Falkiner+reply+to+Selepe+on+Gramsci+and+Hegemony

=Joe Falkiner’s reply to Cheche Selepe concerning Hegemony=

June 9th, 2005


 * Dear Comrade Cheche,**

I hope you won’t mind my writing in answer to your response to the Hegemony article. Some of what you said I agree with entirely. Other bits might result in us agreeing to disagree. However.

The kind of thing I agree with is contained in your sentence “The concept (hegemony) could help unravel domination, primarily class domination”. Exactly. And that is why I wrote the article in the first place. You see, I work with students for the priesthood, and I am fully aware of how many religious leaders regard themselves as being of a kind of superior class, and how many of them support the ruling class and refuse to be in solidarity with workers, and how wrong this is. I am trying to make some seminarians aware of the danger of doing this. When they asked me to write an article for their own small magazine, I chose this topic to make hem conscious of what might happen.

Another sentence I agree with wholeheartedly is your sentence “Hegemony according to Gramsci and most Marxists is a class concept that explains the domination of ideas. . . . The ruling class’s ideas are the ruling ideas.” I agree with that statement. But then I must disagree with your next assertion which says “Religion is a ruling class idea”. I’m not going to call it a crazy statement, because religion has so often been hijacked by the ruling class, and so it can appear as if this is true. They have tried to control religion just like they control the means of production. But historically religion as such has existed as long as the human race has existed, and participates (often very weakly) in the struggle against this domination. Religion and religious people are just as affected by the hegemony as are all sorts of other social institutions and social groupings such as the workers. In fact the vast majority of people attending church in our country are workers. Priests in the working class townships are usually very much aware of this, whereas priests in middle-class suburbs are not.

Gramsci wrote an awful lot about religion. I don’t know if you have seen the book FURTHER SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI. The editor has selected Gramsci’s writings on several topics, including Religion, Economics, Education, and on Croce. What I referred to in my article was the selection of his writings on Religion, which occupy no less than 137 pages. It is mostly on Church leadership as he had observed it in his day in Italy, the rest of Europe, and North America, but he also had passages on Judaism, on Indian and Chinese religious culture, and on Islam.

He doesn’t write about the hijacking that I mentioned earlier, as it happened in Europe 1700 years previously at the time that Constantine was the Roman Emperor, that is about 300 years into the Christian Era. Since that time the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in particular has taken on the form of an Imperial Court, with an Emperor (the Pope) at the top, supported by court officials (Cardinals) and regional governors (diocesan bishops). I believe that ordinary church members havesuffered greatly from this hijacking, and because of the hegemony in force many christians are totally unaware of it.

I became aware of it many years ago partly through reading two books, first JESUS BEFORE CHRISTIANITY, by Albert Nolan, and secondly CONSTANTINE VERSUS CHRIST, by Alistair Kee. As I was involved with worker organisations and Trade Unions at that time, I recognized to some extent what was going on. However I did not hear the word “hegemony” until recently, and had never read anything of Gramsci until Dominic Tweedie mentioned him. So in my article I wanted to share some of this with the young seminarians that I live with.

Another part of your response that I like is your analysis that “politics dances to the tune of money”. You have a very good way of putting things on paper. If Comrade Dominic Tweedie had not told me you are a journalist, I would have guessed it.

If you can still bear with me I would like briefly to give you my own analysis of religious ideology and theology in general. It seems to take three main forms. There is priestly theology, prophetic theology, and healing theology. Religious practices and activities seem to be governed by one or other of these three, or by a combination of all three.


 * The type of religious practices and ideologies that are usually criticised by Marxists would mostly fall under the title ‘priestly religion’, and a lot of the criticism is valid. This is religion that is concerned almost exclusively with church buildings and liturgical ritual and money and status and control. I am not saying that all priests behave like this. It is a question of where the main interest lies. I myself am involved in some of those things, but it is not where my primary concern lies.
 * Secondly there is ‘healing religion’, and we experience it most often in the African Traditional Churches. I have not had much experience of this.
 * The third type of religious practices are called ‘prophetic’, and they are concerned largely with justice in society. I would fall into this group.

The word ‘prophet’ here relates back to the activities of people in the tradition of Moses (who led the slaves of Egypt to liberation), and of the prophets in the Old Testament who were so opposed to the injustices that were going on once the descendants if those liberated slaves were drawn into a hierarchical society, with kings and rulers who controlled and exploited them through excessive taxation.

As a follower of Jesus, I note that he never called himself a priest, but often referred to himself as a prophet. He also healed. He claimed that his mission was “to set the downtrodden free”. It was the high priests in the temple who decided he must die, for attacking their economic empire, when he cleaned the traders out of the temple. So I agree with your assertion that “theoretically we know god to be the almighty, but practically money is the almighty”. This is what was happening in his day, and Jesus did not hesitate to attack it. Unfortunately it is still happening today. But it is not universal.

Comrade, you said in your response that “religion will always, and not sometimes, be used to justify capitalist domination, because it is in itself an article of trade”. I’m afraid that I cannot accept that statement. My experience is otherwise. But I grant you that other experiences to the contrary do exist. Ngugi, for example, in his book DEVIL ON THE CROSS, saw things differently.

As I said at the beginning of this response, my article was motivated by my desire to make young seminarians aware of this kind of thing. My efforts might have little effect, but at least I am trying.

With best wishes for what you are doing, and with thanks for your response,


 * Joe Falkiner.**