Chapter Five
Where Did Marx Go Wrong?
(Note: this is a lightly-edited copy of a chapter from my 2000 book, Jesus and the Religions of Man. I am reproducing it here, because Marxism has lately gained traction, somehow. I believe this goes some distance towards answering defenses of Marx published in such journals as Jacobin and Current Affairs, and that one meets in informal settings such as Facebook and BLM riots as well.
(I have been accused of writing under the influence of GK Chesterton, especially in my early books. One thing that means in this case, is that my argument is mostly logical, with more rhetoric than systematic and plodding evidence. I may need to do a deeper dive on Marx to satisfy some of his modern disciples: but I still think this is an accurate sketch of the main problems with Marxism.)
"To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be tried again."
G. K. Chesterton, 1925
"Thousands of epidemics and natural catastrophes are to be preferred to the slightest notion of a god." Vladimir Lenin
Our sixth floor dorm was hot in June, and I'd been at my books for hours. We had been watching the epic drama of the "democracy movement" beamed via satellite
across the Strait of Taiwan,
and the restlessness growing in the city of Taipei seemed to weigh on me along with my studies. Thousands of students were pouring into Beijing day by day to swell the throng of protesters on Tiananmen Square. On the island of Taiwan, where Nationalist civil servants and soldiers
and their children had been building in miniature their alternative interpretation of what it meant to be Chinese for the last forty years, people could talk of little else. I attended a mass rally in support of the mainland students in the spacious park around General Chiang Kai-Shek's mausoleum. The Nationalists had been predicting the imminent
fall of the "communist bandits" from grace since the 1920s.
Was this finally it? Was Chiang
Kai-shek to be vindicated from his grave? And if
the Marxist regime collapsed, as many expected, what next? Civil
war?
A long, painful period of economic restructuring?
One
evening
someone
rented
a
video
called
The Mission. I'd
seen
the
film,
but
to
get
my
mind
off
my
studies
and
the
political
tension,
I
slumped
on
the
couch
and
watched
it
again.
Rather
than
a
cheap
escape,
though,
the
film
seemed
to
echo
and
amplify
my
misgivings.
The movie
periscoped
the
story
of
Jesuit
missionaries
who
built
a Christian
Shangri-la
among
Indians of
the
Paraguayan
highlands.
In
the
end,
colonial
and
church
authorities
seized
the
Indian's
land
by
force
and
enslaved
the
survivors,
with
much
bloodshed.
Explaining
to
superiors
in
Rome,
a world-weary old
bishop
pronounced
a
somber
and
paradoxical
benediction
on
the
fate
of
the respective
sides:
"They
have
died.
And
yet
it
is
they
who
are
alive,
and
we
who
are
dead."
As I went to bed, my eyes remained glued to the bunk above me. My mind was racing with the climactic
images of the film: Spanish soldiers advancing
across a river on an Indian village,
cannon booming, muskets firing. Young warriors fighting bravely with crude weapons till they fell, blood pouring from their wounds. A priest with a cross around his neck falling next to a mother with a baby in her arms. Houses burning, children running for the river. What did soldiers
think about when they looked in the eyes of mothers and children they were about to kill? How did they quiet their conscience as they bombed a defenseless village?
I did not realize it, but at
the moment these thoughts were keeping me awake, on the other side of the Straits, the real-time
drama was reaching a similar climax. Peoples' Liberation
Army soldiers were lining up and pointing rifles. Tanks were moving on Tiananmen Square.
In a few months, however, the world would witness a surprising reversal in which, as Lao Zi put it, strength would be conquered
by weakness. The configuration of political forces across Eurasia changed on an autumn tide, and the "Evil Empire," that the West had opposed with nuclear
warheads, collapsed through people power, unless prayer power is a better name for it. A tide of proletarian humanity, led by a Polish electrician, a Czech playwright, and a Romanian pastor, overthrew
the governments of Eastern Europe. As Christmas
lights went up, the Berlin Wall came down. Pieces were sold in Western shopping centers as stocking stuffers. Before long even Russians
were tearing down statues of Lenin. Since
then in China, too, capitalism, freedom,
and the rule of law have increased, along with corruption. The communist party never recovered from its victory of June 6, 1989. The students died and
gained a certain immortality,
however.
The history of Marxism defined the 20th Century. More
than a third of the world was recruited into helping fashion an Eden of the cities, a vision for society based on one strand of Enlightenment ideals. Countless intelligent men and women saw it as the hope of the human race, and many laid
their lives down to bring it about. The rise and fall of Marxism was the most spectacular spiritual experiment of the 20th Century, unleashing
passions, inspiring martyrs,
and radically transforming the consciousness of cultures -- killing a hundred million men, women, and children along the
way.
Once again, it remains to sort
things out.
