Surplus Labor, Class, and Capitalism: A Brief Intro to Marxian Class Analysis
At the outset, I need to qualify the limited and theoretically specific terms of what I am arguing, as a Marxist economist, in this section. For certain Marxian theorists, class spills over into every crack and crevice of a social formation by ambiguous and underspecified means - effectively, everything within a social formation/society becomes rigorously determined by capitalist class processes but by means that such theorists are unwilling to take the time to theorize or elaborate. By contrast, if I make the argument that capitalist class processes determine other economic, political, and cultural processes within a social formation, than I insist on specifying media through which the effects of capitalism can be transmitted. Further, I insist on defining capitalism in terms that rigorously delineate what we mean by class, what we mean by capitalism, and what we understand to be the means through which capitalism influences or otherwise shapes and determines other processes. Such a commitment to specificity has been the hallmark of the Althusserian Marxist theorists who most influenced my approach to Marxist class analysis (see, most critically, Resnick, Stephen A. and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987 (henceforth "Resnick and Wolff")).
To begin, the term class pertains to something quite specific: the relationship of individuals to the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor or, in monetized form, surplus value. Surplus labor refers to the excess of consumable goods and services (use values) produced in a given social formation/society, over and above the specific physical or otherwise subsistence needs/necessities of the producers of these goods and services. Every kind of social formation/society is likely to produce some quantity of surplus labor if only because the availability of surplus labor achieves a wide range of possible needs that the social formation may experience that do not precisely conform to the terms of a consumption necessity. Taking a rather simple type of social formation as an example, an individual household, producing a range of goods and services for its own consumption to the exclusion of market exchange, may produce an excess in order to invest in possible future consumption. The time and physical and mental efforts put by household members on some home improvement project, for example, may not satisfy present-time consumption needs, but it would, conceivably, secure the possibility of greater future enjoyment of household living space. In order to perform such an investment, however, the household needs to accumulate something more than it usually consumes to reproduce its lifestyle (i.e. its everyday consumption needs), assuming that it will continue to consume all of the other things that it requires as its necessities. The household needs surplus labor to invest in things beyond its immediate everyday needs.
If we restrict the idea of necessary consumption (i.e. those goods and services that must be consumed by producers in order to ensure that they can continue to be producers; those that enable them to achieve a certain level of subsistence, most often substantially in excess of bare biological subsistence), there are certain things that we can conceive of individuals in a given social formation being able to live without. Most people in the contemporary U.S. might accept that possession of an automobile is a necessity and, thus, that the expenses accruing to car ownership are a component within the necessary compensation of workers if they are to be able to subsist within our contemporary car-centric society (oddly enough, not owning a car, I have been able to side-step this need by using mass transit to travel 25 miles to and from work everyday!). It goes without saying that most American workers expect that labor compensation should secure at least a 2,000 calorie diet per individual per day, and that such a diet should include gratuitous quantities of high protein/high fat and high carbohydrate/sugar, often highly processed, food items, even at the expense of less costly, more healthful and nourishing, and minimally processed vegetable food sources (as an employee of a purveyor of meat products, I am at least partly to blame in enabling the continuity of such deleterious patterns). Producers even in other parts of the advanced industrialized world (e.g. the Euro-zone economies) might construct a substantially different and highly diversified basket of goods and services that collectively might define their subsistence needs. Producers outside of the advanced industrialized economies, by contrast, might have substantially diminished conceptions of what constitutes subsistence. Ultimately, the notion of subsistence advanced by Marxian economic theory is contextually and culturally specific and continuously changing based on the overall technological changes in production and consumption possibilities and cultural transformations in the tastes and preferences of given populations. The overall point is that where the production of subsistence necessities ends, the production of surplus labor begins.
In certain ways, the production and consumption of surplus labor may stand to benefit its producers in the long run. If goods and services in excess of the contemporaneous subsistence needs of producers are invested in increasing the quantity and/or range of goods and services that can be consumed to satisfy subsistence needs, then production may either secure the subsistence needs of a larger number of producers, raise the quantity each producer is able to consume and, hence, transform the very definition of subsistence, or both. In either case, the investment/accumulation of surplus labor may be productive, in the sense that it creates a potential for production of even larger quantities of surplus labor by a larger and/or better fed, housed, entertained, and educated/enlightened force of producers.
