SOF Publications: 15 Burton St, Loughborough LE11 2DT (cheques payable to ‘SOF’) SOF 49/ September 2001 SEA WORKS #3 Anarchist Catholic PETER LUMSDEN, whose "Eat the Rich" t-shirt is familiar to SoF conferencegoers, describes how we can make a revolution by going to church - but never on Sundays welcome to the next last supper Anarchists share with the general population the idea that religion is something best avoided, but that some people seem to need it. The attitude of my daughter is typical. "Dad", she says, "why do you bother with all that shit?" The idea of course arises from the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, and secular politicians have atempted to sideline religion. The attempt was made by Zionists to make Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, built Chandigarh to be the capital of India, the idea being that people should consider themselves Indians rather than Muslims or Hindus.
So I propose that we don't walk around this shit but we turn it into fertiliser. It was done in the Reformation, which wasn't a reform but a revolution which provided the basis of the modern world. This was the origin of capitalism, the Protestant reformers turning the shit of the Catholic Church into the fertiliser of capitalism - and yes folks, there was a time when capitalism was liberating. It's all relative.
We anarchists have a faith, a secular faith. We believe in the free society and the end of authority. Of course, all oppressed people dream of liberation, and their view of the future divides roughly into two camps. One simply inverts the social order without changing it, and the exploited become the exploiters. Some, however, are visionaries with dreams of an egalitarian society, where social conflict is at an end. You might call these people pre-scientific anarchists because they believe in divine power to accomplish their ends.
In the accounts of the Last Supper, one can see that both tendencies were present. The disciples argued over precedence, and Jesus said that precedence was at an end.
The egalitarian ideas are well known in Christianity - the peaceable kingdom, swords into ploughshares and the rest; and they have their secular versions in the Land of Cockaigne and the Great Rock Candy Mountain.
Perhaps the most appealing of these images comes from the Bible in Isaiah 25: 6-9. This descibes the messianic banquet and meat feast which (as the story goes) will be given by god for all humanity to mark the end of history and the beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven. "In this mountain shall the Lord make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of ° fat things full of marrow". The accounts of eating and drinking at the Last Supper are seen as foreshadowing this messianic banquet.
Jesus of Nazareth, about whom there is no reliable historical information, seems to have been an egalitarian visionary. But he lived in a rigidly hierarchical society, and hierarchy in any society is most clearly shown in who eats with who and in what order. In other words, his practice of eating with "publicans and sinners", which caused such offence, was a form of propaganda by deed, a form of civil disobedience which he may have learnt from the Cynics.
He did it to show that in the coming kingdom of god, which all Judaism expected, there would be no hierarchy.
There are at least two anarchist groups who practise this form of revolutionary activity today: the "Food not Bombs" group and the Catholic Worker. This activity transgresses social norms, destroying existing social relationships and creating new ones. Today's "publicans and sinners" are the lumpenproletariat - the riff-raff, the underclass, the unemployed, the homeless, those who are economically unproductive. Abolish this class and we have a revolution.
I'm talking about solidarity - hardly a new concept. It happened in the trade union movement. Once there was solidarity between the craft unions and the unskilled unions there was progress for all.
As there is neither a Catholic Worker nor a Food not Bombs chapter in London (where I live), I have decided to "bore from within" in two of the seventy groups that work with the homeless here. One provides an excellent threecourse vegetarian meal but the volunteers do not generally join the clients in the dining room but eat by themselves in the kitchen. So, just as in ancient Palestine, who eats with who is a powerful indicator of social hierarchy. By eating with the clients, I feel 1am giving them the message that hierarchy can be overcome.
Quite a lot of these operations are in the crypts of churches and again the hierarchy is obvious - god above but man below. There is one place I work where the project has got out from under god and has taken over half the church. Here you feel god and man are slugging it out on a level playing field.
In this place you can glimpse the end of religion, where the earth is in the process of being won back for humanity, where the excluded, the drugged and the destitute mix on equal terms of easy familiarity with ordinary members of society. It is a real community centre and I have become a regular churchgoer. Just never on Sundays.
This article first appeared in the Anarchist paper ‘Freedom’.