Whodunit? Why did so many people find Marxism a cause worthy of blood, sweat and tears? Why didn't it work? Was it Stalin's fault? Or Lenin's? Was Marx simply not a good enough economist? As his mother is said to have complained, "I wish Karl would stop writing about capital and start earning some?" Were Russia and China just not ready for the radical changes
Marx's theories heralded?
Or
did
communism
fail
because
it
was
"godless?"
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn,
the
unauthorized
historian
of
the
krasnii uzel, the “red knot” of Russian
history,
summed up
decades of
research
in
four-word
s:
"Men
have
forgotten
God."
Did
his
rich
"inside
experience"
as
a
slave laborer
in
Stalin's
camps
rob
him
of
objectivity? No
one
accuses
the
Spanish
lords
of
South
America of
forgetting
the
name
of
God, anyway.
The world never held war crime trials or other post-mortem to bring closure. Everyone seems to have an alibi. The people who planned revolution
were merely social theoreticians distressed by proletarian suffering,
it is said. The mobs who carried it out were caught up in the
passion of the moment, and misled
by self-serving leaders. The leaders themselves
are equally unrepentant. Even Pol Pott stated, before death, that his conscience was untroubled by the million
innocent people who died in his "killing fields." Nor have all the intellectuals in the West who
defended Marxism stepped forward to claim a measure of
blame.
But what does it matter now? For better or worse, the thing is dead and gone. Times have changed. Shouldn't we move on?
The quick readiness of some to let bygones be bygones reminds me of the face
of the villain
in a Colombo mystery, when the detective goes out the door and returns saying, "Oh! Just one more thing . . . " In the new era of Western triumphalism, when technology is making the ancient dream of humanity as
god more and more promising,
when world culture has fractured along new stress lines, the failure of Marxism is not relevant,
it is pressing. First, because
Russian and Chinese society sickened of a virus caught in the West. And second, because East and West show signs of coming down with the same primordial spiritual disease.
Was communism
godless? No. In many ways, communism represented the joining of two streams of spirituality flowing from Eden. The first we might call religious revolution, and includes Islam and other Messianic "religions of the oppressed." The second stream was an element in the Enlightenment, but Marx traced it to Prometheus, the man who
defied the gods, and Mao traced it to Sun Wukong, the
monkey who made war on Heaven.
It is an old debate whether the life of humanity is cyclical (as ancient Greeks and Chinese thought) or linear (as the Hebrews, Romans, Norse, and modern Westerners tend to see it). The debate is never settled, because history progresses dialectically, with characteristics of both qualities. Modern history has certainly become more than "one darn thing after another." Yet it often shows a dramatic trick of restating
old themes, revisiting prior acts, haunting
us with familiar patterns, and even some of the same lines. Thus the failure of Marxism
can be retold as the original Whodunit:
the story of the Garden of Eden and the apple. We hear again from many quarters,
as from Adam and Eve, "It wasn't my fault!" I will argue that the failure of Marxism has everything
to do with us, and I don't just mean atheists. What is it in human nature, and therefore also in human religion, that starts with nice ideas and ends shooting children? That is the nature of our inquiry.
While the words "new," "revolutionary," "bold," and "progressive" are scattered across their literature like cherry blossoms on the lawn after a May shower, none of the moral innovations of the modern world are really new. Revolution is one of the
poles between which history has oscillated since the snake and Eve formed a
United Front against Yahweh in the Garden of Eden. This
story, the oft-told tale of the human race,
has been called "paradise lost.”
But for Marx, it began in an urban jungle.
Garden in the Jungle
Like Thailand or India at the beginning
of their Industrial Revolutions, for the lower classes,
England in the mid-19th Century seemed to combine the worst of worlds: the poverty of subsistence farming with the soot and inhumanity of machines that drove peasant off farm and the blacksmith and seamstress from shops. Dickens described
the "Cold, wet, shelter-less midnight streets of London: the foul and frowzy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the
haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together." A young Jewish scholar from the western German city of Trier wandered those streets. To him it seemed the gap between the Ebenezers and the Cratchits
was widening. "It is true that labor produces
for the rich wonderful things," he wrote, "but
for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty -- but for the worker, deformity." While the rich got richer,
the poor got old, choking on coal dust and unsanitary conditions, a cog in a wheel more impersonal
than fate, unable to "affirm himself" or "develop freely."
Surveying history under the influence of Darwin and Hegel, however, a
promising pattern seemed to emerge. Over the ages, society could be said to progress. This
progress came not gradually and steadily, but in a series of surges and storms,
like a salmon making its way up a stream from pool to pool. Just when conditions worsened beyond bearing, a revolution occurred
in “means of production,” leading a new and broader class to power. Thus society progressed from slavery to serfdom to capitalism.