Other distributions of surplus labor, by contrast, may secure social needs distinct from accumulation to increase or enhance the production of necessities. For example, in social formations with market exchange processes mediated by monetary sources, a range of monetary/financial processes may arise that have nothing to do with the subsistence needs of producers (that it to say, money may pay for food, fuel, clothing, and housing, but money is not good for eating or dressing yourself; in itself, money is not a consumable good but a means to obtain consumable goods). Banks are useful social innovations to transfer money from people who may not need it today to other people who do not presently have enough, but, in the end, banks do not produce the equivalent wealth in goods and services that the money they circulate represents - they merely facilitate market exchange processes to enable individuals to get the goods and services they need today even if they lack the monetary resources to pay for them today. For producing such useful services, all of the people working to perform the services of banks need to be compensated. To the extent that the production of financial services is not, in itself, productive of necessary consumption articles, this compensation has to be paid for, in large part, from surplus labor. As such, there are a range of non-productive activities in a social formation/society that involve individuals who, despite the fact that they do not meaningfully contribute to the total mass of consumable goods and services available to the society, must still feed, house, clothe, educate, and entertain themselves just like productive workers and, therefore, need to obtain compensation from available sources of consumable goods and services that they do not themselves produce - they must be paid with surplus labor.
In still other cases, surplus labor secures non-productive needs serving to purposefully accentuate divisive social distinctions. Surplus labor pays for the conspicuous consumption not only for the super wealthy but for each income gradation within a population to express a degree of social superiority measured in wealth. That is to say, individuals who may or may not produce surplus labor utilize shares of surplus labor to achieve qualitative differences in their consumption that distinguish them from other individuals not capable of achieving such consumption standards. For example, any automobile will suffice to meet a basic need for mobility, but a luxury SUV will take the satisfaction of this need a step beyond to announce to the world that its owner has made it into the ranks of the well-to-do. Unlike many Marxists, I am not going to dwell excessively on luxury consumption because, however significant it is as a share of total social consumption, it is too difficult to break it down in ways that can adequately identify the luxuriant properties of everyday goods and services - it would require some kind of hedonic index of qualitative features that could distinguish a luxury good from its non-luxury equivalent. Also, overplaying conspicuous consumption moves me away from Marxian conceptions of class toward those of other theorists (e.g. Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen) in ways that will detract from my overall objective of situating religious practice against class processes.
The boundary line between necessary and surplus production and consumption is, in some circumstances, well defined and unambiguous. Certain luxury goods and services (e.g. personal yachts), for example, might be characterized as unqualified objects of conspicuous consumption. Some cultural processes, like marketing, achieve relevant defined systemic needs but manifestly add nothing to the physical mass of consumable wealth available to an economy. Such goods and services are unambiguously paid out of the mass of surplus labor that an economy produces. In other cases, the boundary between necessity and surplus is less clear, and, in a larger sense, a more important distinction arises when we consider all of the potential ways that surplus labor could be invested productively or consumed less productively. Ultimately, for Marxian economic approaches, the existence of surplus labor as an analytical category, is a subject of theoretic inquiry and, hence, open to performative aims of theorists to transform the material reality of an economy by defining or redefining the discursive terms by which it is constructed. At its heart, this principle reiterates Marx's contention about philosophy in his "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845) that the point of theorizing is not to analyze the world but to change it. That is to say, every theorization, in philosophy, economics, physics, or any other discipline participates in the transformation of the reality that it analyzes by transforming fundamentally the way in which it is understood.
What matters most in this elaboration is that every social formation/society/economy manifests some form of surplus labor and that the sets of relationships between individuals delineated by the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor performs the particular role by which individuals are actively classed, often in multiple distinct and sometimes contradictory ways. Some individuals produce surplus labor in certain contexts and receive it in multiple others. Other individuals never produce surplus labor but receive and consume quantities of surplus labor produced by others. Some individuals produce surplus labor and, also, appropriate and distribute the same surplus labor that they produce. Other individuals produce surplus labor but neither appropriate nor distribute the surplus labor that they produce. Still others appropriate and distribute surplus labor produced by other individuals. All of these different relationships to surplus labor defines a class position, and most individuals within a social formation as complex as the U.S. economy are classed multiple times over again across the reality of their everyday lives.
