What is Nkrumahism-Touréism?

By All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP)

Republished from Hood Communist.

The Africa which exists today, as well as the one we are struggling to build, is not the old Africa but a new emergent revolutionary society; a classless society in which a new harmony, a new cohesiveness, a new revolutionary African personality and a new dignity is forged out of the traditional African way of life which has been permanently changed by thousands of years of Euro-Christian and Islamic intrusions and by the historical development of the competing and conflicting slave, feudal, capitalistic and newly emergent socialist modes of production. A new emergent ideology is therefore required. That ideology is Nkrumahism-Touréism!

Nkrumahism-Touréism takes its name from the consistent, revolutionary, socialist and Pan-African principles, practices and policies followed, implemented and taught by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Seku Touré; two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the scientific strategy to liberate and unify Africa under scientific socialism. These principles, practices and policies are recorded in their speeches, writings, actions, achievements and life. In a larger and more complete sense, Nkrumahism-Touréism is the synthesis of the accumulated practical and theoretical contributions and achievements of centuries and generations of mass, revolutionary Pan-African and larger socialist struggles. Nkrumahism-Touréism is the application of the universal laws of revolutionary growth and development of the particular conditions of Africa and her children. Its concrete living manifestation is to be found in the creative contributions of the present day African Revolution.

Nkrumahism-Touréism provides the masses of African People with a program of human transformation turning individual defects into qualities by living the ideology. It is a Pan-African ideology that breaks the web of complexes put on us by the dominant culture and enables us to reclaim our humanity, reassert our dignity, and develop a new Revolutionary African Personality. It provides a revolutionary view of Africa and the world applying the universal principles of scientific socialism in the context of African history, tradition, and aspirations. It gives us a set of analytical tools which enable the masses of Africa People to correctly interpret, understand, redeem African culture and reconstruct Africa by way of the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumahism-Touréism provides a complete social, political, philosophical and economic theory which constitute a comprehensive network of principles, beliefs, values, morals and rules which guide our behavior, determines the form which our institutions and organizations will take; and acts as a cohesive force to bind us together, guide and channel our revolutionary action towards the achievement of Pan-Africanism and the inevitable triumph of socialism worldwide. Nkrumahism-Touréism includes the following principles:

The Primacy and Unity of Africa

The concept of the primacy and unity of Africa has its origins in the emergence of the modern Pan African movement which was characterized by our Peoples resistance to foreign domination in the 15th century. This foreign domination was soon followed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and full blown colonialism which culminated in the European partition of Africa agreed upon by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885. The primacy of Africa dictates that we reject these artificially imposed colonial borders. A united Africa, the concept of continental African unity is the source of our strength and the key to our liberation. As Nkrumah says:

“African Unity gives an indispensable continental dimension to the concept of the African nation…Unity is the first prerequisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary and basic is the need for a union government on the much divided continent of Africa.” (Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism p.253) We cannot accept any other version of our land, to define Africa as anything less than the entire continent including its islands is to accept the neo-colonial strategy to divide and conquer. The primacy of Africa also speaks to our primary identity as African people. We are African. Rather than promoting our micro-national identities such as Nigerian, Ivorian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Brazilian, African-American, etc. we must focus on the common denominator which is African. For us as Africans and Pan-Africanists as Nkrumah says, “the core of the black revolution is in Africa and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the black man throughout the world lacks a national home… All people of African decent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.” (Nkrumah, K Class Struggle in Africa)

The Integrity Of The Revolutionary African Personality

The African personality is the product of the evolution of African people’s conception of the world, way of life, their ethics and moral principles which are a particular reflection of African culture. This African cultural personality has been under attack by capitalism /colonialism and its extension neo-colonialism which have developed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways a moral, intellectual, and cultural superiority complex towards us as an oppressed people. Sekou Touré says, ”the science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behavior and devaluing our own original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation”. (Touré A. S.The Political Leader Considered As The Representative Of A Culture p.3) We are clear that the assertion of the cultural personality of an oppressed culture becomes the catalyst for its national liberation movement. Nkrumah and Touré both call for the revival and integrity of the African personality, it is this re-personalization, which constitutes the successful affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed culture. Re-personalization for Africans means re-Africanisation to be accomplished through the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumah says that the revolutionary African personality “expresses identification not only with Africa’s historical past, but with the struggle of the African people in the African Revolution to liberate and unify the continent and to build a just society.”(Nkrumah,K Revolutionary Path p 206). The Revolutionary African Personality is a pan-Africanist concept which identifies us not by our language, religion or geographical location but in terms of our goals which are dynamic, just and noble. Thus, the Revolutionary African Personality puts emphasis on our ideological identity over anything else. It is this ideological identity for which we must consistently struggle which can only be ultimately realized through the success of the Cultural Revolution.

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism are the cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society and define the African personality. Respect for human beings and social solidarity, coupled with a keen sense of fraternity, justice and cooperation between men and women are the very foundation of traditional African society.

However, Sekou Touré adds to this that “ society has been marked by the existence of two natures of life, two natures transposing themselves in thought, action, behavior and in the options of (wo)men, whether political, economic, social or cultural. In other words there are two human natures in mankind and in each People; we have the People [interests] itself and the anti-People [interests], with a permanent struggle being waged between the two, the class struggle.”…(Touré A.S. Women In Society p26)

The imperialist incursion into Africa has exacerbated these contradictions, and the battle against the anti-people’s class has dictated that we incorporate in addition to our class analysis the national and gender aspects of the struggle to include the full scope of our Pan African reality. Our ideology teaches us that the first principle of the Revolution is that everything we have earned in life is a reflection of the struggles and contributions of the People and that the masses of People are the makers of history. Included in this principle is the understanding that (wo)man is not merely treated as a means to an end but also as an end in themselves. This is the revolutionary operational principle that forms the basis for the egalitarian, humanist and collectivist character of our ideology.

