McCabe on Marx

ABSTRACT

Herbert McCabe was unique amongst the grammatical thomists in making significant use of the thought of Karl Marx. He engaged, moreover, with two topics in Marx which have generally been avoided by Christian theologians: class struggle and atheism. This paper examines McCabe’s treatment of both themes, and concludes that he effected a compelling incorporation of them into Christian thought. With respect to class struggle, McCabe understands there to be an intrinsic antagonism in capitalist society. He holds that an antagonistic society is antithetical to Christian norms, and concludes (with Marx) that this kind of society ought to be done away with by engaging in the side in the class-struggle – namely the working class – which has the capacity to do away with class society. He situates this view ironically, however, relativising the claims made about socialist society in the light of God’s Kingdom. With respect to atheism, McCabe brings his thomistic doctrine of God into conversation with Marx’s atheism, arguing that what Marx rejects when he rejects ‘God’ is a thing in the world, whereas God is – by thomistic hypothesis – not one more thing in the world. A radical view, therefore, is sustained by a traditional theology.

KEYWORDS:

• Herbert McCabe
• Marx
• grammatical thomism
• Christianity and Marxism

Herbert McCabe’s engagement with the thought of Karl Marx has been underemphasised in treatments of his work subsequent to his death. This is unsurprising, and not just because of the decline of interest in Marx and Marxism following the demise of the Eastern European states which claimed his name.¹ It is also to be expected because the neo-thomism which arose in response to Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris,² and which seems to be undergoing a revival at the present time, is resolutely hostile to Marx. For the neo-thomists Marx is simply a godless proponent of a form of society antithetical to Catholic norms and an instance of the modern philosophy against which Aquinas is a bulwark.³

Yet McCabe’s use of Marx deserves attention. It represents an innovative incorporation into Christian thought of what seem to be two of the aspects of Marx’s understanding of the world least suited to appropriation by a Christian philosopher: class struggle and atheism. Indeed when Christians have made use of Marx, these components of his thought have usually been set aside. This is the case, for instance, with most Latin American liberation theologians.⁴ McCabe, however, refuses to work with a pared-down Marx, and draws material of interest from both loci of the Marxian corpus.

In what follows, I will outline first McCabe’s use of Marx in thinking about class struggle, before going on to examine his treatment of Marx’s atheism. I will then offer some concluding reflections concerning the potential for conversation with Marx’s writings on the part of contemporary Christian thinkers.

Class struggle

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ write Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.⁵ And if class struggle pervades human history, it is a feature in particular of capitalist society. So Marx and Engels say this,

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.⁶

McCabe accepts this analysis, and in his paper The Class Struggle and Christian Love argues that Christians can accept it. He argues for the legitimacy, therefore, of what he himself does. He is, however, acutely aware of the fact that many Christians and many Marxists think that Christians cannot accept the doctrine of class struggle. A typical Marxist thinks that a Christian who accepts the doctrine should abandon Christianity. A typical Christian thinks that a Christian who accepts the doctrine should abandon it. Both sides think that being both a Christian and a believer in class struggle is untenable. McCabe writes of the suggestion that Christianity and class struggle are incompatible as ‘one of the few positions shared by the International Marxist Group, Mrs. Thatcher and Joseph Stalin’.⁷

A distinction is necessary at this point. What I have been calling ‘the doctrine of class struggle’ in fact consists of two claims:

1. There is a class struggle in capitalist society.

2. We should engage in class struggle.

Of course, (2.) does not say on which side we should engage in the class struggle. McCabe’s view is that,

1. The victory of the working class would result in a better society than capitalist society.

In what follows I will examine McCabe’s reasons for holding (1.), before looking at his account of (3.) and finally turning my attention to (2.)

First (1.), then: why does McCabe hold, with Marx, that there is a class struggle in capitalist society? First of all, he marks the distinction between employers and workers, or – to put the distinction in Marxian language, between bourgeoisie and proletariat:

The worker by his labour creates a certain amount of wealth, only part of which is returned to him in the form of wages, etc. The rest is appropriated by the employer, or capitalist, so called because his function is to accumulate capital in this way. The capitalist receives from a great many workers the extra wealth which they produce but do not need for their subsistence and minimal contentment, and bringing all this wealth together he is able to invest, to provide the conditions under which more work may be done — and so on. On this fundamental division between worker and employer the whole class system rests.⁸

This is, in essence, Marx’s account of profit from volume one of Capital. Workers create value (McCabe’s ‘wealth’) and receive back in the form of wages the value needed to reproduce their own labour-power. The value not returned to the workers as wages constitutes surplus value, and is the basis of profit (minus which Marx calls ‘constant capital’, encompassing other costs to the capitalist).⁹ How does this give rise to a class struggle? Here McCabe is less clear, but we can flesh out his basis for (1.) by looking at Marx, on whom he is clearly drawing in The Class Struggle and Christian Love.

