Barr blasts far left for making politics a 'secular religion,' calls Dems who excuse violence 'cowards'

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/barr-far-left-politics-religion-democrats-cowards

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Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist

https://mises.org/library/karl-marx-religious-eschatologist

But the nature of Marxism as religion cuts deeper than the follies and evasions of Marxists or the cryptic and often unintelligible nature of Marxian writings. For it is the contention of this article that the crucial goal —communism — is an atheized version of a certain type of religious eschatology; that the alleged inevitable process of getting there — the dialectic — is an atheistic form of the same religious laws of history; and that the supposedly central problem of capitalism as perceived by "humanist" Marxists, the problem of "alienation," is an atheistic version of the selfsame religion's metaphysical grievance at the entire created universe.

As far as I know, there is no commonly-agreed-upon name to designate this fatefully influential religion. One name is "process theology," but I shall rather call it "reabsorption theology," for the word "reabsorption" highlights the allegedly inevitable end point of human history as well as its supposed starting point in a precreation union with God.

As Leszek Kolakowski points out in his monumental work on Marxism, reabsorption theology begins with the 3rd-century Greek philosopher Plotinus, and moves from Plotinus to some of the Christian Platonists, where it takes its place as a Christian heresy. That heresy tends to bubble up repeatedly from beneath the surface in the works of such Christian mystics as the 19th-century philosopher John Scotus Erigena and the 14th-century Meister Johannes Eckhart.

The nature and profound implications of reabsorption theology may best be grasped by contrasting this heresy to Christian orthodoxy. We begin at the beginning — with creatology, the science or discipline of the first days. Why did God create the universe? The orthodox Christian answer is that God created the universe out of a benevolent and overflowing love for his creatures. Creation was therefore good and wondrous.

The fly in the ointment was introduced by man's disobedience to God's laws, for which sin he was cast out of Eden. Out of this Fall he can be redeemed by the Incarnation of God in human flesh and the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Note that the Fall was a moral one, and that creation itself remains metaphysically good. Note, too, that in orthodox Christianity, each human individual, made in the image of God, is of supreme importance, and each individual's salvation becomes of critical concern.

It is the contention of this article that the crucial goal — communism — is an atheized version of a certain type of religious eschatology.

Here are the origins of the magical Hegelian-Marxian "dialectic": one state of affairs somehow gives rise to a contrasting state. In the German language, Hegel, the master of the concept of the dialectic, used the crucial term aufhebung, a "lifting up," which is ambiguous enough to encompass this sudden shift into a very different state, this lifting up which is at one and the same time a preserving, a transcending, and a creating a stark contrast to, the original condition. The standard English translation for this process in Hegel and Marx is "negating," but such translation makes the theory even more absurd than it really is — probably "transcending" would be a better term.[10]

Thus, as usual, the dialectic consists of three stages. Stage One is the original state of the precreation cosmic blob, with man and God in happy and harmonious unity, but each rather undeveloped. Then, the magic dialectic does its work, Stage Two occurs, and God creates man and the universe. But then, finally, when the development of man and God is completed, Stage Two creates its own aufhebung, its transcendence into its opposite or negation: in short, Stage Three, the reunion of God and man in an "ecstasy of union," and the end of history.

>>10252719

The dialectical process by which one state of affairs gives rise to a very different state, if not its opposite, is, for the reabsorptionists, a mystical though inevitable development. There was no need for them to explain the mechanism. Indeed, particularly influential for Hegel and later reabsorptionist thinkers was one of the later Christian mystics in this tradition: the early 17th-century German cobbler Jakob Boehme. Pantheizing the dialectic, Boehme declared that it was not God's will but some primal force that launched the cosmic dialectic of creation and history.

"In orthodox Christianity, each human individual, made in the image of God, is of supreme importance, and each individual's salvation becomes of critical concern."

How, Boehme asked, did the world of precreation transcend itself into creation? Before creation, he answered, there was a primal source, an eternal unity, an undifferentiated, indistinct, literal Nothing [Ungrund]. Oddly enough, this Nothing possessed within itself an inner striving, a nisus, a drive for self-realization. That drive, Boehme asserted, gave rise to its opposite, the Will, the interaction of which with nisus transformed the Nothing into the Something of the created universe.[11]

Heavily influenced by Jakob Boehme was the mystical English communist, Gerrard Winstanley, founder of the Digger sect during the English Civil War. Son of a textile merchant who had failed in the cloth business and then had sunk to the status of agricultural laborer, Winstanley, in early 1649, had a mystical vision of the ideal communist world of the future. Originally, according to this vision, a version of God had created the universe; but the spirit of "selfishness," the Devil itself, had entered into man and brought about private property and a market economy.