In fact the (dialectical) relationship between (wo)man and the People shows that the Peoples interests are (wo)man’s interest because it is the People that generate (wo)man. Further more the value and level of the historical evolution of a People is faithfully measured by the condition of the women in society.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Revolutionaries want Revolution because it means a qualitative change in the oppressive conditions of the status- quo of capitalist society. In order to bring about this change, revolutionaries must study the science of Revolution. Dialectical and historical materialism is the essence of revolutionary science. Through the study and application of revolutionary ideology, which includes the scientific laws of dialectical and historical materialism, revolutionaries are able to understand the most general laws of the development of nature, human society, and thinking. It is therefore an indispensable instrument of scientific analysis and revolutionary transformation of the world. Sekou Touré says dialectical materialism “studies the general connections between the elements of nature, the laws of evolution of the objective world and the action that these laws exercise on human consciousness.”.(Touré, A.S.Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution, 52) “Dialectics is the method of scientific analysis which all [people] Christians, Muslims and atheist alike can use. Historical materialism is scientific. It objectively proves the rule of historical evolution from the production system. The changes society experienced, the succession of different regimes from the primitive community to socialism can scientifically be explained by historical materialism. Here dialectics deals with the method of analysis and explanation of facts of social and historical phenomena. Historical materialism made it possible to enlighten the process of changes recorded in every man’s life and characterized by the existence of production systems with properties and features different from one another.”(Touré, A.S. Africa On The Move vol xxiv chapterVI,Revolution and Religion p185) 

Historical materialism is the dialectical method applied to history. Historical materialism analyzes and explains the historical processes of evolutionary and revolutionary changes in society characterized by the changes in production systems with properties and features which differ from one to another. Historical materialism does not list the stages of the evolution of society, it analyzes society to show the specific origin of every stage of it’ s evolution, how every qualitative change originates and the specific characteristics of every stage.

The Harmony between Religion/Spirituality and Revolution

For Nkrumahism-Touréism, a revolutionary ideology coming from African culture there is and cannot be any contradiction between Revolution and Religion. In fact Revolution and Religion/spirituality are in harmony and are complementary aspects of culture. Religion and spirituality are dominant features of the African Personality. Nkrumah points out that “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity and value” ( Nkrumah,K. Consciencism p68).

For African people there is essential harmony in our faith in the Creator and the African Revolution. To fulfill our obligations to our religion or spirituality we have an obligation to properly serve one another, Gods’ highest creation. Man and Woman, the true servants of God and the People, have the duty to fight for the liberation of those deprived of liberty, whether an individual or a People.

Revolution is the collective action and struggle of an oppressed People guided and supported by a consciously planned process (ideology) and determination to qualitatively change an old, backward and oppressive political-economic condition (capitalism), into a new progressive and just system that will work for the People’s interests (Socialism).

Religion is a set of beliefs and principles that affirm the existence of one or more supreme beings or God(s) which govern us all. Religion influences and motivates social behavior in the sense that it serves as a moral guide and provides reassurance to People that in spite of what may seem to be an overwhelmingly negative situation, through the practice of religion and serving God, peace, justice and prosperity will prevail. Religion holds respect for human dignity and human virtue. Religion can also project man’s existence onto the next world, and reserves for a future world positive or negative existence according to their life conduct in this world. However as Sekou Touré, a revolutionary who practices Islam,  points out “The Revolution does not intend to deny this future world; it only wishes that the struggle against evil be not `deferred` or postponed, and this is actually what all sincere believers and the dispossessed, regardless of race, sex or nationality are pressing for.” (A. S. Touré, Revolution and Religion, Africa On The Move volxxiv).

Both Revolution and Religion share common values which they want people to reflect, and even more they want People to become the uncompromising and faithful advocates of. Some of these values are justice, peace and freedom for mankind, the nation and the laboring masses. Revolution and Religion proclaim, organize and conduct a permanent struggle, a universal struggle which, for the former is class struggle, the clash between antagonistic interests represented by classes that are opposed in the process of production, distribution and utilization of goods. While for the latter it is a struggle between good and evil, good embodying truth, justice and beauty, and evil embodying exploitation, lies, oppression, in essence all that is contrary to good.

Suffering, sweat and sacrifice are considered by both Revolution and Religion as necessary and ongoing on the long road to freedom. An important part of Religion and Revolution involves the unity of the philosophy and the behavior it advocates. In other words, not only is there is a constant struggle for the honest adherents of both Revolution and Religion to live up to the principles of each, but both Revolution and Religion have also been misused by corrupt men and women as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

Hence we should judge Revolution and Religion primarily by its principles not necessarily by its adherents. We know that our People’s faith and belief in righteousness and justice, which is upheld by their religious and spiritual faith must reinforce the need to engage in revolutionary political activity to defeat the enemies of God and the People on earth. The essential harmony of Revolution and Religion can only be affirmed in the struggle to build a just society.

The Necessity For Permanent, Mass, Revolutionary, Pan-African Political Education, Organization and Action

Following the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the mass political party emerged within the mass political movements as a qualitative leap and superior form of organized mass struggle, although mass political movement remained the dominant form of struggle. Some of these political movements can and do topple neo-colonialism, as most puppet regimes are weak. But generally speaking only mass-based revolutionary parties unified by a monolithic ideology will be strong enough to seize and sustain state power when confronted with imperialism’s counter-offensive of political, economic, military and psychological terrorism. Only mass-based parties with revolutionary ideology will maintain class struggle as a strategic principle and properly organize the class struggle along clear-cut class lines to defeat the internal and external enemies of the People’s class. Only ideological monolithic mass parties of conscious cadre are capable of organizing socialist transformation. 

A dialectical relationship exists between mass political movements and mass revolutionary parties. Revolutionary mass parties are a product of mass political movements. The mass movements remain relentless in struggle against oppression and for a better way of life. They serve as a source of sustenance and bulwark of defense for revolutionary party building. The wider mass movements stand as an inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary mass potential, which ultimately must be tapped to realize our mass party. Revolutionary party building is integrally connected with and seeks to be a catalytic force with respect to ideologically transforming the broader mass movements into one revolutionary mass Pan-African party. Through ideological education and struggle, the Party seeks to progressively raise the level of class-consciousness. This transformation largely depends on acquiring the special Competence of ideologically recruiting and training cadre on a mass scale.

