Well, I don’t know about you, but when I go home, I get into politics debates with my family (what can I say? I’ve always been a radical). Recently, I’ve been listening to lectures by Richard Wolff on Marxism (yikes!) and he has given me a whole new way of understanding economics and politics. Then I watched a show called Undercover Boss and I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit. The show demonstrated what’s wrong with America.

Here’s what happened in this week’s episode: The CEO of Diamond Resorts puts on a (really bad) disguise and pretends to be a new hire at various jobs in the company. He works alongside receptionists, plumbers, etc. At the end of the show, he reveals to the people he worked with that he’s the CEO and then he gives the workers that he worked alongside a big bonus, like paying off their mortgage or a new truck. Super generous of him right!? I don’t think so, and here’s how Karl Marx showed me why:

Ok, let’s look at the idea of work more generally first. If we look around we can see that in every society there are people that work and people that don’t work (this isn’t necessarily bad, some of the people that don’t work are children, the elderly, etc.). In order to take care of the people that don’t work, the workers have to produce more than they need for themselves. The word that Marx used for that “more” is “surplus.” Surplus is the extra stuff that the workers produce that goes to take care of needs/wants that are not their own. 

For example: let’s say I have a small shoemaking business and at home I have a baby. In order to take care of the baby (who obviously can’t work), I have to make some shoes to sell to take care of myself and I have to keep making more shoes so that I can take care of my baby. Part of the money that I make from my labor of making shoes goes to me and part of it goes to my baby. Any of the money that comes from my labor that doesn’t go to me is called surplus (obviously, the surplus that goes to my baby is good!).

In the shoemaker example, I make the shoes and I choose to make extra shoes (in Marxist terms: I choose to produce surplus) so that I can take care of my baby. Notice, and this is key: As self-employed person, I’m in charge of my own surplus. 

Now, let’s say that I apply for a job at McDonald’s. Like everyone else, I want to “get paid what I’m worth!” But here’s the rub: we all know that McDonald’s will only pay me $10/hour as long as I am producing more than $10/hour worth of Big Macs to sell. If McDonald’s doesn’t make more than $10 off of my labor, then I’ll get laid off. This is true in all businesses that are organized in what Marx called a capitalist business structure. In other words: in a capitalist business, the worker does not get all the surplus from their labor. Capitalism is not a way of organizing government, it’s a way of organizing labor relationships in a business.

So McDonald’s makes money off of my labor, i.e., they get to keep part of my surplus and I have no say in what happens to it. Marx called this “exploitation.” Now, stick with me because it sounds inflammatory, but all it means is that in capitalism, the worker does not have control of their surplus. The caplitalist business keeps the worker’s surplus. It doesn’t matter if the worker is aware of this, or if you have a really nice boss with good intentions that pays you the “market rate.” It simply means that the worker doesn’t have any say over the surplus of their labor. In US corporations, it is the board of directors who decide what happens to the surplus (keep in mind the workers have no say in electing the board!). Thus, in capitalism, there is a built-in tension between the workers and the people who get the surplus. They must continually argue about how much or how little of the worker’s surplus that the owners keep. For example, every time you ask for a raise, you’re in essence asking to keep more of the surplus from your labor.

 Recently the Pew Poll Research Center performed a ‘Political Rhetoric Test’ to discover that young Americans have an increasingly positive response to ‘socialism’ and a declining one to ‘capitalism.’  I am interested in why y’all may think this is the case.  It’s important to note that a political rhetoric test has nothing to do with the respondent actually having any clue what ‘socialism,’ capitalism,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’ actually mean.  It is simply a way of gauging how one responds to the word when used so I wouldn’t make near as big of a deal of this as Alexander Eichler at the Huffington Post who titled his post “Young People More Likely To Favor Socialism Than Capitalism,” but the stats are the stats.

“The poll, published Wednesday, found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin — 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view — socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.”

So ‘socialism’ being popular among young Americans doesn’t mean they have any clue what it means.  Surely some do but I think it may be the fact that for most young Americans we know our lives – regardless of our hard work – will not as a whole be as good or better than our parents.  So if ‘socialism’ is the word for a different way of organizing our economic relationships as a country why not say ‘positive’ when asked because ‘capitalism’ has broken the promise of the American dream.

