article
by Kevin Filan
With
the Soviet Union's demise and
In a similar vein, it's difficult to speak of contemporary Wicca and Neopaganism without touching on "An it harm none, do what you will" -- the Wiccan Rede. Not all Witches follow the Rede; among those who do, interpretations can vary widely. (Of course, the same could be said for Marxism: see Stalin versus Trotsky and Khruschev versus Mao Zedong for further details). Still, just about every Witch is at least familiar with the concept. Witches may follow the Rede or consider it a silly attempt to whitewash Witchcraft -- but they will likely have to at least consider the Rede when formulating an ethical policy. In cultural studies parlance, Witches must "engage with" the Rede... much as cultural studies professors "engage with" Marx and his intellectual descendents.
A Marxist analysis of the Rede can shed light on both Wiccan and Marxist preconceptions and prejudices. It can also stir up a fair amount of controversy. While I have drawn on various Marxist and Neopagan sources for this essay, it is hardly exhaustive. If you disagree with any of my precepts or conclusions, follow the best Marxist tradition -- write a polemic condemning me as bourgeois and reactionary.
So What is Marxism?
Simply put, Marxism is the philosophy first described by Karl Marx and put into practice by various political leaders. Marxism views human interaction through an economic lens. The wealthy control the means of production, while the poor provide the labor that allows the rich to amass greater wealth. This relationship has taken various forms throughout time. Tribal cultures had chieftains and slaves; feudal societies had lords and peasants; our modern era has the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie control the means of production; they own the factories and businesses that employ the proletariat.
To keep this separate and unequal system in place, the bourgeoisie use a number of tools. Raw power -- control of police forces, courts and armies -- is one means by which the rich oppress the poor. Another tool, more subtle but no less effective, is ideology. In The German Ideology Marx defines ideology as the "production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness," including "politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc." Through advertising, propaganda, and control of the media and educational institutions, the ruling class justifies its privileged position and minimizes the violence and injustice required to preserve that position.
Marxists seek to change this state of affairs through a number of tools. They seek to "kick the ass of the ruling class" via revolutionary action and revolutionary thinking. A revolution that is not grounded in a proper ideology will only replace one oppressor with another. To hasten our progress to a Marxist utopia, we must change not only our rulers but also our way of viewing the world. One technique that many Marxist philosophers use toward this end is dialectical analysis. According to this theory, every state of affairs (thesis) gives rise to its opposite (antithesis), and then a synthesis of the two is formed, which becomes the new thesis, and the process starts all over again. As Marxist scholar Rob Sewell says in "What Is Dialectical Marxism?": "To understand something, its essence, it is necessary to seek out these internal contradictions." This essay applies a dialectical analysis to the Wiccan Rede.
Thesis
The first difficulty in a Marxist analysis of the Rede comes with "do what you will." These four words imply free will and the ability to make choices concerning one's actions. Many interpretations of Marxism are as deterministic as Skinnerian Behaviorism or Calvinist Christianity. These Marxists believe that human actions and social events are as determined as all other events -- not the product of free agency, but rather the result of economic and cultural conditions. Telling someone "do what you will" is like telling the sun "rise in the east" or telling water "flow downward."
Even those Marxists who accept some degree of free will would point out that freedom has always meant "freedom of the ruling class." Greece and Rome had free men and slaves: the Middle Ages had nobles and serfs. Today our standard of living is maintained largely by those who toil in the "service industries," or who work as menial laborers in fields, factories and sweatshops. Surely not even the most diehard capitalist can argue with a straight face that "do what you will" means the same thing to Mexican migrant farm workers or single mothers working more than 50 hours a week at their local Wal-Mart as it does to factory owners or CEOs.
Indeed, some might claim that talk of "freedom" and "free will" only serves to divert our attention from our chains. "Under the flag of `freedom of industry' the most rapacious of wars were conducted," Lenin said in What is to be Done? "Under the banner of `freedom of labor' workers have been robbed." By convincing us that we are free to "do what we will," the Rede may well serve to palliate our feelings of bondage. We believe we have the freedom to choose our actions, never realizing that our circumstances have predetermined or (at best) seriously limited our choices.
