1. Precedence. "First, A must precede B, to cause it . . .
"Christianity cannot be blamed for the general phenomena of
inquisitions, or credited for the institution of marriage, since people were abusing
others, marrying, or (like Estella in Great Expectations) doing both at
the same time, long before the first noel range out . . .
"What belongs to our species as a whole cannot be credited to or
blamed on any particular belief system . . .
2. Proximity. "Second, like magnetism, the closer you stand, the harder a social
influencer pulls. Mohammed preached against idols, and before his
death, Mecca had been cleared of them. Marx advocated revolution,
and seventy years later, the October Revolution erupted. Most often,
we are influenced by teachings we see lived out around us. A hurricane
spawned near Africa may break on Cape Cod, but only when warm water lies
between source and destination.
Similarly, an ancient scripture may build great force over millennia, but
only when the “warm water” of a practicing community of believers keeps it
going. Even when precepts are codified in text, what moves us
is how those whose hands we shake on Sunday morning interpret those texts. Proximity matters.
3. "Third, so does duration. Sometimes
a religion is quickly accepted, but its deeper implications take generations to
sink in.
4. An active ingredient. "Fourth, something in the alleged cause should explain its supposed
effect. If Islam is blamed for encouraging prepubescent marriages,
one should find something in the life of Mohammed or early Muslim teaching
that encourages or allows men to marry young girls. (Such as records
of his consummating marriage to the nine-year-old Aisha.)
If Christianity is credited for saving girls from foot-binding in China, that
claim will be strengthened if we find Jesus or the apostles helping
women in analogous ways in the New Testament . . .
“'People take from the Bible what they put in,' you may object. Perhaps
religious texts are mere Rorschach ink blot tests: Mother Theresa and the Grand
Inquisitor read the same Bible, then depending on their character or
upbringing, reach opposite conclusions about how to treat folks. Yet as novelist Tom Wolfe noted in The
Kingdom of Speech, from Mohammed to Marx, history demonstrates the power of
words to shape society. A linguistic
artist himself, Wolfe recognized Jesus as one of five men whose words have cut
most deeply . . .
"Every society developed mating rituals long before
Christianity arrived. There is no simple, deterministic
calculus by which to perfectly weigh each variable. Eros is a
famously capricious brat, firing arrows where he will.
5. Energetic motion. "So fifth, causation is also clearer if change
moves uphill against so powerful an element in human nature. Why
would any man sleep with more than one woman? The answer is too
obvious, to most men, to need stating. Lust and philandering need no
explanation, nor do rape, conquest, polygamy, or enslavement of the
weak . . . It takes moral energy to move society uphill
against the gravitational resistance of political power.
6. Citation. "Finally, if reformers cite or allude to a text while instituting
reform, that may indeed point to the source of their inspiration.
"So a religious explanation for social innovation is more credible
if the teaching closely precedes reform in a believing community, is repeated
over time, if one finds in it clear justification for change, if that
justification is cited, if belief is widely enough embraced to effect change,
and if the change it initiates works against our strong instincts."
Now let us apply these six principles to (a) the claim that Marx caused the Gulag and the rest, and (b) the claim that Jesus caused the KKK.
(1) Precedence?
This one may seem easy. Christianity preceded the appearance of the KKK, as the writings of Marx preceded Stalin's camps. So it is possible that these two teachings could have caused those movements.
In the broader sense, KKK-like secret societies, and scapegoating, are common in world history, especially in the wake of a cataclysmic conflict like the Civil War. So neither Christ nor Marx could have invented scapegoating or secret societies as a whole, but could have inspired or influenced the form a particular such phenomenon took. (In theory.)
Some other aspects of communism-in-practice were also common: dictatorship, mass murder, scapegoating, mass human bondage (when technology allowed). But other parts of the system were fairly unusual. Communes were established in most communist states. They were not the first communes in history, but they were unusual in being established on a top-down basis, and the extreme to which, say, the Maoists and Kmer Rouge took them. The attempt to put the proletariat in charge (or intellectuals in the name of the proletariat) was also unusual. Attacks on one religion or other are not unique, but wholesale destruction represented a stark break from the past. Rule by the communist party, and party organization from the top down to the village, school, and platoon levels, did not I think have close parallels in prior Russian or Chinese societies.