The curse of the self, opined Winstanley, was "the beginner of particular interest," or private property, with men buying and selling and saying, "This is mine." The end of original communism and its breakup into private property meant that universal liberty was gone, and creation brought "under the curse of bondage, sorrow, and tears." In England, Winstanley absurdly held, property had been communist until the Norman Conquest of 1066, which created the institution of private property.[12]

But soon, declared Winstanley, universal "love" would eliminate private property, and would thus restore the earth to "a common property as it was in the beginning … making the earth one storehouse, and every man and woman to live … as members of one household." This communism and absolute equality of possessions would thus bring to the world the millennium, "a new heaven, and a new earth."[13]

At first, Winstanley believed that little or no coercion would be necessary for establishing and maintaining his communist society. Soon, however, he realized, in the completed draft of his utopia, that all wage labor and all commerce would have to be prohibited on the penalty of death. Winstanley was quite willing to go this far with his program. Everyone was to contribute to, and take from, the common storehouse, and the death penalty was to be levied on all use of money, and on any buying or selling. The "sin" of idleness would of course be combated by forced labor for the benefit of the communist community.

This all-encompassing stress on the executioner makes particularly grisly the declaration of Winstanley that "all punishments that are to be inflicted … are only such as to make the offender … to live in the community of the righteous law of love one with another." Education in "love" was to be insured by free and compulsory schooling conducted by the state, mainly in useful crafts rather than in liberal arts, as well as by "ministers" elected by the public to preach secular sermons upholding the new system.

>>10252742

Hegel as Pantheist Reabsorptionist

Everyone knows that Marx was essentially a Hegelian in philosophy, but the precise scope of Hegel's influence on Marx is less well understood. Hegel's dubious accomplishment was to completely pantheize reabsorption theology. It is little realized that Hegel was only one, although the most elaborate and hypertrophic, of a host of writers who constituted the highly influential Romantic movement in Germany and England at the end of the 18th and during the first half of the 19th centuries.[15]

Hegel was a theology student at the University of Tübingen, and many of his fellow Romantics, friends and colleagues, such as Schelling, Schiller, Holderlin, and Fichte, began as theology students, many of them at Tübingen.[16]

The Romantic twist to the reabsorption story was to proclaim that God is in reality man. Man, or rather the Man-God, created the universe. But man's imperfection, his flaw, lay in his failure to realize that he is God. The Man-God begins his life in history unconscious of the vital fact that he is God. He is alienated, cut off from the crucial knowledge that he and God are one, that he created, and continues to empower, the universe.

History, then, is the inevitable process by which the Man-God develops his faculties, fulfills his potential, and advances his knowledge, until that blissful day when man acquires Absolute Knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is God. At that point, the Man-God finally reaches his potential, becomes an infinite being without bounds, and thereby puts an end to history. The dialectic of history occurs, again, in three fundamental stages: the precreation stage; the postcreation stage of development with alienation; and the final reabsorption into the state of infinity and absolute self-knowledge, which culminates, and puts an end to, the historical process.

Why, then, did Hegel's Man-God (also termed by Hegel the "world-self" or "world-spirit" [Weltgeist]) create the universe? Not out of benevolence, but out of a felt need to become conscious of itself as a world-self. This process of growing consciousness is achieved through the creative activity by which the world-self externalizes itself. First, this externalization occurs by the Man-God creating nature, and next, by a continuing self-externalization through human history.

By building civilization, man increases the knowledge of his own divinity; in that way, through history man gradually puts an end to his own "self-alienation," which for Hegel was ipso facto the alienation of man from God. Crucial to Hegelian doctrine is that man is alienated, and he perceives the world as hostile, because it is not himself. All these conflicts are finally resolved when man realizes at long last that the world really is himself.

>>10252749

But why is Hegel's man so odd and neurotic that he regards everything that is not himself as alien and hostile? The answer is central to the Hegelian mystique. It is because Hegel, or Hegel's man, cannot stand the idea of himself not being God, and therefore not being of infinite space and without boundary or limit. Seeing any other being or any other object exist would imply that he himself is not infinite or divine. In short, Hegel's philosophy constitutes solipsistic megalomania on a grand and cosmic scale. Professor Robert C. Tucker describes the situation with characteristic acuity:

For Hegel alienation is finitude, and finitude in turn is bondage. The experience of self-estrangement in the presence of an apparent objective world is an experience of enslavement.… Spirit, when confronted with an object or "other," is ipso facto aware of itself as merely finite being … as extending only so far and no farther. The object is, therefore, a "limit" (Grenze). And a limit, since it contradicts spirit's notion of itself as absolute being, i.e., being-without-limit, is necessarily apprehended as a "barrier" or "fetter" (Schranke).… In its confrontation with an apparent object, spirit feels imprisoned in limitation. It experiences what Hegel calls the "sorrow of finitude." …

In Hegel's quite unique conception of it, freedom means the consciousness of self as unbounded; it is the absence of a limiting object or non-self.…

Accordingly, the growth of spirit's self-knowledge in history is alternatively describable as a progress of the consciousness of freedom.[17]

Hegel's dialectic of history did not simply have three stages; history moved forward in a series of stages, each one of which was moved forward dramatically by a process of aufhebung. It is evident that the "man" who creates the world, who advances his "self"-knowledge, and who finally "returns" "Home" in an ecstasy of self-knowledge is not puny individual man, but man as collective species. But, for Hegel, each stage of advance is propelled by great individuals, "world-historical" men, who embody the attributes of the Absolute more than others, and act as significant agents of the next aufhebung, the lifting up of the Man-God or "world-soul's" next great advance into "self-knowledge."

