SOUL SURMISING PART 2- MARXIST, CAPITALIST or AMOSIST

Tue 30th Sep 2008

Having been called a Marxist on a recent trip to Alabama Stocki declares that his views on economics are influenced not by economic systems but by Amos and other biblical prophets...

So I got called a Marxist! I was in Alabama and I guess I should have been flattered, after all Dom Helder Camara said, ““When I feed the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” However, I would not call myself a Marxist so I was rather perturbed. I guess too, that I was as much perturbed by what the accuser understands of my thinking because I knew he wasn’t throwing it out as a compliment. I had spoken a day or two earlier in The Cathedral Of Advent in Birmingham, Alabama and quickly replayed my sermon over and over to see what had triggered the accusation.

I imagine it might have been when I said that we had to do more to rid the world of third world poverty than wearing a Make Poverty History bracelet. I suggested that for the poor to get a more just deal some of us might have to sacrifice our decadence and perhaps do without our iPods. I always loved that last line until I was given the gift of an iPod for speaking somewhere. It catches in the throat a little bit now but at least I didn’t buy it! Anyway, I also suggested that perhaps at the Gleneagles G8 Summit, the week after Live 8 in 2005, that the world leaders were agreeing that they needed to make poverty history but that to do so they’d have to raise the income tax and the very people that were campaigning to end poverty would then vote against them in the next election. I probably then added that I am suspicious of political parties that gain control by the lowering of taxes because it plays into the hands of our deep rooted selfishness! You can see where I was asking for it.

Having set out to provoke and then having provoked should not have been a surprise but I was shocked at the assumptions made. Basically I was a Marxist and a lot of Marxist ideals were listed and attributed to me and a lot of Capitalist beliefs were listed and I was told I obviously did not believe them! Well, I disagreed with what I was supposed to believe and neither did I not believe what I was told I didn’t believe! I was then a little surprised to find that though Marxism had failed that Capitalism had worked. That is quite a black and white conclusion and not one that is probably shared by my friends who live in shacks on townships around Cape Town. When you walk the streets of the townships you have to give people more than a concept of capitalism. You need to create an environment where capitalism has an opportunity to function. And the truth is that the injustice of the obscene divide between the rich and the poor has blocked out that fairness or freedom. So, Capitalism has its failures too.

Now, you are asking what I am going to replace Marxism and Capitalism with. Well, I don’t know and that is actually not my dilemma. For me the sermon I preached that got me labelled a Marxist was not about economic systems. It was about everyday discipleship and ordinary Biblical principles of the Kingdom of God. It was all based on the teaching of the prophets who seemed to live in similar times as us when the rich were languishing in their summer houses full of decadence and ivory while at the same time the poor were being oppressed. Idolatry and the disparity between rich and poor are the recurring judgements of God in the Scriptures and the link between the two seems almost assured. It is why Jesus advises that no one can serve both God and money.

So whatever economic system that the economist employs has to be weighed in the balances of such judgements from Scripture. To me they all seem to be found wanting. What Marx got most wrong was that a change in economic system would sort out the heinous selfish greed at the core of the human soul. It might also be that irresponsible freedom of Capitalism best allows such heinous selfish greed to bloom. The kind of responsible Biblical economics will always be focused on the benefit of the poor rather than the benefit of the rich. That somehow the American government can find $700 billion to bail out Wall Street when they were never able to find $25 billion to save 25,000 children per day from needless starvation and disease suggest that the system is being used with a demonic inspiration rather than a Godly one. As an Amosist or a prophetist or a Biblicist or as a Christian I need to pray and live and vote for a worldwide economy that looks more like the caring just equality of heaven than the fat cat manipulation of today’s world markets. That’ll need more than the idolatry of an economic system but a gouging out of the selfishness within. Bring it on Lord!