DURING the mid-1990s, when I was at university, I took a course under the tutelage of Professor David McLellan, someone who is widely considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on Karl Marx. The course itself was entitled ‘Politics and Christianity’ and, given that he is a committed Social Democrat in the Rosa Luxemburg mould and that I was in the process of moving between Strasserism and Anarchism, I certainly enjoyed the intellectual gamesmanship that took place between us during his seminars. He was very personable, actually, but whilst I initially found his attempts to reconcile his own liberal Christianity with Marxism somewhat beguiling I eventually came to realise that, once you strip away the ideological-theological paraphernalia, there is actually very little difference between the two.

I am referring to their mutual adherence to the linear version of history, of course, which flows in a vertical fashion and relies on several developmental stages: Primitive Communism/Garden of Eden, Crucifixion/Capitalism, Second Coming/Revolution and Heaven/Communist Utopia. My own explanation for these similarities lies in the fact that both Christianity and Marxism – for good or ill – have Jewish roots, meaning that they are a psychical manifestation of a particular ethnic group. Take Marx himself, for example, who was born into a Jewish-Lutheran family. One could argue that his ideology developed as an unconscious reaction to his own upbringing, yet how far did Marx actually depart from the religious views of his forebears?

These thoughts, such as they are, came to mind as I was reading about a famous Mitzvah, or Hebrew commandant, in which a certain Rabbi Ya’akov says that a man who is walking along a road whilst studying Torah, but who interrupts his studies by looking up and commenting on the beauty of a tree or a ploughed field is, in the eyes of Scripture, committing a mortal sin. Interestingly, Marx spent his entire life sitting in the British Library and, according to the late agriculturalist and distributist, John Seymour,

“probably came as little into contact with nature as it was possible to do and still stay alive. The result was that his philosophy ignored everything not human absolutely completely. He was aware (just) that food came from the country. He was aware that there must be some people out there somewhere who grew it. It was his object to rescue these imaginary people from what he called the idiocy of rural life. What is that to the idiocy of spending all your life in the British Museum Library?”

I must be perfectly honest here and admit that I also spend a considerable amount of time immersed in my library, working on my books, but I am always careful to ensure that I do just enough sightseeing to retain my place on the ladder of sinfulness. Nonetheless, these little convergences do make you think.