Thus, at a time when most patriotic Prussians were reacting violently against Napoleon's imperial conquests, and mobilizing their forces against him, Hegel wrote to a friend in ecstasy about having seen Napoleon, "the Emperor — this world-soul," riding down the street; for Napoleon, even if unconsciously, was pursuing the world-historical mission of bringing a strong Prussian State into being.

>>10252765

It is interesting that Hegel got his idea of the "cunning of Reason," of great individuals acting as unconscious agents of the world-soul through history, by perusing the works of the Rev. Adam Ferguson, whose phrase about events being "the product of human action but not of human design," has been so influential in the thought of F. A. Hayek and his disciples.[19] In the economic realm, as well, Hegel learned of the alleged misery of alienation in separation — that is, specialization and the division of labor — from Ferguson himself through Friedrich Schiller and from Ferguson's good friend, Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations.[20]

It is easy to see how the reabsorptionist-Hegelian doctrine of unity-good, separation-bad helped form the Marxian goal of communism, the end state of history in which the individual is totally absorbed into the collective, thus attaining the state of true collective-man "freedom." But there are also more particular influences. Thus, the Marxian idea of early or primitive communism, happy and integrated though undeveloped, and then burst apart by rapacious, alienating if developing capitalism, was prefigured by Hegel's historical outlook.

Following his friend and mentor the Romantic writer Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, in an article written in 1795, lauded the alleged homogeneity, harmony, and unity of ancient Greece, supposedly free of the alienating division of labor. The consequent aufhebung, though leading to the growth of commerce, living standards, and individualism, also destroyed the wonderful unity of Greece, and radically fragmented man. To Hegel, the next inevitable stage of history would reintegrate man and the State.

"In short, Hegel's philosophy constitutes solipsistic megalomania on a grand and cosmic scale."

The State was critical for Hegel. Again foreshadowing Marx, it is now particularly important for man — the collective organism — to surmount unconscious, blind fate, and "consciously" take control of it by means of the State.

Hegel was quite insistent that, in order for the State to fulfill its vital function it must be guided by a comprehensive philosophy, and indeed by a Great Philosopher, to give its mighty rule the necessary coherence. Otherwise, as Professor Plant explains, "such a state, devoid of philosophical comprehension, would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition of the freedom of individuals." But, on the contrary, if armed with Hegelian philosophy and with Hegel himself as its great leader, "this alien aspect of the progressive modern state would disappear and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness."[21]

Armed, then, with such a philosophy and such a philosopher, the modern, especially the modern Prussian, State could take its divinely appointed stand at the apex of human history and civilization, as God on earth. Thus, "The modern State … when comprehended philosophically, could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit, or God in the contemporary world." The State, then, is "a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world"; "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth"; "The State is the march of God through the world"; "The State is the actually existing, realized moral life"; the "State is the reality of the kingdom of heaven." And finally, "The State is God's Will."

>>10252771

For Hegel, of all the various forms of State, monarchy — as in contemporary Prussia — is best, since it permits all its subjects to be "free" (in the Hegelian sense) by submerging their being into the divine substance, which is the authoritarian, monarchial State. The people are only "free" as insignificant particles of this divine substance. As Tucker writes,

Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the word. The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being, or in Hegel's own words must elevate itself to a "self-comprehending totality," in order to achieve the consciousness of freedom.[23]

-end-

Communism as the Kingdom of God on Earth: From Joachim to Müntzer

So far we have dealt with reabsorption theology as a crucial forerunner of Marx's religious, eschatological communism. But there is another important strand sometimes woven in with the first, fused into his eschatological vision: messianic millennialism, or chiliasm, the establishing of a communist Kingdom of God on Earth.

Throughout its history, Christianity has had to confront the question of the millennium: the thousand-year reign of God on earth. Particularly in such murky parts of the Bible as the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, there are suggestions of such a millennial Kingdom of God on Earth before the final Day of Judgment and the end of human history.

The orthodox Christian line was set by the great Saint Augustine in the early 5th century, and has been accepted ever since by the mainstream Christian churches: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and arguably by Calvin and at least by the Dutch wing of the Calvinist church. That orthodox line holds that the millennial Kingdom of God on Earth [KGE] is strictly a metaphor for the Christian Church, which reigns on earth only in the spiritual sense. The material realization of the Kingdom of God will only arrive upon the Day of Judgment and is therefore to be confined to heaven alone.