If "do what you will" is problematic, "an it harm none" is particularly noxious. Marxism presupposes class struggle -- eternal warfare between the haves and the have-nots -- until such time as capitalist resistance has been broken, the workers control the means of production and the state has withered away. As Lenin said in "Socialism and War," Marxists "understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within a country; we understand that wars cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and socialism is created... we regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by an oppressed class against the oppressor class, by slaves against slaveholders, by serfs against landowners, and by wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as fully legitimate, progressive, and necessary."
It's difficult to reconcile the demands of revolution with a requirement to "harm none." In fact, many Marxists might claim that the Wiccan Rede is a bourgeois tool, a plaything designed by children of privilege for children of privilege. While Christianity preaches "a moral code enslaving the worker by preaching its doctrines of humility, affected contempt for worldly goods and lavish promises of rewards after death" (Simmons, "Some Ethical Problems"), the Rede presents deity as a an indulgent Mother Goddess telling bored youngsters, "Do whatever you want... just make sure no one gets hurt." By adding "an it harm none," the Rede turns the Opiate of the Masses into Marijuana for the Bourgeoisie... a mild hallucinogen that alleviates boredom and ensures employment for the makers of incense and pentagram jewelry.
Antithesis
Most Witches who follow the Rede would interpret "harm none" to cover passive evil as well as active evil -- what the Roman Catholic Act of Contrition divides into sins "in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do." If we see oppression and do not act to end it, our silence and our tacit assent harms the oppressed. They do not view the Wiccan Rede as a simple "if it feels good, do it"; they interpret "harm none" not just as "don't hurt anybody" but as "avoid actions -- and inactions -- that contribute to suffering." This isn't just a negative commandment -- a "thou shalt not harm others" -- but a positive "thou shalt seek to minimize harm."
Witches also understand that the world is an interconnected web, and that even actions that might appear innocuous may do harm to others. Behaving in a way that "harms none" means leading what Socrates called "the examined life." We have to contemplate our role in the world, and the ways in which that role leads to the oppression and suffering of others. Most people wouldn't consider buying a shirt at the local mall to be "harming others," but yet if that shirt was produced by sweatshop labor, are we not harming those workers by feeding into the corporate profit machine that perpetrates this system? Do our gas-guzzling cars help to keep oil-rich dictators in power? Is our morning bottle of soda pop helping to fund death squads against Colombian union organizers?
Leon Trotsky said in "Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects," "The struggle against war is decided not by pressure on the government but only by the revolutionary struggle for power." However, there have been numerous peaceful (or relatively peaceful) revolutions. The advances made by the American civil rights movement came about largely through peaceful protests, and Mahatma Gandhi was able to force the British out of India through civil disobedience. While some diehard Marxists might scorn these advances as "bourgeois revolutions" or "scraps thrown from the master's table," they unquestionably have resulted in real improvements in the lives of oppressed people. So there are examples of people who were able to "harm none" while at the same time struggling against oppression and fighting for the rights of the downtrodden.
Many Witches are environmentalists. They are well aware of how poor communities suffer disproportionably from pollution, and of how the capitalist "profit uber alles" mindset contributes to that suffering. Starhawk has been on the front line of antiwar, antiglobalization, and pro-justice protests for decades. Her Reclaiming Tradition, which honors the Rede, is organized in Communist Party fashion as "cells" of a "collective." They see environmentalism and justice work as two parts of the same struggle; they understand that, as Eugene Kamenka states in Marxian Humanism and the Crisis in Socialist Ethics, "Money lowers all the gods of mankind and transforms them into a commodity... it has therefore robbed the whole world, both the human world and nature, of its own peculiar value."
It would be easy enough to dismiss the Rede and the faiths that honor it as bourgeois nonsense -- except for those pesky Pagan activists who insist on changing the world.
Synthesis
It's easy to forget that Karl Marx never saw his ideas put into practice. He had been dead for decades by the time Russian workers threw off their chains in 1917. The various forms of "Marxism" that we have seen implemented have actually been "Marxism <insert name here>." Lenin added some bells and whistles to his interpretation of Marxism (he placed a bit more emphasis on the "dictatorship of the proletariat," for one thing), as did Mao Zedong, Castro, Stalin, Albania's Enver Hoxha, Yugoslavia's Josef Tito and other leaders who actually had to create practical applications for Marxist theory. We have not yet seen a "pure" Marxism, and indeed, given that Marx is no longer with us, we never will.