(2) Proximity?
The KKK did not appear in the first 1800 years of the existence of Christianity. Other movements did, of course, and some of them were harmful. But based on this criterion, the case that Jesus "caused" the KKK is greatly weakened. If the New Testament were such as to inspire KKKs, they should probably have appeared millennia earlier.
The chronological line between Marx and the USSR and CCP is much shorter and more direct. Marx died in 1883, having fomented revolution for decades. Lenin was 13 years old then, and several years later, was pouring over The Communist Manifesto, the 1848 call to revolution written by Marx and Engels. He then fomented and led revolution in Russia. He met Marx's son-in-law, read Plekhanov, who had also been influenced by the Communist Manifesto and traveled to Geneva, beginning to argue for revolution in Russia based on Marx's theories.
The revolutionaries who came to power in 1917 were, in other words, close second-generation followers of Marx and Engels and part of the faith community they had established.
From Marx' death to the Russian Revolution was 34 years, about the same as the time from Jesus' death to the writing of the first gospels, within individual memory. From Jesus to the founding of the KKK, on the other hand, was more than 1800 years, or more than 50 generations of similar length.
By the criterion of proximity, then, it is exponentially more plausible to credit the Russian Revolution to Marx, than the KKK to Jesus.
(3) Duration?
Duration is an ambivalent criterion, potentially in conflict with proximity. The influence of an idea can grow, or degrade. Few would argue that the Inquisitors were more strongly influenced by the teachings of Christ than Peter and John, because they'd had more time to think about it. Yet some effects do take time to assimilate and develop, without coercion. Christian marriage was one such idea that impacted Europe over time, as Joseph Henrich argues in The WEIRDest People in the World, as was anti-slavery, Rodney Stark argues in For the Glory of God.
Where early believers gain power, as in Mecca, they can impose ideologies quickly, and suppress contrary habits. Revolutionary ideologies do not, then, require long duration to strongly impact cultures, as can be seen in diverse cults (which compel compliance internally) and revolutionary governments. Joseph Smith regularized polygamy, Jim Jones' word was law, and Charles Manson instituted new concepts in mating and violence in short order.
One could argue (as some do) that all the communist countries were mere "Asiatic despotisms" that reprised traditional forms of tyranny in a new name. However, revolutionary governments are able to affect changes in a short time that peaceful preaching fails at over a long time. The Paris Commune of 1871, for instance, closed all Catholic churches and schools, an example that Engels pointed to: "Well, then, gentlemen, do you want to know how this dictatorship looks? Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat." That is an example of the impact ideas enforced from above can have, of which Marx and Engels approved.
Christianity had influenced western culture for centuries between the KKK arose. So there was more than enough time for that influence to work, or weaken. And communism, being imposed from above, had enough coercive power to apply Marx's doctrines, if that's what revolutionaries wished. So this criterion may not be very relevant in the present comparison.
(4) Is there clear justification in original texts or accounts of teacher for the later movement (active ingredients)?
Jesus cannot rationally be cited to justify wearing bed sheets, burning crosses, or terrorizing black or Jewish people (he belonged to the latter race himself.) I need not belabor this point, as any reasonable person who reads the New Testament will see this quickly. Not much "love your enemies" or "the meek shall inherit the earth" seems to have gone on under those bedsheets, still less "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Jesus offered neither precept nor example to justify terrorizing one's neighbors.
Which does not prove that his sayings could not possibly have influenced the founding of the KKK. History is not always rational. Sometimes it goes in odd directions, like a bouncing ball that strikes a rock at an unexpected angle. Misquotes and selective proof-texting are common. If someone makes the case that abuse of some words of Jesus contributed to the founding of the KKK, I'll hear them out. But Jesus and the KKK are too far out of harmony for an honest and sincere follower of the former to found the latter.