Revolutionary Ideology as The Greatest Asset

Nkrumahism-Touréism puts emphasis on the fact that the fundamental task facing Africa is the ideological transformation of man and woman. This transformation begins in the realm of morals and values:

“Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest, informed man [and woman] who submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man [and woman] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man [and woman] whose humility is his [her] strength and whose integrity is his [her] greatness.” (Nkrumah,K. 1975 Africa Must Unite p.130).

Both Nkrumah and Touré held ideology as the crucial element and the greatest asset in the African revolution. Touré teaches us that “Culture is the framework of ideology. Culture is the container, which carries ideology as its contents.” Africa has her own culture and thus must have her own ideology thereby conforming to the African personality. Nkrumah informs us that philosophy is an instrument of ideology and must derive it’s weapons from the living conditions of African people and that it is from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created. Nkrumah teaches us further that…. “a united people armed with an ideology which explains the status quo and illuminates our path of development is the greatest asset we posses for the total liberation and complete emancipation of Africa. And the emancipation of Africa completes the process of the emancipation of man.” (Nkrumah, K. 1964 Why The Spark p.2).

Touré echoes Nkrumah’s position that political freedom is a prerequisite for economic freedom and adds that political revolution is part and parcel of the ideological revolution. Hence ideological revolution is the fundamental requirement for political and economic revolutions. Likewise, political independence is incomplete unless it is followed by an economic revolution. Touré shows revolutionary ideology as the critical element in developing revolutionary consciousness as he teaches us the laws of developing consciousness. When he says,

“ Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution! All those who have had to conduct revolution have been able to verify this. But where does this revolutionary consciousness come from, since it is certain that it is not basic datum, nor does it come into being and develop spontaneously? History teaches that it is created and developed through ideological education and revolutionary practice. We can equally affirm that without ideological training and without revolutionary action, there can be no revolutionary consciousness.”

Sekou Touré

To achieve a decisive impact on or recruit from mass movements the Party must have ideologically strong cadre and a program of ideological development. With the mass party our masses can bring forth and strengthen the best attributes of the mass movement into the qualified expressions of the mass revolutionary party characterized by mass revolutionary consciousness and mass ideological power as the guiding force to revolutionary practice.

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) is a permanent, independent, revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African Political Party based in Africa. Africa is the just homeland of African People all over the world. Our Party is an integral part of the Pan-African and World Socialist revolutionary movement. The A-APRP understands that “all people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any other part of the world, are Africans and belong to the African Nation”. — (Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, page 4)

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Secularism

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in a conjuncture characterized by the resurgence of fascist groupings. This has meant the activation of religious fanaticism, in which spirituality breaks out of the confines of secularity to openly assert undemocratic identities. The inability of the modern epoch to preempt the emergence of primitive fundamentalism is a result of its internal contradictions. In “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx writes that feudal civil society “secluded the individual from the state as a whole and…converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as…[it] converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation.” This specific configuration of social organization meant that “the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state…appear[ed] as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people. The advent of bourgeois political revolution changed this situation by smashing “all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community.” Henceforth, state affairs would become affairs of the people, a matter of general concern.

Thus, the bourgeois political revolution “broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals.” This division of humanity into the abstractness of political society and the concreteness of civil society “set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life.” However, the “political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis.”

Further, “man as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme [man] as distinct from citoyen [citizen], because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person.” In other words: “The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen…Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person”. This disjunctive dimension of bourgeois modernity has special implications for secularism. Insofar that the bourgeois state does not abolish real distinctions in the realm of civil society and feels itself to be universal only in opposition to the particularity of the latter, religion under capitalism is not weakened but simply displaced from the state into civil society. In short, capitalism privatizes religion.

Marx writes:

“Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves…as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism…It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men…It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness”. This conversion of religion from the social medium of public life to the individual language of private life ensures that religion continues to exist as the irrational counterpart of rational secularism. In fact, the abstract secularism of capitalist modernity can exist only through its constant juxtaposition to the parochial religiosity that makes up the concrete content of civil society. This is because the bourgeoisie does not want to radically transform the social relations that prevail in society; it is content with the empty idealism of the state. Such idealism does not eliminate the egoism that is found in feudal civil society. Instead, it accepts the “egoistic man…[as] the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man. The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty…is…the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life. Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.”

Since the capitalist privatization of religion perpetuates the existence of undemocratic spirituality in civil society, we need a communist transformation of political society that replaces its thin conception of juridical generality with the thick conception of socially evolved universality. This would entail the democratization of religiosity, the fostering of communicative rationality wherein participants would critically argue and question stereotypical suppositions about religion. While this won’t necessarily translate into a radical conversion or the adoption of a totally different point of view, it would certainly facilitate the creation of a public discourse that has a willingness for democratic dialogue and self-critical examination. In this democratically-collectively managed spirituality, one will gain the ability to be both religious and rational, and take part in a praxis of communicative rationality without being hindered by any dogmas.

Spectacular Death and the Histrionics of Loss

By Michael Templeton

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

For one summer, I worked at a local cemetery mowing grass. Spring Grove Cemetery encompasses over 700 acres of land. It was chartered in 1845 and remains open to this day. The cemetery is a major destination for walking, biking, sight-seeing, and simply relaxing in the natural surroundings. One of the things I came to notice as an employee was the stark contrast between the older parts of the cemetery and the newer plots. The oldest stones and grave markers contain little information. Some stones do not even have names on them. They simply say “Father” or “Infant,” etc. Older stones that do have writing on them generally state the date of birth, the date of death, and a few lines from the Bible. There are symbols on some of the stones which denote certain professions—doctors, clergy, military men—carry an iconography specific to those vocations and most of this iconography is quite ancient. By contrast, the newer stones are covered with writing. Lines from popular songs, poetry, and sentiments from the bereaved clutter these stones. The newest stones may have etched images from photographs so that an image of the deceased is engraved onto the stone. In the newer parts of the cemetery, one can find grave markers shaped like cartoon characters. Some of the stones have the appearance of modernist sculpture so as to set it apart from older gravestones. The change from stones and graves which leave nothing but a bare stone to graves which are covered with information is not attributable to mere fashion or advances in technology. Rather, this change has everything to do with the ways people understand death itself.