Orthodox Christians have always warned that taking the KGE literally, what the late orthodox-Christian theorist Erich Voegelin called "immanentizing the eschaton" — bringing the eschaton down to earth — is bound to create grave social problems.

For one thing, most versions of how the KGE will come into being are apocalyptic. The KGE is to be preceded by a mighty Armageddon, a titanic war of good against evil, in which the good will finally, though inevitably, triumph.

"With no money to purchase any good, the population became slavishly dependent on handouts or rations from the power elite."

One reason for the apocalypse is a fundamental problem faced by all KGE theorists. The KGE, by definition, will consist of a society of saints, of perfect people. But if this is true, what has become of the host of human sinners, of whom alas there are legion? In order to establish the KGE there must first be some sort of mighty apocalyptic purge of the sinners to clear the ground for the society of saints.

"Premillennial" and "postmillennial" variants of apocalyptics accomplish this task in different ways. The pre-mils, who believe that Jesus's Second Advent will precede the KGE, and that Jesus will run the Kingdom with the cadre of saints at his right hand, achieve the purge by a divinely determined Armageddon between God's forces and the forces of the Beast and the Antichrist. The post-mils, who believe that man must establish the KGE as a precondition of Jesus's Second Coming, have to take matters more directly in their own hands and accomplish the great purge on their own.

https://mises.org/library/karl-marx-religious-eschatologist

>>10252788

Thus, one disturbing aspect of the KGE is the preparatory purgation of the host of human sinners. A second problem is what the KGE is going to look like. As we might imagine, KGE theorists have been extremely cloudy about the nature of their perfect society, but one troublesome feature is that, to the extent that we know its operations at all, the KGE is almost always depicted as a communist society, lacking work, private property, or the division of labor. In short, something like the Marxian communist utopia, except run by a cadre, not of the vanguard of the proletariat, but of theocratic saints.

Any communist system faces the problem of production: who would have the incentive to produce for the communal storehouse, and how would this work and its products be allocated? The first, and most highly influential, communist Christian heretic was the late 12th-century Calabrian abbot and hermit, Joachim of Fiore.

Joachim, who almost managed to convert three popes to his heresy, adopted the thesis that there are destined to be in history, not just two Ages (pre- and post-Christian) as orthodox Christians believe, but a Third Age aborning, of which he was the prophet. The pre-Christian era was the age of the Father, of the Old Testament; the Christian era the age of the Son, the New Testament. And now arrives the third apocalyptic age of the Holy Spirit, to be ushered in during the next half-century, an age of pure love and freedom, in which history was to come to an end. The Church, the Bible, and the State would be swept away, and man would live in a free, communist community without work or property.

Joachim dispensed with the problem of production and allocation under communism very neatly and effectively, more so than any communist successor. In the Third Age, he declared, man's material body will disappear, and man will be pure spirit, free to spend all of his days in mystical ecstasy chanting praises to God for a thousand years until the Day of Judgment. Without physical bodies, there is of course precious little need for production.[27]

For Joachim, the path to this kingdom of pure spirit would be blazed by a new order of highly spiritual monks, from whom would come 12 patriarchs headed by a supreme teacher, who would convert the Jews to Christianity as foretold in the book of Revelation. For a blazing three and a half years a secular king, the Antichrist, would crush and destroy the corrupt Christian Church, after which the Antichrist would be overthrown by the new monastic order, who would promptly establish the millennial age of the Spirit. It is no wonder that a rigorist wing of the Franciscan order, which was to emerge during the first half of the 13th century, and be dedicated to material poverty, should see themselves as the coming Joachimite cadre.

At the same period, the Amaurians, led by a group of theology students of Amalric at the University of Paris, carried on the Joachimite doctrine of the three Ages, and added an interesting twist: each age, they declared, has enjoyed its own Incarnation. In the age of the Old Testament, the divine Incarnation settled in Abraham and perhaps some other patriarchs; for the New Testament age, the Incarnation was of course Jesus; and now, for the dawning Age of the Holy Spirit, the Incarnation would emerge among the various human beings themselves.

As might be expected, the Amaurian cadre proclaimed themselves to be living gods, the Incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Not that they would always remain a divine elite, among men; on the contrary, they were destined to be the vanguard, leading mankind to its universal Incarnation.

>>10252797

During the following century, a congeries of groups throughout northern Europe known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit added another important ingredient to this brew: the mystical dialectic of the "reabsorption into God." But the brethren added their own elitist twist: while the reabsorption of all men must await the end of history, and the mass of the "crude in spirit" must meanwhile meet their individual deaths, there was a glorious minority, the "subtle in spirit," who could and did become reabsorbed and therefore living gods during their lifetime.

This minority, of course, was the cadre of the Brethren themselves, who, by virtue of years of training, self-torture, and visions had become perfect gods, more perfect and more godlike than even Christ himself. Furthermore, once this stage of mystical union was reached, it was to be permanent and eternal. These new gods, in fact, often proclaimed themselves greater than God himself.