I concede (insist) that Marxism evolved. No great communist leader followed Marx's plans exactly -- nor could they have. But while the intellectual link between Marx and communist rule is not perfect, many aspects of that rule are clearly justified or encouraged by the writings of Marx:
a. The Communist Manifesto, which influenced the Russian Revolution as noted above, clearly did call for violent revolution.
b. The term "dictatorship of the proletariat" foreshadows tyranny of some sort. Marx and Engels set forth a program in the Communist Manifesto that demanded tyrannical power, including "abolition of property in land," abolition of inheritance, "confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels," "centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State," "industrial armies," etc, which Marx and Engels themselves describe as "despotic."
Given that a vague class cannot hire, fire, make laws, tell cops whom to arrest, and so on, such enormous power was bound to fall into few hands. It cannot be a coincidence that Engels praised dictatorships, and dictatorships appeared. Nor is it surprising that when they appeared, they were led by individual dictators. It is folly to suppose things could have turned out differently.
c. Communes and banishment of private property can be justified in the writings of Marx and Engels. The word "commune" in English is connected with the Paris Commune of 1871, which they commented on and which seems to have changed their thinking in some ways.
d. Marx and Engel's hostility to religion, while hardly unique among 19th Century radicals, was reflected by numerous measures against Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists: destruction of churches, torture and murder of pastors, burning of Scriptures, imprisonment of common believers. One might deny that Marx called for these specific actions. Nevertheless, his hostility is a plausible cause for that effect.
e. Marx rejected traditional morality, setting up three new moral systems: by which Marxists judged capitalists, themselves, and revolutionary society. Revolution justified breaking all the Ten Commandments: envy, expropriating property, bearing false witness, murder, adultery, and of course fearing and worshipping God alone. Traditional morality tended to filter back once the revolutionaries had taken power, and found they needed a well-behaved citizenry, but this could take time, and consequentialist moral justifications often took the form of rationalizing gross evil. Marx opened that Pandora's box.
f. Marx and Engels were structuralists. They located evil in a class or condition of society. This implies that should the structure be improved, those evils will disappear or at least abate.
Such optimism seems, in retrospect (and to Burke, beforehand) a foolish and dangerous doctrine, which was bound to cause trouble in several ways:
First, competition in a free enterprise system optimizes economic progress. By stifling markets, poverty broke out again and again, until rulers ratcheted back their Marxism and allowed markets again. (This is about the stage when I came into China, in 1984.)
Second, if evil is located in the capital-owning classes, why worry about revolutionaries? They represent the People, the Working Classes! And so charismatic and effective power-grabbers were fated to come to power by the naivete of communism itself: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Tito, Mao, Xi Jinping, Castro, Hoxha, Kim I, II and III, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Jim Jones (yes, another Marxist), BLM, and on and on.
 |
Marx was deeply influenced by the Greek story
of Prometheus, such as Aeschylus' Prometheus
Bound, and by Percey Shelly's
Prometheus Unbound. |
Third,
Marx and Engels view of historical progress was naive because of their structuralism. For instance, Engels claimed that "almost all savages
and barbarians" early in human evolution, “women not only
have freedom, but are held in high esteem.” Because society was supposed to pass through definite Hegelian stages, one could generalize based on scanty data, and extrapolate progress to the future. But human cultures are not simply determined by developmental stage. India and Burma were both rich-growing lowland cultures at similar stages of development, but women were treated quite differently, not due to material state, but to religious writings, like the Law of Manu and Buddhist sutras. Preliterate cultures also different radically in ideology and therefore lifestyle.
g. Contrary to what one of my critics claims, Marx did, in fact, predict that capitalism would make workers poorer:
"The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth." (Communist Manifesto)
"The higher the productiveness of labor, the greater is the pressure of the laborers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence."
"Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole." (Capital I)
"The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract." Wage Labor and Capital
It is hard to imagine great economic nonsense, or anything that has been more thoroughly refuted by history. Compare the horrors Marx himself records at an early stage of capitalism, to, say, the facts Steven Pinker describes, and the figures he gives, in Enlightenment Now. And I have seen this with my own eyes: I watched free markets raise the people of East Asia from poverty to wealth over the past 40+ years.
