a sustained, mass-supported attack on the hegemony of corporations and the regulations that allow them to dominate us […] the radical decentralisation of power, whether private or state […] the return of power to us, the people, at the level of community […] the assertion of spirituality, of whatever form, to the heart of our social structures.2
Revolution’s real achievement is not just to make the transformation of corporate capitalism Brand advocates attractive in the basic sense (i.e. exciting, stimulating and enjoyable), but to boldly proclaim the ethical and spiritual motivation behind socialist agitation for a better world.
Lunacharsky’s concept of a socialist religion was not new, although previously the socialism derived from the religion and not vice-versa. The libertarian essence of Christ’s ministry had been recognised since the early Apostles. In the Middle Ages, religious dissidents such as the Lollards, Hussites and Anabaptists were persecuted by the Church and feudal aristocracy for daring to express it. It was the core of the Christian Socialist tradition expressed by John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Labour leaders Keir Hardie, George Lansbury and Tony Benn were driven by a Christian Socialist ethic, as were Martin Luther King and Hugo Chavez. In his History of the World, H.G. Wells wrote of Jesus that the rich elites of his own time, and subsequently, were discomforted by his message, for “He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the smug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love”.3 Or as Brand neatly put it, “Socialism is Christianity politicised”.4
From this tradition and the school of Catholic social activism arose Liberation Theology, central to the revival of socialism and anti-imperialism in Latin America since the 1980s. Noam Chomsky described it as an attempt to return to the first three centuries of Christianity before the Nicene Creed of 325, when it was “a pacifist religion of the poor”. It arose from a conference of Latin American bishops at Medellin in 1968, after which many of its adherents refocused their missions towards social goals such as fighting poverty and a “preferential option for the poor”. This option was inspired by passages in the Bible such as the excoriating attack on the rich in the New Testament, the Book of James 5, 1:6:
Go now, ye rich men, weep and howl for the miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as if it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord.5
A radical and uncompromising Christianity was a challenge to the Catholic Church, with its vast riches and Vatican Bank, and to conservative hypocrites who professed Christianity in theory while ignoring it in practice. Catholic priests such as Samuel Ruiz, Bishop of Chiapas, increasingly came to see that the gold and silver of the Latin American elite was cankered and that as good Christians it was their duty to speak for “the labourers who have reaped down your fields”. Ruiz supported the precursor of the Zapatista Army, the Maoist organisation Popular Politics (PP), and its model of community organising. Subcommandante Marcos praised him as one of the first twelve PP activists who relocated in Chiapas in 1983 to organise a guerrilla war. The PP operated under the protection of the local church, often accompanying priests on religious missions into rural areas. They demanded “work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, justice and peace”, and pledged to form a “free and democratic government”. While they appealed to Mexican nationalism, they also spoke on behalf of Mexico’s oppressed indigenous population.
Like Liberation Theology, the new rationalistic thinking of the early 20th century was inevitably subversive. Only in Russia was there a return to authority and tradition. A collection of essays called Vekhi (Landmarks) by several prominent Russian intellectuals, published in 1909, caused immediate controversy. The contributors were selected by Peter Struve, who now stood on the right of the Kadet party. With minor differences they all dissented from what to that point had been the central tenet of the Russian intelligentsia–its unwavering hostility to Tsarism and Orthodoxy. They argued that the intelligentsia’s rationalism, utilitarianism and atheism had made it incapable of constructive political engagement, and this had led to the defeats of 1905 and the failure to establish a proper constitutional order.
Struve had moved away from Marxism because he felt it lacked a spiritual dimension and asked too much of its working-class base. He indicted all forms of rationalism and “scientism” and he condemned the Russian intelligentsia tout court as a frivolous, destructive opposition to whatever the Russian government attempted to do. But given that nearly all of the intelligentsia, from Marxist to Liberal, had taken part in the Duma experiment, and it was the government that closed it down and rigged its franchise, it is hard to see his logic. In the most notorious Vekhi essay the literary historian Mikhail Gershenzon criticised Marxists for dividing people into friends and enemies, and yet he did the same when he wrote that instead of union with the people “we ought to fear the people and bless this government which, with its prisons and bayonets, still protects us from the people’s fury”.6
Vekhi sought to isolate Russia from the cultural “degeneration” sweeping fin-de-siècle Europe at the pivot of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was a movement in which, to much surprise, Imperial Russia played a major part. Prior to 1890 Russia’s chief claim to artistic fame was her glittering array of literary talent–a range of poets and novelists including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Although their brilliance was universally acknowledged, it was not until the 1890s that an explosion of Russian artistic talent, in Camilla Gray’s estimation, “began to make a serious contribution to western culture in general”.7 It was announced by the experimental watercolours of Mikhail Vrubel, a fusion of Byzantine art and erotic imagery that created a Russian version of Art Nouveau. Vrubel made his reputation in 1890 with Seated Demon, based on Lermontov’s Romantic epic. He produced several paintings on different aspects of the Demon until the nihilistic, apocalyptic themes of his masterpiece Demon Downcast drove him to a nervous breakdown in 1902. But his work in the 1890s, in particular The Dance of Tamara, had opened the door to a flowering of Russian modern art which found its voice in the “World of Art” movement.
Established by the designer, producer and art critic Alexander Benois, the World of Art magazine ran from 1898 to 1904. It helped organise exhibitions as well as promoting and explaining Russian modernism to the world. After a while the entire enterprise fell under the control and direction of Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario and creative driver of the Ballets Russes, the most significant expression of the World of Art movement. The Ballets Russes never performed within Russia itself due to official censorship, but other manifestations of the World of Art had great impact on the cultural elite of Moscow, St Petersburg and Odessa.