Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623. Check out his piece “Christianity, Morality, and Socialism” at Jacobin. We linked to this piece in Sunday night’s odds and ends. But after reading it more closely, I thought I would do a separate post on the essay. Guastella believes socialism will not work without Christian ethics. Here’s a taste:
Today, many of those who identify as leftists take pride in being excised of “bourgeois” morality, sentimentality, and prudishness. But, as Berlinguer might warn, we replace bourgeois morality with amorality at our own peril. On any number of important questions pertaining to the family, faith, work, discipline, education, etc., some radical now responds, “Who needs it?” This may be a politically incorrect answer, but it’s not a dishonest one. Any socialist confronted with genuine moral questions is forced to confront a paradox: socialism, the most moral of causes, seems to lack a coherent moral theory all its own.
Historically, in Christian Europe and Latin America, it was easy to avoid this problem. Whenever moral questions became political questions, socialists simply retreated to popular Christian positions, as in Kautsky’s defense of the family or Lenin’s admonition of prostitution. There was no specifically Marxist defense for these supposedly “backward” stances, but the hegemony of Christian morality made them almost unthinkingly reasonable. Contemporary socialists have no such recourse. Instead, in the wake of the norm smashing New Left, we typically default to a liberal morality: the live-and-let-live attitude that says it’s none of my business how any particular person lives their life, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my ability to do the same.
But this retreat to liberalism is morally bankrupt and politically barren. Is it possible to advance a vision of the good society without a stable conception of what it means to live a good life? Moral questions are inextricably bound up with political and economic ones. Searching for a surer moral footing upon which to launch a socialist political program has again raised the specter of Christian ethics.
Consider the revival of interest in Alasdair MacIntyre’s work. An intellectual biography of the ninety-five-year-old philosopher was first translated into English in 2022 then reviewed positively that year in Jacobin, of all places. Meanwhile, this year, MacIntyre was profiled in the left-leaning London Review of Books by an editorial board member of the journal Radical Philosophy. MacIntyre was, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a dazzlingly brilliant young Marxist intellectual. He wrote Marxism and Christianity when he was only twenty-three, advancing the argument that Marx was not simply influenced by Christian ideas but actively imbued his theory with a Christian ethos. Later, MacIntyre made his name professionally with the breakout After Virtue in 1980, a book that looks squarely at the moral vacuity of modern liberal democracy. Shortly after its publication he converted to Catholicism.
MacIntyre’s political legacy has been hotly debated (right-wing communitarian or Marxist wolf in paschal lamb’s clothing?), but the sudden resurgence of his ideas does suggest that the moral hole in the middle of socialism yearns to be filled. Liberalism has no answers. To the question “What is best for me to do, as an individual?” it offers nothing. And when asked “What is best for us to do, as a society?” it simply shrugs. In theory, the former question is meant to be left to the realm of the private, and the latter to democratic deliberation. In practice, however, both are ultimately decided by the market. To surrender moral questions to liberalism, then, is to surrender social questions to the market. And worse, to surrender political opposition to market morality to the opportunists of the reactionary right.
Whether socialism can survive without its bedrock Christian assumptions remains to be seen, but it certainly cannot survive without the working class. And working-class rejection of libertarian responses to crime, social normlessness, drugs, and more has been a stable feature of left-wing political atrophy. In the coming period, socialists will again and again be forced to confront moral questions as social questions. The push for the legalization of more drugs will expand — the State of Oregon at first said yes, and then said no. Sports betting and other forms of digital gambling continue their spread. Next up is whether capitalist societies will liberalize assisted suicide — an option that will surely be taken up by the poor, the disabled, the lonely, the economically “redundant.” What do socialists say? Is it a good society that allows the consequences of its madness to be killed off “consensually”? Does it make one a good person to advocate for it?
Read the entire piece here.