Nonsense, as C. S. Lewis put it, draws evil after it.
Among the greatest evils done by communism were the many and varied, but almost all disastrous, experiments in collectivization carried out. Of course they didn't all follow Marx precisely, because he didn't give a clear plan, and because what he did say was such nonsense, as above.
Communism also anticipated the impoverishment and collapse of the capitalist West. This did not happen, instead, the West grew richer and richer, except when it experimented with socialism itself. (No, socialism did not make Scandinavia wealthy!) Modern Marxists therefore add a post hoc theory to explain Marx's failure of prediction away: yes, the West grew richer, because it exploits Third World countries!
To refute that theory lies beyond the scope of this essay. (And a little knowledge of the world is enough to refute it, anyway.) The point at present is that Marx' pessimism about the poor under capitalism clearly inspired the communism movement as a whole. North Korea may still be telling people that Americans and South Koreans are starving. That's where communist media got that from.
h. Delegitimization of existing social structures and beliefs was also bound to concentrate power in the hands of the sole authority remaining. Marx's idea that such things as religion were a "superstructure" on economy, which he claimed to explain, subordinated everything to his dictatorship, even in theory, as he seems to have recognized himself. While Freud's theory tracing diverse motivation to sexuality may have been equally reductionistic, it was also inherently individualistic, since people control their own bodies in the obvious sense. But setting economic structure at center, and then proposing a change in that structure would occur and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" emerge before government magically withered away, concentrated power even in theory. Practice would follow.
i. Marx and Engels paradoxically assumed, by writing books, that ideas change social relations! While employing millions of words to promote revolution, they failed to see that beliefs carried by words matter at least as much as economic structure.
j. Marx's love of theory can plausibly be credited for inspiring a similar impulse to pose as cutting-edge social theoreticians by future revolutionary leaders. Solzhenitsyn satirizes this tendency by picturing Stalin up late at night deciding to make his blundering mark on linguistics. (In the First Circle.) Mao Zedong Thought and the Little Red Book may be reflections of the same bent: a great political leader had to be a great theorist as well, like Marx! In North Korea, we see the ideology of Juche, credited to the god-like founders of the state, pompously called Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism. (The sort of terminology replete in theoretical communist writings, one reason I dislike reading them.) Marx's blending of theory with action may have encouraged this unfortunate marriage of theory and obsequious power.
Idolatrous rule is headed off in Christianity by making Christ the unique Son of God, and setting obedience to God first among moral commandments. I would argue (and did some, in Jesus and the Religions of Man) that worship of God seriously undermined tyranny first in the West, then in other countries as well.
k. Marx's paradoxical position within 19th Century radicalism prefaces a curious fact: most "proletarian" revolutions were led by intellectuals. Neither Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pott, or Guzman, worked much with their hands. Most were teachers, philosophers, poets, budding lawyers, and avoided dirtying their hands like the plague.
Two practical results followed: first, they neither showed much practical sympathy for ordinary workers, nor knew how to improve their lives. (Again Solzhenitsyn satirizes this flaw, this time in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.)
l. Second, this special position of the "leading edge" of the revolution set party bosses up as god-like figures who would do the thinking for mankind.
So most importantly, Marx's narcissism, obvious in some of his writings, and mentioned by acquaintances, is a credible source to which to trace the rampant self-worship of communist dictators. I spend some time on this pattern in Jesus and the Religions of Man, arguing that the "red knot" of history replays the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, who fell through wishing to be "as gods, knowing good and evil." I will not belabor that point here.
So those are thirteen important ways in which later communism was foreshadowed in the writings and life of Karl Marx. There are, no doubt, others: it has been a while since I have thought about this.
(5) Are the allegedly influential texts cited in the course of instituting reform?