To be specific, some of what happens in the U.S. economy involves the class structure that Marxian theory recognizes as capitalism. In capitalism, there are certain individuals who rent out their capacity to do productive work (labor power) to another set of individuals in exchange for compensation that will satisfy their needs for consumable goods and services. The former set of individuals (employees) are, potentially, producers of capitalist surplus labor or, in monetized form, surplus value - they produce surplus value when the value they produce in a given working period exceeds the value that their employer has laid out for their compensation and for the tools, equipment, and raw materials that they utilize and/or transform over the course of their work. The latter set of individuals (employers) are, potentially, appropriators and distributors of capitalist surplus labor/value - they appropriate the surplus labor that their employees produce and distribute it in accordance with the needs of their capitalist enterprise. Part of this surplus labor must, in most circumstance, be distributed back to the capitalist appropriators/distributors (they have to eat, house, and clothe themselves too!). Other shares of the capitalist surplus labor get distributed to the various jurisdictions of federal, state, and local governments through taxation. Other shares get distributed to the financial system as repayment of debt (to banks or to bondholders) or to shareholders/owners as dividends. Still other shares of the capitalist surplus labor may go to providers of non-productive services downstream on the firm's supply chain - to wholesalers or retailers of goods as volume or other discounts to ensure that a firm does not accumulate costly inventories. Still other shares end up finding their way into the political system, as the appropriators/distributors realize the strategic value to their business from electing political figures who agree with their politics and defend their bottom lines against rising costs from, say, over-regulation. Sometimes, in tight markets for labor power, some share of surplus labor even finds its way back into the hands of its producers(!) as the capitalist appropriators/distributors of surplus labor discover that they have to pay higher wages or bonuses to retain the labor power that they need to continue to produce the quantities of surplus labor that they need for distribution to all of its other recipients.
Understood in these terms, capitalism involves one basic fundamental class relationship (between the producers and appropriators of surplus labor) and many subsequent subsumed class relationships (between the distributors and a long list of recipients of surplus labor) (see Resnick and Wolff, 117-124). Each of these relationships constitutes particular forms of class conflict in which one stakeholder to a particular capitalist process of surplus labor production seeks to enhance their claim on surplus labor produced and distributed relative to all other stakeholders. This particular, multi-dimensional imagery of capitalism as a class structure involving multiple simultaneous conflicts between producers and appropriators of surplus labor, on the one hand, and distributors and recipients of surplus labor, on the other, constitutes the background against which Marxian theory aims to analyze capitalism, as one among many different class structures organizing a complex market economy like that of the U.S.
Defining the Contours and Purposes of Religious Practice
To begin this section, I need to concretely specify, again, what I mean by religious practice and why I think such practices are important, not mererly in the context of an evaluation of the judicially imposed constrictions on the Affordable Care Act, but in the more general terms constituting individual human development and socialization. Respecting the limited space that I am devoting to a subject that is broad enough to fill entire libraries, religion can be considered on the distinct but intertwined and mutually constitutive levels of faith/belief/thought and material practice. Faith, however loosely conceived by an individual or rigorously codified in texts/artifacts shared by a broader community, articulates a relationship between the individual believer or the community of believers, the spiritual/metaphysical object of his/her/their devotion, and the myriad processes of material existence that constitute the universe/reality. The material practice of religion entails the totality of material processes prescribed by faith as requisites for the individual believe to exist in conformity with the dictates of his/her relationship to his/her spirtual/metaphysical object of devotion and the universe. Such dictates might include participation in liturgical/sacremental ceremonies and everyday prayer. They might also include practices such as almsgiving. Particular individuals, typically indoctrinated into a formal body of clergy, may be vested with responsibilities to perform ceremonial duties and conceive/develop/codify theological/metaphysical ideas addressing issues for individuals practicing the faith as social processes not associated or otherwise treated within the faith intervene in practice. A complete portrait of the material practice of religion has to take into account functional organizational (e.g. assembly and formalization of congregations and hierarchical bodies of believers, formalization of specialized clerical roles and duties of clergy and the laity) and physical structural/infrastructural requirements (e.g. construction of places of worship, development and production of religious texts, sanctification of artifacts) and the residual effects of past material practices as belief structures evolve. This brief understanding of religious practice conforms, in important ways, to the understanding of religion that I developed in emerging from devout practice of Roman Catholicism, but, in my view, it could sensibly describe, in some measure, any body of religious practices within the world.