The next stage, Marx argued, would be socialism,
then communism. Workers would become their own masters. People would share fairly, contributing labor according to ability, receiving benefits according to their need. There would be no room for those who merely made use of other people's hard labor, who sucked the lifeblood of common people, and gave nothing back.
Of course, you need to break eggs to make an omelet, as one of Marx's disciples later put it. Revolution, said another, was not a dinner party. The apathetic needed to be awakened, oppressors overthrown, and private property -- here was the key, said Marx -- needed to be "abolished." None of this could happen apart from a violent, bloody reaction from the Powers-That-Be. Marx
welcomed conflict, and often seemed to exult in the bloodshed
and violence that would accompany
it.
Karl Marx and his followers believed the human race would get along better without religion, too. The old myths relegating Eden to another world, and telling slaves to submit, had been refuted by Enlightenment thinkers like Darwin, Feuerbach and Tylor. The angels guarding the entrance to paradise were paper
mercenaries, scare crows of the ruling class. "The people cannot really be happy until it has been
deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion." Laugh, and the world laughs with you: Marx proved that the principle
holds for sneering, too. Pouring scorn on hope in another world, he gained for
his own highly speculative metaphysics a broad exemption from the debunking
spirit loose in Europe.
Marx's theories were first tested in Russia.
Revolution
came at an awkward time for the Holy Russian Empire. Russia had been industrializing rapidly. In the late 19th Century, Russian grain output climbed and challenged that of America. Her artists were creating opera and epic that would amaze the world for a hundred years. But when Prussian troops counterattacked against a hasty Russian defense of "brother Serbs," the Russian Army was
caught flat-footed and this fragile progress was fractured. With the royal family mesmerized by Rasputin, a mystical guru of "salvation through sin," and her generals short on both the kind of intelligence that figures out where the enemy is and the kind that knows what to do about it, the Romanov state was no match either for the German war machine, or for the fire and spirit of revolution
following in its wake.
The leader of the revolutionaries, who called himself Lenin, had an acid tongue, a pen sharper
than a bayonet, and a practical plan for realizing
the vague prophecies
of his guru. He invented
a tool of social control called the Communist
Party, and used it to tame and reorder Russia. He didn't live to extend Marx's vision much beyond the borders of Russia, however.
That duty fell to a lieutenant: Joseph Stalin, a man of "steel," which is what the name means, from the
Caucasus.
Some say times were hard and called for a hard man to lead the nation. Strong guidance was needed to force independent-thinking farmers to work for the greater good, build a modern economy,
take Russia through the Great Depression, defeat Nazi armies, and challenge
the capitalist world. All this Stalin provided.
Stalin wasn't given to sarcasm like his predecessor. He came across to many Western visitors
as humble, efficient,
even fatherly. But the angel of death hovered over Stalin's vast realm like a malevolent cloud, descending with the force of a whirlwind to snatch away those whose deeds or thoughts were deemed impure. This
one died in a car crash, that one was tried for treason, a third was found
in Mexico with a pick in his back. Stalin skillfully cultivated contradictions among more flamboyant
rivals. When
the dust settled, his companions
and rivals were gone, and so were whole populations: physicians, Red Army officers, Ukrainian
peasants.
Mother Russia was giving birth to a new world order. It seemed to be a painful
delivery; you could hear muffled cries from the delivery room. But few among the Western intelligentsia jumped to hasty condemnation. On the contrary, one leading English publisher nominated
Stalin as "Man of the Year"
at the height of the Great Purges. George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and many others, praised the Soviet Union in extravagant terms long after horrible details came to light. "We have seen the future, and it works!" said one star-struck visitor to the Soviet Union.
Marx's vision caught fire elsewhere. The Baltic Republics were handed Russia in a deal with Hitler. Stalin took Eastern Europe as spoils of war. Mao Zedong, a student of Chinese military
history from the hills
of Hunan Province, liberated China after a long, complex struggle between many armies. Rice patty revolutionaries outfought
"imperialist" armies in Korea,
Cuba, and Vietnam. One by one, newly independent states in Africa shook off the chains of their colonial
masters and declared themselves for liberation. By the mid 1970s waves of revolutionary idealism lapped even at the gates of European and American campuses.
Whodunit?
But just as socialism
was being praised by students as the wave of the future, its
past began to catch up with it. The early work of Solzhenitsyn appeared in the West about this time. Official Soviet literature had degenerated to the level of works like Cement, a book historian Donald Treadgold dryly described as "the world's first boy-girl-tractor love triangle." But here, of a sudden, was meat for the soul in the best tradition
of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn's passionate yet sardonic description of the horrors of police-state terror gripped the imagination of Western
thinkers and helped them visualize
formerly faceless victims, encouraging a "neo-conservative" reaction.
