Lessons from Marx and Lenin

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, edited by Friedrich Engels, was published in English in 1888. The original document appeared in 1848 and went through a number of editions and translations. It inspired the Russian Revolution and attacked the rampant free-trade world economy which had already emerged, while the ruling class which grew wealthy through it was labelled the bourgeoisie.

Marx, a Jewish intellectual, was writing at a time of rapid de-Christianization of Germany by German Idealism, the Hegelian Dialectic and Friedrich Nietzsche, a nihilistic philosopher who denied and was hostile to the very values emanating from Jesus Christ and led many Germans to conclude that strength of will was all that mattered. The forces at work in the 19^th century set the scene for both Nazi and Communistic totalitarianism and probably set off the tragic events leading to World Wars I and II.

To quote, Marx considered that

 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.

 The Manifesto’s attack on the bourgeoisie reads like that of many a modern columnist on the global capitalist system of today, which again is based largely on free international trade, with little regard for the social costs of production moving according to market forces, be these of labour or goods or raw materials, and in which everything in life is reduced to a commodity or assigned a monetary value. Even debt itself has been made a commodity in the form of collateralised debt obligations and futures.

Christianity is attacked by Marx because it has allegedly colluded with the ruling classes in subjugating and exploiting the lower classes for monetary gain, while at the same time he implicitly recognises the reality of the sacred and holy – e.g. in talking about money and the way everything in life has been given a price he says 

...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.

  In attempting to sweep away all the church institutions, which undoubtedly did sometimes depart radically from the teachings of Jesus Christ, Marx ignores the provenance of Christian values, i.e. what happened during the life of Jesus and within a decade or so of His Crucifixion: over 200 prophecies of the coming of Christ centuries in advance, the parables and commands of Jesus Christ recorded by His contemporaries, the empty tomb, the widely reported Resurrection appearances, the supernatural nature of Christ's image embedded in the recently re-dated Shroud of Turin image, the vision of Saul, the first conversions of gentiles, the Pentecost, His miracles and those of the apostles and the persecution by the authorities. The Romanized institutionalized  church and its ramifications, which Marx despised,  did not begin until almost three centuries later. Even then, with all its faults, you only have to take a look at the non-Christian world of the time to see the difference. There is also much archeological evidence and historical accounts by
Josephus, a Jewish historian at the time of Christ, and other non-Christian contemporaries.

After the failure of communism, which caused mass starvation under Stalin in the Ukrain (part of Russia) in the 1930s, a new kind of Marxism developed in Germany after the end of World War 2. It began in the Frankfurt Institute and attracted left wing intellectuals from around the world, and became known as the Frankfurt School, embodying such ideologies as critical race theory, queer theory and gender ideology. The Best 30-Minute Explanation of Marxism I Have Ever Heard - YouTube 

 Marx seems to be correct in seeing that every economic order goes to a state of maximum efficiency while simultaneously sowing the seeds of its own downfall. This probably applies to any system of organizing human affairs, since nothing in life is static: circumstances change. Even the societies which claimed to be working towards the communist ideal collapsed from within. But he failed to realize that although a society may wish to redistribute bread more fairly, it cannot live by bread alone. Reality is not a machine., an economy and society with no soul. Well over 100 million died in the last century (more than in all previous history) because of this mistake, this departure from basic divine wisdom, as human beings were systematically killed in the name of atheist values or the human gods which always fill the spiritual vacuum left behind when the real holy source of reality is ignored by society. 

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

 Today, like Marx, we decry the folly and greed of bankers and borrowers. To the extent that a new system is needed perhaps it should lie somewhere between the unfettered market-based one of today and a Christian socialism, more internationalised in some respects, more localised in others. Or maybe something we cannot even envisage. Whatever system emerges let’s not forget the lesson of history: every man, woman and child should treat each other in accord with this command from our Saviour: ‘...love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love each other.’ John 13:34. A command that must be held sacred in all the institutions of humankind as well as individuals. 

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.

As communism began to fail in Russia (e.g. millions of Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin in the 1930s) a ne form of co'munism was spawned by intellectuals in the west, starting with the Frankfurt School in Germany. This took various forms but they all involved creating  victim classes exploited by oppressors. Terms such as 'woke', 'critical race theory', 'white oppression', 'gender ideology' and 'politically correct' began to invade the language in the western world. The idea was to break down western societies by creating divisions and categories divided into exploiters and vicitms. Ultimately, a new elite would take control.

Today it looks as though Christianity is returning to its true foundation of infinite redeeming love generated by the Resurrection and flowing through the whole of creation, bringing about justice by restorative love rather then retribution. Franciscans are definitely in the ascendant and Christianity as a whole is spreading fast in the world as a whole and even beginning to revive among intellectuals in western countries corrupted by  promiscuity, obsession with pride, desanctification of Holy Matrimony,  identity politics, mass killing of unborn babies and a return to a loss of faith in truth itself. Hopefully it won't be too late to avert upheaval and collapse (End Times?) Perhaps a New Heaven and a New Earth will come sooner than most have expected, preceded by a Revival.

 John Sears

 updated July 2023