Capitalism is driven by profit, such that firms which are not profitable will go out of business, and all firms face a constant imperative to increase their profits. There are two ways, for Marx, that they can do this: by increasing absolute surplus value, or by increasing relative surplus value. An increase in absolute surplus value involves lengthening the amount of time a worker has to work for a given wage – this can take place through lengthening the working day, reducing breaks, or (an option made more possible by current technology) allowing work to intrude into what is nominally a worker’s free time. Relative surplus value, an increase in which does not require a growth in the total value produced but which adds to the proportion of value accruing to the capitalist, may be increased by cuts in wages and increases in productivity. In either case, the interests of the workers can be seen to be directly opposed to those of their employers. A struggle between workers and employers is therefore built into the dynamics of the capitalist system¹⁰ quite independently of socialist agitation or the making of the suggestion that working class victory in the class struggle would result in a better society. Thus, according to Marx’s analysis of capitalist society, (1.) is true.

Marx did think, though, that the victory of the working class would lead to a better society. And McCabe agrees with him. This brings us to (3.). McCabe writes about the instability of capitalism, its insatiable expansion, from individual entrepreneur, to national firm, to transnational corporation. He goes on to say:

But all this is really only building an appearance of modernity onto an out-of-date basis which still remains the basis of private, non-social ownership and the market economy. The obvious move is to eliminate the archaic irrelevancy of the market, and with it the archaic irrelevancy of the capitalist class, and to transfer the whole thing to the organised working class. The accumulation of capital and its investment will then not be at the mercy of the maximisation of profit by this or that corporation, but can be organised rationally (and therefore justly) in terms of what people need and want.¹¹

Marx would not actually be content with talking about ‘the accumulation of capital’ in a socialist society. Capital, and its accumulation, are for Marx grounded in the specific social relations of capitalism.¹² What McCabe means is that the production and distribution of wealth under socialism ‘can be organised rationally (and therefore justly)’. Capitalists qua capitalists¹³ clearly have an interest against the supersession of capitalism by socialism, since capitalism is the basis of their profits. The working class, meanwhile, have a clear interest in bringing about socialism, since capitalism is the basis of their exploitation and of their lack on control over the organisation of the world’s resources. McCabe puts the matter like this:

The struggle of the working class is not, therefore, simply a struggle within capitalism, as though it were a matter of reversing positions and ‘putting the workers on top’ (as in the game of parliamentary elections); it is a struggle within capitalism which, insofar as it is successful, leads beyond capitalism.¹⁴

This is followed immediately by McCabe quoting Marx approvingly:

An oppressed class is a vital ingredient of every society based on class antagonism. The emancipation of the oppressed class therefore necessarily involves the creation of a new society … Does this mean the downfall of the old society will be followed by a new class domination expressing itself in a new political power? No, the condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes.¹⁵

This gets to the heart of why McCabe supports (3.). In moving beyond capitalist society, the working class will do away with classes; socialist society is classless.¹⁶ In this respect, socialism is better than capitalism for everyone. Free from the antagonism that goes with class society, human beings would be able to live in, what McCabe elsewhere terms political friendship (he is translating philia, as understood in the Aristotelian-thomist tradition). It is the intrinsically antagonistic relationships which characterise it that underwrite McCabe’s ethical hostility to capitalism: ‘What is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antagonism, and it is precisely here that it comes into conflict with Christianity’.¹⁷ Because ‘the condition for the emancipation of the working class’, is, moreover, what Marx terms ‘a universal class’, a class whose victory is in the ultimate interests of all.

