14.01.1999

Not to bring peace

For decades the Christian establishment was known as the Tory Party at prayer. Then it became, according to some, the SDP at prayer - and perhaps New Labour at prayer. But now the rapidly declining cult has decided that it is time for a face-lift.

Remember all those rightwing Conservative MPs like Norman Tebbit who used to fulminate against “Marxist bishops” (when they were not condemning the BBC as the “Bolshevik Broadcasting Company”)? These “Marxist bishops” had committed the cardinal sin of mentioning the poverty and social deprivation of Britain under Tory rule - and in the case of the then bishop of Durham had expressed some sort of vague humanitarian-philanthropic solidarity with the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85.

It seems that the good brethren have taken inspiration from the jibes of Tebbit et al. It has now decided to repackage itself as the Tooting Popular Front at prayer - or at least to make an effort to convince us that to be a Christian is to be part of a radical counter-culture. A group called Christians in Media have launched a poster campaign which seeks to associate Jesus with the semi-mythical revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara. This takes the form of manipulating the classic ‘student bedsit’ Che image (which seems to have become a capitalist product par excellence) in order to make Jesus look like the charismatic Argentinean - so the Guevara image now has a crown of thorns as opposed to a beret with a five-point star. The slogan underneath the ‘Jesus Guevara/Che Christ’ depiction has the words, “Meek and mild, as if: discover the real Jesus”. This also ties in nicely of course with the razzmataz surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

In other words, the iconography of the suffering and passive martyr, Jesus, is beeing replaced - at least for this particular campaign - by the iconography of the violent revolutionary martyr, Che Guevara. As the reverend Tom Ambrose, of the Churches in Advertising Network, put it, “We want people to realise that Jesus is not a wimp in a white nightie or someone who is a bit of a walkover, but a strong, revolutionary figure.”

Naturally, this has proved all too much for the delicate sensibilities of the Christian ‘traditionalists’. Harry Greenway of the Conservative Christian Fellowship has denounced the Christians in Media campaign as “grossly sacrilegious”. Ann Widdecombe, new convert to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, retorted: “As far as this poster goes, we should be modelling ourselves on Christ, not modelling Christ on us.” Quite understandably, the bishop of Wakefield did not think the poster campaign was “the proper way of presenting the message of love and peace”. 

Communists would indeed support the supposed aim of the poster campaign to “discover the real Jesus” - ie, the historical Jesus. He was certainly not meek and mild. Nor was he a wimpy pacifist who urged the masses to turn the other cheek and love their Roman oppressors. Jesus was a violent revolutionary who wanted to establish a theocratic communism. Therefore we have to disagree with the ignorant comments of the reverend Peter Owen-Jones, a key figure behind Christians in the Media: “We are not saying that Jesus was a communist, but that he was a revolutionary.”

The truth is that, no matter how uncomfortable it may be for Christians, Jesus was both a revolutionary and a communist - albeit of an apocalyptic or primitive sort. In that sense, the similarities between Jesus and Guevara are not to be lightly dismissed. They have much in common. However, it should be plain for all to see that you will not discover the real Jesus following the Christian cult - whatever denomination or schism. To do that you will have to read - for instance - the works of Karl Kautsky (The foundations of Christianity), outstanding Jewish scholars like Hyam Maccoby (Revolution in Judea) or the publications of the Communist Party of Great Britain (see Jack Conrad, ‘Jesus: from Jewish revolutionary to imperial god’ Weekly Worker December 17 1998).

The positive qualities possessed by Jesus and Guevara (courage, selflessness, self-sacrifice, etc) need to be balanced with more negative ones. Both revolutionaries had their faults. Marxists are not pantheists who have a list of secular saints who are somehow above criticism. We must ruthlessly criticise everything and everybody. For materialists, the prime charge to direct against both Jesus and Guevara was the fact that they were fundamentally utopian revolutionaries. That is, they looked to an elite minority to bring salvation. For Jesus it was his tiny band of disciples armed with two swords; while for the more practical Guevara it was the guerrilla units (or foci) armed with AK47s which would descend upon the cities and introduce ‘communism’. Jesus had god and divine intervention to rely upon; Guevara looked towards the guerrilla leader triggering an uprising of the masses.

