make no mistake, at no point does the following post
consist of any original research or insights…the points I am making
has been commented upon for at least a hundred years…
many times the right has accused the left of participating in
a or creating a religion……. the right is always accusing
the left of turning science or evolution into a religion…
not true, but the truth is not the strong point of the right…
but one cannot deny the strong relationship between Marxism
and Christianity… they share so many aspects as to be very interesting…
for example, the Christian ideal of Eschatology, end of times,
where god establishes his thousand years of peace and prosperity…
and when the Marxist classless society becomes established, we shall
see an endless time of peace and prosperity…
Marx tries to play the role of Jesus… myth making, predictions,
prophet, prophesies…
in Marxism, you had the “true” believers who were those who were to
lead others to the promised land of the classless society…
and you had to have true faith in “dialectical materialism”…
that political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces
and are interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions.
this conflict is believed to be caused by material needs…
this all consuming faith in the necessity of “dialectical materialism”
within history and human beings, lead one to be able to sacrifice people
to its whims because “dialectical materialism” was the silent hand of
history driving towards it inevitable ends…that of a classless society…
and thus human beings are sacrificed to historical inevitability of
the “dialectical materialism”… this nihilism is no different then
the Capitalistic nihilism of the invisible hand of god driving the forces
of profits and no different then the Catholicism or any other religion in which
human beings are sacrificed to the necessity of god’s work toward the end of times…
there is always some sort of plan that lies outside of the human ability to
understand and comprehend…….which drove human actions and acted upon
human actions and behavior………
reading the history of Marxism and the following communism societies that
followed, one is amazed with the number of times the charge of Heresy is
leveled against various people within the Marxist world…at one time or
another, every single person in the Marxist world is charged, rightly or wrongly,
with heresy to the “official” Marxist position and that includes Marx being charged
with heresy at times…
the one thing that needs to be understood is the fact that in Marx’s own time,
he was engaged with a very small number of people…his groups never numbered
more then a couple of thousand people………he was the leader of a very small
and unimportant group of people… just like Jesus and he felt he was preaching
the “true” gospel, just like Jesus… he had his disciples that never reached
much more then the number of disciples that Jesus had…
Personally, Marx had a authoritarian personality and he clashed with
just about everybody in his circle including Engels…
Marx was completely and absolutely convinced that he and he alone
held the truth to history and how history has unfolded and will unfold…
and if you disagreed, you were disagreeing with the holder of the truth,
nothing less then Jesus…….
it may sound like a rather odd thing to say, but we need a secular
Marxism… a Marxism that is detached from it religious context…
where there is no final eschatology of Marxism like the forever classless
society…and where we remove Marxism from its authoritarian beginnings….
where we really have Marxism become the so called “scientific” theory it
claimed for itself… when one tries to deviate from the established “Marxist”
theory, they are called “Heretics” and in that is different then established
science, where different theories are compared to the current theories
and seen if they fit into the established theories…for example,
when Gould and Eldredge suggested the “punctuated equilibrium” theory
of evolution…it wasn’t rejected out of hand as being “heresy” against
the accepted theory of evolution, it was studied to see how it worked with
the established theories of evolution……
so, when one proclaims a political theory to be wrong, it is quite common
to proclaim the new theory as wrong and Heresy… but scientific theories
are quite different from political or philosophical or cultural theories…
we should be able to test new scientific theories whereas we quite often
can’t test political, philosophical or cultural theories…
so if Marxism is a “scientific” theory, it should be testable in some fashion
but a simple look into history and the various “predictions” of Marxism
leads us to the simple fact that Marxism is a terrible way to predict the
future…thus it is very, very limited in the way we might call Marxism
a “scientific theory” as Marx thought of it…
but as a religion, Marxism does fulfill the criteria of a religion…
Marxism has its official “texts” like the bible and Marxism has its
official prophets and it official belief system, “dialectical materialism”
and it has its own eschatology …. it is enough for me to declare Marxism
as an religion…
so, to save Marxism from itself, we must disengage official Marxism from
its status as religion…we must engage with Marxism as a secular
theory of history and how people engage with or interact with each other…
if we narrow the theme of Marxism to being about what it means to be
human, Marxism can be a useful tool for us to engage with what it
means to be human and the existential question, “What are we to do?”
and Marxism may give us an answer to that existential question…
Kropotkin