Chapter 10. Marx's Vision of Communism
1. Millennial Communism
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx, 1818-1883, is, at bottom, a simple one.
Karl Marx was a communist.
A seemingly banal or trite statement, set alongside Marxism's myriad of jargon-ridden concepts and philosophy, economics, history, culture, et al.
Yet Marx's devotion to Communism was his crucial point.
Far more central than the dialectic, the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest.
Communism was the goal, the great end, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile.
History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man,
in the same way as the return of the messiah in Christian theology would put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth,
So, the establishment of Communism would put an end to human history.
And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God's prophets and saints, would
establish a kingdom of God on earth, and for pre-millennials, Jesus would have many human
assistants in establishing such a kingdom.
So for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints,
would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.
In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty violent
upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil.
After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age of peace and harmony, a reign of
justice would be established upon the earth.
Marx emphatically rejected those utopians who aimed to arrive at communism through a
gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good.
No, Marx harked back to the apocalyptic, the post-millennial coercive German and Dutch
Anabaptists of the 16th Century, to the millennial sects during the English Civil War, and to
the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the last
days before the millennium could be established.
Indeed, since the immediateist Post Mills refused to wait for gradual goodness and sainthood
to permeate among men, they joined the pre-mills in believing that only a violent apocalyptic
final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could establish the millennium.
Violent worldwide revolution in Marx's version made by the oppressed proletariat would be
the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.
In fact, Marx, like the premils or millenarians, went further to hold that the reign of evil
on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse.
For Marx, as for the millenarians, writes Ernest Tuvesson, the evil of the world must
proceed to its height before, in one great complete root and branch upheaval, it would
be swept away.
and pessimism about the perfectibility of the existing world is crossed by a supreme optimism.
History, the millenarian believes, so operates that when evil has reached its height, the hopeless situation will be reversed.
The original, the true harmonious state of society, in some kind of egalitarian order, will be re-established.
In contrast to the various groups of utopian socialists and in common with religious messianists,
Karl Marx did not sketch the features of his future communism in any detail, not for Marx,
for example, to spell out the number of people in his utopia and the shape and location of
their houses, the pattern of their cities. In the first place, there is a quintessentially
are crazy heir to utopias that are mapped by their creators in precise detail.
But more importantly, spelling out the details of one's ideal society removes the crucial
element of awe and mystery from the allegedly inevitable world of the future.
In the same way, science fiction movies lose their glamour and excitement when in the second
And half of the film, the mysterious, powerful and previously invisible monsters become concretized
into slow-moving green blob-like creatures that have lost their mysterious aura and have
become almost commonplace.
But certain features are broadly alike in all visions of communism.
Private property is eliminated.
Individualism goes by the board.
Individuality is flattened.
All property is owned and controlled communally, and the individual units of the new collective
organism are in some vague way equal to one another.
This millennialist emphasis on the collective is a long way from the orthodox Christian
Augustinian stress on the individual soul and his salvation.
In orthodox, amillennial Christianity, the individual does or does not achieve salvation
until Jesus returns and puts an end to history and ushers in the Day of Judgment.
There is no millennium on earth.
The kingdom of God remains safely and appropriately in heaven.
But millennialism's emphasis on achieving a kingdom of God on earth inevitably stressed,
in the required human agency of the post-millennialists, the inevitable collective march toward the
kingdom in and through history.
In what we may call the immediateist version of post-mill doctrine, as we have seen in
Volume 1 in the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the coercive Anabaptists of the Reformation,
In Christian Communists and in a secularized version in Marxism, the object is to seize
immediate power in a violent revolution and to purge the world of sinners and heretics,
that is, all who are not followers of the sect in question, so as to establish the millennium,
the precondition of Jesus' second advent.
In contrast, the gradualist Postmills, in less violent and precipitate fashion, who
would seize control of most of the Protestant churches in the northern United States during
the 19th century, wanted to use state power to coerce morality and virtue and then establish
the Kingdom of God, not only in the United States but throughout the world.
As one historian penetratingly concludes about one of the most prominent post-mill economists
and social scientists of the late 19th century, a passage that could apply to the entire movement.
In Richard T. Eli's eyes, government was the God-given instrument through which we
had to work.
Its preeminence as a divine instrument was based on the post-Reformation abolition of
The Division Between the Sacred and the Secular and on the State's Power to Implement Ethical
Solutions to Public Problems.
The same identification of sacred and secular enabled Eli to both divinize the state and
socialize Christianity.
He thought of government as God's major instrument of redemption.