If the above characterization of belief and material religious practices describes, to some degree, what religion is, we must subsequently ask what religion does (i.e. why are religious practices socially important?). Critically, there is no way to provide a complete, objective, and unambiguous answer to this subsequent question, if for no other reason, then because the rationale for religion is intertwined with individual questions of faith that would render any attempt to account for the purposes of religion wholly subjective. As with any other analytical question entertained on this blog, my answer can only reflect the particular overdetermination of my conception of the subject. That is to say, I can only answer the question "why religion" as a Marxian theorist with my particular background in religious practices and theoretical learning, seeking to situate religion through a particular body of Marxian theoretical ideas. And Marxian theory, as I understand it, maintains its own particular answer to this question. Emphatically, following Marx's comments in the introduction to "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)," religion is an opiate, a succour for the pain of everyday life for human beings trapped in political repression and capitalist exploitation through the promise of eternal happiness for the souls of the faithful.
In certain respects, I want to argue that the literal terms of Marx's analogy are too strong - in a region where opioid addiction is becoming a serious public health problem (including, sadly, for at least one friend and former coworker), comparisons of religion and drug addiction as chronic emotional escapisms somehow seem to miss the mark when we consider the chemical aspects of an opioid addiction. In another sense, the analogy is far too weak - almost every human being craves the kind of emotional and metaphysical certainty conferred by the belief, in whatever way the promise is expressed, that life is meaningful and that eternity holds the promise of happiness beyond the futility of a life filled, at best, with banal material pleasures and, at worst, with perverse and pointless physical and/or emotional suffering. As such, the motivations that drive human beings into churches, conventional or cultish, are far more universal than the chemical compulsions emanating from needles plunged into arms. As a believer in the immaterial ("God," for lack of any more definitive characterization), I am not different in this respect. Thus, intellectual efforts to undermine religious faith, however focused on rationally conceived appraisals of the negative effects of religious fundamentalism, tend to assault sentiments basic to the human condition, replacing the certainties manifest in spirituality, on the one hand, with sterile positivism and, on the other hand, with ambiguous, self-centered nihilism. One wonders how many heroin addicts face the prospect of renouncing their conception of the universe and their place within it as a precondition of liberation from the burdens of chemical dependency!
[At this point, in advancing phrases like "almost every human being," I need to engage with the very criticisms that Marx levels against Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, insofar as I am advancing, by my understanding, a virtually identical thesis! Following the same sorts of criticisms that Marx advances in his "Theses on Feuerbach," I cannot claim "scientific" objectivity in my characterization of the religious impulse in the same sense as Feuerbach, in his position as an early Hegelian theoretical materialist en route to full fledged dialectical materialism. Rather, as a serious and intellectually committed Althusserian-Marxist/overdeterminist, I must (and, indeed, I think I have) acknowledge that my arguments are contained within a broader field of (performative) theoretic contestation in which no theorist can ever claim objectivity. The arguments that I am making here seek to come to terms with a broader set of questions concerning the Marxian class analysis of religious practices, and, in these terms, the particular subjective insights that I introduce in this post can contribute to an inquiry into the distributions of value entering into religious organizations from capitalist producers and capitalist appropriators/distributors of surplus value (i.e. determining the extent to which religion is a component in the necessary expenditures of producers and the extent to which it is a component in the subsumed class payments of capitalist appropriators/distributors).]
