Christ, Class, and Capital
By: Ryan Lindsey
Tags: Relationships, Christianity, Faith, Capitalism, Economics

Christ, Class, and Capital

Why should Christians be interested, to any extent, in thinking about the economic system known as capitalism? After all, aren’t we as Christians inherently people of faith, whose savior nor true enemy is “of this world”? But what if our faith requires us to critically examine the power and influence of capital: what might our faith have to do with this?

Relationships & God

One of the tenets of my faith — and I believe at the faith of many others, Christian and non-Christian alike — is the conviction that relationships matter. Our relationships with God, with others, with the entirety of all God’s beloved creation, and with ourselves truly matter. This tenet is the foundation for this essay, but if you don’t accept this idea then please, keep reading, and hopefully I’ll convince you of the importance of relationship to God and the Christian faith.

We are all in a relationship with a relational God who intentionally created us to be relational beings. The Hebrew scriptures especially speak of covenantal relationships that exist between the Creator and creation, especially with all of humanity. These covenantal relationships were (and are) made to promote and ensure the well-being of all creation; the covenants aren’t meant to bless only one people or only one group. These covenants are established for the benefit of all people, all creatures, all creation everywhere and everywhen.

The first covenant in the Hebrew scriptures is the covenant God made with Noah and his family, and it changes the terms for the relationship between Creator and creation. In the story as told in Genesis, God destroyed everything “within whose nostrils was the breath of life” (like all ancient Mesopotamian gods apparently did when humans misbehaved). By the time the flood recedes, God establishes a covenant to never do that again, which is clearly for our common good. Every subsequent covenant builds and expands on this first covenant’s pursuit of the well-being of the Creator-creation relationship. This pursuit exists in the covenants with Abraham and Sarah, Abraham and Hagar, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leia, and Rachel, David, the various prophets, and especially through the covenantal relationship that emerges through Jesus. At the root of all these covenants is the unmistakable message God cares deeply about our relationships.

Throughout almost any holy text, God’s desire to liberate and restore his beloved creation — including all people — from distorted and violent existence. Even Jesus 9as told in the Gospel of Luke) inaugurates His own Earthly ministry by borrowing the powerful words of Isaiah, proclaiming:

…the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captive, and recovery of sight to the blind. To let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Jesus starts his ministry by promising and announcing restoration for exploited and dispossessed people, liberation for people living under the thumb of oppressive powers, healing for suffering people, and the Divine Power’s insatiable intent to bless the entirety of creation.

It seems inescapable that God is relentlessly pursuing the well-being of all creation, which inherently means that our relationships matter to God. And if our relationships to God matter, then it follows that the ways we relate to ourselves and other people matter to God. And if those relationships matter to God, then they should matter to us. That in essence is the human side of all these bargains with God, these covenants. Aside from God’s one-sided covenant with Noah, all other covenants require us to have right relationships with one ourselves, with each other, with creation, and with the Creator.

Faith

For many of us, when we hear or read the word faith today— whether used by religious folks, entertainment celebrities, politicians, or billionaire philanthropists — what is most often meant is either blind trust in something that may or may not happen (who knows?) or choosing to abide by a list of doctrinal beliefs about the existence and ontology of God, or Biblical inerrancy, or the precise “facts” about the afterlife. Those understandings of faith are not what I am referring to. When I say “faith”, I’m referring to what or who we are faithful to; the cause or being that has captured our deepest desires, the beliefs that we are ultimately concerned with in the core of our beings. And while faith is not of the material world, it is shown in the material world, it can never be drawn out entirely from the material. Our faith — our truest, deepest concerns — are continually revealed through our material relationships. The desires that guide our lives, the way that are in the world, are always being embodied.

The tricky part about our faith is that we’re not always conscious of who (or what) we are being faithful to. Take for example the Apostle Paul. In his letter to the Romans he says “I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want but I do the very things I hate.” In this part of his letter, we can clearly hear him pointing out the way that we internalize our faith — our concerns, desires, and values — without being consciously aware of what we’re doing. But this lack of conscious awareness does not stop this internalization from shaping our existence and relationships in the world.