Many
diehard Marxists treat Marxist political theory like religious dogma. To hear
them talk, you would think that Karl Marx's writings were divine revelations
that could be applied As Is to all times and all places. They are willing to
apply the Hegelian dialectic to everything but Marxist thought. At best,
it turns philosophy into a utopian theology, one that can only grow
increasingly detached from the real-world conditions it seeks to influence. At
worst this has led to the sad spectacle of Marxists acting as apologists for
the excesses of Stalin and his ilk. Like any other philosopher, Marx was a
product of his place and time...
Marx,
like many post-Enlightenment philosophers, had little use for religion. He saw
it as an "opiate" -- and yet in many cases this "opiate" has acted more like
methamphetamine, spurring the downtrodden to take up arms against their
oppressors. Like Nietzsche, Marx mistakenly assumed that religions of the
disenfranchised -- what Nietzsche called "slave religions" -- advocated peaceful
submission and "knowing one's place." In fact, for many of the poor and
powerless religion is the only outlet for their feelings of anger. And
often, religious leaders have provided a catalyst for real-world changes while
"Marxists" declaimed from their ivory towers about how Something Must Be Done.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi come to mind immediately; Osama
Bin Laden provides another, more controversial example. Abdullah Ocalan's PKK
combined Islam and Marxism to create a movement that has waged a three-decade
struggle for Kurdish liberation in
All too often, modern Witchcraft has degenerated into a live-action role playing game that does nothing to right the wrongs of the world. A Marxist reading of this tendency -- and its consequences -- can challenge us to avoid the Straits of Fluffiness and the Shoals of Irrelevance. We can recognize how our lives of privilege harm others, and how we can work to minimize that harm. We can take our lip service to "the interconnected web of all living things" and see the ways in which we actually are interconnected. Much as symbolic logic helps us design computers and calculus helps us chart the course of a rocket in flight, Marxism can help us understand the nature of oppression and the ways in which we can help to end it.
For their part, Marxists might do well to consider "an it harm none" when contemplating possible courses of action. There may well be a time and a place to meet violence with violence, but this should be seen as a last resort, not as an inevitable by-product of any "real revolution." Making a serious effort to avoid doing harm -- even to "capitalist pig-dogs" -- may help make our revolution one in which everyone benefits, one that is more concerned with forging coalitions than with "smashing enemies." The Cambodian killing fields, the North Korean prison camps and Cuban "re-education centers," the various ecological and humanitarian disasters throughout the former Soviet Union -- all of these might have been avoided by a Marxism that recognized a human obligation to "harm none" that transcended class obligations or even the march toward utopia. It could well be that peaceful revolution, not bloodshed and warfare, will ultimately make the dream of the Internationale -- the withering away of the state -- a reality.
References
www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshops/.
www.killercoke.org.
"Introduction to Karl Marx: Module on Ideology": www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/marxism/modules/marxideology.html.
Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (1962): www.marxists.org/archive/kamenka/1962/ethical-foundations/ch09.htm.
Eugene Kamenka, Marxian Humanism and the Crisis in Socialist Ethics. (1965). www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/kamenka.htm.
Vladimir I. Lenin,
"Socialism and war," Collected Works, Volume 21.
Vladymir Ilich
Lenin, What is to be Done? (1902).
www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/worldcivreader/worldcivreader_2/lenin.html.
Karl Marx, The
Communist Manifesto (1847)
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/.
Karl Marx, The
German Ideology (1845-1846)
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/.
Peter Montague, "Crimes of Shell," www.thirdworldtraveler.com//Boycotts/Crimes_Shell.html.
Rob Sewell, "What is Dialectical Materialism?" www.marxist.com//Theory/study_guide1.html.
May Wood Simmons,
"Some Ethical Problems." International Socialist Review, Vol 1, No. 16,
December, 1900.
www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/simmons/ethics.htm.
Leon Trotsky.
"Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects." Chapter 8: From Marxism to
Pacifism.
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1931-tpv/pr08.htm.
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by Judy Harrow, whose comments on an earlier version of this article proved invaluable.
Copyright © 2006 by the article's author