

"The economic system denies the right of the sincerest and most sympathetic to keep their hands out of the blood of their brothers. We may not go to our rest at night, or waken to our work in the morning, without bearing the burden of the communal guilt; without being ourselves creators and causes of the wrongs we seek to bear away. At every step, when we would do good, evil is present with us, and exacts its tribute from the very citadel of the soul."

"No longer is it possible for men to be content to have, while their brothers have not. The physical misery of the world's disinherited is becoming the spiritual misery of the world's elect. Superior privileges of any sort now carry with them the sense of shame."

"This railway system practically administers the government of the United States, in all things that concern the system, and the governments of the several states of the Union as well. The majority of the United States senators recently elected have been its mere appointees and lobbyists, and agents at the same time for other corporate properties. In all this corrupt exploitation of the nation by the most degrading sort of economic force, in this debauchery of every citizen of my commonwealth, I am obliged to participate, in order to travel anywhere upon the national highways, whether I go upon God's errands or go in quest of evil to do."

"Without regard to his conscience, the economic system involves a man in the guilt of the moral and physical death of his brothers: their blood cries to him from the adulterated and monopolized foods he eats; from the sweat-shop clothes he wears; from his educational advantages, his special privileges, his social opportunities. ... In fine, civilization denies to man that highest of all rights — the right to live a guiltless life, the right to do right."

"All that is good in civilization must be for the equal use of all, in order that each man may make his life most worthwhile to the common life and to himself."

"Civilization no longer represents the conscience of the individuals who must find therein their work. The facts and forces which now organize industry and so-called justice, violate the best instincts of mankind."

"It is only the densest ethical ignorance that talks about a "Christian business" life; for business is now intrinsically evil."

"Whoever says that a man can live the Christian life, while at the same time successfully participating in the present order of things, is either profound in the lack of knowledge, or else he deliberately lies."

"There are no honest goods to buy or to sell; adulterated foods, shoddy manufacture of all that we wear, the underpaid labor and consumed life that make every garment a texture of falsehood, the hideous competitive war that slays its millions where swords and cannons slay their tens, all unite to baffle and mock the efforts of the awakened conscience at every turn, and make the industrial system seem like the triumph of hell and madness on the earth. Only by a sort of terrible daily denial of his spiritual self, a crucifixion of the principles by which he longs to organize his life, can a man wrest a stained and insecure livelihood from this terrible war for bread which we call industry."

"I can no longer clothe myself, whether in good clothes or cheap, without the likelihood that my clothes are made under sweat-shop conditions. ... If I send my students to pursue further study upon subjects to which I have introduced them, I must send them to receive the benefits of endowments from the hands of a besotted philanthropy, drunken and sated with the wine of life pressed from the crushed and exhausted millions who feed the modern industrial wine press."

"Whatever I do, whichever way I turn, I can neither feed nor clothe my family, nor take part in public affairs as a citizen, nor speak the truth as I conceive it, without being stained with the blood of my brothers and sisters; without putting my hands into the wickedness that prostitutes every sacred national and religious function."

"The hope of the social reformer is to open wide the gates of opportunity, so that every creature, from the least to the greatest, may make his life a moral adventure and a joy, and exhaust his possibilities in the thing he can best do."

"Presumably those who profess and call themselves Christians believe their religion to be in some sense true; but in what sense? ... The truth of the Christian faith is the truth of a faith, or a way of life which shows itself true ... for those who live it."

"The final encounter with God, or an encounter with God that would take you beyond doubt, wouldn't have the character of a metaphysical proof."

"Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests the God who transcends every division."

"Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire... Such an account [of Christ] must inevitably make an appeal to beauty."

"Creation's being is God's pleasure, creation's beauty God's glory; beauty reveals the shining of an uncreated light. … Creation is only a splendor that hangs upon that life of love and knowledge, and only by grace; it is first and foremost a surface, a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love. … It is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation's beauty—only in seeing that creation truly is beauty—does one apprehend what creation is."

