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NOTE 10. Marx's Vision of Communism

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Chapter 10. Marx's Vision of Communism

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1. Millennial Communism

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The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx, 1818-1883, is, at bottom, a simple one.

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Karl Marx was a communist.

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A seemingly banal or trite statement, set alongside Marxism's myriad of jargon-ridden concepts and philosophy, economics, history, culture, et al.

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Yet Marx's devotion to Communism was his crucial point.

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Far more central than the dialectic, the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest.

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Communism was the goal, the great end, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile.

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History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man,

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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,

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So, the establishment of Communism would put an end to human history.

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And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God's prophets and saints, would

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establish a kingdom of God on earth, and for pre-millennials, Jesus would have many human

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assistants in establishing such a kingdom.

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So for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints,

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would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.

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In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty violent

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upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil.

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After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age of peace and harmony, a reign of

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justice would be established upon the earth.

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Marx emphatically rejected those utopians who aimed to arrive at communism through a

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gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good.

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No, Marx harked back to the apocalyptic, the post-millennial coercive German and Dutch

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Anabaptists of the 16th Century, to the millennial sects during the English Civil War, and to

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the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the last

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days before the millennium could be established.

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Indeed, since the immediateist Post Mills refused to wait for gradual goodness and sainthood

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to permeate among men, they joined the pre-mills in believing that only a violent apocalyptic

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final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could establish the millennium.

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Violent worldwide revolution in Marx's version made by the oppressed proletariat would be

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the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.

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In fact, Marx, like the premils or millenarians, went further to hold that the reign of evil

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on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse.

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For Marx, as for the millenarians, writes Ernest Tuvesson, the evil of the world must

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proceed to its height before, in one great complete root and branch upheaval, it would

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be swept away.

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and pessimism about the perfectibility of the existing world is crossed by a supreme optimism.

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History, the millenarian believes, so operates that when evil has reached its height, the hopeless situation will be reversed.

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The original, the true harmonious state of society, in some kind of egalitarian order, will be re-established.

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In contrast to the various groups of utopian socialists and in common with religious messianists,

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Karl Marx did not sketch the features of his future communism in any detail, not for Marx,

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for example, to spell out the number of people in his utopia and the shape and location of

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their houses, the pattern of their cities. In the first place, there is a quintessentially

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are crazy heir to utopias that are mapped by their creators in precise detail.

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But more importantly, spelling out the details of one's ideal society removes the crucial

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element of awe and mystery from the allegedly inevitable world of the future.

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In the same way, science fiction movies lose their glamour and excitement when in the second

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And half of the film, the mysterious, powerful and previously invisible monsters become concretized

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into slow-moving green blob-like creatures that have lost their mysterious aura and have

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become almost commonplace.

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But certain features are broadly alike in all visions of communism.

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Private property is eliminated.

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Individualism goes by the board.

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Individuality is flattened.

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All property is owned and controlled communally, and the individual units of the new collective

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organism are in some vague way equal to one another.

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This millennialist emphasis on the collective is a long way from the orthodox Christian

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Augustinian stress on the individual soul and his salvation.

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In orthodox, amillennial Christianity, the individual does or does not achieve salvation

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until Jesus returns and puts an end to history and ushers in the Day of Judgment.

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There is no millennium on earth.

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The kingdom of God remains safely and appropriately in heaven.

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But millennialism's emphasis on achieving a kingdom of God on earth inevitably stressed,

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in the required human agency of the post-millennialists, the inevitable collective march toward the

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kingdom in and through history.

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In what we may call the immediateist version of post-mill doctrine, as we have seen in

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Volume 1 in the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the coercive Anabaptists of the Reformation,

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In Christian Communists and in a secularized version in Marxism, the object is to seize

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immediate power in a violent revolution and to purge the world of sinners and heretics,

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that is, all who are not followers of the sect in question, so as to establish the millennium,

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the precondition of Jesus' second advent.

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In contrast, the gradualist Postmills, in less violent and precipitate fashion, who

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would seize control of most of the Protestant churches in the northern United States during

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the 19th century, wanted to use state power to coerce morality and virtue and then establish

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the Kingdom of God, not only in the United States but throughout the world.

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As one historian penetratingly concludes about one of the most prominent post-mill economists

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and social scientists of the late 19th century, a passage that could apply to the entire movement.

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In Richard T. Eli's eyes, government was the God-given instrument through which we

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had to work.

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Its preeminence as a divine instrument was based on the post-Reformation abolition of

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The Division Between the Sacred and the Secular and on the State's Power to Implement Ethical

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Solutions to Public Problems.

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The same identification of sacred and secular enabled Eli to both divinize the state and

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socialize Christianity.

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He thought of government as God's major instrument of redemption.