I have tried to find original source materials from the 19th Century KKK, without success so far. So I'll leave it as an open question as to whether the KKK cited Jesus to justify their actions, and how seriously, frequently, and sincerely. Or leave furnishing such evidence to the person who thinks such a link credible. Given that the South was, in theory, mostly Protestant, and that religion is a unifying factor in every society (its "Sacred Canopy"), one would expect that some such effort, however strained and weak, was probably made.
Communists certainly have cited Marx, frequently, and with apparent sincerity. Some of my students at Peking University worked in the School of Marxism. I interviewed students in that field going abroad to study developments in European Marxism. Mao cited both Lenin and Marx in his influential "On Contradictions:"
"It was not until Marx and Engels, the great protagonists of the proletarian movement, had synthesized the positive achievements in the history of human knowledge and, in particular, critically absorbed the rational elements of Hegelian dialectics and created the great theory of dialectical and historical materialism that an unprecedented revolution occurred in the history of human knowledge. This theory was further developed by Lenin and Stalin. As soon as it spread to China, it wrought tremendous changes in the world of Chinese thought."
So according to Mao, Marx's thinking had an enormous influence in China, including his concept of "dialectical and historical materialism," that is, an anti-religious model of history.
How about the Russian Revolution? Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife and deputy education commissar in the Soviet Union for ten years, describes Lenin's deep dependence on Marx and attempts to make his work better known:
Lenin had a wonderful knowledge of Marx. In 1893, when he came to St. Petersburg, he astonished all of us who were Marxists at the time with his tremendous knowledge of the works of Marx and Engels.
In the nineties, when Marxist circles began to be formed, it was chiefly the first volume of "Capital" which was studied. It was possible to obtain "Capital," although with great difficulties. But matters were extremely bad with regard to the other works of Marx. Most of the members of the circles had not even read the "Communist Manifesto." I, for example, read it for the first time only in 1898, in German, when I was in exile.
Marx and Engels were absolutely prohibited (by the state) . . .
Lenin understood foreign languages, and he did his best to dig out everything that he could by Marx and Engels in German and French. Anna. Ilyinishna tells how he read "The Poverty of Philosophy" in French together with his sister, Olga. He had to read most in German. He translated into Russian for himself the most important parts of the works of Marx and Engels which interested him.
In his first big work, published illegally by him in 1894, "Who are the Friends of the People?" there are quotations from the "Communist Manifesto," the "Critique of Political Economy," the "Poverty of Philosophy," "German Ideology," "The Letter of Marx to Ruge " in 1843, Engels' books "Anti-Dühring" and "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State."
The "Friends of the People " tremendously widened the Marxist outlook of the majority of the then Marxists, who as yet had very little acquaintance with the works of Marx. It dealt with a number of questions in an entirely new way and was tremendously successful.
In the next work of Lenin, "The Economic Content of the Teachings of the Narodniki and a Criticism of Them in the Book of Struve" we find already references to "The Eighteenth Brumaire" and the "The Civil War in France," to the "The Criticism of the Gotha Programme" and the second and third volumes of "Capital."
Later, life in emigration made it possible for Lenin to become acquainted with all the works of Marx and Engels and to study them.
The biography of Marx written by Lenin in 1914 for "Granat': Encyclopaedia" illustrates better than anything else the wonderful knowledge of the works of Marx by Lenin.
This is also shown by the innumerable extracts from Marx which Lenin constantly made when reading his works. The Lenin Institute has many notebooks with extracts from Marx.
In short, Marx was frequently cited by communist revolutionaries who showed sincerity and even passion in doing so. That they sometimes disagreed with Marx, say on Stalin's idea of revolution in one country, or in Mao's reliance on the peasants, or in Zinn's appeal to racism, does not change this fact in the least. By hypothesis, Marxism is a scientific school of thought. Marx is not supposed to be a divine oracle issuing ultimate truths to all mankind. So there was reason, as well as rationalizing, in adapting his theories to the varying conditions they encountered.
By contrast, on Christian hypothesis, Jesus was the Son of God. If the KKK were sincere in following him, they would have to be more faithful to his words than communists were to a mere economic philosopher. Lots of luck proving that!
(6) Energetic motion: does change move against human nature?
