the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles...freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word the oppressor and the oppressed.
Each time the fight ended either in a re-constitution of society or in the common ruin of the warring classes. During the late nineteenth century, largely as a result of industrialization and global free trade, the opposing sections of society were the bourgeoisie (the oppressor) and the proletariat (the oppressed), and he maintained that the time was ripe for a new struggle that would lead to a new social order: communism. The proletariat would be victorious, religion would be exterminated and all would live in peace and harmony, a brotherhood of man.
...all that is solid melts away, all that is holy is profaned
Yet the means he proposes for providing what he must have regarded as a more just state of affairs happens in a material world with no spiritual dimension and God either does not exist or is irrelevant, being replaced by man. Morality itself becomes meaningless other than as a set of man-made rules. It is impossible to declare anything morally wrong by any absolute standard if there is no holy source of morality. Yet deep down he obviously believed in the notion of holiness without wondering where it came from or how it was to be sustained when its source was ignored. 'Without God anything is permissible' (Dostoevsky). Those who killed 100+ million people for the sake of Mao Zedong, Marx and Lenin were breaking sacred laws laid down for the benefit and flourishing of human beings. They also led to mass starvation in Stalinist Russia. It was all done for the good of humanity. Similarly with cruel and lethal medical experiments on pregnant mothers and disabled inmates of Nazi concentration camps, or even medical experiments in the UK, for example, in the wake of World War II. It was all done in the name of human flourishing.
Josephus, a Jewish historian at the time of Christ, and other non-Christian contemporaries.
What Marx and his disciples failed to realise is that no human being or group of humans can decide what is good by reason alone apart from God: there must be humility, justice, love and truth, and these do not come from genetically expressed protein molecules, which themselves ultimately originate from God, but from submission to our Creator made incarnate in humanity through the Christ. See also 1984 revisited: collective postmodernism
In western society we are subconsciously aware of this command largely through habit. However, this awareness needs to be refreshed and kept alive by a nucleus of genuine, radical Christian believers. The Spirit needs to be consciously cultivated and encouraged throughout society in order to make it more like heaven on earth.
For this reason I believe that prayers and Christian symbols need to become part of public life. The values of the Sermon on the Mount are not likely to be adhered to rigorously but awareness of these through church going and the occasional media event can only be a good thing in re-establishing the trust and mutual respect needed for society to be viable at all. Recent problems with social media illustrate this.
Returning to the Soviet experiment I recently came across a quotation from V.I.Lenin made when he was close to death, in 1924. He recognizes too late that scientific atheism is unable to bring about net social progress:
I have deluded myself. Without doubt, it was necessary to free the oppressed masses. However, our methods resulted in other oppressions and gruesome massacres. You know I am deathly ill; I feel lost in an ocean of blood formed by countless victims. This was necessary to save our Russia, but it is too late to turn back. We would need ten Francis of Assisi.