Communism before Marx

There are people I am familiar with who seem to dismiss the philosophy of Karl Marx without knowing why they do so. Most are Conservative supporters, blissfully unaware of the irony of their unwavering support for an economic system that has so miserably failed us all over the past few years, and is destined to do so again (from a Marxian perspective), whilst trying to outright dismiss the tools used by Marx to critique the system.

Marx, to me is a Utopian and one of the most forward thinkers in generations. We can use Marx as a tool to critique the failings of the system that we live under, and to highlight its weaknesses. Does this mean that those of us who consider ourselves Marxists wish to overthrow the entire system and abandon all property rights? Of course not. We recognise the fundamental differences between early Capitalism of the time in which Marx was writing, and the massively complicated system that we live under today. We simply use Marxist thinking to try to explain the structural weaknesses and inherent contradictions within that system. Marx, in that respect, is more relevant today than he has been for decades. More so than Thatcher, more so than Reagan, more so than Osborne. None of whom are in the same league as Karl Marx for economic and social critique and scientific understanding.

I have promised a classmate at University, that I would try to explain why Karl Marx was simply a product of history, and was not responsible for the fundamental idea behind his writings, but simply someone who managed to create a thesis if you will, a consolidation of thoughts and ideas belonging to the tradition of collectivism throughout history. He simply provided a scientific analysis for the linear progression of society from feudalism, to imperialism, to capitalism, to communism. He was not the first to promote egalitarian principles.

By the 1st Century BC, the Jewish community was spread from Israel right the way to the far western front of the Roman Empire. They weren’t an organised community as such; there were a few factions. The Pharisees and the Sadducees are the most famous, purely because they were pretty hostile to one another. But there existed a group called the Essene. Pliny the Elder is one of the very few historians who mentions them, but they are mentioned elsewhere, if you look hard enough. They existed on the Western coast of the Dead Sea. They were like a family; very close. They practiced a system of property sharing. If one of their members had two loaves of bread and one had nothing, the one with two loaves would share one. They were not threatened into doing so, or forced in any way, it was simply part of their nature. They were not a different section of humanity. They prove that humanity is not necessarily motivated entirely by greed. They lived in a society where greed was not rewarded, and so the trait of greed was not amplified, as it is in the system that we live in. Human nature is so vast and so unpredictable, it takes the form of whatever society it is a part of. It is not greedy alone. The Essene also used a system of income distribution according to need. This was 2000 years before Marx wrote arguably his most famous line; “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” They did not own slaves, instead they worked to help each other. Today, we would call them communists.

The Didache, an important first century Christian document known as “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles“, states:

“Share everything with your brother. Do not say, ‘It is private property.’ If you share what is everlasting, you should be that much more willing to share things which do not last.”

The Archbishop of Constantinople, and very important early Christian teacher, John Chrysostom, remarked:

“The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor, even if they have acquired them honestly or inherited them legally. Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life.

Many Christian sects throughout the Middle Ages were the last remnants of real Christianity, not the monstrous sect of privilege and pomp we have today. Those old Christian sects presented a problem for the ever powerful and rich central Church. The Waldensians for example promoted the ideas of social justice and looking after those less fortunate. The lived in a commune. They were very forward thinking, noting in the 12th Century that the Catholic Church was corrupt and full of power hungry maniacs. They were thus declared heretics by Pope Lucius III, many were burnt as heretics because they had shown “contempt for ecclesiastical power”.

The 17th Century group known as the “diggers” were a radical sect who wished to overthrow the feudal system and replace it with small powerless egalitarian agricultural communities. They started to plant crops in privately owned fields, to help the fact that food prices had rocketed. They invited the poor to all join in. They pulled down private enclosures of land. The shared food and goods between them.

Max Beer, the German historian writes:

…there cannot be any doubt that common possessions were looked upon by many of the first Christians as an ideal to be aimed at.”

It would seem that many of the early Christians followed their earlier Jewish Essene brothers in advocating common ownership rather than private property. And why not? After all their sacred text says this:

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.”

Christianity’s most popular names have pronounced similar sentiments to those pronounced by the Essene and early Christians. In the fourth Century, St Augustine’s teacher, St Ambrose wrote quite emphatically:

Nature has poured fourth all things for all men, to be held in common. For God commanded all things to be produced so that food be common to all and that the Earth should be a common possession to all. Nature therefore created common right. Habit created private right. Since, therefore, His bounty is common, how is it that you have so many fields, and your neighbor not even a clod of earth?

It would seem that one of the greatest advocates of early communist ideals, and a man who understood class conflict, was the priest and instigator of the peasants revolt, the priest John Ball. He was an early revolutionary, born in the wrong era. He was known to try to whip up aggression among the peasants against the Lords of the land and the Monarchy. He was an early communist. And yet no one knows his name. In his day, he was simply known by the Nobility as “the crazy priest”. One of his many speeches reads:

” My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill have they used us ? and for what reason do they thus hold us in bondage ? Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve ? and what can they show, or what reasons give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves ? except, perhaps, in making us labor and work for them to spend.

They are clothed in velvets and rich stuffs, ornamented with ermine and other furs, while we are forced to wear poor cloth. They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of the straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labors in the fields; but it is from our labor they have wherewith to support their pomp. We are called slaves; and, if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice…. ”

That was six centuries ago. An early Karl Marx, and certainly not crazy.
In the same era as Ball was sparking up popular dissent in England, a group called the Taborites were living what was considered an heretical life by the Catholic Church, in the Czech city of Tabor. They also practised communal living; sharing all the land and all property. They announced that in their community, there were no masters and no servants.

A 16th Century revolutionary whose name is not known, but who historians call “the revolutionary of the upper Rhine” once wrote:

What a lot of harm springs from self seeking!….. It is necessary therefore that all property become one single property.

Reading Thomas More’s Utopia (I have a bit of an obsession with 16th Century History), you soon come to a couple of paragraphs that make you wonder whether or not you are readin a 16th Century writer, or a modern Marxist. I have put the two paragraphs together in one quote here, because it’s far easier to read that way:

“I am quite convinced that you’ll never get a fair distribution of goods or a satisfactory organisation of human life, until you abolish private property altogether. So long as it exists, the vast majority of the human race will inevitably go on labouring under a burden of poverty, hardship, and worry.

In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the World, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organising society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible.”

So you see, there were many revolutionary freethinkers throughout history who would today be labelled evil communists. And yet, we revere them as great people from the past. Thomas More is now Saint Thomas More (which always amuses me; cannonising a man who wished to burn to death any man who dared to own a copy of the Bible in English). The early egalitarian Christians planted that seed that became slowly entwined with the money tree of Medieval Europe and its corrupt power structure. Modern day Christianity, and especially Catholicism should feel ashamed to link itself in any way to the early Church whose name it has so violently stolen and pissed all over.

Karl Marx did not come up with the ideas he speaks of in the Communist Manifesto, all by himself. He had a very rich history of egalitarian thought and rebellion behind him. He modernised those thoughts, and consolidated them, creating a beautifully crafted popular critique of the vile Capitalist world he inhabited. That was his genius.