Karl Marx, who was never given to undue pessimism about his place in world history, once remarked: “No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.… What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

The observation occurs in a letter dated 1852. The magnum opus on Capital (1867) still lay in the future. But The Communist Manifesto (1848) and sundry other writings had already diagnosed the world’s ills, sketched out a utopia, and pointed the way to achieve it.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes the modern reader about these writings is the quaint combination of prophetic panache, cocksureness, and wordy Victorian pedantry. But running through all is a profound moral earnestness and righteous indignation. And this, together with the fact that Marxism has become a major world faith—perhaps the only one of modern origin—compels attention.

The opening words of The Communist Manifesto proclaim: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The book goes on to explain that the modern epoch is characterized by the splitting of society into “two great hostile camps”: the bourgeoisie (the class, according to Engels’s notes, of “modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor”) and the proletariat (“the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live”). Already the bourgeoisie has “converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” As the process of history mounts to its climax, the bourgeoisie becomes more powerful and the proletariat more downtrodden. But the competition of capitalism will eventually prove its downfall. The workers will band together in revolutionary combination. The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat “are equally inevitable.”

The central part of the Manifesto contains ten proposals for the implementation of a communist society ranging from the abolition of private property and all right of inheritance to state education, and from the state centralization of banks, communication, and industry to the equal liability of all to labor and the redistribution of the population. It ends with a reminder to the “proletarians” that they have nothing to lose but their chains. “Working men of all countries, unite!”

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Behind these views lay a long history of personal ups and downs. Marx, born in Germany of Jewish parents, had obtained his doctorate at Jena for a study of Greek philosophy. He had come under the spell of Hegel’s philosophy with its doctrine that reality is the dialectical outworking of the absolute spirit. But Marx—under the influence of Feuerbach and the left-wing Hegelians—had secularized the process. What was left was materialism, and it fell to Marx to give the definitive exposition of its laws.

In the meantime Marx ventured into journalism and revolutionary politics. He was banished from Germany and expelled from France. In 1848 he settled in London, this time for good. He was supported by his fellow communist and ex-Hegelian Friedrich Engels, the heir of a German industrialist who had a cotton firm in Manchester. Marx spent his days reading, writing, and endeavoring to guide the fortunes of the First International Working Men’s Association, which he and Engels had founded.

As a prophet and analyst of historical trends, Marx has turned out to be only fair to middling. Even the grand declaration that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, which has such an air of finality and revelation, does not bear close inspection. This is not to deny that there have ever been class struggles. But often there has been class cooperation. In elections, voting regularly cuts across class divisions. Foreign wars and national emergencies tend to draw together the ranks of a nation. Marx’s preoccupation with class conflict blinded him to the significance of nationalism, as both a uniting and a dividing factor in human affairs, and to the real roots of tension within classes.

For Marx “the immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” This in turn would usher in the peace and prosperity of the classless society.

The world has changed a good deal since Marx worked out his theories in the calm of the British Museum. Among those changes has been the emergence of several states in which his doctrines have been implemented. In some cases it has not worked out quite as envisaged; in others the logical implications of his doctrines have been all too apparent.

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The expected collapse of capitalist economies has not occurred. The workers of the world have not united to overthrow capitalism. In fact, it is precisely in those places where capitalist economies have flourished most that the workers have gained most in pay, housing, working conditions, medical care, and personal and political freedom. The communist revolutions that have taken place have largely been in peasant communities—Russia and China are the obvious examples—in which the regimes overthrown were hardly bourgeois and capitalist in the modern sense of those terms.

In purely economic terms a strong case could be made for the view that production in communist countries would have been at least as high under a free system as under the present regimes, and perhaps higher. The point is vividly illustrated by Cuba, where despite intensive measures to improve the living conditions of the workers, only meager advances have come.

As A. J. P. Taylor has remarked, revolutions are made in the name of the proletariat, not by it, and usually in countries where the proletariat hardly exists. Where communist revolutions have taken place, they have invariably resulted in dictatorships. But the “dictatorship of the proletariat” has remained a figment of Marx’s powerful imagination. What has come into being has been a form of state capitalism, controlled by a managerial class of middle-class middlemen like Marx himself. One form of repression has been replaced by another.

