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[1]
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
One evening someone rented a video called The
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
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
The history of Marxism defined the 20th Century. More
than a third of the world was recruited into helping fashion an
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
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-words: "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
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
Was communism
godless? No. In many ways, communism represented the joining of two streams of spirituality flowing from
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
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
Marx's theories were first tested in
Revolution
came at an awkward time for the Holy Russian Empire.
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
That duty fell to a lieutenant: Joseph Stalin, a man of "steel," which is what the name means, from the
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
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
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.[4] George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and many others, praised the
Marx's vision caught fire elsewhere. The
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.
In
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
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
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."[6]
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
"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."[7]
"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."[8]
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.”[9] Even Richard Rorty hints that if the Middle
Class is too selfish with the money it earns, he may join the revolutionaries.[10] Marx began Communist Manifesto with the words, "A specter is haunting
"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."[11]
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."[12] 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?[13]
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
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
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."[14] 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."[15]
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
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
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."[16] 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
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
Churchill called the
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."[17] 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."[18]
"(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."[19]
"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."[20]
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."[21]
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
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
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.”[22] 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.”[23] 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’
Skeptic
though he was, Marx and his followers drew on the experience of religious communes
in
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
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.
[1] Richard
Wurmbrand, From Suffering to Triumph,
Kregel,
[2] Cited by Plantinga, Atheism and Rationality
[3] In tones
reminiscent of recent Balkan conflict, Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, Bantom, 1974, p.64.
[4] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, Harper and Row, 1988,
p.277
[5] The best guide
to the topsy-turvy world of anti-anti communism is Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims.
[6] For a healthy
send-up of such blow-hard titles, note the names of Stalin in Solzhenitsyn’s
great novel,
[7] Reflections on the Revolution in France,
Penguin, 1969, p.177
[8] Robert H.
Meineilly, Government is Not God’s Work,
New York Times,
[9] Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death: the Collapse of
Our Traditional Ethics, (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1994), p. 215
[10] Rorty, Objectivity, Realism, and Truth
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991), p. 15n
[11] Marx-Engels Reader, Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 489
[12] Reflections on the Revolution in France,
p.184
[13] In Faith of the Fatherless: the Psychology of
Atheism,
[14] Marx-Engels Reader, Edited by Robert
Tucker, W. W. Norton & Co., 1978, p.488
[15] Ibid.,p.487
[16] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Macmillan
Co.,1947, p.78
[17] Intellectuals, p.56
[18] Civil War
general Carl Schwarz, on meeting Marx, from Lewis Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals,
p. 42-3
[19] Donald
Treadgold, 20th Century
[20] Hugh
Seton-Watson, From Lenin to Krushchev:
The History of World Communism, Westview Press
[21] George Orwell,
1984, (Signet: New York, 1984), p.
217
[22] Paul Tillich, Christianity and
the Encounter of the World Religions, p. 4
[23] Emile
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life, p. 41
