12/08/07Gaither Stewart Peoplesvoice.org

Though Marx’s description of global capitalism of 1848 could just as well have been written today, the wide appeal of Communism in practice born three quarters of century afterwards is not clear. What is it about Communism that led many historians to compare it with early Christianity and even with modern Jesuits? Why did Communist slogans also appeal to Islam?

In his Communist Manifesto Marx pinpointed capitalism so precisely that his description had lasting impact. He showed once and for all how capitalism transformed the world, subverting all previous hierarchies in disregard of distinctions between sacred and secular and its ceaseless creation of new needs and new inequalities. His ideas ultimately spread like wildfire and attracted believers throughout the world as only a religion can.

Later converts to the new religion of Communism were totally dedicated, even though it was first realized in backward Russia, contrary to Marx’s program for Communism in the advanced industrial world—in his native Germany. Communists then remained loyal to the faith through Stalin’s purges and even after his pact with Hitler just to gain time for the final universal victory in which they believed. Many held to their faith even after the Soviet Union crushed revolts of opposition in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968 and Communist China crushed students in revolt on Tienanmen Square in 1989.

Though Communism always proclaimed itself godless and anti-religious, its adherents have been compared to Jesuits as a result of the rigorous dogma of their faith, the iron discipline, their passionate loyalty and confidence in the future. Therefore the historical tendency, especially among ex-Communists, to label Communism a religion and the Manifesto a holy book.

The collapse of the USSR and its East European satellites has detracted from the true essence of Communism itself. That it took place in backward Russia perhaps doomed it to failure there. By the same token the association between Communism in Russia and an authoritarian state was not Lenin’s invention; Russia was authoritarian long before the advent of Communism. Nonetheless, though it failed economically and politically, its religious-like appeal has remained intact for some people in the world looking beyond capitalism.

The English historian R.N. Carew Hunt in his Theory and Practice of Communism labeled Communism “the largest mass movement since the rise of Christianity.” Writer after writer, historian after historian, has argued that Communism is a religion. Yet Communists themselves have always denied the connection. Communism was not even an ideal, Marx insisted. Marx and Engels wrote that Communism was “a movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

For Marx it was pointless to speculate about Communism as an ideal. Instead it described an on-going situation, according to its theorists, the natural course of things. Today, without the Cold War to cloud matters, one can see more clearly what Communism was and for some still is. Some historians claim to have unearthed the hidden link between Communism and religion.

At first it might ring strange to hear that Marx’s Communism—like Utopian Socialism in Great Britain and France—emerged from a movement of religious reform in Germany. Marx’s forerunners, the Young Hegelians of the early Nineteenth century, believed in the imminent fall of Christianity, to be replaced by a new humanist faith. Christianity that transformed the natural communal character of man into a union of each individual with a personal God was responsible for the individualism of modern society. Young Hegelians and other philosophers claimed that Communism rested on the religious conception of the essence of man.

Though Marx apparently toyed with the new humanism of his times, he tried to deny it and later covered his tracks in the Manifesto. His Communism was not just the abolition of private property, but also the reclaiming of the conception of “Man”, which he called “the return of Man to himself.”

Yet, a perplexed Marx either had to abandon Communism or redefine it. If the others were right, then Communism was merely another variant of religion. The Marx of the Communist Manifesto changed the cards on the table, ignoring the religious pre-history of German Communism, that is, what purists label “the real Communism.”

His solution was to return to class struggle: “Morality and religion and ideology sprang from class struggle,” he wrote. His Communism was henceforth not an ethical goal but the expression of the real movement of history. Communism was the vocation of the proletariat and the crisis of Christianity was nothing more than the final crisis of capitalism.

Today many serious scholars agree that Marxist Communism grew out of a humanism designed to compete with and ultimately replace Christianity. It was religious in that it gave the exploited and downtrodden of the world a sacred vocation and a clear vision and certainty of the future. History shows that total devotion and the belief that the end justifies the means are seldom merely political. That was seen in the ferocity of Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation in Europe, and is likewise present in contemporary fanatical religious groups, from Islam to Christianity.

Thus the paradox that Communism, with its dogma of sacred books, its priests and perceived by believers as a religion, has proclaimed itself throughout its history militantly materialist, scientific, and rabidly anti-religious.

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December 8, 2007 Gaither Stewart, Rome