Had the classes melted away in terror? For a few moments. But then a new class of bullies
rushed into the void. What had they built behind
barbed wire? The truth came out in a form the world could no longer ignore. As Burke noted, "Those who destroy everything
will remove some grievance." A rising tide lifts all boats, and the new society was organized in a military
fashion that marshaled
resources for health care and education to increase life expectancy and, by some measures, the standard of living. But no one could look at these dismal forests
of flaking high rises where toilets didn't flush, neighbor feared neighbor,
coal dust choked the lungs, and lies choked the spirit, and confuse them with utopia. And then
there were the mass graves.
Whodunit? The detectives
have drawn lines on the ground. The press has arrived with cameras
and microphones. The coroner has appeared in white coat with scalpel. Court psychologists are on hand. Let us consider the suspects.
"It Was the Snake's Fault"
"Joseph Stalin is the reason communism
failed," some say. "He wormed his way into the apple and spoiled it."
It would be hard for Central Casting to come up with a more plausible
villain. Stalin's were the thick, mustached lips that sent millions to labor camps and death. His fingers squeezed the life from Russian culture and commerce. He set the example for the communist parties of the world of what a socialist state ought to be. Stalin has certainly earned the prominent
spot given him in Madame Tussaud's
House of Horrors.
Before his arrest in 1945, as a front-line Red Army officer, Solzhenitsyn agreed with those who fingered "The Leader." While Marx and Lenin remained objects of adoration,
a cutting
description of the "man with the mustache" earned him his prison term. But in prison Solzhenitsyn ran into some of Stalin's revolutionary rivals, and decided he'd been naive. These dedicated Trotskyites and Octobrists, surrounded
by men who were suffering unjustly,
still could not refrain from speaking with great ruthlessness, and showed little mercy to fellow-prisoners.
Dostoevsky showed, with his Grand Inquisitor, how a church can begin with "love
your neighbor" as premise and, after twelve hundred years of rationalization, come to torture as conclusion. But what if "Thou
shalt hate thy neighbor" is your starting point? None of Stalin's rivals could bring himself to openly denounce murder as an instrument of state. Even those who may have been repelled by Stalin's bloody methods couldn't find
a Marxist rationale to object. After
all, Marx himself said the use of terror was "historically inevitable." Compared to some of his comrades,
Stalin talked like a moderate.
Phnom Penh and Lima are a long ways from Moscow. Yet the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge and Sendero Luminoso might have
embarrassed some rulers Stalin picked for Eastern Europe.
In China, many who terrorized
neighbors during the Cultural Revolution
now blame Mao for what they did. "We were deceived," I have heard some say. "It wasn't our fault."
But as French sociologist Jacques Ellul said, propaganda can only exploit what is in a person,
not what is not. Who gained a new apartment when a neighbor was denounced
in a secret letter, or ate imported sweets while everyone else was standing in
line for bread, because he was willing to shoot at shadows slipping westward? Not Stalin alone. The devil tempts, he doesn't usually make us do what we don't want to do.
"Wrong Apple"
Others, mostly scholarly Western Marxists, remind us that Karl Marx never predicted revolution in backward places like Russia or China. Marx described
the evolution of advanced industrial societies like Germany or the United States. What were those uproars in Eastern Europe and unpronounceable countries
of Asia and Africa? Either a clumsy attempt to kick-start the engine of history that instead slid primitive economies
into the swamp of feudal tyranny, or a virulent
form of capitalism masquerading as socialism, to deceive if possible the very elect.
Marxist theorists
called the first "Asiatic despotism." Ancient empires grew along rivers, as despotic rulers "mobilized the masses" of previously free peasants for irrigation projects. Rather than allowing common people to enjoy the fruit of their labor, however, they channeled the capital thus created towards projects that reflected their growing power and arrogance: pyramids, Taj Mahals, treasure-filled tombs. They seldom stopped to count slaves buried in the rubble.
Communist regimes, some say, slipped into the mold of the Pharaohs and the Khans. And little wonder. Haven't the countries they ruled been under the thumb of one tyrant or another
since the days of Nero?
A second way some admirers of Marx explained
away the failure of communism
was by the term "state capitalism." Imagine a conglomerate so big it owns the government. Bureaucrats run the factories,
and resources are allocated by office politics and bribery.
The press is the conglomerate's marketing
division, the police force its salesmen. What you have, now, is not socialism or any derivative
thereof, but Marx's worst nightmare
run amuck. Welcome
to the U.S.S.R.
Both solutions
carry some explanatory power. Communist rulers did share a bit in common with Xerxes, and a bit also
with Bill Gates.