Gradualists or immediateists, all millennialists have caused grave social and political trouble
by immanentizing the eschaton, in the political philosopher Eric Vogelin's infelicitously
worded but highly perceptive phrase.
As an orthodox Christian, Vogelin believed that the eschaton, the final days, the kingdom
For utopian socialists and communists, Marx sought in communism the apotheosis of the
collective species, mankind as one new super-being, in which the only meaning possessed by the
individual is as a negligible particle of that collective organism.
One incisive portrayal of Marxian collective organicism, what amounts to a celebration
One of the new socialist man to be created during the communizing process was that of
a top Bolshevik theoretician of the early 20th century, Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov,
1873-1928. Bogdanov, like Joachim of Fiore, spoke of three ages of human history. First
First was a religious, authoritarian society and a self-sufficient economy.
Next came the Second Age, an exchange economy, marked by diversity and the emergence of autonomy
of the individual human personality.
But this individualism, at first progressive, later becomes an obstacle to progress as it
hampers and contradicts the unifying tendencies of the Machine Age.
But then there will arise the third age, the final stage of history, Communism, though
not, as with Joachim, an age of the Holy Spirit.
This last stage will be marked by a collective self-sufficient economy, and by the fusion
of personal lives into one colossal whole, harmonious in the relations of its parts,
systematically grouping all elements for one common struggle.
against the Endless Spontaneity of Nature.
An enormous mass of creative activity is necessary in order to solve this task.
It demands the forces not of man, but of mankind.
And only in working at this task does mankind as such emerge.
The Acme of Messianic Communism appears in the frenzied three-volume Phantasmagoria by
by the notable German blend of Christian messianist and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Ernst Bloch,
1885-1977.
Bloch held that the inner truth of things could only be discovered after a complete
transformation of the universe, a grand apocalypse, the descent of the messiah, a new heaven and
a new earth.
As J.P. Stern writes in his review of Block's three-volume Principle of Hope, the book contains
such remarkable declamations as, where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem, and that the Bolshevist
fulfillment of Communism is part and parcel of the age-old fight for God.
There is also more than a hint in Block that disease, nay, even death itself, will be abolished
In contrast, there is no more eloquent championing of Orthodox Christian individualism and revulsion
against collectivism than G. K. Chesterton's critique of the views of a leading Fabian
socialist, Mrs. Annie Besant, in which Chesterton swats Mrs. Besant's pantheistic Buddhism.
According to Mrs. Besant, the universal church is simply the universal self.
It is the doctrine that we are really all one person, that there are no real walls of
individuality between man and man.
She does not tell us to love our neighbor.
She tells us to be our neighbors.
The intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity is that, for the Buddhist or
For theosophist, personality is the fall of man.
For the Christian, it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.
Let us turn to some of the main features of communism.
In the typical communal millennial future, an epoch of bliss and harmony, work, the necessity
to labor, becomes de-emphasized or disappears altogether.
Labor, at least labor in order to maintain and advance one's living standards, does
not ring true with very many people as a feature of utopia.
Thus, in the vision of Joachim of Fior, perhaps the first medieval millennialist, no work
would be required to disturb the endless round of celebration and prayer, because mankind
would have achieved the status of immaterial objects.
If man were pure spirit, it is true that the economic problem, the problem of production
and living standards, would necessarily disappear.
Unfortunately, however, Marx, being an atheist and materialist, could not exactly fall back
on a Fior-like communism of pure spirit.
How could solidly material human beings solve the problem of production and of maintaining
There was method in Marx's refusal to treat the communist stage in any detail.
His utopia was shadowy.
On the one hand, Marx assumed and asserted that goods in the future communist society
would be superabundant.
If so, there would, of course, be no need to refer to the universal economic problem
of scarcity of means and resources as applied to ends.
But by assuming away the problem, Marx bequeathed the puzzle to future generations, and Marxists
have been split on the question.
Will communism itself bring about this magical state of superabundance, or should we wait
until capitalism brings superabundance before we establish communism?
Generally, Marxist groups have solved this problem not in theory but in practice or praxis,
by cleaving to whatever path would allow them either to conquer or to maintain their power.
Thus, Marxist vanguards or parties on seeing an opportunity to seize power have been invariably
willing to skip the stages of history preordained by their master and exercise their revolutionary
will.
On the other hand, Marxist elites, already entrenched in power, have prudentially put
off the ultimate goal of Communism even further into a receding future.
And so, the Soviets were quick to stress hard work and gradualism in persevering toward
the ultimate goal.
There are several other probable reasons for Marx's failure to detail the features
History.
