Cells: everything Old is New Again

A terrific post from Old Doug Johnson at The Weblog. It evokes for me the one expression of justice, or positive, ideal, content, that I support fully and without reservation, an ideal explicit in the book of Acts as well as in Marxism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Zizek's push for a return to old fashioned party politics is provocative, but can't be sustained without a prior return to the politics of the cell.

We hear a lot about cells these days. Cancer cells. Jail cells. Sleeper al Qaeda cells. Embryonic stem cells. Fifty years ago or so it was communists cells. Cells are not neutral we are told. Or at least if they are initially, they do not remain that way. They have enormous potential for good or for evil. They multiply at an incredible rate. When they begin to grow too large, they divide, then grow some more, then divide again. Cells seem to have a preternatural ability to maneuver around potential problems, to repair damaged areas or replace functionally deficient groupings. Their growth or multiplication is almost impossible to contain. They respond quickly and efficiently to changed elements in their environment while maintaining some sort of mysterious line of signal communication or symbiotic relationship with their master cells. A cell’s nucleus is often hard to isolate, and the cell cycle from mitosis until death is often not well understood by larger organisms.

One only needs to look for instance at the first several chapters of the book of Acts. This is one of the most fecund moments in revolutionary political history. This is a time before the Constantinian sell-out of the Church to state violence. This is a time before a deep rift between Jewish and Gentile Christians. This is a time when Jesus’ teachings regarding wealth and poverty are taken so seriously that Church members begin holding all things in common. And this is also a time when Jesus’ disciples are determined to multiply into militant cells. In short, from the Resurrection through the first fourteen chapters of Acts, we have record of a time when a group of pacifist radicals who reject the law of empire in favor of God’s law are militantly recruiting for membership in their communist collective. Can you even imagine the violence of reactions to a similarly committed collective in today’s Empire? Communism. Pacifism. Recruitment. A rejection of secular Law. Now that is a recipe for a political nightmare.

For whatever its worth, the cell politics on display in Acts had an important influence on the first phases of Marxist political history. To be brief: early in the eighteenth century a group of Moravian anabaptists who took the early chapters of Acts quite seriously wound up coming into contact with John Wesley on a boat over to the British colonies in what is now the southern part of the U.S. Their influence led Wesley to adopt a method of recruitment and discipline that survives in much weakened form today in Methodist 'circle groups'. Back home in Britain, Wesley's cell groups became the model for early English worker movements, worker movements that apparently had some influence on Marx and through Marx a myriad of communist movements that ultimately provided the necessary constituency of communist parties around the world.

Comments

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Thanks, Jodi, for the vote of confidence in posting this. I'm definitely flattered. The discussion of the post at over at the weblog has been somewhat more stimulating than the comment box here.