But we shouldn't let the purists return to their ivory towers or soap boxes too quickly. It may be that when Joseph Stalin built "New
Siberia" in the frozen taiga on the corpses of his countrymen, he cackled like Ivan the Terrible. Perhaps Chairman Mao was a reincarnation of his predecessor, Emperor Qin, who sacrificed thousands
of workers to bury clay horses under mounds of dirt. But Mao was once
a poet and an idealistic
young man. Pol Pott had
been a teacher,
and Abimael Guzman Reymoso, shadowy head of Peru's sinister Shining Path, taught philosophy at the university
level. Even Stalin once risked life and limb for his
ideal.
Such rhetoric
tends to obscure that what Stalin and Mao shared with the rulers of the past, and
with corporate
heads and government bureaucrats, is just
what they share with us: their humanity.
Human Nature and the Ship of State
Governing a nation is often compared to sailing a ship. This
metaphor is implicit in the title often given Marxist rulers, the "Great Helmsman."
Old sailing ships
allowed for bad weather by coming about and facing wind and waves. Sailors tied the pilot to the bridge, and a
mate might stand by so that if he went overboard,
the ship wouldn’t flounder.
Democracies allow that, due to the vicissitudes of human nature, government, like the sea, is a dangerous
place.
Voting "ties" leaders to the good of the people. Parliaments, judges, churches, and the press keep an eye on politicians and provide alternative leadership should the president "go overboard" in his or her policies.
Such institutions were built into democracy
out of a particular, some say cynical, religious view that government
is "for men, not angels," as James Madison (author of the American Constitution) put it.
But to Marx human flaws were by-products of the old order. Much has been
written about the economic impact of this assumption, how "all for one and one for all" led to starvation
by removing the ordinary worker's "selfish" incentive
to make good for his family. But if communism wreaked havoc by ignoring the nature of those
at the bottom, worse came of a corresponding naivete about those at the top. Communist government was designed for angels, not men, but given to men whose vanity and narcissism
was more than ordinary. Each new communist ruler, as he emerged
in dashing red bandanna or egalitarian Mao jacket from the pack of idealistic teachers and students who formed the base of most revolutions, was greeted by a chorus of popular applause. Emotional
symbiosis between masses and regime helps explain why many in the West remained in denial long after survivors
crept across no-man's land with signs of torture on arms and testicles.
But how could such widely read, intelligent people as Karl Marx and the intellectuals who to this day admire him, convince themselves that iron workers in Kiev would want to put in extra hours for wood cutters in Yakutsk? Or that men who have gained power with bombs and lies will wield it
with restraint? How could Marx. who read Burke, overlook his prophecy of the French Revolution, and how it came true?
"Criminal means once tolerated
are soon preferred. . . . Justifying perfidy and murder for the public benefit, public benefit will soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end."
"It's Just One Branch -- The Rest of the Tree is Solid"
"It was the lack of democratic
controls that made Marxism
dangerous," others say. "Marx and Lenin made communism into a kind of state church. Marxism imbibed its crusader mentality, its need to be right, from the Church of the Dark Ages. A secular
spirit is important precisely to prevent such a dominant ideology, a fundamentalism, if you will, from forcing its will on society."
Some Humanists
have argued that Marxism was merely another chapter in the long, cruel story of ecclesiastical dogmatism. Robert Meneilly, pastor of Village Presbyterian Church, wrote in a New York Times
article that the "religious right confronts us with a threat far greater than communism."
However, Marx's plan
for "cracking eggs"
was not a Christian recipe, but derived from Enlightenment concepts like "survival of the fittest," the Promethean struggle against God and conventional morality, and human perfectibility. "Abolish all religion" is a pretty fundamental break with the West's spiritual
heritage, after all.
Meanwhile, a hundred more heads of Leviathan emerge.
Nietzsche, the poetic “ethical immoralist”
continues to draw fans to contempt for kindness. The milder Peter Singer argues, “Cultures that practiced infanticide were
on solid ground.” Even Richard Rorty hints that if the Middle
Class is too selfish with the money it earns, he may join the revolutionaries. Marx began Communist Manifesto with the words, "A specter is haunting Europe." While the body of Marxist ideology has died, the cruel spirit that animated it does indeed seem with us still.
"Marx Cut Down the Tree of Good and Evil"
Yet it would not be fair to imply, as some Christians have, that all who ignore God are somehow
implicated in the cruelty of the KGB. An Indian-born Christian,
Ravi Zacharius, wrote a book entitled, "Can Man Be Good Without God?" and answered in the negative. If we define "good" in the ordinary sense, I think I
would answer in the positive. We Christians
defy credibility if we deny that people almost as skeptical
of our faith as Marx often make excellent neighbors, colleagues and spouses. (Jesus spoke of a deeper meaning of the word “good”
at which
these appearances are deceiving, howevee.)
Marx and Engels found the following description of communism plausible or common enough to put in the mouths of his critics (without refuting it):
"Communism abolishes
all morality, all eternal
truths, and all religion, instead
of constituting them on a new basis."