Spring Grove Cemetery itself came into existence due to increasing concern over cholera outbreaks and the unsanitary and unsightly presence of old church cemeteries which left dead bodies to decay into sources of drinking water and were an affront to middle-class ideas of how neighborhoods should appear. The dual pressures of public health and changing attitudes toward the emplacement of the dead coincided throughout the Western world with the emergence of the modern cemetery and Spring Grove Cemetery is emblematic of those pressures. It is now an enormous example of the drive to create a space for the dead which was easily accessible to the city center but outside of the city proper, and it is an example of such a space that serves the additional purpose of being a destination for recreation. It is adjacent to the city but not in it. It is a space reserved for the interment of the dead, but it is a marvel of landscape design and architecture. Lastly, it contains something of an archaeological record of a shift in the way individuals understand death itself.

The cemetery is an example of that type of space defined by Foucault as a heterotopia. It is both real and unreal. It occupies a border region in terms of the actual space which is occupied by real individuals.

Heterotopias are liminal places—the way a mirror offers a real place which is both present and absent:

"The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there." [1]

The cemetery offers a similar social function. It is the mirror image of the city in that it is completely deliberate in its spatial design and it is occupied. Yet, the cemetery is designed not to facilitate the movement of bodies but to inter bodies—and it is occupied with the dead. It is the inverse version of the city itself. Like the mirror, the cemetery is a real place, but it operates in a manner that is unreal since it does not function as a place for individuals to exist, only to desist. So, the modern cemetery emerged as a site in which societies could place the dead in a real place that functioned as a kind of unreality with regard to everyday life. There is the place of the dead which one could visit and even enjoy, but the place of the dead could be put out of mind when it came to living life.

Spring Grove was born of this social movement. Founded in 1845, it coincides with the historical period described by Foucault and it bears the cultural traces which Foucault describes as signs of the modern cemetery. These are sacred spaces, but they emerged during a time that was distinctly secular. The modern “cult of the dead” emerges during a time of a paradox:

"This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become ‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead." [2]

An “atheistic,” or secular, society is also the society that creates an entire city devoted to the preservation of the dead. It is under these conditions—conditions in which a firm belief in the life of the soul is fading and therefore must be performed in an ever more elaborate fashion—that the place in which commemoration of the dead becomes a visible and dramatic presence. In previous times, when the conditions of possibility created the conditions in which individuals firmly believed that God guaranteed the care of the soul, people did not need to commemorate bodies. As faith in the soul decreased, care of the body increased. Again, Foucault:

"Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities." [3]

We create a city of the dead only when we are no longer certain that God has done this for us. This is not to say that the advent of the cemetery coincided with the complete abandonment of faith in the afterlife. Rather, the rise of the modern cemetery marks a time in which faith in the afterlife is no longer a fundamental fact for the living and must therefore be demarcated in the form of a space that is both sacred and secular so that the living may continue to have access to some kind of symbolic place and sign which stands in for both loss and faith in the afterlife. The modern cemetery is a heterotopia in the sense that it is an “other space” and it is a place in which a paradoxical understanding of death could find some measure of reconciliation.

We see evidence of complete faith in the afterlife in the forms of gravestones which carry little to no information. The facts of the life of the deceased are of no importance because the deceased is no longer in the world and has passed on to another world. To consign the dead to a nearly anonymous place in the world requires absolute faith that the soul of the dead has literally passed on to another world. A parent who has lost a child, for example, does not require a stone with the child’s name engraved upon it in order to remember that child. The stone simply does not perform that function. It marks the site of a burial and nothing more. As Foucault states, it is the move toward a more “atheistic” society which demands monuments to testify to the life of the deceased. What is more, the monuments and the small personal boxes for bodies speak more to the living than to the dead. We do not erect monuments for the dead for the simple fact that they are dead. We erect monuments for ourselves. They are markers to prove to ourselves that the deceased were in fact important to us, and the monuments are to show others that we care. The heterotopia of the cemetery has much more in common with the mirror than the dialectic of the real and the unreal.

As we move into the 20th century, the gravestones become more loquacious. Modern and contemporary stones are engraved with lines of biblical scripture. They bear poetry and song lyrics. The most recent stones bear engraved images from photographs. These are extremely realistic images which look like black and white photographs which have been directly printed onto the stone. In another cemetery in Southern Indiana, the stones are almost all this type. People leave photographs, toys, trinkets of all kinds, along with religious items such as rosary beads and crosses. As we move into contemporary times and the function of religion and faith fades from playing any role in everyday life, the demonstrations of grief and loss, the sheer number of words used to mark loss, and the profusion of images just explodes all over the cemetery. The more removed faith in the afterlife becomes, the more pronounced the declarations of faith in the afterlife.

More words are inscribed to mark the faith of those who still live. More realistic images are rendered to commemorate the lost loved ones. This would indicate more than a loss of faith. It indicates a turn away from loss itself and a nearly obsessive focus on the ego of the bereaved.

The contemporary grave marker is a mirror of the ego on which the bereaved can gaze upon themselves. The heterotopic structure remains, but it has returned on the level of the ego.

A fundamental lack of real belief finds an expression in the iconography and cluttered language of the contemporary headstone. What we see in these histrionic displays is a profound inability to confront the reality of death. One forestalls the reality of death by filling in the loss with a profusion (and confusion) of images, words, and trinkets thus shifting the focus away from loss itself and onto the individual who experiences the loss.