Under the revolutionary doctrines of Jesus the masses are relegated to the role of cheerleaders - at best. Jesus’s God-given monarchical communism was not democratic; it did not look to self-liberation. Ultimately, neither did Guevara’s guerrilla nucleus. This was amply demonstrated during his ill-fated Bolivian campaign. His forces were regarded more with fear than rejoicing by the downtrodden and oppressed peasantry, to whom the appearance of Guevara meant army retribution and hence yet more suffering.

His narodnik-utopian scheme stifled the real class struggle. Guevara’s impatience and frustration was therefore often directed against the peasantry he was supposed to be liberating. As John Lee Anderson writes,

“Fear and panic from civilians often greeted their [Guevara’s unit] arrival, and to obtain food and information they frequently had to resort to coercion, adopting the practice of holding people hostage while a relative or friend was sent off on errands for them” (JL Anderson Che Guevara: a revolutionary life London 1997, p722). 

Jesus and Guevara were also united by their voluntarism, which dismissed material reality and the existing social-economic conditions as essentially irrelevant to the revolutionary struggle.Jesus had the illusion that he and his small band could seize the temple in Jerusalem and immediately inaugurate the ‘kingdom of god’. Guevara thought that the chronically backward countries of Cuba, Bolivia, Congo, Vietnam, etc were ripe for ‘communism’ - all that was necessary was an extreme act of will and heroic self-sacrifice. In 1960 René Dumont, a French Marxist economist, held discussions with Guevara. He came to the opinion that Guevara “was far ahead of his time - in thought, he had already entered a communist stage” (ibid p480).

The flip-side of Guevara’s romantic narodnik-utopianism was an attraction to bureaucracy and personality cultism. For all his criticisms, Guevara saw the ‘socialist bloc’ countries as models. His admiration for JV Stalin or Mao never diminished. Quite the opposite appears to be the case.

It is perfectly true that in his later years Guevara became disenchanted with the “state capitalist” Soviet Union and its vassals. But his growing, and understandable, cynicism about the Soviet bureaucracy took the semi-Maoist form of an increased admiration for the ‘anti-Soviet regimes’ in China, North Korea, Albania, etc. His hopes for the future became focused almost exclusively on the rural, undeveloped countries and the ‘noble peasant’.

Consequently, he effectively abandoned the proletariat - especially those in the advanced capitalist countries - who lived in the “degenerate cities”, and seemed bent on the creation of a “pastoral utopia” through guerrilla warfare (ibid p621 and p299). It is not too difficult to see where petty bourgeois groups like the Revolutionary Communist Group/Fight Racism Fight Imperialism get their ‘third worldist’ moralism from. For the RCG virtually all workers - except ‘the dispossessed’ - in the advanced countries are by definition ‘labour aristocrats’.       

Interestingly enough, as more evidence of his romantic utopianism, Guevara viewed Lenin as “the culprit” - if not the fallen angel - for introducing the New Economic Policy and hence ‘ruining’ the pristine ideals of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. Instead, Guevara glorified the years of war communism, when money - and hence, so he thought, individualism - had been ‘abolished’ ... by civil war, famine, chaos and generalised want.

You could say that unlike Guevara, Jesus did not enjoy the advantage of having access to Marxism and scientific socialism - nor did he look to state dictatorships as vehicles for salvation. Then again, Guevara always looked to human beings, not supernatural forces, as the agency of political-social change and history.

Whatever the case, we must not let the Christian cult appropriate and hijack the revolutionary kernel which you can find in the doctrines of Jesus and Ernesto Che Guevara. The established church’s mission has been to provide theological justifications for the status quo and exploitative class rule. Jesus and Che were revolutionaries who sided with the oppressed.

Danny Hammill