"The cross of Christ is not, after all, simply an eternal validation of pain and death, but their overthrow. If all the tribulations of this world were to be written off as calculably necessary contributions to redemption -- part of the great "balance" of things -- then Christ's sacrifice would not be a unique saving act so much as the metaphysical ground for a universe of "sacrifice," wherein suffering and death are part of the sublime and inevitable fabric of finitude; and divine providence would be indistinguishable from fate."

"The secret irony pervading these arguments [on objections to the goodness of God] is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture."

"There is a sense in which Ivan's love of that little girl [in The Brothers Karamazov] is always in danger of becoming a kind of demonic compassion: a desire that she not exist at all, a conviction that it were better she had never been summoned into the wounded freedom of cosmic time or called into rational union with God than she suffer the wrongs done her at the hands of fallen creatures."

"Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power."

"Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?"

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion: to he worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to have an oratory in my own heart, and present spotless sacrifices of dignified kindness in the temple of humanity; to spread no opinions glaringly out like show-plants, and yet leave the garden gate ever open for the chosen friend and the chance acquaintance: to make no pretenses to greatness; to seek no notoriety; to attempt no wide influence; to have no ambitious projects; to let my writings be the daily bubbling spring flowing through constancy, swelled by experiences, into the full, deep river of wisdom; to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; … in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony."

"Yet ideas about forcible equalization of status and property were catching the imagination of others. Although Napoleon Bonaparte imposed a personal dictatorship in 1799, France remained a forcing bed for revolutionary ideas well into the nineteenth century. Among the influential figures was Henry de St Simon. He and his followers called for the gathering of ‘instruments of labour, land and capital in a social fund.’ Hereditary wealth was to be expropriated. St Simon aimed at creating a vast ‘association of toilers’ who would be organized from above. They would be assigned tasks according to their talent and rewarded according to their work. St Simon’ doctrine envisaged an end to war and the start of an endless era of plenty for humankind. This was meant to come about through dutiful propaganda."

"Of the "utopian socialists," to use Marx's label, Saint-Simon was the most accurate forecaster of the politics and economics of industry. Rational, worldwide territorial planning is implied in Saint-Simon's system..."

"The man who was born Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, and who died in poverty surrounded by a group of young disciples who looked upon him as the prophet of a new religion, must be considered something of an eccentric, as was Fourier, his younger contemporary. But, unlike the latter, whose origins and behavior were utterly bourgeois, Saint-Simon led a life as a cavalier as the name he renounced."

"In contrast with Babeuf, the French theorist the Comte de Saint-Simon was no believer in equality, but he has some claim to be regarded as the ‘founder of modern theoretical socialism, conceived not merely as an ideal but as the outcome of a historical process’. Saint-Simon believed that free economic competition produced poverty and crises and that society was moving inexorably to a stage when its affairs would be planned in accordance with social needs. He was resolutely opposed to violence and held that the most educated section of society would become convinced of the necessity of the development of more rational administration, based upon the application of science, and that other social groups would be won over to an appreciation of such a development. Although Saint-Simon’s was the first form of socialism to which the young Karl Marx was introduced – by his future father-in-law, Ludwig von Westphalen – Marx was later to pour scorn on Saint-Simon’s followers on account of their utopianism, commitment to peaceful change and trust in the possibility of class cooperation rather than the inevitability of class struggle."

"Saint-Simon was the prophet of meritocracy, seeking to reorder society in the image of the new chessboard he had designed for revolutionary France, with a hierarchy in which the king was replaced by a figure called Talent."

"[Count Henri de Saint-Simon] was for a time supported by his former valet, whose function had been—so the Saint-Simonian legend says, and it is not hard to believe—to rouse the count each day with the words, "Get up, my lord, you have great things to do today!""

"To colonize the world with the European race, which is superior to every other race: to make the world accessible and habitable like Europe—such is the sort of enterprise by which the European Parliament should continually keep Europe active and happy"

"Saint-Simon was the first to emphasize the efficiency of huge industrial undertakings and argued that the government should actively intervene in production, distribution, and commerce in the interest of promoting the welfare of the masses. He sanctioned both private property and its privileges as long as they were used to promote the welfare of the masses."

