John Paul is fully convinced that the purpose of Gorbachev’s innovation has everything to do with adaptation of failed Soviet structures and nothing at all to do with change of Soviet ideology. There is not the slightest doubt in the Pontiff’s mind that Gorbachev understands as clearly as anyone that the non-Marxist nations are now building international structures in which eventually to house a geopolitical world. Nor can there be much question that his dramatic innovations are intended in the first instance to take full advantage of the tried-and-true formula of balance still favored by the West. The Soviet Union must establish itself quickly as an acceptable partner in the building of those new international structures. Indeed, it is fairly certain that Gorbachev will, if he can, chisel the Soviet name deeper than even Lenin might ever have dreamed into the very cornerstones of those new structures.
If Gorbachev can accomplish that much—and he appears to be well on his way—then John Paul is convinced that the USSR has a fair chance at its long-term goal: the effective and thoroughgoing domination of those same structures.
If those near- and long-term goals sound simplistic to some; or if they seem too much like the goals always nurtured and nourished by less appealing Soviet leaders of the past; or if they fall as uncomfortably on the mind as John Paul’s moral assessment of the East-West division of the world, the Pope suffers no embarrassment for that. For it has been his experience that most modern leaders of nations, and most ordinary people in the West, do not realize that Mikhail Gorbachev is thoroughly soaked in the Marxism of Lenin; or that Lenin was deeply, sincerely committed to his hatred of everything about capitalism and capitalists. Only those who do not really accept that ugly fact about Soviet Leninist Marxism as a backdrop to all Gorbachev says and does, only they can blithely do business with the Soviet Union and its surrogates as if their doing so invited no danger to what they hold most dear—their fortunes, their lives and their way of life.
Not for a moment does Pope John Paul share such attitudes. On the contrary. Because he finds them unrealistic—and potentially at least as deadly as the policy of containment that housed them for so many decades—the Pope cannot even label those attitudes as hopeful.
What he emphasizes instead is a seemingly unmistakable line of heredity and evolution leading from Marx’s Marxism, through Lenin’s Leninism and Stalin’s Stalinism, all the way up to Gorbachev and his Gorbachevism. Four different styles distinguish these four men one from the other, no doubt about it. But one common thread can be seen that unites them all—the frustrated would-be university professor who lies buried in London’s Highgate Hill Cemetery, the dapper little zealot mummified beneath Red Square in Moscow, the black-toothed tyrant hidden away in the Kremlin’s wall, and the current mover and shaker of our international community.
For all their many differences, these are the four great Champions of Hammer and Sickle. The four greatest visionaries who share a utopian ideal that has already left the world a misshapen place, and that would remake the whole of the human race according to a mind John Paul recognizes as filled with hatred for all that is divine in the human condition.
Leaving aside that question of personal style, the most important differences between Mikhail Gorbachev and his predecessors lie in three areas for Pope John Paul.
First, this new Soviet leader has an extraordinary grasp of the geopolitical capability of the Leninist-Marxist system he now controls. Second, he has a clear understanding of the basic errors in Lenin’s thinking. And finally, he realizes that Lenin should have listened to Antonio Gramsci—the one man who got the scenario right the first time, because he had taken the measure of the West in the twentieth century as no other Marxist before or since has ever done.
For John Paul, therefore, no understanding of Mikhail Gorbachev or of his Gorbachevism will be possible in the West as long as the West leaders insist on wearing historical blinders. There will be no understanding of Gorbachev as a prime contender in the geopolitical arena, or of Gorbachevism as his intended vehicle for ultimate Soviet success in that arena, unless the West rids itself once and for all of the international pretense that has permitted it to accept the Big Lie that the Soviet Union was founded and developed as a normal nation by normal means.
It is essential, insists John Paul, to understand that the USSR was never a nation at all, in fact, but a hybrid system of structures forced upon a hundred ethnic groups and a variety of nations. It is a system of thoroughly sinful structures that gave itself a clever name, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, under which it has been allowed to masquerade as a normal nation in the family of nations. Moreover, it is essential to trace how all this happened; and to do so without draping the Big Lie any longer in the acceptable folds of principles of balance and policies of containment.
To understand Gorbachev and his Gorbachevism, insists Pope John Paul, understand the real and unromanticized Marx and what drove him. Understand the real Lenin together with the vision and purpose of his Leninism. Understand the successful, blood-soaked mania of Stalin. And understand the fundamentally Leninist turn that Gorbachev has given to the direction of world affairs. When all of that is digested, understand the one man who might have saved Lenin’s vision from Stalin’s rape.
Understand the one man whose voice Gorbachev seems to have heard as the clarion of Soviet triumph. Understand the role of Antonio Gramsci in the geopolitical endgame of our age.
If the West nations fail to do all or any of that, then, John Paul warns, they will also fail to understand Mikhail Gorbachev. They will fail to understand Gorbachevism. And they will fail to see how Gorbachev configures the future of the Soviet Union and of our coming world.
Meanwhile, and whether or not Gorbachev remains personally in power, it is a certainty, in John Paul’s unblinking assessment of past and future, that this most appealing and most theatrical of Soviet leaders has triggered events that prefigure an unparalleled new course for East and West alike. And for East and West alike, there is no turning back now from a future whose roots lie deep within the ineradicable truth of Soviet history.
10
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a Jewish family at Trier, Germany, on May 5, 1818. He passed rapidly from the undigested Judaism of his childhood into a short but perfervid period of Lutheranism, to which he converted with his whole family; and during that time he wrote touching poems to Christ as his Savior.