Some say Marx took his false step here, not in warring on God, but by assaulting the tao, the common moral heritage
of humanity.
Traditional morality said, "Honor your father and mother." Marx, Engels, and Mao were on poor terms with one or both parents. Stalin's father was a drunk
who beat his sons and died in a brawl. Mao once
avoided a beating from his tight-fisted father by threatening suicide. French revolutionaries felt, "It is a sufficient
motive to destroy an
old scheme of things, because it is an old one." Chinese communists, likewise, mounted campaigns against "the Four Olds." Mao stood on Tiananmen
Gate and called teenagers to struggle against their parent's generation. Teachers
suffered in particular. Confucius, Moses, or Freud might have made the same point.
What do you expect from children who hate their parents?
The Tao said, "thou shalt not steal," and "thou shalt not covet." Rousseau initiated rebellion against this standard
by tracing all heartache to the instant the first man drew a circle around a plot of land and said, "This is mine." Karl Marx agreed possessiveness was the fatal error. The Bolshevik Party financed early struggles by bank robbery. When
it seized power, it took everything it had overlooked
in previous heists, from kitchen cutlery to the Ural Mountains.
Traditional morality said, "Thou
shalt not murder." For what will the 20th Century be remembered? Perhaps for the fact that, even with its bloody wars to end war, about as many people died at the hand of their governments as of “enemies.”
The theory that Marx's gravest error lay in "abolishing" traditional morality therefore appears
plausible. Burke thundered against the danger of a relativized morality: "Criminal means once tolerated
are soon preferred." Yet talk with a revolutionary, or an older person in Russia or China who looks back with nostalgia
on more fervent periods of rebellion. What they remember is often not the criminal means, but
the noble ends. Marx
claimed to "abolish" religion
and morality. Yet he is rightly remembered
as a prophet coming down from the mountain
with words of thunder written in stone. The whole appeal of Marxism was in fact moral.
Marx did "reestablish morality” – in fact, three new moralities. But none of
the assumptions
behind those moralities were new.
Marx applied his first standard to "oppressors.” Some scholars say Marx used terms like
"oppression," and "exploitation" in a technical,
scientific, non-moralistic sense. But when you talk with real Marxist revolutionaries, you find them full of righteous anger. When you read Marx, you see where it came from. Thus
the Communist Manifesto speaks of the "slothful indolence" of the ruling class and their "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" of the poor. Marx shakes his finger and rants, "The
bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production." He piles on moralistic
sarcasm: "Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this charge we plead guilty."
Moral passion and indignation against oppression were the first weapon Marxist revolutionaries drew against the ruling classes. Later, a second weapon was unsheathed on the proletariat.
A month after the Tiananmen massacre I visited southern China. On many street corners, magazines with amateurish photos of half-naked
women were displayed
openly. Prostitutes seemed to be using some of the rooms of the otherwise
respectable hotel I stayed at. In mainland China, this came as a shock: on my first visit, in 1984, husbands and wives
didn't even hold hands in the streets.
After the massacre, the "left," diehard Marxists, took some time to reconsolidate power. When they had done
so, they conducted a campaign against "spiritual pollution." By my next visit, pornography was gone again, and thousands
of prostitutes had been arrested. Human sexuality was not invisible
as in 1984, but sex was off the streets, temporarily.
 |
Core Socialist Values in front of a museum in
Anyang, Henan, capital of China during part
of the Shang Dynasty. |
For
an
ideology
that
abolished
morality,
when
it
came
to
power
Marxism
turned
out
surprisingly
straight.
Not
just
in
regards
to
sex,
either.
Wall
posters
and
ads
sprang
up
urging people
to
work
hard,
keep
sober,
don't
spit,
take
thought
for
your
fellow
man.
(And woman: Marxist
regimes made genuine strides in reducing gender inequality.) Big
Brother
had
a
side
not
unlike
a
strict
but
well-meaning
grandmother.
Indeed, even as late as 2025, moralistic propaganda is everywhere in Mainland China. "Don't spit." "Live a low-carbon lifestyle." (No, Global Warming concerns are not just a show for export, as some conservatives suppose.) "One world, one love." (Ads against smuggling rare animal parts.) And most of all, the "The Core Socialist Values."
 |
"Freedom" and "Equality:" two of 12 Core
Socialist Values that are ever-present
in Chinese internal propaganda. |
You see far more of that sort of nagging aboard, say, Beijing subways trains, than on trains in Taiwan.
As with other forms of what might be termed social dualism, such as radical feminism and the Nation of Islam, socialism revealed society through
a polarizing filter. The classes were a dark, malevolent mass like a cloud, bound to spend themselves in vain fury and be carried away on the winds of history. The masses were
a layer of air polluted by the old system, ready to be scrubbed by the fresh rain
of revolution. The weaknesses
of the common people were due to enemy intrigues
(said Stalin) or to lack of sufficient ideological training (said Mao).