Developing beyond the basic Marxian identification of religion as opiate, we have the characterization of religion as a quintessential cultural process and, in relation to diverse other cultural processes, an integral component in the ideological superstructure of capitalism, theorized by Althusser in reference to the ideological state apparatus (ISA). Emphatically, religion is the first institution Althusser lists (however, in no particular level of significance) in his elaboration of the ISA, not to be confused with the repressive state apparatus (RSA) (the government, courts, police, military, prisons, etc.) (see Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward and Investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 142-148. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 (henceforth, "Althusser"), available online at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70ii.html). The notion of ISA, in some degree, crystalizes the insights heretofore established in regard to the functioning of religious practices in relation to capitalism - in some degree, it problematizes the portrait of religion as opiate. For Althusser, religious practices did not merely provide a relief and an escapism from the viciousness of everyday (economic and political) reality - religious ideologies (and all other ideologies) constitute individuals as subjects (through interpellation) (Althusser, 170-177). In the absence of ideologies, individuals cease to exist in a psychologically foundational sense, and, as such, individuation, per se, involves the internalization of multifarious, contradictory, and evolving ideological conceptions by the self. The inaccessability of objective reality by the individual, as such, is the starting point for understanding ideology in general and religion in particular. In the end, what we have in Althusser's approach to ideology is a reconceptualization of individual subjectivity that prohibits us from merely invalidating and dismissing religious insights as irrational mysticisms without asking how such insights operate within the lives/ontological conceptualizations of individuals and where they fit against other social processes, like capitalist class processes. The notion of a world without religion governed by some materialistic rationality, thus, amounts to a misnomer. The imagery of such a world is, itself, a particular element of (ruthlessly and dogmatically secular) religious faith.
If religion and other cultural/ideological processes are foundational as constitutive elements in the subjectivity of individuals, then it stands to reason that every act committed in the name of religious faith must exercise some effect in the everyday lives of individuals and, in particular, in their lives as classed subjects (producers, appropriators/distributors, and/or recipients of surplus labor). Proceeding in the opposite direction, as a critical component in the constitution of a broader social formation, every outcome of a class process must likewise impact religious practices, by virtue of the fact that the material practices of religion involve investments of direct and indirect human labor. As a class analytic matter, we need to investigate how material religious practices produce and/or consume received surplus labor and how these processes shape the existence of other class processes. The point here is that the differential production and consumption of surplus labor dictated by religious prerogatives is not merely a contested subject on the plane of relgious ideological production but also a matter of class conflict.
The Class Organization of Payments in Support of Religious Practices
Proceeding from the terms defined in the previous sections, our understanding of the relationship between capitalism and religious practices is constituted by the particular ways in which the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of capitalist surplus labor affects material religious practices (rituals, organizations, and physical structural/infrastructural investments). In this respect, there is no singular relationship involved here. In some cases, organizational entities associated with particular religious denominations (e.g. a hospital/health care system operated by a Roman Catholic denomination, a community center with a loose association to a Jewish synagogue providing fee-for-service recreational services, religious organizations operating educational facilities, etc.) produce consumable goods and services. In doing so, such organizations are likely to produce surplus labor, appropriated by certain individuals within the organization as capitalist surplus labor, produced by a set of producers/employees, and distributed by the appropriator/employer in order to secure the needs of the organization not associated with renting labor power or obtaining the tools, equipment, and raw materials necessary to reproduce the conditions its production of surplus labor at a continuous scale.
Such organizational entities obviously face particular fundamental class struggles between the producers of their capitalist surplus labor and its appropriators (i.e. between the paid employees, providing diverse medical services, community services, and/or educational services, in accordance with the particular missions of the enterprises, and the administrators of the enterprises, tasked by their associated denominational authorities to manage the flow of monetary resources into service provision relative to the costs of maintaining human resources). The nature of this conflict is not palpably transformed if the organizational entities operate as not-for-profit enterprises, under the definition of U.S. tax law (e.g. 501(c)(3) non-profit corporations). Within the contours of this Marxian class analytic approach, the only distinction evident for a non-profit corporation relative to for-profit capitalist enterprises (i.e. enterprises that generate surplus labor through the exploitation of rented labor power in exchange for a wage) is that not-for-profit enterprises are legally prohibited from distributing a share of their surplus labor to their shareholders as enterprise profits, returns to capital advanced. Thus, non-profit hospitals, associated with religious organizations and charging fees-for-service to patients and/or third-party insurers, operate as capitalist enterprises in which the producers of surplus value struggle against hospital boards of trustees or other capitalist appropriators/distributors to increase the share of total values that they receive as compensation relative to the share that accumulates as surplus value to be appropriated and distributed by the board.