So McCabe argues that there is a class struggle under capitalism, and that the victory of the working class in this struggle would issue in a society significantly preferable to capitalism. Should we engage, however, in the struggle on behalf of the working class? Is (2.) true, in particular, is it true when ‘we’ are Christians? Here McCabe draws attention to what we have already noted, that the class struggle is intrinsic to capitalism. We are in no position to start a class struggle. It is, for Marx and McCabe, there already. Nor are we in any position to abstain from the class struggle. To fail to engage on behalf of the exploited class is simply to favour the status quo, and with it the exploiting class. What is true for McCabe is that this state-of-affairs, characterised by class struggle, is inadequate, because conflict is not a good basis for the human fellowship for which God created us. As we have already noted, however, McCabe holds that the victory of the working class in the class struggle will end class conflict. There is, then, a way of moving beyond class conflict, but it is not by attempting to stay out of class struggle (which is impossible), but rather by consciously engaging in struggle on behalf of the working class. ‘The only way to end the class war is to win it’.¹⁸

McCabe supports (2.) and does so on the ground that class struggle is inevitable, and therefore that we should engage in it in a manner that has the potential to end it. Yet he does not simply urge Christians to engage in class struggle. He has things to say about how Christians should engage in this struggle, and it is at this point that we see most clearly the difference between McCabe and a purely secular Marxist. He counsels attention to the Sermon on the Mount; those who have taken that on board will not be self-obsessed or caught up in violence for its own sake, qualities detrimental to a genuine revolutionary.¹⁹ Furthermore, the Christian engaged in class struggle will, in the final analysis, love her enemies. This does not mean that they will cease to be enemies, or that she will cease struggling against them, but it does mean that she will not hate them.²⁰ Her loving her enemies is a wager on the future reconciliation that belongs to the Kingdom of God.

The mention of the Kingdom of God gives cause to mention an important component of McCabe’s approach to political struggle, which although present in The Class Struggle and Christian Love is more clearly developed in other writings, namely his critique of politics. All political struggle, however necessary it might be in the here-and-now, and all human attempts at building a good society fall short of the Kingdom of God. Whilst we certainly should engage in the difficult and conflictual process of working towards a better society, thinks McCabe, we should never lose sight of the fact that all our efforts are relativised by the gift of God’s Kingdom, which cannot be identified with any pre-eschatological society. An important function of the Church with respect to political life is to proclaim, and to make present by its life, this eschatological proviso. This reinforces McCabe’s view of how Christians should engage in political struggle,

The Christian socialist, as I see her, is more complex, more ironic, than her non-Christian colleagues, because her eye is also on the ultimate future, on the future that is attained by weakness, through and beyond the struggle to win in this immediate fight. But even short of the eschaton, the Christian is also more vividly aware not only of the need to avoid injustice in the fight for justice (as any rational non-Christian socialist would, of course, be) but also of the need to crown victory not with triumphalism but with forgiveness and mercy, for only in this way can the victory won in this fight remain related to the kingdom of God.²¹

McCabe agrees with Marx about class struggle, its inevitability under capitalism and the need to engage consciously with it. He adds to what Marx has to say norms about how that struggle should be fought and understood, derived from his Christian faith.

Marxist atheism

‘The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism’, wrote Marx, and the criticism he had in mind whilst writing this was undoubtedly the atheism of Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians. In line with this, atheism has been a feature of almost all subsequent Marxism and, unsurprisingly, a focus of ecclesiastical attacks on Marx. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1984 instruction Libertatis Nuncius has this to say,

Let us recall the fact that atheism and the denial of the human person, his liberty and rights, are at the core of the Marxist theory. This theory, then, contains errors which directly threaten the truths of the faith regarding the eternal destiny of individual persons. Moreover, to attempt to integrate into theology an analysis whose criterion of interpretation depends on this atheistic conception is to involve oneself in terrible contradictions.²²

This is muddled. It is far from clear what it would be to engage in ‘denial of the human person’, and it is simply untrue that Marx is opposed to human liberty and rights (as distinct from bourgeois conceptions of these things). It might be conceded, though, that the Instruction is inadequate in its dealing with the human person, but surely, one can imagine it being insisted, the Congregation is right that Marxist atheism is hostile to the Christian faith and that the incorporation of it into theology must be avoided on pain of ‘terrible contradictions’.