On the other hand, the notorious acts of subversion and repression now so familiar that they are hardly noticed by those who do not suffer from them are entirely justified on Marxist premises. One-party government with single lists of candidates, the suppression of trade unions, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, imperialist colonialism such as the czars never knew, prison camps, the hounding of those who presume to ask critical questions—all are entirely justified on Marxist premises.

After all, if there is no reality other than matter, morals become a matter of economics and politics. Right becomes what is economically and politically expedient. The last judgment is in the hands of the party boss. Big brother is built into the system from the start. In the dialectics of revolution the end always justifies the means, and even the end can always be changed to suit the party line. The individual, the group, whole nations may have to fall beneath the juggernaut of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as it mangles its way toward a goal that is always beyond the horizon.

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It is not a case of Soviet Russia or Red China having fallen short of the lofty ideals of gentle Marx. The institution of the classless society has to be preceded by the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; if there be recalcitrant persons, so much the worse for them. With the abolition of God, man has to make up his own values, and in the cause of revolution anything can be justified.

But at this point Marxist philosophy experiences a certain embarrassment. Marx spoke of the coming of the classless society as an inevitability. It was precisely his talk about the dialectical processes of history that gave his dogmas a semblance of a claim to be scientific, even though (as Bertrand Russell once remarked) his system retained a cosmic optimism such as only a belief in God could justify.

But what happens when the predictions fail to come out? The only answer is that they have to be made to come out. Already in the 1930s the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez was proclaiming that “there is nothing inevitable in the crushing of capitalism.” Later on he tried to rouse his fellow Communists by telling them that “the concept of an iron law, of an inevitability,” is a “dead weight upon the working classes.” But if this is so, what becomes of the “scientific” laws that propel history towards the downfall of capitalism and the establishment of the utopian classless society?

More recently Thorez’s view has been endorsed by Professor Roger Garaudy in his Marxism in the Twentieth Century. Garaudy, a leading Communist intellectual who was expelled from the Politbureau for his attitude over Czechoslovakia, has pleaded for an abandonment of Marxist dogmatism in favor of thought in the Marxist spirit. He sees the way forward in (to use Lenin’s phrase) “the union of revolutionary theory with revolutionary practice.”

But to call in question the invasion of Czechoslovakia is to side with the counter revolutionaries who were plotting to undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat there. It is to deny the very thing that Garaudy wants: the union of revolutionary theory with revolutionary practice. The fact is that however much one might try to revamp Marxism with calls for flexibility and action, it remains what it has always been: a form of man’s inhumanity to man, a means of manipulating people in the name of progress and classless society.

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Why do people become Marxists? One of the most impressive documents of the twentieth century is the collection of testimonies by ex-Communists published under the title The God That Failed. In very few cases is it a matter of intellectual conversion effected by the sheer weight of argument and analytical depth of The Communist Manifesto. Many feel society is disintegrating and are thirsting for a faith. The promised utopia and revolt against a polluted society are the two poles that provide the tension of the militant creed.

At first the talk about the impending and inevitable collapse of capitalism and the disappearance of bourgeois morality and of institutions like the family came as intoxicating revelations. Disillusionment came slowly. This or that case of inhumanity or double-think could be explained away. But the root trouble with Marxism is that inhumanity and double-think are built into the system precisely because it is a system of dialectical, revolutionary materialism.

Is there any real alternative? An unbridled capitalism can be just as inhuman. Marx’s idea that the existence of classes is bound up with particular, historic phases in the development of production has some truth in it. But it is not the sole truth about the human predicament. Bread is important—man cannot live without it. But man cannot live by bread alone. The Christian believes that true humanism does not begin with man; it begins with his maker. After all, if there is a God, the key to life must lie with him. The one sure way of making a mess of things is to leave him out of account.

Colin Brown is dean of studies at Tyndale Hall in Bristol, England, and a teacher of theology at the University of Bristol, from which he holds the Ph.D. He is the author of “Philosophy and the Christian Faith.”

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