Faith & The Material World

This is why people of faith must talk about politics and economics. The political and economic relationships in our lives — whether in our workplaces, our homes, our intimate relationships, or even our country’s international trade agreements — reveal our ultimate concerns and desires as individuals and communities, they reveal our faith that directs the way we are in the world. Do you want to know what or who someone, a group, or even a nation is faithful to? Don’t ask them to recite a specified list of beliefs. Don’t ask them to tell you their religion or to recite a national anthem or creed. No, all you have to do is look at how they relate to their selves and to others in the material world. Where do individuals spend their time? Where does the community spend its money? On what does the state spend the collected tax dollars? How do the people use their energy? What are the desires or interests that drive their material existence?

As Christians who say that our faith is in the God of Jesus, we must strive to evermore-perfectly align our concerns and our desires with God’s concerns and God’s desires. And if our relationships matter to God and and thus should matter to us, then the relationships caused by and required of capitalism should not be exempt from critical examination. This is why Christians must be willing to take a hard, painful, and honest look at the preeminient economic system of the world.

Relationships & Capitalism

Two brief disclaimers before moving on:

First, I fully acknowledge that a critique of capitalism and capitalist enterprises is an inherently broad and sweeping endeavor that will — unfortunately but inevitably — lack some level of nuance. Obviously there can be (and often are) abundant and significant differences between an enterprise like Amazon and an enterprise like the locally-owned pizza joint down the block. While some of my analysis and criticism certainly applies to both types of enterprise, the bulk of this critique is directed towards the former (even though I do use the latter in an example simply for simplicity’s and relatability’s sake).

Second, I intentionally tried to avoid anecdotes or specific issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. While this might seem absurd, I wanted to avoid any charges of basing my stances off of pandemic-induced working conditions and relational issues that many believe are merely temporary. While I don’t personally buy into this “merely temporary” idea of pandemic labor struggles, I realize that many people do and wanted to preemptively remove that potential stumbling block. I assure you that by making this intentionally omission I in no way am meaning to minimize the effects of the pandemic on workers.

Personally, I think that analyzing the class structure of capitalist workplaces is a good place to start when thinking about what capitalism does, how it does it, and why it does it. Before continuing, please understand that by class structure, I am referring to the particular way that the system of capitalism causes — some would say requires — relationships to be organized in our workplaces and broader society. (For the scope of this piece however, I am just going to be talking about the relational organization in capitalist workplaces.) Additionally, I am operating on the claim that it is these relationships that make an enterprise “capitalist” as opposed to being something else, like mutualist, syndicalist, co-op, what have you.

To analyze the class structure of capitalist workplaces, we must think about class differently than how it is often defined and described, as nothing more than a variation of income level or wealth accumulation. In the rare occasions that the concept of class is brought up in the U.S., it is almost always used merely as a shorthand for income brackets: there’s a lower class with an annual household income of less than $21,000 for a family a four; a middle class with an annual household income of anywhere between the (incredibly low) poverty line and, let’s say, $300,000 a year; and an upper class with an annual income between $300,000 and sky’s-the-limit.

However, instead of reducing class to simply income level, or even total accumulated wealth (both are very important, of course), what if our understanding of class revolved more around concepts of relationship and power? From this point of understanding, we can ask several important questions:

What fundamental relationships are inherent in capitalist enterprises?

How do the relational agents relate to each other?

How do the relational agents relate to the production and distribution of an enterprise’s profits?

How is power divvied up between the relational agents?

This is what class looks like in terms of relationship and power.

Production & Distribution of Profit

Before identifying the two foundational groups that are an inherent part of every capitalist workplace, I want to spend a little more time discussing these processes of producing and distributing profits.

Every enterprise has a production side from which, predictably, profits are produced. For example, imagine you’re at your favorite ice cream shop: the worker behind the counter dips you an absolutely perfect salted caramel ice cream cone and then sells it to you. Of course, they sell it to you for a price higher than what they earned in the time it took them to make the cone plus the costs of the materials. Just like that, the worker produced profits.

On the other side of the enterprise is the distribution side from which, predictably, those produced profits are distributed. Some profits are distributed to the workers; this share of the profits is known as wages and the rest of the profits are distributed to other destinations I’ll discuss later. The point for now is that you can see that enterprises — even your favorite ice cream shop — have dual processes of producing and distributing profits.

Production, Distribution, and Relationship

Just like there is a profit production and distribution side of every workplace, in capitalist workplaces there are also two distinct groups that relate to each other and relate to profit production and distribution in specific ways. Again, it is this specific way of organizing workplace relationships that makes an enterprise capitalist as opposed to non-capitalist.