Even this is far from clear once thought is given to what is meant by ‘atheism’. The meaning of a denial of God’s existence turns on what is intended by the word ‘God’. For McCabe, taking his lead from Aquinas,²³ God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, but is an absolute mystery: we cannot know what God is in this life.²⁴ But this conception of God is far from that held by many modern atheists when they assert that God does not exist, so there is a real danger of talking at cross purposes,

Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is something instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or has been told is a religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially Christians claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it … that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.²⁵

Now I do not want to claim that Marx thought there was a mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, and thereby argue that there is no real disagreement between Marx and McCabe. But I do want to argue that Marx’s explicit atheism is certainly a denial of McCabe’s ‘Top Person.’ Marx thinks that belief in God results from a projection of the human essence occasioned by alienated social relations. Such belief is certainly in a powerful person; it is just that for Marx in believing we are misrecognising our own powers and personalities as belonging to God. Now McCabe, as he says, is ’atheistic’ about God on such a conception, so as far as the explicit philosophy of God goes he is not in disagreement with Marx. And in this he is perfectly in line with classical theism, contra Libertatis Nuncius.

One characteristically McCabian way of putting the point here is that God is not a god. Christians, holds McCabe, are called to reject the gods (and, of course, have this in common with Marxists). In fact, the rejection of the gods is important, thinks McCabe, for developing a good understanding of society (compare here Marx’s ‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’),

God the creator, who is not one of the participants in history but the mover of Cyrus and of all history, is the liberator fundamentally because he is not a god, because there are no gods, or at least gods to be worshipped. This leaves history in human hands under the judgement of God. Human misery can no longer be attributed to the gods and accepted with resignation or evaded with sacrifices. The long slow process can begin of identifying the human roots of oppression and exploitation, just as the way now lies open for the scientific understanding and control of the forces of nature.²⁶

McCabe, then, is squarely in line with the Marxian insistence that we must be atheists in order to see the world aright in order to transform it. His atheism, however, is with respect to the gods, not to God (and what God is, we cannot yet know).

Another locus of agreement between McCabe and the Marxist tradition, if not directly Marx, concerns God’s apparent enslavement of human beings. Here McCabe’s concern is distinctively Christian rather than generically theist. God, according to tradition, loves us and enters into friendship with us. Yet how can this be? Love obtains between equals, and between the transcendent creator of all that is and finite creatures there is no equality. God surely confronts us as the ultimate slave master, responsible for us yet unable to love us. In this inability to love he seems, as we would put it of a human being unable to love, immature. Such an entity must be entirely unworthy of our worship.

[God] cannot himself, it seems, be other than a vast omnipotent baby, unable to grow up, unable to abandon himself in love. Nietzsche, and from a different starting point, Karl Marx, saw that to accept this God was to accept a kind of slavery. However kind and good God might be, we are ultimately his servants; perhaps well-treated servants and slaves, perhaps slaves compassionately forgiven and rewarded with the life of heaven, but still fundamentally slaves. If you believe that the essence of the human is freedom then you cannot accept this benign slave-master of a God. The heart of modern atheism, certainly the heart of Marxist atheism, lies in the rejection of this master-slave relationship. God is not rejected because he is evil or cruel but because he is alienating and paternalist; he is rejected not in the name of human happiness but in the name of human freedom.²⁷

I don’t think this gets Marx quite right. The enslaving function of religion is not a major theme in his writings. That said, Marx would certainly have agreed with the rejection of a religiosity organised around a master-slave relationship. Subsequent Marxism was sometimes more explicit in this rejection. Be this as it may, McCabe’s response to this ‘atheism in the name of human freedom’ is interesting in itself. He draws explicitly on Christian doctrine, specifically on the doctrines of the Incarnation and of divinisation, to argue that there is an answer available to the charge that God is a ‘benign slave-master’, unable to love us. For McCabe, the central fact about Jesus is that he is loved by the Father.²⁸ In this is already contained the doctrine of the Incarnation, since love is between equals (as we have seen), and in particular the Father can only love an equal. Furthermore, Christ draws us into this relationship of love, divinising us, so that we can dare to speak of the love between us and God as a love between equals:

The adult love of God belongs within the Trinitarian life of the Godhead, the Father can only love what is divine. But as Jesus announces that God is grown up, that he can love, he does so by announcing that he is loved by the Father and simultaneously announces that we are taken up into this love … God cannot, of course, love us as creatures, but ‘in Christ’ we are taken up into the exchange of love between the Father and the incarnate and human Son, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we become part of the divine life. We call this ‘grace’.²⁹

The God who becomes Incarnate, insists McCabe, can draw us into a relationship other than that which obtains between master and slave.