Being living gods on earth brought a lot of good things in its wake. In the first place, it led directly to an extreme form of the antinomian heresy; that is, if people are gods, then it is impossible for them to sin. Whatever they did is necessarily moral and perfect. This means that any act ordinarily considered to be sin, from adultery to murder, became perfectly legitimate when performed by the living gods. Indeed, the Free Spirits, like other antinomians, were tempted to demonstrate and flaunt their freedom from sin by performing all manner of sins imaginable.

But there was also a catch. Among the Free Spirit cultists, only a minority of leading adepts were "living gods." For the rank-and-file cultists, striving to become gods, there was one sin and one alone which they must not commit: disobedience to their master.

Each disciple was bound by an oath of absolute obedience to a particular living god. Take, for example, Nicholas of Basle, a leading Free Spirit, whose cult stretched most of the length of the Rhine. Claiming to be the new Christ, Nicholas held that everyone's sole path to salvation consisted of making an act of absolute and total submission to Nicholas himself. In return for this total fealty, Nicholas granted his followers freedom from all sin.

As for the rest of mankind outside the cults, they were simply unredeemed and unregenerate beings who existed only to be used and exploited by the Elect. This gospel of total rule went hand in hand with the social doctrine of many of the 14th-century cults of the Free Spirit: a communistic assault on the institution of private property. In a sense, however, this philosophic communism was merely a thinly camouflaged cover for the Free Spirits' self-proclaimed right to commit theft at will. The Free Spirit adept, in short, regarded all property of the non-Elect as rightfully his own.

The Bishop of Strasbourg summed up this creed in 1817: "They believe that all things are common, whence they conclude that theft is lawful for them." Or as the Free Spirit adept from Erfurt, Johann Hartmann, put it, "The truly free man is king and lord of all creatures. All things belong to him, and he has the right to use whatever pleases him. If anyone tries to prevent him, the free man may kill him and take his goods."[28] As one of the favorite sayings of the Brethren of the Free Spirit phrased it, "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it."

Karl Marx: Apocalyptic Reabsorptionist Communist

Karl Marx was born in Trier, a venerable city in Rhineland Prussia, in 1818, son of a distinguished jurist, and grandson of a rabbi. Indeed, both of Marx's parents were descended from rabbis. Marx's father Heinrich was a liberal rationalist who felt no great qualms about his forced conversion to official Lutheranism in 1816. What is little known is that, in his early years, the baptized Karl was a dedicated Christian.43

In his graduation essays from Trier gymnasium in 1835, the very young Marx prefigured his later development. His essay on an assigned topic, "On the Union of the Faithful with Christ" was orthodox evangelical Christian, but it also contained hints of the fundamental "alienation" theme that he would later find in Hegel. Marx's discussion of the "necessity for union" with Christ stressed that this union would put an end to the tragedy of God's alleged rejection of man. In a companion essay on "Reflections of A Young Man on the Choice of a Profession," Marx expressed a worry about his own "demon of ambition," of the great temptation he felt to "inveigh against the Deity and curse mankind."

Going first to the University of Bonn and then off to the prestigious new University of Berlin to study law, Marx soon converted to militant atheism, shifted his major to philosophy, and joined a Doktorklub of Young (or Left) Hegelianism, of which he soon became a leader and general secretary.

The shift to atheism quickly gave Marx's demon of ambition full rein. Particularly revelatory of Marx's adult as well as youthful character are volumes of poems, most of them lost until a few were recovered in recent years.44 Historians, when they discuss these poems, tend to dismiss them as inchoate Romantic yearnings, but they are too congruent with the adult Marx's social and revolutionary doctrines to be casually dismissed.

Surely, here seems to be a case where a unified (early-plus-late) Marx is vividly revealed. Thus, in his poem "Feelings," dedicated to his childhood sweetheart and later wife, Jenny von Westphalen, Marx expressed both his megalomania and his enormous thirst for destruction:

Heaven I would comprehend

I would draw the world to me;

Loving, hating, I intend

That my star shine brilliantly

and

Worlds I would destroy forever,

Since I can create no world;

Since my call they notice never

Here, of course, is a classic expression of Satan's supposed reason for hating, and rebelling against, God.

In another poem Marx writes of his triumph after he shall have destroyed God's created world:

Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,

Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.

Every word of mine is fire and action.

My breast is equal to that of the Creator.

And in his poem "Invocation of One in Despair," Marx writes,

I shall build my throne high overhead,

Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.

For its bulwark — superstitious dread.

For its marshal — blackest agony.45

The Satan theme is most explicitly set forth in Marx's "The Fiddler," dedicated to his father.

See this sword?

The prince of darkness

Sold it to me.

and

With Satan I have struck my deal,

He chalks the signs, beats time for me

I play the death march fast and free.