Taking this example a stage further, the board of trustees to, say, a Catholic hospital faces a range of subsumed class conflicts, involving the range of stakeholders in the distribution of the surplus values that it appropriates. Some of these stakeholders manifest a greater capacity to compel the organization to distribute a share of its surplus their way. In this respect, governmental entities that exercise some capacity to extract surplus value from the organization in the form of inspection and licensing fees and other mandatory public expenditures (e.g. payroll taxes) may exert the most compelling pressure on the distributors of surplus. The presence of governmental claims on surplus value may, thus, compel the board to reserve a countervailing distribution of surplus toward industry lobbying organizations in order to demand reductions to the tax and regulatory burden on not-for-profit religious-associated hospitals from legislators. Conversely, another range of surplus value distributions must arise from the particular market structure for health care provision, associated with the prevalence of third-party insurance payers for health care services. Health insurers for particular groups of patients seek to reduce the total expenditure for diverse categories of health care procedures by directly negotiating with hospitals and, increasingly, hospital systems. In class analytic terms, these negotiations involve a particular distribution of surplus value in the form of a discount on the cost of medical services relative to what would be charged to individual patients not represented by a third-party payer. By giving up a share of their surplus value to insurers, the hospital seeks to secure a more reliable stream of payments from insurers, albeit at a diminished rate of reimbursement for services. The recent movement of hospitals toward regional and interregional consolidation into hospital systems represents, however, an effort to diminish the share of surplus values from medical services distributed to insurers - a hospital system that operates with greater market power within a given region can command lower discounts on reimbursement of services by insurers, enabling the system to retain a larger share of its surplus values while still securing greater reliability of payments from insurers. Beyond subsumed class expenditures of surplus value destined to be paid to government and to third-party payers for medical services, religious hospitals also must devote certain quantities of their capitalist surplus values to be paid out to certain practitioners with services in high demand (i.e. as premiums over and above the compensation rates for other service providers), to invest in the newest equipment and in new facilities, and to service financial debt held by banks and/or bondholders. Diverse categories of stakeholders represent their interests regarding each of these distributions in order to claim larger shares of the surplus, reflecting the contentious/conflictual nature of the relationship between the board and each claimant and between each set of claimants.
And, then, we have the relationship between the religious-associated organization (e.g. the non-profit hospital, community center, school, etc.) and the denomination. The point of this relationship is to advance a particular mission to which the denomination has committed itself. In this respect, a Catholic denomination that has set itself to the task of enhancing the provision of medical services in a region by establishing a hospital maintains a stake in the values generated by the hospital, comparable in certain respects to the stake that holders of equity in a private corporation maintain, payable as enterprise profits. Distributions of surplus value going back to the denomination that secure the everyday needs of the denomination, including its more traditional liturgical religious practices, might, thus, be viewed, in certain respects, as a return on capital advanced. In the case of Catholic-associated organizations, it is, similarly, possible that some share of the surplus labor distributed back to the denomination may be subsequently distributed to other, hierarchically-structured diocesan entities, although it is equally likely that the preponderant flow of values between diocesan entities and individual religious-associated organizations may be in the opposite direction. The point, however, is that, in some way, shape, or form, religious-associated non-profit organizations that perform capitalist surplus labor distribute capitalist surplus labor/value back to their associated denominations in support of various traditional religious practices. This particular relationship represents a single avenue by which religious organizations obtain resources (i.e. monetary/financial and non-monetary) necessary to undertake religious practices.
If the receiving of surplus values from denominationally-associated not-for-profit capitalist enterprises represents one way in which religious practices are financed in the U.S. economy, there are indisputably other, more preponderant means. Individual charitable contributions make up the most important revenue stream for religious denominations. A class analysis of such contributions needs to recognize the full complexity in the integration of distinct class structures to comprehend the class nature of particular payments. Initiating such an analysis in reference to for-profit capitalist enterprises, religious denominations may receive charitable contributions from both the producers of surplus labor (as a share of the total necessary compensation received by producers/employees) and from its appropriators/distributors (as a share of the surplus labor appropriated and distributed), either in the name of the enterprise itself or, as a subsequent distribution from received surplus values, in the name of owners/shareholders, executives, or other non-productive, administrative employees of the enterprise. Evaluated strictly from a framework of capitalist class relationships, religious contributions constitute a mix of payments by producers of surplus value and payments by recipients of surplus value.