Rather than allow the progression of psychological mechanisms in which an individual experiences loss, suffers the process of mourning, and finds resolution in the acceptance of the loss, we see the cultural expression of a complete fixation on loss itself. This is Freudian melancholia on the scale of public theater, and it manifests itself in forms which resemble graffiti. Freudian mourning and melancholia are distinguished by the thorough process of mourning in which the ego is directed outside of itself and melancholia in which the ego contemplates itself:

"In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself." [4]

This would be sufficient except that the contemporary ego is already poor and empty since it has been evacuated of substance by finding a place of meaning exclusively in the exterior drama of the spectacle. This is an inversion of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” in that these demonstrations do not reflect what Artaud envisioned as an expression of “both the upper and lower strata of the mind.” These are theatrical advertisements for loss that express only the most superficial marks of grief. [5] Contemporary life projects the ego into the external world and can only find a ground of being and meaning to the extent that this exterior ego function is reified in the system of exchange which only knows consumer existence.

Consumer existence requires the system of exchange in order for anything to be real. The form of melancholia expressed through the verbose and graffiti strewn headstones we find in the newest parts of the cemetery indicate an ego which cannot comprehend death at all except as an affirmation of itself.

Far from paying homage to the deceased and far from a spiritual declaration of faith in the afterlife, the contemporary headstone is a testament to the flimsy ego of the same individuals whose lives are devoid of any reality because at the level of individual experience. There is no reality which exists outside the realm of merchandise and display. The profusion of words and images is designed to compensate for an ego that has been entirely evacuated of substance.

What we witness in the contemporary graveyard is not melancholia proper since the ego fixation on itself is in fact an ego fixation on a prescribed mode of performance loss. There is no confrontation or meaningful experience of loss since it is denied in the form of a spectacular show of loss.

"The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is certainly the formation of that category of “experience”, in the limited sense that one has “experiences” (sexual, athletic, professional, artistic, sentimental, ludic, etc.). In the Bloom [the indeterminate form of contemporary life], everything results from this loss, or is synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as with the metropolis, men never experience concrete events, only conventions, rules, an entirely symbolic second nature, entirely constructed." [6]

The loss of experience means the loss of the ability to truly experience death. People experience the forms of loss, grief, and mourning only to the extent that there are prescribed modes of experience which come from elsewhere. That is to say “forms” of loss, grief, and mourning because the actual experience is deferred in favor of the performance of these modes of experience. The loss of experience proper negates the experience of loss.

Death, of course, remains a reality, but in its social forms, the reality of death cannot exist except insofar as it can become a commodified abstraction. Death is the abstract nothing forestalled by the business of creating a form of life. Individuals render the loss of their own loved ones with the histrionic displays engraved onto headstones. They otherwise deny death by buying into economic abstractions which further render death an abstraction. There is a business of death prior to death: “Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible without first arranging for the system’s adjustment to the economic loss one’s death will incur.” [7] Death can only be grasped from within the abstractions prescribed by the spectacle, and rendered in equally abstract images that have more in common with advertising than individual loss and grief.

Under present cultural conditions, this theological ground no longer holds, and we see this clearly in maudlin displays of grief which are in fact desperate displays of melancholia. The nature of contemporary consciousness is such that we find no resolution in the face of death therefore we simply deny it. We hide from death because it is invisible and unknowable, yet we perform grief with ever greater histrionic displays so as to affirm our egos in the face of the one thing we know expunges the ego.

Returning to the most basic features of the spectacle, we can find the same mystifications at work that we saw in spectacular pseudo-belief:

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." [8]

Our relationship to each other and to the world around us is mediated by images to the extent that what is known is no longer things in the world but our relationship to images of things in the world. Our understanding of death is now captured in the spectacle as much as any other aspect of life. Death is negated by the image of death and we find a sense of solace in loss through our relationship to these images of death, mourning, and loss.

There is no death, mourning, and loss; there is only the performance and image of death, mourning, and loss. One expresses themselves through engraved images of the lost loved one, not the lost loved one. The contemporary grieving person finds some measure of peace in contemplating the image of the person they lost, and this constitutes a fundamental denial of loss. The only thing that matters is that the grieving person remains alive and anyone who passes the grave of the deceased knows that someone lost someone else. In this way “it is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that have become the most impenetrable and rarefied.” [9]

It is not death that is impenetrable and rarefied, it is the consumer of signs of loss and death.

The spectacle denies the validity of life as it is lived in everyday experience. Nothing so common as loss can be commodified unless images and tangible commodifiable expressions of loss can be made to supersede the lived experience of real loss.

Thus, it is that “the absolute denial of life, in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected into the heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself.” [10] We find a sense of the afterlife only in images that dramatize the beyond because there can be no way of conceptualizing anything that is not material and commodified. Gravestones are no longer markers of death and loss. They are markers of the ongoing participation of one who has lost, but one whose sole understanding of loss is as a histrionic expression of their own ego within the heaven of spectacular images.

Spectacular life cannot include death. There is simply no place for something so utterly final and real. As we saw above, we never experience concrete events; we only experience the conventions and rules of events. The experience of events has been replaced with the formal specifications of events. We do not experience a rock concert, we experience the prescribed modes of behavior which a rock concert demands. There are formal aspects to concert experiences which are dictated ahead of time by representations of musical events. In the same way, contemporary life excludes the possibility of experiencing death.

One does not live the experience of the death of a loved one. One experiences the formal attributes of loss.

The television news will never show you a person bereft of any and all expression as they are overcome with loss and grief. What we see through the screens are rehearsed performances, histrionic displays. People repeat the same clichés: “they were too young,” “they had their whole life ahead of them,” “our thoughts and prayers are with the family,” etc. In the absence of the possibility of belief, as we saw above, there can be no understanding of anything that resists representation. There is no real death, only images that mediate a collective inability to recognize the reality of death.

The function of religion with respect to death was, in essence, a Hegelian sublation. Death negates life. Religion serves as a mediating force which negates the negation. The simultaneous negation and transformation of the fact of death constitutes a resolution. The dead are negated and elevated to another plane of existence. In effect, the religious mediation of death served the function of Freudian mourning. The finality of death is resolved in the sublation of this finality into a spiritual faith in something that transcends death. This step in the psycho-social confrontation with death depended on a qualitative change in one’s existence. The finality of death serves as the negation of our temporal existence. This negation is itself negated as the soul of the deceased is lifted into another plane of existence. In this, the full dialectic is resolved.