Particularly instructive is Marx's lengthy unfinished poetic drama of this youthful period, Oulanem, A Tragedy. In the course of this drama his hero, Oulanem, delivers a remarkable soliloquy, pouring out sustained invective, a deep hatred of the world and of mankind, a hatred of creation, and a threat and a vision of total world destruction.

Thus Oulanem pours out his vials of wrath:

I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind.

Ha! Eternity! She is an eternal grief.

Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,

Made to be foul-calendars of Time and Space,

Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,

So that there shall be something to ruin

If there is a Something which devours,

I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins —

The world which bulks between me and the Abyss

I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.

I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality:

Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,

And then sink down to utter nothingness,

Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!

And

…the leaden world holds us fast

And we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened,

Eternally chained to this marble block of Being,

… and we — We are the apes of a cold God.46

All this reveals a spirit that often seems to animate militant atheism. In contrast to the nonmilitant variety, which expresses a simple disbelief in God's existence, militant atheism seems to believe implicitly in God's existence, but to hate Him and to wage war for His destruction.

https://mises.org/library/karl-marx-religious-eschatologist

>>10252834

Such a spirit was all too clearly revealed in the retort of militant atheist and anarchocommunist Bakunin to the famous protheist remark of Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." The demented Bakunin retorted, "If God did exist, it would be necessary to destroy Him." It was this hatred of God as a creator greater than himself that apparently animated Karl Marx.

When Marx came to the University of Berlin, the heart of Hegelianism, he found that doctrine regnant but in a certain amount of disarray. Hegel had died in 1831; the Great Philosopher was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead, and history continued to march on. So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either. But if he was not, then mightn't the dialectic of history be getting ready for yet another twist, another aufhebung?

So reasoned groups of radical youth who, during the late 1830s and 1840s in Germany and elsewhere, formed the movement of the Young, or Left, Hegelians Disillusioned in the Prussian State. The Young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming apocalyptic revolution that would destroy and transcend that State, a revolution that would really bring about the end of history in the form of national, or world, communism. After Hegel, there was one more twist of the dialectic to go.

One of the first and most influential of the Left Hegelians was a Polish aristocrat, Count August Cieszkowski, who wrote in German and published in 1838 his Prolegomena to a Historiosophy. Cieszkowski brought to Hegelianism a new dialectic of history, a new variant of the three ages of man.

The first age, the age of antiquity, was, for some reason, the Age of Emotion, the epoch of pure feeling, of no reflective thought, of elemental immediacy and hence unity with nature. The "spirit" was "in itself" (an sich). The second age, the Christian Era, stretching from the birth of Jesus to the death of the great Hegel, was the Age of Thought, of reflection, in which the "spirit" moved "toward itself," in the direction of abstraction and universality. But Christianity, the Age of Thought, was also an era of intolerable duality, of alienation, of man separated from God, of spirit separated from matter, and thought from action.

Finally, the third and culminating age, the Age aborning, heralded (of course?) by Count Cieszkowski, was to be the Age of Action. The third post-Hegelian age would be an age of practical action, in which the thought of both Christianity and of Hegel would be transcended and embodied into an act of will, a final revolution to overthrow and transcend existing institutions.

>>10252841

Count Cieszkowski, however, was not destined to ride the wave of the future of revolutionary socialism. For he took the Christian messianic, rather than the atheistic, path to the new society. In his massive, unfinished work of 1848, Our Father (Ojcze nasz), Cieszkowski maintained that the new age of revolutionary communism would be a Third Age, an Age of the Holy Spirit (shades of Joachimism!), an era that would be the Kingdom of God on earth "as it is in heaven." This final Kingdom of God on earth would reintegrate all of "organic humanity," and would be governed by a Central Government of All Mankind, headed by a Universal Council of the People.

At that time, it was by no means clear which strand of revolutionary communism, the religious or the atheist, would ultimately win out. Thus, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, a founder of the Russian revolutionary tradition, was entranced by Cieszkowski's brand of Left Hegelianism, writing that "the future society is to be the work not of the heart, but of the concrete. Hegel is the new Christ bringing the word of truth to men."48 And soon, Bruno Bauer, friend and mentor of Karl Marx and leader of the Doktorklub of Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, hailed Cieszkowski's new philosophy of action in late 1841 as "The Trumpet Call of the Last Judgment."

But the winning strand in the European socialist movement, as we have indicated, was eventually to be Karl Marx's atheism. If Hegel pantheized and elaborated the dialectic of the Christian messianics, Marx now "stood Hegel on his head" by atheizing the dialectic, and resting it not on mysticism or religion or "spirit" or the Absolute Idea or the World-Mind, but on the supposedly solid and "scientific" foundation of philosophical materialism.

Marx adopted his materialism from the Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly from his work The Essence of Christianity (1843). In contrast to the Hegelian emphasis on "spirit," Marx would study the allegedly scientific laws of matter in some way operating through history. Marx, in short, took the dialectic and made it into a "materialist dialectic of history."

