The Bias Magazine: The Voice of the Christian Left, a project of the Institute for Christian Socialism, has republished Herbert McCabe’s seminal essay for a limited time, “The Class Struggle and Christian Love”, with permission from Bloomsbury:
The Irish-born McCabe entered the Dominincan Order in England in 1949. After ordination he went on to become editor of New Blackfriars journal and taught at Blackfriars, Oxford for many years. While McCabe's ingenious theological and philosophical work has enjoyed an ecumenical renaissance, his Marxist political convictions and occasional articles on politics and global struggles against capitalism are less well-known (or ignored). From 1964 to 1970, McCabe was involved in Slant, a journal and working group composed mainly of academic and clerical Catholic Marxists, who sought to radicalize Christianity through dialogue with Marxism and the New Left.The following essay from 1980 discusses the meaning and necessity of class struggle against capitalism in light of the Christian imperative of universal love. In addition to its incisive arguments about class struggle, the use (and misuse) of violence, and the ‘revolution’ of Christianity, it is also a very capable primer in the basics of Marxism.
