WorkRosa Luxemburg

Socialism and the Churches

A pamphlet for churchgoing workers in 1905, arguing from the Church Fathers that the clergy, not the socialists, had abandoned the first Christians.

by Rosa Luxemburg59 passages held

German, a translation held here

Original title: Kościół a socjalizm
First published: 1905(aged 34)
Original language: Polish

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Overview

Workers in Russian Poland who went to church in 1905 were hearing sermons against the strikes. The pamphlet begins there, in the year when strikes against the tsar's government spread across the Russian empire, with priests who tell the poor to bear their lot and denounce socialists from the pulpit. Rosa Luxemburg wrote it in Polish for her own party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. It was printed in Kraków, on the Austrian side of the border, under the name Józef Chmura. Her readers were believers, and she argues with them from their own tradition. The first Christians, she writes, held their goods in common and ate at shared tables, as the Acts of the Apostles describe. In the fourth century preachers such as Basil and John Chrysostom, the patriarch of Constantinople, were still calling the rich back to that practice. It failed, on her account, because it shared out what people consumed and left the production of goods as it was: the stores ran down, the rich stayed rich, and charity took the place of equality. Meanwhile the Church acquired a paid clergy, then tithes and land, and came to side with the owners it had once condemned. Social democrats, she concludes, take away no one's faith and demand freedom of conscience for everyone. It is the clergy who have turned the pulpit into a political platform, and workers should answer them as they would any other defender of the tsar and the employers. A third Polish edition appeared in Warsaw in 1906 and another in Moscow in 1920. The French Socialist Party published a French translation in 1937, and the English version was made from the French.

Key concepts

What is a community of consumption in this pamphlet?

It is Luxemburg's term for the way the first Christians shared: finished goods were held in common, while the making of goods stayed as before. Members put money and movable property into a common chest and ate at shared tables. Fields and workshops remained private, and the work was done by slaves. What is only consumed runs out, so such a community depends on fresh gifts from those who still have property.

What do social democrats want held in common, according to Luxemburg?

They want the means of production in common: land, factories, workshops and tools, so that everyone works together and lives from that work. Luxemburg sets this beside the Church Fathers, who asked the rich to hand over part of their wealth. Their appeal left the source of wealth where it was. Hers is addressed to people who already do society's work in factories owned by someone else, and who could run them jointly.

How does Luxemburg explain the rise of Christianity?

She explains it from the misery of the Roman empire. Great landowners had taken the peasants' land and worked it with slaves, and the landless crowded into Rome, where they were kept quiet with free grain and circus games. With no work and no hope of help from the state, these people turned to a teaching that condemned the rich and promised equality. Christianity was at first, on this account, a religion of the destitute.

How did the clergy become a separate class, in her account?

It grew out of the division of tasks in the congregations. As communities became large, looking after the common chest and the services could no longer be done beside a trade, so members were chosen to do it full time and were paid for it. A second inequality thus arose inside the Church, between clergy and people, next to that between rich and poor. Bishops of wealthy cities then rose above the rest.

What does freedom of conscience mean in Socialism and the Churches?

It means that a person's belief is their own affair, to be neither persecuted nor insulted by anyone. Luxemburg presents this as a principle of social democracy everywhere and turns it against the tsar's government, which harassed Catholics, Jews, Uniates and dissenters. The party therefore asks no member to give up religion. Its quarrel with priests starts only when the pulpit is used to defend the employers and the government against striking workers.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why the first Christians' common goods did not last

The Acts of the Apostles describe believers who held everything in common. Luxemburg asks her churchgoing readers why that way of life vanished, and what it would take for it to hold.

Christianity, on Luxemburg's account, arose among the dispossessed of the Roman empire, people who lived on doles of grain while slaves did the work. Their remedy was to share what there was to consume: money in a common chest, meals at common tables. Since land and labour stayed as they were, the stores had to be refilled by those who still owned something, and sharing turned into alms. In the fourth century Basil and John Chrysostom still preached the old practice, and Gregory the Great called giving the payment of a debt. Economic conditions, she concludes, are stronger than the finest sermons. Lasting equality needs common work with common tools.

early christianity
communal property
communism
charity
poverty
slavery
ancient history
means of production
equality
wealth
social inequality

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How the Church came to side with the owners

Priests in 1905 preached against the strikes. Luxemburg asks how the heirs of a church of the poor came to defend the rich, and answers with a history of church property.

As congregations grew, their business became a full-time office whose holders had to be paid, and a clergy set apart from the people appeared. From the sixth century believers owed it the tithe, a tenth of every harvest. In the Middle Ages the Church was the mightiest landlord of all, and before the Revolution the French clergy held a fifth of the country's soil. Its defence of owners follows from being one. Social democrats, Luxemburg tells believing workers, attack no one's faith and demand freedom of conscience against the tsar. They answer the priest only where he speaks for the employers and the government.

religion and politics
clergy
church wealth
church
religious institutions
taxation
feudalism
exploitation
socialism
class struggle

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Within this work

passages held: 59
distinct concepts: 109
by passages held, corpus-wide: #631

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “religion and politics” and “socialism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 80 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
religion and politics	socialism	9
communal property	early christianity	6
exploitation	religion and politics	6
early christianity	poverty	4
communal property	poverty	3
early christianity	socialism	3
clergy	poverty	2
communal property	social inequality	2
early christianity	social inequality	2
exploitation	poverty	2
poverty	religion and politics	2
clergy	social inequality	1
exploitation	social inequality	1
poverty	socialism	1
religion and politics	social inequality	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1899 Reform or Revolution (Sozialreform oder Revolution?)
Within a year of her arrival in Berlin she had written the newspaper articles gathered here. Their case about where reform stops is the ground she argues from in everything later.
DE
1904 Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie)
Written against Lenin's plan for a party, this is her sustained piece on how one should be organised. The prison manuscript on the Russian Revolution took the argument up again fourteen years later.
DE
1905 Socialism and the Churches (Kościół a socjalizm) you are here DE
1906 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften)
The fullest statement of her view that mass action cannot be scheduled by leaders. The dispute it opened with the trade unions came back in 1910 as her break with Karl Kautsky, the party's leading theorist.
DE
1913 The Accumulation of Capital (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals)
Among pamphlets and articles, this is the one full-length treatise she finished. It supplies the economic basis for the account of war she gave three years later in the Junius Pamphlet.
DE
1916 The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet) (Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie)
The account of imperialism from The Accumulation of Capital, applied three years later to an actual war and to the party that had voted for it.
DE
1919 Aufsätze und Artikel
Newspaper and journal pieces from 1893 to 1919, the running record beside the books. They include the 1910 polemics against Karl Kautsky and her last articles for Die Rote Fahne.
DE
1919 Reden
What she said aloud, on the questions her articles and pamphlets argue in print, from her first months in Germany in 1898 to the last weeks of her life.
DE
1922 The Russian Revolution (Die russische Revolution)
She left it unfinished in Breslau prison in 1918, and Paul Levi printed it four years later. It returns to the objection she had made to Lenin in 1904, now that his party held a state.
DE
1925 Introduction to Political Economy (Einführung in die Nationalökonomie)
Her economics as she taught it: plainer than The Accumulation of Capital, which grew out of it, and the place where her reading on communal societies before capitalism is set out.
DE

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