While there are often factions within each of these two main group, these factions remain bound by this capitalist relational organization. So what are these two foundational groups?

Every capitalist enterprise has Group 1, who I will call “the producers”, and Group 2, who I will call “the directors”. The Producers consist of the workers, or the employees. The Directors consist of the capitalists, including the employers, the board of directors, and major shareholders. The Producers are told what to produce, as well as where and how to produce. The Directors govern The Producers’ labor and profit distribution; they direct the processes of producing and distributing profits from start to finish. While The Producers produce the products and services that are sold for profits, The Directors appropriate and distribute those profits in whatever way they can agree — amongst themselves — to.

Aside from possibly getting to pick the flavor of the month, our ice cream shop employee does not have any direction over what their labor produces; they are excluded from participating in the direction of the enterprise. On the flip side of this, their employer has all the say, all the directing power, in what is produced and how to distribute the profits. The Producers sells their labor (along with the rights to the fruits of their labor) to The Directors for wages that are less than the value of the profits they produce (this gap is where profits come from). In this relationship, The Directors are empowered to buy the labor of employees, to pay them less than the value that their labor creates, and to live and thrive off of the value created by their workers’ labor.

What I really want to drive home is this disparity, this unequal distribution of power between the relational agents in this class structure of capitalist enterprises made of The Producers and The Directors. Do you see it yet?

For another example (one less sympathetic than a local ice cream shop), look at Walmart. Literally millions of Walmart employees do not have a say over the commodities — the items and services — the corporation has produced and sold to the very communities these employees live in. Likewise, they have no decision making power in how the profits they produce via their collective labor are spent and distributed. Rather, the major shareholders handpick a few directors to sit on a board and govern the profit distribution, the appropriation and distribution of the value collectively produced by millions of Walmart employees. To put it plainly, the lion’s share of the burden of Walmart’s production of new value and profits is entirely laid on the backs of The Producers. At the same time, The Producers who carry this weight are excluded from any important decision making in the enterprise. All the important decision making is concentrated in the hands of The Directors — including decisions about the distribution of profits. The Producers are disempowered in order for the The Directors to be empowered.

Power Inequalities & Relationship

Imagine if this capitalist structure of relationship was applied to our government? (Well, maybe it would be more appropriate to say “applied even more to our government.”) What if you were given the chance to live in a society where you had no say, no vote, no voice, and no representation in the political realm? What if all the decision making that affected you and everyone else in this society was made by those who were most superior to everyone else in terms of wealth and power?

Essentially, the class structure of this society would organize almost all (if not just all) of the systemic decision making power in the hands of a small few, rather than dispersing this power among everyone.

Does this hypothetical society sound like one that you are excited to live in? Personally, it doesn’t sound that great to me . In fact, it sounds terrible— I think I would feel excluded and disrespected, belittled and dehumanized. I highly doubt that after years and years of living in this situation that I would truly feel like an equal to the select few who were autocratically making decisions for me and for my community.

On a personal level, I only engage in relationships of equality and mutuality that respect the dignity and personhood of all involved parties and that give all participants equal power as equals made in the image of God. On a political level, I definitely prefer relationships of equality and mutuality that respect the dignity and personhood of all involved parties and that give all participants equal power as equals made in the image of God. So why, when it comes to my economic relationships, should I accept anything less?

Ask yourself: if you wouldn’t want to be a mere subject in a hierarchical and authoritarian political system where a small cadre of elites had all the political power over the masses of people, why are you so quick to subject yourself to un-, no, anti-democratic economic relationships? Economic relationships that depend on an perpetuate massive power inequalities between the wealthier few and the less-wealthy many? Why have we so deeply internalized the belief that the power inequality in our workplaces, the places where many of us spend the majority of our waking hours, is natural, or just, or — as many American pastors and theologians have said — ordained by God?

The relationships we take part in, as well as the systems and structures we defend, justify, and perpetuate reveals where our faith truly lays, as well as the kind of god we truly believe the God of Jesus is. Does our God yearn for us to defend, respect, and promote the dignity, value, and personhood of all people, who all are equals made in the image of God? Or does God desire for power to be unequally distributed to some to lorded over the many who are excluded from that same power?

I can’t escape this conclusion: if God is not concerned with the well-being of our economic relationships, then God is not concerned with our relationships at all. Clearly, that is not the case.