Death under the dominance of the spectacle provides no such resolution. Within the spectacle, death negates life. Rather than confronting this fact, the contemporary subject simply disavowals that which cannot be transformed into life.

There is no finality in consumer culture; only a new version of the commodity which is designed to fill the void that does not exist without consumer culture. The contemporary confrontation with death is manifest in the grave marker which is yet another consumer spectacle. It can be consumed endlessly, therefore there is no death. The gravestone stands in for an absence that is never properly experienced as an absence. The clutter of the stone creates presence. Contemporary understandings of death can find no resolution and subsequent sublation. What we have is a childish disavowal of the reality of death and a psychological return to our own ego. Cluttered and outlandish grave markers do not signify the deceased. They signify the living. These grave markers scream “me, me, me” and “I, I, I.” They are infantile demonstrations of impotence. There is no dialectical resolution since contemporary life does not allow for any qualitative differences as valid differences. We have only quantitative differences. Under a regime of knowledge that can admit nothing but quantity, there is no net gain from death. Therefore, death can only be disavowed with quantities of grief. More display equals more grief. The operative term is “more.”

Even the medical establishment disavows death. Even as science moves to endlessly split hairs on the medical definition of death, the mechanisms of medical science cannot find the precise moment or even conditions that constitute death. For centuries, death was defined as the moment the heart and breathing stopped. This was simple. When a body no longer showed basic vital signs, that body was dead. Beginning in 1959, a new definition of death began to emerge. With the medical classification of what is termed coma depasse, or overcoma, medical science began to take account of a body which was by all objective measures dead but would continue to show basic vital functions with the assistance of medical instruments that assist with breathing and feeding. [11] The living person was effectively dead, but they continued to live at the most basic biological level to the extent that organs continue to function with the help of machinery. Near the end of the Twentieth Century, medicine advanced the notion of brain death as the final determination of death. This meant that “(o)nce the adequate medical tests had been confirmed the death of the entire brain (not only of the neocortex but also of the brain stem), the patient was to be considered dead, even if, thanks to life-support technology, he continued breathing.” [12]

However, the definition of brain death was confirmed because brain death finally leads to the cessation of heart and respiratory functions. Brain death is confirmed with the definition of death that preceded it. This is to say that, “According to a clear logical inconsistency, heart failure—which was just rejected as a valid criterion of death—reappears to prove the exactness of the criterion that is to substitute for it.” [13] The moment of death is brain death, but brain death leads to heart failure which is the moment of death. All of this leads to a zone of indeterminacy wherein death occurs but does not occur at the same time. Agamben draws this problem out to further his theory of the state of exception which lies at the heart of contemporary biopolitics. For our purposes, it is enough to understand that death remains a fundamentally unreal thing, even in the realm of medical science.

Contemporary consumer culture depends on externalizing all real lived experience. Individual experience only takes on validity once it is sutured into the realm of consumable images and the commodities which give these images meaning. My “I” only exists to the extent that it enters the flow of other egos who participate in the systems of exchange. Whereas the individual was once a mystification within capitalism insofar as one’s individuality exists in relation to one’s participation as a working subject of capitalism, we have gone many steps further and one’s individual status as a human can only exist insofar as you have projected yourself into the realm of images and rendered yourself a meaningful participant in spectacular culture. All of this renders individual subjectivity a completely external feature of public consumption and the realm of interior life has no value or even any meaning.

Individual beliefs no longer exist because belief takes place elsewhere, in the realm of the image. Individual egos have no meaning other than as externalized performances of ego-ness. I demonstrate myself, therefore I am. Just as images circulate in a state of pseudo-eternity in image space and image time, in the realm of pseudo-cyclical time as we saw above, so the contemporary ego circulates forever in a consumerist limbo that will not admit death.

Medical determinations of death are left to systems of political power. Since doctors are only in the business of life, they have no obligation to offer a final determination of death that would serve in all cases. Death is a political question. It is not a medical or biological question. Death is not even a theological question, no matter the amount of biblical language you inscribe on a stone. Death is not, and the heterotopia of the cemetery serves the dual function of being a place for the dead, and yet another place to publicly perform yourself. No longer that other space where the city lays its dead adjacent to the city proper where people continue to live, the cemetery is now the other space where we wallow in our emptiness against one of the only things that cannot be commodified: the absolute finality of death.

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis and creative non-fiction. He is also the blog writer for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Endnotes

[1] Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces," p. 4

[2] Ibid., p. 5

[3] Ibid., pp. 5-6

[4] Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 246

[5] Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. p. 82

[6] The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom, pp. 47-48

[7] Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, p. 115

[8] Ibid. 12

[9] Ibid. 18

[10] Ibid. 18

[11] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p. 160

[12] Ibid. p. 162

[13] Ibid. p. 163

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. p. 82.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité. October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec).

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” From The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV. Tr. and General Editor James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press.

The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. Creative Commons. 2012.

How to Go On: Do We Have the Stomach for What's Required

By Luke Bretherton

Watching the election results come in, and as the dawning realization of what was happening began to become apparent, the following quotation from Henry James came to me:

Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly ever apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion … we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

I learned this quotation from reading Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, a book penned in 1971 when the 60s were going sour. Richard Nixon was in office, the Weather Underground had issued their "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States and were in the midst of a bombing campaign, and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers had revealed a long history of the U.S. government deceiving the American public about the war in Vietnam. The scandal of Watergate was yet to come. This quote seems as fitting now as it did to Alinsky in 1971.

But, theologically, the quote is always fitting. This is the world as it is: a world that a robust doctrine of sin should teach us to expect but which idolatry seduces us into forgetting. The chasing after idols is always foolish, but some have the luxury to indulge such foolishness at no physical cost to themselves. The election of Trump is a wake-up call to remember what those who are black, brown, queer, disabled, or a religious minority can only forget at their peril: that oppression is likely to get worse, but the struggle goes on; that the absurd becomes normalized, but must nevertheless be ridiculed even to the point where ridicule feels absurd; that love is more real than hate, but real love means hating what is evil; that the space between the world as it is and the world as it should be must be grieved in order to find the hope to go on; that a truly good, happy and meaningful life cannot involve leisure built off the domination of others. No form of life can be good if it does not have in its institutional forms and ends justice and generosity for all, and pursues this in such a way as to foster the agency of everyone, especially the vulnerable and dependent.

