A Red Flag Rises

In all the long history of the human race, I doubt that a more inherently evil political and social system than Communism has ever been created by the mind of man, if indeed it was created by the mind of man, and not by something rather more diabolic. It seems strange to me that so many people today consider Communism to be something of the past, and also assume that the great evils which it has perpetrated upon millions are merely corruptions of its original design, accidental to its benign and purely economic intentions.

To these two great errors I reply with the following two facts:

1. Communism is still very much at large in the world, both under its own name, and in other guises.
2. The seed from which Communism sprang was rotten to the center from the beginning.

I will attempt to support these statements presently, and in doing so I shall also attempt to demonstrate why I consider knowledge of Communism as something still pertinent to our own times and circumstances.

Let us begin with that seed from which Communism grew. It is not enough to start with The Communist Manifesto, or Das Kapital. The economic ideas of Marx, Engels, and their contemporaries are not the true root of Communist ideology. If we view Communism purely as an economic theory we will utterly miss its real character and intention. Marx was influential, and he had his own influences as well, and his personal philosophical ideas were fairly mature before Proudhon suggested at a dinner party that he apply them to economics. In other words, the economic side of Communism is merely the aspect of  human experience to which Marx applied his philosophical theories, and we can never truly understand Communism until we understand those theories. So let us review a little history and philosophy.

We start our review with a journey back in time to the very early nineteenth century, to Germany and to a philosopher by the name of Georg Hegel. Like so many other philosophers who spend their lives dealing in esoteric thoughts and complicated polysyllabic words, Hegel actually had an immense impact on the everyday thoughts and lives of everyday people. There are a variety of aspects to Hegel's thought but we will focus only upon one great cornerstone of it which has become deeply entrenched in modern thought, and that is the concept of Hegelian Dialectic. To offer a quick and simple explanation of Hegelian Dialectic, we may use the three terms thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Hegel's thought every thesis (word, idea, force, action, etc.) will find itself opposed by its opposite, or antithesis. The ensuing struggle between these two ideas results, not in the traditional concepts of victory and defeat, but rather in the creation of something new and different-- a synthesis. Each synthesis is evolutionary, an improvement upon what had preceded it. Applied to thought and understanding the dialectic process should eventually leads humanity to a god-like state, when man realizes that he is actually god.

Five aspects of Hegelian Dialectic should be noted here, as they will continue to be important.

1. It is always revolutionary. Antithesis, opposition, antagonism, or revolt against the existing order is always essential to advancement.

2. It is evolutionary. It assumes that the synthesis is an improvement upon the thesis and antithesis, an expanding of horizons, a deepening of knowledge. It is unclear to me where this process ever ends, for the final perfect synthesis should also have its antithesis, but it is quite clear that it leads to a disparagement of past thought.

3. It is relativistic. Absolute truth either does not exist in such a Hegelian construct, or else is presently unknowable to humans, since every certainty which we hold will be opposed by its antithesis, both of which will prove to be untrue or imperfect in light of the synthesis. It breaks with the traditional current of Western thought which has been in place since the Greek philosophers, expressed in the logical dictum "If one of two opposites be infinite, the other must be entirely destroyed".

4. It destroys all traditional concepts of God and origins, and tends toward either atheism or some form of human or natural apotheosis.

5. It subjugates the means to the end. Both thesis and antithesis are to some degree inconsequential in light the synthesis, and the inherent relativism of the structure.

So much for Hegel. The philosopher's greatest student was another German, a young man named Ludwig Feuerbach. His ideas did not precisely mesh with those of his teacher (Feuerbach was an outspoken atheist and a materialist, while Hegel was not a materialist, and was a covert atheist), but must be noted that all of his thought was rooted in Hegel's system of dialectic. Like Hegel, Feuerbach understood history in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but all viewed through a purely atheistic and materialistic lens.  Feuerbach believed that man, seeing in himself both good and evil, objectifies and apotheosizes the good, giving to it the name of god-- that something perfect towards which we aspire in our imperfections. Taking this good and placing it outside himself, man robs himself of his own potential. He writes, "Man...objectifies his being and then again makes himself an object to the objectivized image of himself thus converted into a subject...." (The Essence of Christianity 1841). However, to Feuerbach this objectification of our being is not only an error, but an evil. By attributing our own attributes to an imaginary god, we remain forever subjects to that imaginary god, incapable of taking back what is ours, and advancing towards a perfection of humanity. Thus atheism was not optional to the mind of Feuerbach, rather it was essential. Feuerbach was not a private atheist, but rather an evangelist of atheism, teaching that the notion of God must be destroyed in order to free mankind from its self-imposed slavery. In addition to the five points listed above concerning Hegelian Dialectic, we may add from Feuerbach's thought this aggressive ant-theism, this need to utterly destroy the very notion of god from the human consciousness in order to liberate mankind for greatness.

Feuerbach's influence as the leader of the Left Hegelians was immense, and his influence was strongly felt by none others than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx, in fact wrote his doctoral thesis on Feuerbach, and though it was a criticism, Marx remained firmly entrenched in Hegelian Dialectic, and the atheistic materialism of Feuerbach. We must not underestimate this influence. It is here that we must look to truly understand Communism. Communism is a social, political, and economic system, yes. But it is first and foremost a worldview rooted in atheism, materialism, and Hegelian Dialectic. How this is so and what it means will be examined in ensuing posts.