What about revolutionaries? What moral absolutes did the "glorious, shining, illustrious, irradiant" communist party adhere to? (As the authors of my trusty Chinese dictionary, printed in Beijing a few years after the Cultural Revolution, described it.) By
what external criteria should a man guide his life whose thoughts were, like Mao's, such that the same dictionary could find nothing better to illustrate
"radiance"? One does not light candles to guide the
sun across the sky. Nor was legalistic conformity
to puritanical codes expected of great communist teachers. (Any more than of gurus in
esoteric sects who attain enlightenment.)
C. S. Lewis wrote, "I am very doubtful whether history has shown us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently." Revolutionary religions
encourage a double-standard. Mohammed, Jim Jones, and Hong Xiuquan received special revelations allowing them to marry many wives, while restricting the common believer to a few or none at all. In the same way, Mao Zedong separated families across China for the good of the revolution, while forming
a harem for himself.
Is
that it? Can we count up dachas and swimming pools and consider the riddle solved? Did
old-fashioned hypocrisy undue Marxism?
Communist apologists
reconstruct Marx' contradictory writings on morality in different
ways.
I cannot read the writings of the communist elite and convince myself of a
Machiavellian theory of Marxist morality, nor of a complete lack of
sincerity.
It seems to me that, for all its hypocrisy, the elite did hold itself to
a standard. Joseph Fletcher called it
"Situation Ethics": that the end, the "greatest good of the greatest number," justifies any means. No matter how they might bend the rules of "bourgeois morality," not even when they denied "right" and "wrong" meant anything, did revolutionaries stop trying to convince themselves
they were right by this standard. In First Circle,
Solzhenitsyn pictures Stalin plotting
murder while picturing himself as offering
mankind happiness like a man giving a bowl of milk
to a
puppy. I find this portrait true to human
nature.
Churchill called the Soviet Union "a mystery inside a riddle hidden in an enigma." The Bible says, "The
heart is deceitful . . . who can know it?" (Jeremiah
17:9) Indeed, the Marxist approach
to right and wrong seems enigmatic and contradictory. Marx
and his followers “abolished” morality, and spoke instead of historic necessity.
Yet they could not attack enemies, inspire
masses, or write memoirs, without appealing to one or another version of that which they claimed to have abolished, meditating on the tao with bullhorns
from street corners, when they rose up and when they
sat down.
The snake told Eve:
"You will not surely die, but will be as gods, knowing good from evil."
Adam and Eve
also left God to seek autonomous knowledge of good and evil. Their question also ended in broken dreams and
a pointing of fingers. Perhaps we should
consider the same diagnosis: the universal human desire to play God.
The God Within
In the end, I do not entirely agree with Solzhenitsyn that Marxism failed because
"Men have forgotten God,"
nor with Dostoevsky's statement that, "If there is no God, everything
is permitted." I don't think the human heart allows escape either from moral law or from consciousness
of God. The core problem is not
that they forgot God, but that they tried to be God.
Marx wrote that "Religion is only the illusory sun around which man revolves,
until he begins to revolve around himself." You can get dizzy, doing that. In a nutshell,
this attempt to revolve around an immortalized and omnipotent collectivized
projection of oneself, is what made the
Evil Empire lose balance and collapse.
Consider what observers said about the character of three great Marxists: Marx himself, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky:
"Never have I seen anyone whose manner was more insufferably arrogant. He would not give a moment's consideration to any opinion that differed from his own. He treated with open contempt everyone who contradicted him. Arguments that were not to his taste were answered either by mordant sarcasms upon the speaker's lamentable
ignorance, or else by casting suspicions upon the motives of his adversary."
"(Ivan Plekhanov,
the ‘father of Russian communism’) "Was the first and last of Lenin's contemporaries to whom he deferred in wisdom, and that only for a few years."
"It is not true that (Trotsky)
was modest, but that his vanity consisted
in seeing himself as the instrument
of never clearly-defined historical and class forces."
George
Orwell understood the spirit that pervaded Marxism. His villain, O'Brien, explained to his victim Winston Smith in the satire 1984:
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested
in the good of others; we are interested
solely in power . .
. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists . . . never had the courage to recognize
their own motives . . . Power is not a means, it is an end."
It may seem unfair to call such men "cowards" or say they had no interest in the
common good. Facing torture and death, intrigue and betrayal, they charted the course of the 20th Century,
and brought about reforms that more
politically-timid religions never accomplished. They were the rugged warriors of China's Long March, veterans
of Siberia and the Ho Chi Minh trail. Yet bullets can be easier to face than the truth about oneself.
Few defend Stalin or even Lenin today,
and the army of gray patriarchal giants, the statues of the revolutionaries, have
fallen.