"After a violent convulsion Europe fears fresh disasters, and feel the end for a long repose; the sovereigns of all the European nations are assembled to give her peace. All of them seem to desire peace, all are famed for their wisdom, yet they will not reach their goal. I have asked myself why all the efforts of the statesmen are powerless against the evils which afflict Europe, and I have perceived that there is no salvation for Europe except through a general reorganization. I have thought out a plan of reorganization: the explanation of this plan is the subject of this work."

"Saint-Simon was the founder of corporatism, or at least of technocracy. It is in Saint-Simon that we find the identification of the categories life, or society, with industry. Saint-Simon helps to generate a theme which subsequently pervades all socialist traditions, for he raises the issue of status or legitimacy of citizenship with reference to productivity. Saint-Simon's hoped-for world is not only one where those who do not work shall not eat; it is also a place where they absolutely shall not rule. As Paul Ricoeur points out, Saint-Simon leaves a legacy which affects all socialisms, for he introduces into social theory (he theme of idleness and parasitism as social problems consequent on the evasion of the central social responsibility ascribed to citizens: the duty to be productive. Saint-Simon then adds his second profound message – that the elimination of the social problem of parasitism can finally lead to the disappearance of the state. For the logic of Saint-Simon is that the only legitimate social functions are those of production, and those of the scholarship which aids production. It is no accident that this corporatist utopia is today defended by western labour movements, for it exhausts the contemporary utopic vision of citizenship – good citizens are those who either boost Gross National Product or who conduct Wissenschaft as part of that process. For Saint-Simon was indeed to argue that 'Politics is the science of production'; here there is a politics of economic interests, but no other politics. Thus the second legacy – for where there is no politics, there need be no state, or at least no state conventionally defined. Saint-Simon proposes that there ought henceforth to be three chambers of government, functionally defined and solely directed to the national productive task." Politics would thus become administration, society would become a technocratic utopia untroubled by the routine vicissitudes of everyday life as encountered by the 'unproductive' masses. Bourgeoisie and proletariat would be locked into perpetual embrace, while parasites rich and poor alike would wither and government along with them. For the new society would only have hands, head and heart, and the parasites would be expelled by the body corporate."

"A religion of life had come to replace a religion of penance and emaciation, of fasting and prayer. The crucified body had risen in its turn and was no longer abashed Man had reached a harmonious unity: he had discovered that he is a single being not made, like a pendulum, of two different metals, that check each other; he realised that the foe in his members had ceased to exist."

"It was in America, while I was fighting for the cause of industrial liberty, that I first felt the desire to see this plant from another world flower in my own country. This desire has since dominated all my thinking. Without respite I studied the course of advancement and further assured myself that the progress of civilisation could have no other end. And I invoked this aim of true liberty, true public happiness, with my most fervent hopes. For me every event that seemed to point in that direction was a new joy, a new hope. The French Revolution broke out, and at first it seemed to be thoroughly industrial. But it soon lost that character, and the many noble efforts which ought to have produced liberty resulted only in the tyranny of the Jacobins and military despotism. A happier age has now started to dawn for us: at last a government has been established which declares its own power to be based on the power of opinion. Ever since then France has yielded to common sense, that is, to the free discussion of its common interests."

"Since governmental activity may be deemed a service which is useful to society, society should consent to pay for this service."

"It may be argued that writers stick to their convictions and serve only the truth, and that they only approve and support governmental conduct when they judge it to be in the interests of the governed. We accept that. We know that even those writers working under the eyes and under the influence of the Government always work, or at least claim to work only for society as a whole, and would be offended if it were thought otherwise. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the governed know better than anyone what they want and what is in their interest. We believe that government is at least an unnecessary intermediary between those who think about the public interest and those who feel it, between political writers and industry."