The temptation is not to abide with the truth of what Henry James is saying so that we might more fully confront the reality of the world as it is. The temptation is to blame others before we accept our responsibility for this situation and the judgment of God on us. Falling prey to this temptation to blame others by white Christian men and women, and the racial and religious scapegoating it generated, is partly what propelled Trump to victory. But his victory is also partly the responsibility of the left and the failure to confront its own failures.

A mood of nativist discontent and racial scapegoating married to actual economic displacement among a broad cross section of American society has up to this point lacked a determinate and focused ideological articulation. It is a mood that is easily captured by a demagogue like Trump. The only way to counter this kind of capture are forms of organizing that intervene to disrupt the sense that only Trump is speaking into and giving voice to this mood. Such organizing helps dis-identify potential supporters from either a right-wing populist like Trump, or explicitly fascist groups, through creating alternative political scripts that disarticulate the reasons for discontent from the interpretative frameworks the likes of Trump provides. But the kind of engaged, relational organizing that does not begin by denouncing people as a "basket of deplorables" requires leftists to stomach building relationships with people they don't like and find scandalous.

Yet this is exactly what successful anti-fascist organizers did in the 1930s in the U.S. and Britain, unlike on the continent of Europe. For example, Alinsky, who explicitly saw his work as anti-fascist, was a secular Jew organizing anti-Semitic Catholics, yet who was also able to recognize these same people as not wholly reducible to that and as potential renewers of democratic life. It was difficult and threatening work but the likes of Alinsky had the stomach for it, as did many others in the British and U.S. labor movements. And it worked. The question is, do those on the left have the stomach for it today?

In the wake of Trump's victory, fascist groups will be on the ascendency. They have the potential to move beyond Trump's vague populist message to ideologically capture the mood and turn it to directly fascist ends. This is seems to be happening in Europe. There is a crucial distinction to be made between potential supporters of and actual fascist groups. The latter needs vehement, agitational, uncompromising opposition. And it is incumbent upon whites to do this work, and especially white Christian men like me, as a form of atonement and repentance for the ways other white Christian men helped create this problem. We need to "come get our people."

Part of this organizing work is to help potential supporters of fascists reckon with a hard truth of building any form of just and generous common life: that is, everyone must change and in the process we must all lose something to someone at some point. This is part of what it means to live as frail, finite, and fallen creatures. Sacrifice and loss, and therefore compromise and negotiation are inevitable. The temptation and sin of the privileged and powerful is to fix the system so that they lose nothing and other always lose, no matter how hard they work. The fight is always to ensure that the loss is not born disproportionately by the poor and marginalized. And that is a Christian fight. It is part of what it means to love our neighbor.

Folded into loving our neighbor is the call to love our enemies. But Christian enemy love tends to fall into one of three traps. Either we make everyone an enemy (the sectarian temptation to denounce anyone who is not like "us"); or we make no one an enemy, denying any substantive conflicts and pretending that if we just read our Bibles and pray, things like racism and economic inequality will get better by means of some invisible hand (the temptation of sentimentalism that denies we are the hands and feet of the body of Christ); or we fail to see how enemies claim to be our friend (the temptation of naiveté that ignores questions of power). In relation to the latter trap, we must recognize that the powerful mostly refuse to recognize they are enemies to the oppressed and claim they are friends to everyone. A loving act in relation to those in power who refuse to acknowledge their oppressive action is to force those who claim to be friends to everyone (and are thereby friends to no one) to recognize the enmity between us so that issues of injustice and domination can be made visible and addressed. This involves struggle and agitation - something Christians are often reluctant to do because of a desire to appear respectable.

In place of these three traps we must learn what it means to see enemies as neighbors capable of conversion. This is simultaneously a missiological and political orientation. Agitational democratic politics is a means of "neighboring" that goes alongside actively building relationship with people we don't like or find scandalous in order to "seek the welfare of the city" (Jer 29.7) so that it displays something of what a just and generous common life might look like.

This article originally appeared at Sojourners.

Luke Bretherton is Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. Before that he taught at King's College London. His books include: Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship & the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing. He has extensive involvement in community organizing and has worked internationally with numerous churches, mission agencies and faith-based organizations.

Is Communism Dead, and Can Spirituality Revive It?

By Paul Tritschler

"Every cultural transformation in history has reached into the most intimate sphere of human motivation."

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you he doesn't exist. This oft-quoted phrase from Baudelaire's short story, The Generous Gambler, could well apply to the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and communism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism assumed a position of unparalleled power, and its ideology became entrenched as common sense. No viable alternative exists. It might need to be tweaked here and there, but capitalism is now the only deal on the table.

Politicians of all stripes battle it out over problems that have capitalism as their source-financial failures, social inequalities, global warming, and military conflicts-but they seek solutions exclusively within the same system. Even many protest campaigns around these problems implicitly believe that capitalism-a system that reproduces itself through exploitation-can be civilised.

By contrast, in his 1846 treatise on The German Ideology, Karl Marx saw communism as a state of mind-more accurately, a revolution of the mind: a movement which searches for emancipation and truth. By testing the boundaries of reality and questioning common sense, communism becomes "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things."

For Marx, the revolutionary potential of communism resides in its revelatory status: not a blueprint for utopia but a way to explain capitalism's irresolvable conflicts and flawed moral position-a means of exposing Baudelaire's devil. It seeks to redefine the meaning of wealth, and to render the principle of caring as a global imperative in place of competition. In this sense, communism is capitalism's greatest enemy, but it's clear that this enemy must be approached with different tactics in a post-communist world. This is where spirituality comes in.