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Gradualists or immediateists, all millennialists have caused grave social and political trouble

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by immanentizing the eschaton, in the political philosopher Eric Vogelin's infelicitously

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worded but highly perceptive phrase.

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As an orthodox Christian, Vogelin believed that the eschaton, the final days, the kingdom

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For utopian socialists and communists, Marx sought in communism the apotheosis of the

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collective species, mankind as one new super-being, in which the only meaning possessed by the

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individual is as a negligible particle of that collective organism.

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One incisive portrayal of Marxian collective organicism, what amounts to a celebration

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One of the new socialist man to be created during the communizing process was that of

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a top Bolshevik theoretician of the early 20th century, Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov,

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1873-1928. Bogdanov, like Joachim of Fiore, spoke of three ages of human history. First

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First was a religious, authoritarian society and a self-sufficient economy.

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Next came the Second Age, an exchange economy, marked by diversity and the emergence of autonomy

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of the individual human personality.

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But this individualism, at first progressive, later becomes an obstacle to progress as it

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hampers and contradicts the unifying tendencies of the Machine Age.

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But then there will arise the third age, the final stage of history, Communism, though

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not, as with Joachim, an age of the Holy Spirit.

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This last stage will be marked by a collective self-sufficient economy, and by the fusion

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of personal lives into one colossal whole, harmonious in the relations of its parts,

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systematically grouping all elements for one common struggle.

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against the Endless Spontaneity of Nature.

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An enormous mass of creative activity is necessary in order to solve this task.

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It demands the forces not of man, but of mankind.

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And only in working at this task does mankind as such emerge.

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The Acme of Messianic Communism appears in the frenzied three-volume Phantasmagoria by

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by the notable German blend of Christian messianist and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Ernst Bloch,

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1885-1977.

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Bloch held that the inner truth of things could only be discovered after a complete

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transformation of the universe, a grand apocalypse, the descent of the messiah, a new heaven and

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a new earth.

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As J.P. Stern writes in his review of Block's three-volume Principle of Hope, the book contains

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such remarkable declamations as, where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem, and that the Bolshevist

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fulfillment of Communism is part and parcel of the age-old fight for God.

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There is also more than a hint in Block that disease, nay, even death itself, will be abolished

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In contrast, there is no more eloquent championing of Orthodox Christian individualism and revulsion

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against collectivism than G. K. Chesterton's critique of the views of a leading Fabian

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socialist, Mrs. Annie Besant, in which Chesterton swats Mrs. Besant's pantheistic Buddhism.

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According to Mrs. Besant, the universal church is simply the universal self.

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It is the doctrine that we are really all one person, that there are no real walls of

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individuality between man and man.

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She does not tell us to love our neighbor.

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She tells us to be our neighbors.

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The intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity is that, for the Buddhist or

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For theosophist, personality is the fall of man.

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For the Christian, it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.

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Let us turn to some of the main features of communism.

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In the typical communal millennial future, an epoch of bliss and harmony, work, the necessity

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to labor, becomes de-emphasized or disappears altogether.

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Labor, at least labor in order to maintain and advance one's living standards, does

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not ring true with very many people as a feature of utopia.

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Thus, in the vision of Joachim of Fior, perhaps the first medieval millennialist, no work

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would be required to disturb the endless round of celebration and prayer, because mankind

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would have achieved the status of immaterial objects.

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If man were pure spirit, it is true that the economic problem, the problem of production

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and living standards, would necessarily disappear.

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Unfortunately, however, Marx, being an atheist and materialist, could not exactly fall back

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on a Fior-like communism of pure spirit.

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How could solidly material human beings solve the problem of production and of maintaining

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There was method in Marx's refusal to treat the communist stage in any detail.

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His utopia was shadowy.

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On the one hand, Marx assumed and asserted that goods in the future communist society

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would be superabundant.

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If so, there would, of course, be no need to refer to the universal economic problem

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of scarcity of means and resources as applied to ends.

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But by assuming away the problem, Marx bequeathed the puzzle to future generations, and Marxists

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have been split on the question.

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Will communism itself bring about this magical state of superabundance, or should we wait

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until capitalism brings superabundance before we establish communism?

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Generally, Marxist groups have solved this problem not in theory but in practice or praxis,

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by cleaving to whatever path would allow them either to conquer or to maintain their power.

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Thus, Marxist vanguards or parties on seeing an opportunity to seize power have been invariably

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willing to skip the stages of history preordained by their master and exercise their revolutionary

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will.

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On the other hand, Marxist elites, already entrenched in power, have prudentially put

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off the ultimate goal of Communism even further into a receding future.

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And so, the Soviets were quick to stress hard work and gradualism in persevering toward

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the ultimate goal.

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There are several other probable reasons for Marx's failure to detail the features

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History.