 Perhaps another reason ‘socialism’ is growing in popularity is thanks to our growing outlandish political Right in the country.  I thought of this when a high school student told me he was a socialist and I said “What? Do you have any idea what that means or would mean for your family?”  He said, “Yeah, you want college to be affordable, healthcare available to all, and to go back to Clinton era taxes.  I mean that’s why everyone is upset at Obama and he’s a socialist.”  What if our hyper-polarizing rhetoric in America and in particular the socialist name calling on the Right is actually making an audience for the very idea they abhor?

Two theological asides.

1) If you look at just the poor and non-white stats our country is significantly critical of capitalism.  Should those on the underside of our system get a hearing from the church about the effects of our system on their lives and family?

2) ‘Progressive‘ is way more popular than ‘Liberal.’

Public reactions to the word progressive are far more favorable than to the word liberal; two-thirds have a positive reaction to the former compared with just half for the latter. There is very little difference among Democrats – who view both terms favorably.  The largest difference is among Republicans most (55%) of whom have a positive reaction to the word progressive, and a negative (70%) reaction to the word liberal. (link)

Does that mean liberal Christians should use progressive?  And why didn’t they ask about ‘Incarnational Christians?’

 I should start this post with a disclaimer: I believe that Texas is one of the three craziest states in the union, right up there with Alaska and California! Texas, however, is currently taking the first place prize (for the week, anyways) in its re-instantiation of debates concerning the teaching of evolution in public schools. That is, Texas’ Board of Education is again taking up the question of whether evolutionary thought is allowed exclusive domain in public schools as a theory of how life emerges and whether there can be intellectual debate about evolutions’ factuality in a formal, statewide education.

I personally think, however, that the whole debate is smitten with a series of category mistakes, which I’d like to  address. I’ll begin by  briefly reconstructing two of the more audacious positions on the matter. First via atheistic evolutionary-biologists, evolution is taken not only to be a true account of human biology, but it is taken to absolutely negate the factual existence of God based on the fact that God is not necessary for evolution. Second, and via creationists, evolution is taken to be untrue precisely because it negates the factual existence of God, the Bibilical accounts of which must be given precedence as that are incommensurate with a evolutionary world. These debates, then, make two category mistakes.

First, God is not, I don’t think, an object among other objects or a “fact” among other “facts,” as I use the term above. That is, if one looks around the room, one has an experience of different objects in the room; one experiences the chairs, knowing in these experiences the functionality and usefulness of the chairs; one experiences the cushions under one’s bottoms, understanding that without them, one would sit on something far more hard. But one does not have an experience of God in this way precisely because God’s being is absolutely distinct from those empirical objects that give themselves over to our perceptions in their uses and qualities.

God, rather, is “invisible,” as the old term goes, which cannot be taken to mean, again, an object in the room that’s unseen, but something utterly different than objects that surround us. That is, when we talk of God, I don’t believe we talk about a direct experience but about what could be called a re-orientation of our experiences. That is, we are addressed by that which is completely other than ourselves in such a way that our previous ways of experiencing are brought into question and formed anew. Paul calls this new experience of the world given by God an experience of the world in terms of faith, hope, and love. I take this to mean that we can no longer experience the world solely in terms of its usefulness for us, especially other people, but in terms of what God intended and intends for it—that what is now the case need not always be so!

In this way, it is silly to try and attest to God’s being by way of factuality and as a fact among other facts. This is a categorically mistaken way of thinking about God’s being, which cannot be proved or disproved as such.

Second, what evolution has more precisely to do with God depends entirely on whether one already stands conscientiously re-oriented within the being of God and, thus, how one interprets the meaning of any worldly fact, including evolution. That is, both sides are wrong to think that evolution says anything necessary about God prior to a belief in God. Rather, one can only interpret the meaning of evolution based on one’s assumption that there is or is not a God. Thus, Christians, for instance, can and do not only affirm the factuality of evolution but can also very specifically interpret evolution as God’s working out of salvation history! Atheists, likewise, can see that, by means of evolution, we do not need to posit a God, which they are absolutely right about even in Christian terms; after all, God is always a gift and never a necessity, which is why the language of emanation has been dropped for the language of grace.

The truth of the matter, then, is that evolution can (and does) stand as a factually demonstrable way to interpret the so called natural history of humanity and the earth while, at the same time, saying absolutely nothing necessary about God, especially in terms of God being interpreted as a fact among other facts. Either way, one can rightly affirm the factuality of evolutionary processes, which really shouldn’t be up for debate.

The only matters that ought to be up for debate are evolution’s interpretive possibilities.