The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has spoken up in support of
Karl Marx, defending key aspects of his critique of capitalism.
Dr Williams warns that in the face of the credit crisis, the financial world
needs new regulation and says that our society is running the risk of
idolatry in its relationship with wealth.
In an article in Friday's Spectator, Dr Williams compares today's
debtors and financiers to the feckless young clerics and landowners
described in the novels of Anthony Trollope. He writes: "Individuals
find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have
nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for
which a debt is simply someone else's wholly disposable asset."
Criticising the practices which involve financial institutions selling debts
onto each other, Dr Williams says: "It is no use pretending that the
financial world can maintain indefinitely the degree of exemption from
scrutiny and regulation that it has got used to."
He calls for a basis of "common prosperity" to be established and
suggests that other financial practices besides short-selling should also be
banned. "Without a background of social stability everyone will
eventually suffer," he warns. "Governments should not lose their
nerve as they look to identify a few more targets."
Dr Williams says the crisis is underpinned by deeper moral issues, and the
connection between money and material reality has to be re-established.
He concedes that entrepeneurs must be allowed to create wealth to help nations
out of poverty. But he argues that it is "a sort of fundamentalism"
to say that this is the only way.
"Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of
the problem," the Archbishop says "Marx long ago observed the way
in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality,
power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right
about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what
you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish
and Christian Scriptures call idolatry."
In a separate, video message Dr Williams also pledged the Anglican Communion
to continue to work for the eradication of poverty.
Speaking on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly meeting on
Millennium Development Goals in New York, Dr Williams said: "Let this
meeting in New York be an occasion where the consciences and the hearts of
all are truly touched and changed, turned towards the needs of the poorest,
turned towards the recognition that we have it in our hands to make a
difference."
The Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu will share a platform with Gordon Brown
and Bill Clinton at the UN meeting tomorrow (thurs).
In his prescient encyclical "On Christian Hope" last year, Pope
Benedict XVI also addressed Marxist economic theory. "With great
precision, albeit with a certain one-sided bias, Marx described the
situation of his time, and with great analytical skill he spelled out the
paths leading to revolution," the Pope said. "Together with the
victory of the revolution, though, Marx's fundamental error also became
evident. He showed precisely how to overthrow the existing order, but he did
not say how matters should proceed thereafter."
The Pope described Marx's "real error" as materialism: "man, in
fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not
possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable
economic environment."