Interpreting contributions to religious organizations from the producers of surplus labor, we need to recognize that necessary payments to producers transition from the framework of the capitalist class structure to the interrelated but distinct class structures of household economies, involving distinct, non-capitalist forms of class (e.g. hierarchical, reciprocity-oriented feudal class organizations, with certain household members performing non-monetary surplus labor and others appropriating the surplus by means of normative familial/hierarchical practices and distributing it in order to secure the continuous reproduction of surplus labor within the household). The introduction of monetary incomes/assets into the household class structure, both by means of market labor in other class structures and by means of household production of goods and services for markets, complicates, in some degree, the relationship of capitalist wage workers/surplus value producers, as recipients of capitalist necessary labor compensation, to religious organizations. When capitalist producers occupy alternative class positions within the household (e.g. as feudal surplus labor appropriators/distributors of household surplus labor), the monetary resources accumulated and distributed by the household are axiomatically re-classed in reference to the different non-capitalist household class structure.
As a consequence, important questions concerning the rationale for religious contributions by households need to be analyzed not strictly in reference to the capitalist class structures within which monetary incomes are earned but in reference to the class structural imperatives of household surplus labor appropriators/distributors, recognizing, in turn, the existence of a divergent set of fundamental and subsumed class conflicts (i.e. between household surplus producers and appropriators (fundamental) and between household surplus distributors and (religious organizational) recipients). In these terms, the transitioning of monetary resources from one class structural context (the capitalist firm) to another (the possibly feudal, possibly ancient/soletary/proprietary, possibly collective/communist, but almost indisputably non- capitalist household) transforms the interpretive basis by which we read household contributions to religious organizations, again, ensuring that religious contributions constitute a distribution of the surplus labor of the household, existing in a monetary form by virtue of its availability from the involvement of household members in capitalist labor processes. That is to say, religious contributions from capitalist producers' households operate to secure non-physical conditions of existence of the household beyond the historically contextual subsistence needs of household members.
The same motivations for household contributions to religious organizations where at least one household member is a capitalist surplus labor producer likely operate in households that make religious contributions from incomes that do not include necessary/wage payments to producers of capitalist surplus. That is to say, distinctions between household income sources pertinent to Marxian class analyses may not manifest a palpable impact in assessing how households decide to contribute resources to religious organizations. Households that earn their monetary incomes exclusively from wage labor in capitalist production processes may mirror households that earn monetary incomes from non-surplus producing processes (e.g. pure retail trades) in deciding to give charitably to religion. While the motivations for giving by such different households might be the same, Marxian class analysis sets its focus on the divergent sources of household income for these households. The same distinctions apply when we are considering charitable contributions from the households of owners and managers of capitalist enterprises. If the CEO of a capitalist corporation and the lowest paid employee of the corporation both make charitable contributions to religion, the motivations for such payments may be the same but the contributions will be interpreted differently in Marxian class analysis because they emerge from different sources (capitalist surplus value v. capitalist necessary/wage payments).
Finally, we have to consider, however minimally, contributions emanating directly from capitalist firms, as direct payments from the surplus values appropriated from capitalist producers. Such payments might constitute a relatively small share of total contributions to religious organizations within the U.S. economy, though by no means a non-existent one.
In, thus, concluding, payments to religious organizations universally emanate from surplus labor, whether they are paid from the surplus labor of capitalist enterprises associated with religious denominations, from direct contributions from private capitalist enterprises as a share of accumulated surplus value, from the household contributions of non-productive workers of capitalist enterprises, or from the household contributions of capitalist producers, transformed into monetized quantities of household surplus labor through the relations of household members in capitalist enterprises. That ultimate point is that religious practices do not secure tangible, physically necessary subsistence needs - they secure culturally specific conditions of existence of capitalist surplus labor production.