By recasting the dialectic onto materialist and atheist terms, however, Marx gave up the powerful motor of the dialectic as it supposedly operated through history: either Christian messianism or Providence or the growing self-consciousness of the world-spirit. How could Marx find a "scientific," materialist replacement, newly grounded in the ineluctable "laws of history," that would explain the historical process thus far, and also — and most importantly — explain the inevitability of the imminent apocalyptic transformation of the world into communism?

"It was this hatred of God as a creator greater than himself that apparently animated Karl Marx."

It is one thing to base the prediction of a forthcoming Armageddon on the Bible; it is quite another to deduce this event from allegedly scientific law. Setting forth the specifics of this engine of history was to occupy Karl Marx for the rest of his life.

>>10252865

Although Marx found Feuerbach indispensable for adopting a thoroughgoing atheist and materialist position, Marx soon found that Feuerbach had not gone nearly far enough. Even though Feuerbach was a philosophical communist, he basically believed that if man foreswore religion, then man's alienation from his self would be over.

To Marx, religion was only one of the problems. The entire world of man (the Menschenwelt) was alienating, and had to be radically overthrown, root and branch. Only apocalyptic destruction of this world of man would permit true human nature to be realized. Only then would the existing un-man (Unmensch) truly become man (Mensch). As Marx thundered in the fourth of his "theses on Feuerbach," "One must proceed to destroy the 'earthly family' as it is both 'in theory and in practice.'"49

In particular, declared Marx, true man, as Feuerbach had argued, is a "communal being" (Gemeinwesen) or "species being" (Gattungswesen). Although the State as it exists must be negated or transcended, man's participation in the State comes as such a communal being.

The major problem comes in the private sphere, the market, or "civil society," in which un-man acts as an egoist, as a private person, treating others as means, and not collectively as masters of their fate. And in existing society, unfortunately, civil society is primary, while the State, or "political community," is secondary. What must be done to realize the full nature of mankind is to transcend the State and civil society by politicizing all of life, by making all of man's actions "collective." Then real individual man will become a true and full species being.50

But only a revolution, an orgy of destruction, can accomplish such a task. And here, Marx harkened back to the call for total destruction that had animated his vision of the world in the poems of his youth. Indeed, in a speech in London in 1856, Marx gave graphic and loving expression to this goal of his "praxis." He mentioned that in Germany in the Middle Ages there existed a secret tribunal called the Vehmgericht. He then explained:

If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the Vehm. All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross. History is the judge — its executioner the proletarian.

>>10252878

Marx, in fact, was not satisfied with the philosophical communism to which he and Engels had separately been converted by the slightly older Left Hegelian Moses Hess in the early 1840s. To Hess's communism, Marx, by the end of 1843, added the crucial emphasis on the proletariat, not simply as an economic class, but as destined to become the "universal class" when communism was achieved.

Ironically, Marx acquired his vision of the proletariat as the key to the communist revolution from an influential book published in 1842 by a youthful enemy of socialism, Lorenz von Stein. Stein interpreted the socialist and communist movements of the day as rationalizations of the class interests of the propertyless proletariat. Marx discovered in Stein's attack the "scientific" engine for the inevitable coming of the communist revolution.52 The proletariat, the most "alienated" and allegedly "propertyless" class, would be the key.

We have been accustomed, ever since Stalin's alterations of Marx, to regard "socialism" as the "first stage" of a communist-run society, and "communism" as the ultimate stage. This is not the way Marx saw the development of his system. Marx, as well as all the other communists of his day, used "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably to describe their ideal society. Instead, Marx foresaw the dialectic operating mysteriously to bring about the first stage, of "raw" or "crude" communism, to be magically transformed by the workings of the dialectic into the "higher" stage of communism.

It is remarkable that Marx, especially in his "Private Property and Communism," accepted the horrendous picture that von Stein drew of the "raw" stage of communism. Stein forecast that communism would 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 [i.e., universal] prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is, the objective being of man, is to abandon the relation of exclusive marriage with the private property owner for the relation of general prostitution with the community.

>>10252906

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, and not the abolition of labour 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 anticommunists 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 that personality totally. Thus Marx wrote,

In completely negating the personality of man, this type of communism is really nothing but the logical expression of private property. General envy, constituting itself as a power, is the disguise in which greed reestablishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way.… In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself.

>>10252924

Marx clearly did not stress this dark side of communist revolution in his later writings. Professor Tucker explains that "these vivid indications from the Paris manuscripts of the way in which Marx envisaged and evaluated the immediate postrevolutionary period very probably explain the extreme reticence that he always later showed on this topic in his published writings."54

But if this communism is admittedly so monstrous, a regime of "infinite degradation," why should anyone favor it, much less dedicate one's life and fight a bloody revolution to establish it? Here, as so often in Marx's thought and writings, he falls back on the mystique of the "dialectic" — that wondrous magic wand by which one social system inevitably gives rise to its victorious transcendence and negation; and, in this case, by which total evil — which turns out, interestingly enough, to be the postrevolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and not previous capitalism — becomes transformed into total good, a never-never land absent the division of labor and all other forms of alienation.