It was the revolutionary end to Marx's neo-Hegelian version of alienation and of the dialectic
process by which the Aufhebung, transcendence, and negation of one historical stage is replaced
by another and opposing one.
In this case, the negation of the evil condition of private property and the division of labor,
and the Establishment of Communism in which man's unity with man and nature is achieved.
To Marx, as to Hegel, history necessarily proceeds by this magical dialectic in which
one stage gives rise inevitably to a later and opposing stage, except that to Marx the
dialectic is material rather than spiritual.
Marx never published his Neo-Hegelian Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in which
the philosophic basis of Marxism was set forth, and one essay of which, Private Property and
Communism, contained Marx's fullest exposition of the communist society.
One reason for his refusal to publish was that in later decades Hegelian philosophy
had gone out of fashion even in Germany, and Marx's followers were interested more in the
economic and revolutionary aspects of Marxism.
2.
Raw Communism
Another important reason for Marx's failure to publish was his candid depiction of the
communist society in the essay Private Property and Communism.
In addition to its being philosophic and not economic, he portrayed a horrifying but allegedly
necessary stage of society immediately after the necessary violent world revolution of
the proletariat, and before ultimate communism is to be finally achieved.
Marx's post-revolutionary society, that of unthinking or raw communism, was not such
Such as to spur the revolutionary energies of the Marxian faithful.
For Marx took to heart two bitter critiques of communism that had become prominent in Europe.
One was by the French mutualist anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who denounced communism
as oppression and slavery, and to whom Marx explicitly referred in his essay.
The other was a fascinating book by the conservative Hegelian monarchist Lorenz von Stein, 1815-1890,
who had been assigned by the Prussian government in 1840 to study the unsettling new doctrines
of socialism and communism becoming rampant in France.
Not only did Marx show a minute textual familiarity with Stein's subsequent book of 1842, but
And he actually based his concept of the proletariat as the foundation and the engine of the world
revolution on Stein's insights into the new revolutionary doctrines as rationalizations
of the class interests of the proletariat.
Most remarkably, Marx admittedly agreed with Proudhon's and particularly Stein's portrayal
Royal of the first stage of the post-revolutionary society, which he agreed with Stein to call
raw communism.
Stein forecast that raw communism would be an attempt to enforce egalitarianism by wildly
and ferociously expropriating and destroying property, confiscating it and coercively communizing
women as well as material wealth.
Indeed, Marx's evaluation of raw communism, the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
was even more negative than Stein's.
In the same way as woman is to abandon marriage for general, that is, universal, prostitution,
so the whole world of wealth, that is, the objective being of man, is to abandon the
The Relation of Exclusive Marriage with the Private Property Owner for the Relation of
General Prostitution with the Community.
Not only that, but as Professor Tucker puts it, Marx concedes that raw communism is not
the real transcendence of private property, but only the universalizing of it.
Not the overcoming of greed, but only the generalizing of it.
and not the abolition of labor but only its extension to all men, it is merely a new form
in which the vileness of private property comes to the surface.
In short, in the stage of communalization of private property, what Marx himself considers
the worst features of private property will be maximized.
Not only that, but Marx concedes the truth of the charge of anti-communists then and
now that communism and communization is but the expression, in Marx's words, of envy
and a desire to reduce all to a common level.
Far from leading to a flowering of human personality, as Marx is supposed to claim, he admits that
communism will negate it totally.
This marks, in completely negating the personality of men, this type of communism is really nothing
but the logical expression of private property.
General envy, constituting itself as power, is the disguise in which greed re-establishes
itself and satisfies itself only in another way.
And the approach to woman as the spoil and handmade of communal lust is press the infinite
degradation in which man exists for himself.
All in all, Marx's portrayal of raw communism is very like the monstrous regimes imposed
by the coercive Anabaptists of the 16th century.
Professor Tucker adds, perhaps underlining the obvious, that these vivid indications
from the Paris Manuscripts of the way in which Marx envisaged and evaluated the immediate
post-revolutionary period, very probably explained the extreme reticence that he always later
showed on this topic in his published writings.
But if this communism is admittedly so monstrous, a regime of infinite degradation, why should
turns out to be the post-revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, and not preceding capitalism,
becomes transformed into total good.
To say the least, Marx cannot and does not attempt to explain how a system of total greed
becomes transformed into total greedlessness.
He leaves it all to the wizardry of the dialectic, now a dialectic fatally shorn of the alleged
Motor of the Class Struggle, which yet somehow transforms the monstrosity of raw communism
into the paradise of communism's higher stage.