Another strand of Marx’s atheism consists in the claim that religious belief is an expression of alienation. Belief in God, say, or in an afterlife is a projection resulting from alienated social conditions. We have already met Marx’s claim that ‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’. He follows this up with one of the most famous passages in the Marxian corpus:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.³⁰

Religious belief, in other words, is an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction, and whilst consoling to its adherents, prevents them from seeing the world aright. Now, the question will be forced, it seems impossible for a Christian like McCabe to agree with this.

Note that Marx is saying that religious belief belongs to a certain period in human existence, namely the period during which there is an ‘inverted world’, where human beings are beset with enduring alienated labour and confronted by the alienated politics of the state. Christians also believe that religious belief belongs only to a certain stage³¹ of human existence. When the Kingdom comes in its fullness, and human beings see God and one another face to face, there will be no need for religion. Thus the book of Revelation, ‘I saw no temple in the city’.³²

McCabe takes these insights and uses them to engage with Marxist atheism. For McCabe, as for Marx, that religion persists is a sign of our alienation. It is just that, according to McCabe, our alienation goes deeper than Marx suggests, and that overcoming it requires not simply a social revolution, but a revolution in our very bodies, that is: resurrection into the fullness of God’s Kingdom. He brings Aquinas to bear on this issue:

For Aquinas, the sacramental and all that belongs to religion and the Church as we know it, is part of the time before [God will be all in all], the time of sin.

Like Karl Marx, Aquinas knew that religious cult belongs to human alienation, and that the passing of this alienation would mean the withering away of the Church. But unlike Marx, he knew that the passing of this alienation needed more than the establishment of socialism, or even of communism; it meant a revolution in our very bodies, a death and resurrection.³³

McCabe chooses his words carefully here. While the passing of alienation requires ‘more than the establishment of socialism’, it does (he thinks) require at least that. Throughout his writings McCabe is passionately committed to the idea that Christians are called to improve the state of society. In his catechism, The Teaching of the Catholic Church, he writes, in response to the question ‘Is almsgiving a special act of charity?’ that,

Almsgiving is a special act of charity but a greater one is to struggle for a more just society in which it will be less necessary.³⁴

The struggle for justice is one McCabe understands in socialist terms, albeit not because of anything in divine revelation. As he puts it,

[I]f I think (as I do) that all my fellow Catholics should support a socialist immediate programme, it is not because I am a Catholic but because I am a socialist.³⁵

Note the a socialist programme is considered by McCabe to be ‘immediate’, because it is pre-eschatological. In addition to this, this short quotation captures a characteristically Dominican account of the relationship between faith and reason, as at once distinct and yet harmonious.

Reflections

It is this combination of faith and reason that is the prism through which we should view McCabe’s encounter with Marx. At a time where strands within Christian theology have moved away from serious attempts to read and learn from secular thought, regarding sometimes the very idea of the ‘secular’ as the creation of theological drift, McCabe calls us back to a generosity of reading and an openness towards an author whose presuppositions are, on the face of it at least, very different from those of Christian theology.

But if there is a general wariness of secular thought, in general, in some quarters, even more so is there a hostility to Marx, particular. The so-called ‘culture wars’ have caused some people to lay at the door of Marx, or at least of something called ‘cultural Marxism’, the corruption of both the academy and wider society. This line of thinking has been picked up by some people within the churches, especially in north America, where the influence of Marx – through liberation theology, for instance – is regarded as damaging and hostile to true Christianity. McCabe’s work contains a potential critique of this position, that it is only on the basis of a shallow reading of Marx that his work need be regarded as undermining Christianity, and that on the contrary there is much that Christians can learn from his work.

If hostility to Marx is a feature of the Christian right, more common – particularly amongst academic theologians – is an indifference towards Marx. He is, on this view, old fashioned, belonging to an age of conflict between capitalism and socialism which is now past, decisively resolved in favour of capitalism. Moreover, academic fashion, like all fashion, moves on, and Marx is not now one of the favoured authors for theological dialogue or correlation. McCabe, who was a thomist before he was a Marxist, kept a wise distance from fashion, and we can perhaps learn from him to do the same. In any case, Marx looks rather less irrelevant during the 2020s than he did at the turn of the millennium. Crisis, both ecological and economic, looms large, and to understand the crises that confront us we, arguably, need to think of capitalism as a whole system.³⁶ Marx is a canonical thinker who did this, and McCabe provides a way-in to theological engagement with Marx.

