=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.

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.

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.

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

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Karl Marx: Apocalyptic Reabsorptionist Communist, part 2

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.

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Karl Marx: Apocalyptic Reabsorption Communist, part 3

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.

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