"Stein forecast that communism would 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 was even more negative than Stein's."

The curious point is that while Marx attempts to explain the dialectic movement from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to the first stage of communism in terms of class struggle and the material productive forces, both of these drop out once raw communism is achieved. The allegedly inevitable transformation from the hell of raw communism to the alleged heaven of higher communism is left totally unexplained; to rely on that crucial transformation, we must fall back on pure faith in the mystique of the dialectic.

Despite Marx's claim to be a "scientific socialist," scorning all other Socialists whom he dismissed as moralistic and "utopian," it should be clear that Marx himself was even more in the messianic utopian tradition than were the competing "utopians." For Marx not only sought a desired future society that would put an end to history, he claimed to have found the path toward that utopia inevitably determined by the "laws of history."

But a utopian, and a fierce one, Marx certainly was. A hallmark of every utopia is a militant desire to put an end to history, to freeze mankind in a static state, to put an end to diversity and man's free will, and to order everyone's life in accordance with the utopian's totalitarian plan. Many early communists and socialists set forth their fixed utopias in great and absurd detail, determining the size of everyone's living quarters, the food they would eat, etc. Marx was not silly enough to do that, but his entire system, as Professor Thomas Molnar points out, is "the search of the utopian mind for the definitive stabilization of mankind or, in gnostic terms, its reabsorption into the timeless."

>>10252953

For Marx, his quest for utopia was, as we have seen, an explicit attack on God's creation, and a ferocious desire to destroy it. The idea of crushing the many, the diverse facets of creation, and of returning to an allegedly lost unity with God began, as we have seen, with Plotinus. As Molnar summed up,

In this view, existence itself is [a] wound on nonbeing. Philosophers from Plotinus to Fichte and beyond have held that the reabsorption of the polichrome universe in the eternal One would be preferable to creation. Short of this solution, they propose to arrange a world in which change is brought under control so as to put an end to a disturbingly free will and to society's uncharted moves. They aspire to return from the linear Hebrew-Christian concept to the Greco-Hindu cycle — that is, to a changeless, timeless permanence.

The triumph of unity over diversity means that, for the utopians, including Marx, "civil society, with its disturbing diversity, can be abolished."55

Substituting in Marx for God's will or the Hegelian dialectic of the world-spirit or the Absolute Idea, is monist materialism; its central assumption, as Molnar puts it, being "that the universe consists of matter plus some sort of one-dimensional law immanent in matter." In that case, "man himself is reduced to a complex but manipulable material aggregate, living in the company of other aggregates, and forming increasingly complex super aggregates called societies, political bodies, churches." The alleged laws of history, then, are derived by scientific Marxists as supposedly evident and immanent within this matter itself.

The Marxian process toward utopia, then, is man acquiring insights into his own true nature, and then rearranging the world to accord with that nature. Engels, in fact, explicitly proclaimed the Hegelian concepts of the Man-God:

Hitherto the question has always stood: What is God? — and German Hegelian philosophy has resolved it as follows: God is man.… Man must now arrange the world in a truly human way, according to the demands of his nature.56

But this process is rife with self-contradictions; for example, and centrally, how can mere matter gain insights into his [its?] nature? As Molnar puts it, "for how can matter gather insights? And if it has insights, it is not entirely matter, but matter plus."

In this allegedly inevitable process of arriving at the proletarian communist utopia after the proletarian class becomes conscious of its true nature, what is supposed to be Karl Marx's own role? In Hegelian theory, Hegel himself is the final and greatest world-historical figure, the Man-God of man-gods. Similarly, Marx in his own view stands at a focal point of history as the man who brought to the world the crucial knowledge of man's true nature and of the laws of history, thereby serving as the "midwife" of the process that would put an end to history. Thus Molnar wrote,

Like other utopian and gnostic writers, Marx is much less interested in the stages of history up to the present (the egotistic now of all utopian writers) than the final stages when the stuff of time becomes more concentrated, when the drama approaches its denouement. In fact, the utopian writer conceives of history as a process leading to himself since he, the ultimate comprehensor, stands in the center of history. It is natural that things accelerate during his own lifetime and come to a watershed: he looms large between the Before and the After.

>>10252994

Thus, in common with other utopian socialists and communists, Marx sought in communism the apotheosis of the collective species — mankind as one new superbeing, in which the only meaning possessed by the individual is as a negligible particle of that collective organism. Many of Marx's numerous epigones carried out his quest.

One incisive portrayal of Marxian collective organicism — what amounts to a celebration 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. Bogdanov, too, spoke of "three ages" of human history. 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 the "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. 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 — 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.

>>10252812

>Panic

Over the target