Is socialism a more divine path than capitalism? Discover how ancient wisdom and modern struggles intertwine in this thought-provoking exploration.
Image: AI
By Gillian Schutte
To say that socialism is closer to God than capitalism is, expresses more than a political stance—it reveals a sacred truth murmured across centuries. The divine, in every expression and unnameable form, never sought conquest, accumulation, or greed. Sacredness does not live in hedge funds or corner offices. It breathes in the broken loaf of bread, the tending of wounds, the welcome extended to strangers, and the reverent care for the earth. Once the crust of religious distortion is peeled away, the heartbeat of every wisdom tradition calls out for justice, compassion, mutual care, and humility. Socialism, when freed from the smears of capitalist propaganda, emerges as the most faithful echo of this sacred ethic.
Capitalism, in contrast, functions as a doctrine of entitlement and division. It elevates a few through the exploitation of many. Bodies, land, water, breath, love—all become commodities. The system thrives on hunger—both literal and manufactured—and sells back poisoned dreams to those it has displaced. It creates artificial scarcity and calls it progress. It separates us—one from another, human from nature—and brands this dismemberment as modernity.
Socialism rejects this rupture. Every life carries worth. Collective wellbeing rises above the hoarding of individuals. Food, shelter, medicine, education, and rest form a sacred covenant. These are not rewards—they are rights. Socialism rekindles ancestral truths. It remembers the commons. Reciprocity lives under the skin. Ancestral ways of being stir in every act of solidarity.
Jesus—poor, brown, and occupied—has been hijacked by empire to justify the very structures he defied. The Jesus of history fed crowds without conditions, healed the wounded without payment, and overturned the tables of wealth. He spoke of the spiritual rot that festers in accumulation. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” His teachings carried no reverence for prosperity. He walked with the marginalised. He rebuked power.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) arrived in a society shaped by tribalism, patriarchy, and class supremacy. His revelations shattered these orders. The Qur’an praises those who care for the orphan, the widow, the traveller. Zakat made redistribution of wealth sacred. The hoarding of riches receives fierce condemnation. Muhammad’s early community rooted itself in justice and mutual aid rather than accumulation.
The Buddha turned from opulence after witnessing suffering. His awakening did not depend on conquest or gain. He recognised craving—whether for wealth, power, or permanence—as the root of anguish. Capitalism feeds endless desire and calls it freedom. The dharma offers stillness, clarity, and a path to liberation. Peace arrives not through consumption, but through understanding sufficiency.
Long before capitalism and conquest, many societies lived through deep relationship. In African cosmologies, personhood was born through community. Ubuntu—“I am because we are”—expresses a truth that predates the market and outlives it. Land was shared. The sangoma healed through ancestral guidance. Elders led by example. Initiation introduced the young to accountability and reverence.
In ancient India, the Vedas and Upanishads described a cosmos where Atman, the individual soul, mirrored Brahman, the infinite. Generosity shaped dharma. The just ruler gave freely. Hoarding led to spiritual decay. Dāna—offering—held the world in balance.
In pre-Christian Europe, from the Celts and Greeks to the Norse and Slavs, sacred cycles guided life. Myths told of death and renewal, storm and harvest, moon and soil. The Eleusinian Mysteries taught transformation. Earth held divinity. The divine moved through river, stone, and flame. The feminine was venerated, not erased.
These ways of living endure. Aboriginal Australians continue to care for Country through Dreaming. The Madí people in South Sudan move with ancestral rhythms. In the Amazon, the Yanomami, Asháninka, and Kayapo uphold communal land, oral traditions, and sacred reciprocity. Their resistance to capitalism is an act of devotion. They preserve what industrial society discarded.
Across cultures, rites of passage marked the threshold between youth and maturity. These were never ceremonies of status but awakenings into service. Elders earned their place through sacrifice, listening, and vision. Capitalism replaced this with consumer rituals—credit, contracts, property. Adulthood became a performance of purchase. The ego gained a throne and wore a crown of brands.
Taoist wisdom speaks of a different power. The Tao flows through surrender rather than force. “He who knows he has enough is rich.” In silence, power holds integrity. In stillness, the world finds balance. The Tao does not conquer. It bends with wind and root, invisible yet enduring.
To entrench its rule, capitalism aligned with patriarchal religion. Together, they erased the divine feminine and silenced gender plurality. Goddesses once revered for their connection to birth, chaos, healing, and wisdom—Sophia, Inanna, Yemọja, Parvati, Isis—were repainted as devils or domestic saints. Mary Magdalene, once a spiritual equal, was cast down into shame. Witches, midwives, herbalists—those who held sacred knowledge—were hunted. What could not be monetised was burned.
Gender-diverse people once carried ceremonial power. In Indigenous North America, Two-Spirit individuals held sacred roles. Hijras in India and third-gender figures in Africa and Southeast Asia bridged worlds. Colonisers enforced binaries to control inheritance, labour, and lineage. Diversity was outlawed.
In recent decades, movements rose to reclaim space for women, queer, and trans people. But neoliberalism, quick to seduce, absorbed and repurposed their struggle. Rainbow flags were hung in banks. Feminist slogans printed on missiles. Trans visibility transformed into cultural currency while the vulnerable remained exposed. A new empire emerged—one that co-opts the language of freedom to carry out the same control.
Socialism, shaped through decolonial and queer traditions, resists these betrayals. It offers protection without performance. It refuses to flatten human complexity into brands or slogans. It remembers that liberation is embodied, ancestral, collective—and can never be sold back to us.
Capitalism preaches that poverty results from failure. That nature exists to serve profit. That power rewards the deserving. These are not truths—they are myths stitched into economic dogma and repeated until believed.
Our ancestors sang another tune. Share food. Heal each other. Listen deeply. Honour the seed and the dying tree. Hold the stranger. Build something that lasts beyond yourself.
Justice holds no price tag. Reverence grows through care, not acquisition. The sacred flows where love meets accountability.
Capitalism whispers: Take more. Socialism answers: Care more.
One isolates. The other connects. One rewards domination. The other calls forth service.
Socialism heals the fracture. It restores what capitalism tried to bury. And beyond it, a greater horizon glows—one where the very need for ownership dissolves. That vision is communism. Not as cold blueprint, but as sacred return.
In this vision, the world becomes common once more. There are no masters, no hoarders, no castoffs. Labour flows with dignity. Time belongs to the people. Land is not bought or sold—it is honoured. Belonging shapes the structure of life.
This echoes the teaching of Nirvana. The soul does not climb—it sheds illusion. The Atman returns to Brahman. The self dissolves into the source. Communism, in its truest possibility, opens the circle—everyone belongs, contributes, is held.
It sits beside the woman who feeds her child the last morsel. It rides the breath of old men telling stories around embers. It hums in the forest, waits in the cracked hands of farmworkers, marches barefoot beside the oppressed. Even where capitalism has devastated soil, soul, and story, the sacred remains. Socialism carries that flame. Communism invites the fire.
This presence—what some call God, Allah, Source, Creator, Spirit—moves through people, not capital. It lives where communion rises, where the circle widens.
And it walks forward—tenderly, fiercely—toward communism, ubuntuism, goodwill, the embodiment of the sacred beyond.
* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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