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It was the revolutionary end to Marx's neo-Hegelian version of alienation and of the dialectic

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process by which the Aufhebung, transcendence, and negation of one historical stage is replaced

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by another and opposing one.

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In this case, the negation of the evil condition of private property and the division of labor,

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and the Establishment of Communism in which man's unity with man and nature is achieved.

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To Marx, as to Hegel, history necessarily proceeds by this magical dialectic in which

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one stage gives rise inevitably to a later and opposing stage, except that to Marx the

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dialectic is material rather than spiritual.

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Marx never published his Neo-Hegelian Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in which

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the philosophic basis of Marxism was set forth, and one essay of which, Private Property and

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Communism, contained Marx's fullest exposition of the communist society.

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One reason for his refusal to publish was that in later decades Hegelian philosophy

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had gone out of fashion even in Germany, and Marx's followers were interested more in the

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economic and revolutionary aspects of Marxism.

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2.

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Raw Communism

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Another important reason for Marx's failure to publish was his candid depiction of the

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communist society in the essay Private Property and Communism.

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In addition to its being philosophic and not economic, he portrayed a horrifying but allegedly

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necessary stage of society immediately after the necessary violent world revolution of

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the proletariat, and before ultimate communism is to be finally achieved.

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Marx's post-revolutionary society, that of unthinking or raw communism, was not such

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Such as to spur the revolutionary energies of the Marxian faithful.

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For Marx took to heart two bitter critiques of communism that had become prominent in Europe.

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One was by the French mutualist anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who denounced communism

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as oppression and slavery, and to whom Marx explicitly referred in his essay.

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The other was a fascinating book by the conservative Hegelian monarchist Lorenz von Stein, 1815-1890,

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who had been assigned by the Prussian government in 1840 to study the unsettling new doctrines

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of socialism and communism becoming rampant in France.

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Not only did Marx show a minute textual familiarity with Stein's subsequent book of 1842, but

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And he actually based his concept of the proletariat as the foundation and the engine of the world

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revolution on Stein's insights into the new revolutionary doctrines as rationalizations

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of the class interests of the proletariat.

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Most remarkably, Marx admittedly agreed with Proudhon's and particularly Stein's portrayal

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Royal of the first stage of the post-revolutionary society, which he agreed with Stein to call

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raw communism.

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Stein forecast that raw communism would be an attempt to enforce egalitarianism by wildly

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and ferociously expropriating and destroying property, confiscating it and coercively communizing

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women as well as material wealth.

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Indeed, Marx's evaluation of raw communism, the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

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was even more negative than Stein's.

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In the same way as woman is to abandon marriage for general, that is, universal, prostitution,

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so the whole world of wealth, that is, the objective being of man, is to abandon the

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The Relation of Exclusive Marriage with the Private Property Owner for the Relation of

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General Prostitution with the Community.

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Not only that, but as Professor Tucker puts it, Marx concedes that raw communism is not

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the real transcendence of private property, but only the universalizing of it.

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Not the overcoming of greed, but only the generalizing of it.

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and not the abolition of labor but only its extension to all men, it is merely a new form

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in which the vileness of private property comes to the surface.

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In short, in the stage of communalization of private property, what Marx himself considers

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the worst features of private property will be maximized.

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Not only that, but Marx concedes the truth of the charge of anti-communists then and

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now that communism and communization is but the expression, in Marx's words, of envy

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and a desire to reduce all to a common level.

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Far from leading to a flowering of human personality, as Marx is supposed to claim, he admits that

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communism will negate it totally.

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This marks, in completely negating the personality of men, this type of communism is really nothing

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but the logical expression of private property.

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General envy, constituting itself as power, is the disguise in which greed re-establishes

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itself and satisfies itself only in another way.

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And the approach to woman as the spoil and handmade of communal lust is press the infinite

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degradation in which man exists for himself.

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All in all, Marx's portrayal of raw communism is very like the monstrous regimes imposed

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by the coercive Anabaptists of the 16th century.

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Professor Tucker adds, perhaps underlining the obvious, that these vivid indications

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from the Paris Manuscripts of the way in which Marx envisaged and evaluated the immediate

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post-revolutionary period, very probably explained the extreme reticence that he always later

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showed on this topic in his published writings.

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But if this communism is admittedly so monstrous, a regime of infinite degradation, why should

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turns out to be the post-revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, and not preceding capitalism,

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becomes transformed into total good.

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To say the least, Marx cannot and does not attempt to explain how a system of total greed

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becomes transformed into total greedlessness.

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He leaves it all to the wizardry of the dialectic, now a dialectic fatally shorn of the alleged

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Motor of the Class Struggle, which yet somehow transforms the monstrosity of raw communism

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into the paradise of communism's higher stage.