Religious Practice as a Battleground of Class Conflict
If the reasons for charitable contributions from households do not substantially vary based on the income sources of such contributions, such rationales may still be meaningfully approached from a class analytic standpoint. Drawing from the insights of the previous sections, religious faith may be psychologically foundational to the process of individuation - individuals see themselves in relation to the ideological conceptualizations that they develop and internalize, including conceptualizations on the immaterial/spirituality/God. Such conceptualizations are continuously shaped by the practice of religion in which individuals are active participants, even to the extent that they may be relatively inactive in organized religion. More importantly, the practice of religion is pertinent to the construction of intersubjective linkages between individuals, especially within households, familial groupings, or larger religious communities/congregations/parishes, etc. Insofar as the practice of religion requires tangible material support from participants, either in a monetary form or in the active contribution of human labor (physical and/or mental), there must minimally be a two-way constitutive relationship between household contributions and religious practices. Households that contribute to religion shape the religious practices in which they are participants and the same religious practices shape and reshape the ideological conceptualizations of individuals (i.e. their faith), transforming the way that they understand the immaterial, material existence/everyday life, others (especially in their households and communities), and themselves.
The critical insight, at this point, is that religious practices frequently seek to engage in critical or even conflictual relationships relative to alternative denominations or faith traditions. That is to say, we cannot underestimate the extent to which particular faith traditions define the relationship between the body of the faithful and the immaterial/God based upon some conflictual relationship to some earthly perverse and profane other. Within Christianity, for example, such a differentiation in the articulation of the faith is evident both within the Great Schism of Western Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox traditions and within the post-Reformation relationships between the Protestant denominations and Catholicism. In Islam, the dichotomous development of Sunni and Shi'a traditions manifest such a development of the faith in relation to its rejected other, complicated further by the uneven integration of mystical traditions collectively composing Sufism as an unorthodox collection of Sunni approaches. At a broader level in the development of Western religious traditions, the Christian faith tradition developed through antagonism toward Pharisaic Judaism, and Islam developed as an historically specific reaction (mediated through particular revelatory/Prophetic experience) to both Rabbinical Judaism and multifarious early approaches to Christianity.
Class, as the critical focus of Marxian analysis, fits somewhere within this nexus through which monetary payments and human labor contributions are made in support of religious practice and religious practices participate in the psychological constitution of the individual believers, because, however individuals relate ideologically to material existence through the lens of religious faith, they must also simultaneous relate, however unconsciously, to the production, appropriation/distribution, and receiving of surplus labor. The relationship between these two practices must likewise be impacted by conflictual relationships between divergent faith traditions. At this point, religious conflict can transition into specific manifestations of class conflict. That is to say, surplus values generated in a particular capitalist class structure may be appropriated and distributed to secure particular conditions of existence in religious practices that specifically operate against the faith and religious practices of the surplus producers. In this manner, a capitalist appropriator/distributor of surplus value may consciously shape religious practices that intentional demonize a faith tradition to which the producers of the surplus adhere and observe.
At this point, Marxism clearly has something meaningful to say about religion beyond the proposition that religious faith is an opiate. If we reside in a world in which the notion of a purely materialistic culture, devoid of the immaterial/God, is not possible and, further, religious practice is integrally shaped by its relationship to class (i.e. to the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor), then the particular manner in which faith traditions become articulared in conflict with other traditions makes differential access to surplus labor a relevant concern in supporting one faith tradition against another. The question of "who appropriates" becomes a key concern in the survival of particular religious faith traditions/practices in particular contexts and the relative impoverishment of one or another faith tradition may shape the particular evolution of religious practices in a context where contesting traditions are well supported by the distribution of surplus labor. Particular exploitative class relations may, thus, support discrimination against religious minorities. If we carry such a class analysis forward to encompass the distribution of surplus labor in support of particular state political/repressive agendas, discriminated sectarian minorities may experience comprehensive efforts by the appropriators/distributors of surplus labor to enact legal and criminal restrictions on their religious practices or to sway public opinion in ways that might promote private, extra-legal oppression. The point is that capitalist surplus value constitutes a vehicle through which appropriators/distributors with a particular sectarian agenda can constrain the capacity of others to freely exercise their religious faith through requisite religious practices. The odious character of such agendas may be, precisely, compounded by the exploitative nature of the class relationship through which the appropriators utilize the same values generated by producers in order to attack the faith of the same producers of surplus value.