But were they the only ones to blame? Who cheered and swelled with pride when East Germany brought home as many Olympic medals as countries a hundred times its wealth? (Communist countries were poor at feeding
people, but skilled at Olympic
competition.) Who found collective
affirmation from reports of model cities in the tundra,
or endless figures about tractors and hydroelectric projects? And why does a wild and hurtful
prophet like Marx still retain the reverence of much the academic world? For the fine and falsified details of his
eschatological vision? Or for his
promethean, debunking spirit?
Marxism was not about quality of life. Marx took little care of his own
family, or even his body. Marx,
like Nietzsche and Hitler, succeeded by making us feel the franchise of god-hood was within our grasp. Communism was about seeking cosmic power in the collective self, of whom the supreme leader was image
and model.
Marxism and Spirituality
Paul
Tillich defined religion as “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.” Marxist revolution was a “concern” that
did indeed grasp millions of men and women in an ultimate way.
Emile Durkheim notes
that religious beliefs “are always shared by a definite group that professes them and that practices the
corresponding rites.” Rite can be more important than belief.
A Hindu or a Buddhist may be atheist, pantheist,
or monotheist, but be
looked on with respect
by their peers so long as they practices the rites of their caste. Guru Nanak, the
founder of modern Sikhism, deliberately created outward symbols (comb, hidden knife, hair one is not to cut) so that male followers
would stand out and find solidarity. "Western" religions
are often also concerned with outward conformity. Among
Reform Jews, and many liberal Christians, purity of belief is
less important than shared community. One can also hide a multitude of heretical thoughts in a sea of men praying Allahu Akbar outside a mosque.
Marxism created a community of ritual, a cult as well as a culture, even aside from its influence on minds. By either definition Marxism was, or is, a
religion, though it failed to postulate a supernatural.
The religious nature of
Marxism appears in many ways. On a
superficial level, communist governments created the paraphernalia of religious
tradition: relics of saints, holy Scriptures, confession, repentance, liturgy, hymns, prayer, and even tales
of the supernatural. In addition, from the beginning
Marxism borrowed and expanded on religious archetypes, like Prometheus and the Monkey King.
Marxism
is the most familiar modern example of a Messianic, or millenarian,
religion. Theologically, Marxism is one of a class of "ultimate concerns" that derive from the Enlightenment. Socially, it can be compared to early Islam and the interpretations of Osama bin Laden and the
Ayatollah Khomeini, the Peoples’ Temple, and peasant rebellions in Asia and Europe. Like
them, it blended church and state, aggressively reformed society, mixed ideas from disparate sources, and tried to create God's Kingdom in this world.
Many Messianic religions adopt forms of what might be called
social dualism. They describe an ancient
fall from grace. They argue that
oppression arises from the social structure.
Utopia will be ushered in by drastic social change: change the system,
and human nature will follow. They draw
the dividing line between good and evil between groups of
people – black and white, male and female, rich and poor, rather than (as Solzhenitsyn discovered
in the Gulag) within every human heart.
Skeptic
though he was, Marx and his followers drew on the experience of religious communes
in Europe and America, such as the Quakers. Mao Zedong also freely admitted his debt to a long Chinese tradition of messianic "grass-roots bandits."
There is nothing
surprising in the fact that Marx used the terminology of the budding social sciences to frame his philosophy. Revolutionary religion borrows from diverse sources,
but bases propaganda on passions of the hour. Islam borrowed a stone and tribal warfare
from pagan Arabia, political
institutions from Persia, God and His prophets from Israel,
and Jesus and more prophets from the Christians. Likewise, Hong Xiuquan, the great 19th century Chinese revolutionary, also ignored spiritual
boundaries by synthesizing diverse and hitherto distinct traditions,
east and west, to attack the Qing Dynasty.
Marx shared the same eclectic intellectual habits. He built upon the philosophical premises
of his class and era. He borrowed biology from Darwin, a pattern of history from Hegel, religious evolution
from Tylor, social ideals from Rousseau, and revolution from Robespierre. Having brought in a touch of Methodist fervor, Quaker communalism, and a prophet's staff from his Jewish ancestors,
he stewed the mixture over the fire of social passion. Out came a new religion, a god, however, that
failed.
A London newspaper
once sponsored an essay contest on the subject, "What
is Wrong with the World?" G. K. Chesterton sent in this concise reply: "I am"
The failure of Marxism should not
encourage religious believers to pat each other on the
back and say, "See what crimes godless heretics can commit? See how important religion is?" (Although it wouldn't hurt godless heretics to consider such questions.) It should serve as a warning shot across all our bows. For it was not so much Marx's denial of God that led to his crimes. Old Testament prophets long
ago derided the puppet God of the upper classes, after all. The real harm was done by the gods Marx served,
in particular, himself.