Rudolf Bahro , the German Left-Green philosopher, is perhaps the most interesting exponent of these new tactics. The motivation behind his attempted 'spiritualisation' of politics had its source in prison. Bahro's dissenting views, expressed in his book The Alternative in Eastern Europe, brought him an eight year prison sentence in East Germany, and the bible was the only book that happened to be available to him in his cell-a cynical move, perhaps, on the part of the Stasi.

He studied it whilst on hunger strike, and although he was never wholly converted to Christianity he saw its place in the world and embraced many of its qualities. His writings reveal an acute sensitivity to personal suffering and the recognition that human needs are spiritual as well as physical and social. True to its origins, therefore, communism for Bahro was above all a revolution of the mind-an awakening.

Bahro was freed and deported after serving a little over a year, thanks to a campaign in the West that had the support of such literary luminaries as Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene and Arthur Miller, as well as many New Left academics, including E.P. Thompson and Ralph Miliband. The Bahro who entered prison, however, was not the Bahro who was released; this new version of himself set out to save the world.

For Bahro, a peaceful eco-communist alternative to capitalism is both possible and essential, but the belief that capitalism offers a life that is desirable must first be overturned if this alternative is to flourish. Through a variety of psychological strategies subsumed under the rubric of 'retail therapy', capitalism promotes pseudo-individualistic lifestyles, drives the desires of the self-absorbed, and promises fulfillment from the menu of all-you-can-eat. Retail therapy locates meaning in life through clothes, cars, homes, holidays and furniture. As the name implies, it even offers a way of self repair.

Consumerism resembles a cult that uses paradoxical statements to transcend rational thought: 'we must spend our wages and leisure hours in pursuit of unnecessary things.' Were this meaningless cycle to stop, capitalism would evaporate, and in the process we might even find our true selves. As Bahro puts it, "Today we consume around ten times as much energy for a worker to be able to sit in front of the TV in the evening with his bottle of beer as was needed in the eighteenth century for Schiller to create his life work."

But the working class will not be the bearer of an alternative society, he concludes. In fact the traditional labour movement's response to the problems of industrial society narrows the space for building those alternatives. Employers and trade unions are traditional power blocs which together institutionalise and manage conflict, thereby stabilising the system. It is not just the bourgeois class but the industrial system itself which threatens our survival. Seen from this angle, class struggle is not the solution.

Instead, Bahro's vision is that of a post-industrial spirituality which represents values that are at variance with hedonistic tendencies, consumerism, and contemporary levels of acquisitiveness. He saw this transition as a peaceful process characterised by dissolution: we don't go in and disband something, he argued, we allow it to disintegrate by withdrawing our energy from the system. That's not to say that this is a wholly passive process: any strategy for non-violent social change that is interwoven with the transformation of consciousness still requires a nudge.

Bahro wanted to reclaim the language of transformative consciousness for an eco-socialist movement, and sought ways to summon the power of whole populations in pursuit of common goals. His focus was on a revolution of the mind-a radical renewal in keeping with Marx's German Ideology-but there is also evidence of a parallel to St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, with its emphasis on transfiguration and metanoia : a 'way of seeing' completely at odds with the political philosophy of possessive individualism and capitalist exploitation. In this revolutionary process he saw the potential for overcoming common obstacles to socialism such as the tendency towards competitiveness, selfishness, greed and fear.

Every major cultural transformation in history has reached into the most intimate sphere of human motivation, and Bahro therefore wanted movements for human development and self-realisation to combine within a political-psychological context. Moreover, he wanted to explore the possibilities for a spiritual awakening that are linked to such a movement. He saw the necessity to bring together all the amorphous groups that are concerned with emancipation and the rescue of civilisation into one coherent form-a mass social movement of cultural transformation. Crucially, this would consist of unity between the Greens and the socialists: the socialists need the Greens because survival is a precondition for them to attain their goals; and the Greens need the socialists because survival can only be ensured by dissolving the basis of monopoly competition.

Similarly, Bahro argued, Christians need socialists, because capitalism is the furthest epoch from God. The moral stand that more and more Christians are adopting on animal rights, ecological issues, the capitalist plundering of impoverished countries and the oppression of the working class is ineffective without political action. But socialists also need Christians, for some degree of religious transcendence is necessarily bound up with subjective values-something which is frequently lost in the struggle to meet the needs of the oppressed.

Bahro was not advocating that socialists convert to Christianity, but that they recognise the necessity for the re-creation of spiritual equilibrium. Socialists should be sensitive, he suggested, to the Christian precept 'Do not store up treasures on earth,' and to the fact that individuals require a basic level of security, not only in the material sense, but also in the sense of having favourable social conditions for the cultivation of their own inner development.

I was fortunate to meet and discuss these ideas with Bahro at a conference in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s, and we maintained a correspondence for some time after his return to Worms in Germany-though language difficulties rendered it short-lived. His political position revealed various hues of red and green before his life was cut short in 1997, but what remained at the heart of his philosophy was the unwavering belief that a spiritual awakening was needed to ensure the rescue of civilization. What was required, as he put it , was 'the reconstruction of God .'

Shortly before he embarked on a journey to investigate the 'alternative' community of Findhorn in the Scottish Highlands, I asked Bahro for his thoughts on the likelihood of a small country like Scotland gaining its independence and fulfilling his vision. He promptly replied that the problem is not that Scotland is too small, but that it's too big. At that time he was exploring the possibilities for 'autarkic equilibrium,' looking at what had worked in medieval forms of communalism fused with contemporary cooperative experiments and variations on the theme of syndicalism. I imagined his idea of self-sustaining communities as something akin to eco-balanced rock pools refreshed by a wider Scottish tide.

Seeing that another Scotland or another world is possible is one thing; sustaining the belief in our ability to effect that change is quite another, but that's where Bahro's ideas are so important. Faced with reversing the tide of industrialism, averting ecological catastrophe and avoiding nuclear annihilation, Bahro calls on all of us to sense and activate our own strength.

This was originally posted at Open Democracy.

Paul Tritschler is a psychology lecturer in Suffolk. Follow him on twitter @TritschlerPaul.