It is a distinctively theological engagement with Marx that we find in McCabe. He situates the Marxian critique of capitalism and socialist politics within a broader narrative, leading from creation, through the Cross to the culmination of all things in the Kingdom of God. His insistence that the ultimate revolution by which we are liberated is the revolution of death and resurrection gives rise to, what the liberation theologians termed, an eschatological proviso. McCabe’s writing carries an implicit warning to theological readers of Marx not to identify socialism with the Kingdom of God. Socialism, for sure, represents a step towards that Kingdom; we are created for fellowship with God and with one another, and the establishment of socialism would remove barriers to that fellowship. However the ultimate flourishing of this fellowship, this caritas, is a pure gift, given by God in Christ and brought about through death and resurrection (Christ’s and our own). It is only at the point at which this gift is realised for the entirety of God’s people that alienation will finally be overcome. ‘For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face’.³⁷

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Hewitt

Simon Hewitt teaches theology at the University of Leeds. As well as Herbert McCabe, he is interested in Aquinas, systematic theology and political theology (including the relationship between Christianity and Marxism). He is the author of ‘Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis’ and ‘Church and Revolution’.

Notes

1. Claimed it unjustly: there is nothing in Marx to justify the kind of totalitarian state which marred much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed Marx regards the state itself as a manifestation of alienation, and hopes for its supersession. See Thomas, Alien Politics and Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, Ch. 2.

2. Accessed October 25, 2023. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html.

3. On the invocation of Thomas against modern philosophy, see Kerr, After Aquinas. For an example of opposition to Marx within a certain style of popular revived neo-thomism, see Accessed October 25, 2023. https://pintswithaquinas.com/catholicism-has-no-place-for-marxism/

4. Gutiérrez, Essential Writings, 45–7. But see, Alistair Kee. Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology.

5. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 79.

6. Communist Manifesto, p. 80.

7. McCabe, “The Class Struggle and Christian Love,” in God Matters, 182.

8. “The Class Struggle and Christian Love,” 188.

9. Marx, Capital I, Parts 3 and 4.

10. And in spite of the relative lack of clarity on the question why (1.) is true, and the lack of reference to Marx’s work, McCabe agrees on this, writing ‘The worker has something to sell as dearly as possible, his labour, and the capitalist wants to buy it as cheaply as possible so as to have the maximum left over for capital investment.’ ‘The Class Struggle and Christian Love’, p. 189.

11. “The Class Struggle and Christian Love,” 190–1.

12. Capital I, Part 7.

13. Qua human beings, capitalists in fact have an interest in socialism, since to live in a just society is universally conducive to human well-being. It is just that capitalists face an immediate economic imperative against socialism.

14. “The Class Struggle and Christian Love,” 191.

15. Ibid.

16. This is one reason why the states of the former Eastern Bloc were not socialist.

17. “The Class Struggle and Christian Love,” 192.

18. Ibid., 195.

19. Ibid.

20. “The Class Struggle and Christian Love,” 198.

21. Herbert McCabe OP, “Christ and Politics,” in God Still Matters, p. 91.

22. Available on-line at Accessed November 20, 2023 https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html.

23. Having argued for the existence of God, Aquinas in the prima pars of the Summa Theologiae immediately asserts that ‘we cannot know what God is’, STh Ia, q3, pr.

24. “Creation,” in God Matters, 1–9.

25. “Creation,” 7.

26. McCabe, “The Involvement of God,” in God Matters, 43.

27. McCabe, “God,” in God Still Matters, 6.

28. “God,” 7.

29. Ibid.

30. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.

31. I do not want to say ‘period’, since it might be thought that it is the whole of human history of which religion is a feature, and that the fullness of the Kingdom belongs to a reality other than historical reality. I myself am somewhat cautious of this line of thought, but it is a common one, and we cannot decide the matter here.

32. Revelation 21:22.

33. “Christ and Politics,” 91.

34. McCabe,The Teaching of the Catholic Church, 63.

35. “Christ and Politics,” 90.

36. For a prominent example of a non-Marxist theologian doing this, see Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism.

37. 1 Corinthians 13:12.