The KKK appealed to ordinary human motives to scapegoat Blacks, Jews, and Catholics: pride, jealousy, the fun of belonging to a secret society and of dressing up, the pleasure of rituals. Such societies were a dime a dozen in traditional China, for instance, and were often implicitly revolutionary: the Heaven and Earth Society, White Lotus, the Tai Pings (which designated the Manchus as "demons" to be killed.)
Such a movement is easy to explain psychologically and sociologically, after the South lost the Civil War to culturally alien Yankees, and sought means of resisting as best they still could.
Tyranny is also easy to understand, including spy networks and harsh punishments. The totalitarian nature of the communist regimes was unusual, however, and harder to produce than mere authoritarian kings -- in China, it resembled Qin rule two hundred years before Christ, but not the layered and multi-faceted system of Confucian rule, based on family and clan, several interlocking spiritual traditions, and state exams. In Das Kapital, Marx implies total control over the economy, religion, media, and government. Totalitarianism is best sustained by a powerful ideology. Chinese peasants had been farming for thousands of years: movement to communes was a huge move away from their normal lifestyles, and took great energy, which Marxist ideology inspired. (Works like "Living" and "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out" and "Frog" depict the difficulty of those transitions.) It also went against human nature to abandon supernatural beliefs, and required great ideological energy to accomplish this. Clearly, "dialectic materialism" created that energy.
Lenin's revolutionary magazine was called "the Spark," denoting an intellectual source of energy.
Conclusions
It is clear, then, that ascribing the effects witnessed during the Soviet, Chinese, and other communist movements to Karl Marx is vastly more plausible than ascribing the KKK to Jesus. It is not merely that on five of six differentiating criteria (the five most important), Marx's influence is more evident. The difference on individual criteria is exponential. Communist revolution followed Marx by a single generation: the KKK followed Jesus by 50. Numerous central doctrines in Marx were emphasized in later communism, while Jesus' ethical teaching seem to be ignored in KKK practice or doctrine. (You find crosses in the New Testament, but no Christians who ritually burnt them!) Marx was avidly read and often cited by leading later communists as central to their programs, who scrambled to find and translate his writings, and set up Marxist academies on state campuses. I am not aware (yet, please cite any such evidence if you can) of any evidence of such sincerity from KKK leaders, though they called themselves Protestant. Furthermore, while KKK practices exhibit fairly common practices among secret societies and ritualists, Jesus exposed scapegoating and was himself scapegoated. In this and many ways, the KKK acted the opposite of Jesus in the gospels.
Communist practices also mark a sharp break from the cultures in which the parties embedded themselves, requiring a heavy expenditure of intellectual energy to force society uphill against its inclinations to farm as families, engage in commerce, and worship God or the gods. That energy clearly came from Karl Marx and the ideology he developed with colleagues. Marx' arrogant and angry personality, remarked on by many who knew him, can also be plausibly seen as the seed which grew into the Cult of Personality and the deification of rulers so common and destructive in communist countries. (Precedented in ancient tyrannies, true, but recognized as a sin in Christian and Confucian societies.)
The CCP seems to have followed Marx and Engel's program in the Communist Manifesto quite closely. Most of the items they listed on the communist agenda, were in fact enacted in later communist societies -- or heroic attempts were made. Marx completely restructured society, and the impact of that restructuring continues to be felt -- often in ways not predicted by Marx, since he was no prophet. The KKK did not follow Jesus' program, by any stretch of the imagination, as the folks at Bible Hub briefly explain here. (If so obvious a fact requires even a short explanation.)
So yes, Karl Marx is very much to blame for later communism. He set the world up for just the sort of self-worshipping, ruthless, tradition-smashing Promethean monsters who appeared in the 20th Century. He might even plausibly be partly credited for Adolf Hitler, in a somewhat different manner, worth exploring another day. Yes, Leo Tolstoy, I do believe in the Great Men theory of history -- even when the 'great man" turns out to be not very good.
As for Jesus inspiring the KKK? It seems like a 1900-year stretch, both absurd and unnecessary. But let's see your argument.
