What I Hate I Do: a Gramscian reading of Romans 7:15-25

 I'm no Marxist, but I've always had a soft spot for the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. For those who, unlike myself,  do not inhabit a university Arts faculty full of communists and other haters of freedom, Gramsci was an Italian Marxist thinker, imprisoned and later executed by Mussolini's fascists. 

Gramsci's basic question was this: why, given that exploitation of the working class is rife, does said working class not rise up and cast off the shackles of its bourgeois oppressors? His answer (grossly simplified and with apologies to any unlikely Gramscians reading this blog) was that the great trick of the bourgeousie in the capitalist system was not just to keep the working class on which it depended under its thumb, but to instil its own values in the members of said working class. The effect was to turn capitalist values of exploitation into 'common sense' values, so that the working class willingly participated in its own exploitation. The reason why the oppressed did not rise up against their oppressors was that they liked being oppressed. They effectively consented to their own exploitation. Gramsci called this concept hegemony.

Now, like I said, I'm no Marxist, but the reason I have a soft spot for Gramsci is that I think his idea of hegemony is pretty good. Whenever crazy leftists at university urge people to rise up in revolution to overthrow their oppressors, I always think 'well, why should they?' From what I can see people (at least here in Australia) seem pretty happy being oppressed, if oppressed they are. Gramsci says this is because they are happy being oppressed - but only because they've been taught to see oppression as common sense. Any revolution needs to break not only the material forces of those in power, but also their hegemony of ideas and values.

So, in the grand Christian tradition of taking the ideas of thinkers radically opposed to the gospel and turning them to our own ends (oh hi there Voltaire), I'd like to apply Gramsci's idea to a Christian context. I reckon this idea is analogous to the Christian conception of sin and its hold over us. That is, sin is a kind of hegemony. I'd particularly like to look at Romans 7:15-25:

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do [...] I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. [...] For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am!

Paul is talking about the fact that sin isn't some outside force compelling us to do things against our will. We're complicit in our own sinfulness. Paul talks about us being slaves to sin, but we're willing slaves. Sin has become our common sense. We're incapable of throwing off the shackles of sin because we're quite happy in our enshacklement (if not a word, totally should be). In a sense we can't help ourselves, so thoroughly have sin's values been exported to us and incorporated into our worldview. An escape from sin isn't just an escape from sin; it's also necessarily an escape from ourselves.

So how can we effect this escape? Well, here's the end of the paragraph from Romans:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Jesus Christ as Gramscian revolutionary, come to set us free from the illusion that sin is just 'common sense' and reveal the true state of affairs: that sin is our oppressor and we need to be rescued from it.

Thanks be to God indeed.