That moment gave way to another intense period of his youth, however, as he progressed through the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Jena. At Berlin University, he indulged in a virulent form of ceremonial, confessional Satanism. Dating from that period, his youthful poems in adoration of “Oulanem”—a ritualistic name for Satan—contrast eerily with his earlier poems in homage to Christ. But the chief outward effect of his early personal Satanist attachment was to be seen in his consistently and professionally anti-God and godless outlook. Marx remained violently opposed to faith and religion for the rest of his life.
By the time he graduated from Jena, in 1841, Marx had settled upon the social condition of mankind throughout history as his field of special interest. No philosopher himself, it was not surprising that he should have looked to the philosophy of another man to supply the superstructure of his own historical and social outlook. What was extraordinary was that Marx, dedicated heart and soul to atheism, should have derived that centerpiece of his thinking from Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had flourished and passed from the scene before Marx was fourteen. For Hegel had lived and died a believing Christian; and his theories about human history were steeped in his faith.
Hegel saw human history as a process through which all mankind has been advancing from the most primitive conditions of thought, culture and belief right up to the emergence of Christianity as the fullest expression of human ideals.
In essence, human progress was defined by Hegel as a process very much like a discussion between two men arguing about something in order to explain it. One man sta
tes his opinion or theory. His companion criticizes that theory, and proposes a different one. From their continuing discussion—presumably a friendly and constructive one—there emerges a third and new theory, which preserves what was true in the first two and which both men accept.
Hegel called the first theory a thesis. The second theory, he said, was an antithesis, because it opposed the first. The discussion itself he labeled a dialectic, from the Greek word for “conversation” or “arguing.” And the theory finally accepted out of this process he called a synthesis.
For Hegel, that dialectic exactly marked the manner of all human progress. There was one primitive stage of human history: a thesis. Another stage appeared in opposition: an antithesis. Out of the clash between the two—the dialectic—came a third and victorious stage: the synthesis.
All human progress, said Hegel, from the most primitive condition up to the most refined, proceeded along the lines of this triple-stage dialectic toward an ultimate goal. Moreover, God himself had fixed that goal ahead of time; and so, too, had God laid out the plan of triple-stage steps by which to arrive at the goal.
That ultimate goal was the transcendence by mankind of its own finite and created nature, and the attainment of absolute knowledge of the infinite: of God.
What Hegel had worked out, in other words, was a dialectic of spiritual transcendence—an attempt to codify the system provided by God from the beginning, by which man was to transcend the material limits of his nature. The entire dialectic process was part and parcel of the destiny God had mandated for mankind to become greater than itself. Spirit inhabited matter, said Hegel, and drove mankind on through the successive triple-stage steps of history to that destiny.
By the time he appropriated Hegel’s idea of the dialectic and applied it to his own thinking about the social condition of mankind throughout history, Marx was a thoroughly convinced atheist, fully persuaded there was no such thing as a soul and no such thing as spirit in man. Obviously, then, there would have to be a few adjustments here and there, if Hegel’s theory was to be made suitable.
Yes, said Marx, there is a dialectic moving men through history. And, yes, that dialectic is a clash between thesis and antithesis. But while there is a series of steps leading to a goal, there is nothing transcendent about any of it.
In fact, for Marx there was nothing transcendent about mankind itself. There was no spirit and no soul. There was just this highly developed and totally material animal called man. And this animal was driven, as all matter was, not by transcendent spirit but by blind forces completely innate in matter. Powerful natural forces that mankind could not successfully resist. All was immanent to man. There was nothing in him that transcended his material condition.
In total contrast to Hegel’s dialectic of spiritual forces, then, Marx constructed a dialectic of material forces. Thus was born the dialectical materialism of the Marxist lexicon.
As the chicken had been redefined, it was obvious that the egg would hatch a new and different beast, as well. The history of material mankind, said Marx, was a series of clashes, or dialectics, which all represented stages in what amounted to just one great clash—a kind of superdialectic of human history that came to be called by the most famous of Marxist terms, the “class struggle.” That clash was and always had been between the blind, material, irresistible forces inner to the proletariat, and the opposing forces of whatever privileged classes there might happen to be at any given historical period.
Human history itself, therefore, was written within the framework of dialectical materialism. It was the story of that clash of clashes. In Marx’s reading of history, the proletarian mass of landless, moneyless, powerless workers—the thesis in Marx’s redefined dialectic of material forces—constituted the structure of human society. In every set of historical arrangements that had ever existed, the proletariat was the manifestation of that same irresistible force, the dominant thesis of human history.
Throughout history, the privileged classes—the antithesis in Marxist thinking—have always imposed a “superstructure” of oppression on the proletarian “structure.” Emperors had imposed their empires. Kings had imposed their kingdoms. Princes had imposed their aristocracies. Religious people and their churches had imposed their hierarchies. The bourgeoisie and the merchant class had imposed their systems of capital and land.
Marx was convinced by all he could see around him that the antithesis of his time was a spent force. The old regime of authoritarian kings was giving way to the rise of parliamentary democracy. But that circumstance itself, said Marx, was just one more passing step on the road to the true destiny of material mankind: the triumph of the proletariat as the final great human synthesis of history.
The first internationally resonant bellow of Marxism was heard in 1848, when, together with fellow socialist Friedrich Engels, Marx published The Communist Manifesto. It was too much for the resident “antithesis” powers of Europe, which were already badly shaken by what historians have dubbed the “year of revolutions.” For Marx was feeding the fires of social upheaval with his prediction of the imminent fulfillment of mankind’s irresistible destiny: the proletarian revolution that would sweep away the oppressive superstructure finally and for all time.
“Society as a whole,” insisted Marx in his Manifesto, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat…. The workers have no country … and the supremacy of the Proletariat will cause the Bourgeoisie to vanish still faster.”
As bellicose as such material was, it was only a foretaste of what was to come. For when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution two years later, in 1850, Marx regarded it as far more than theory. He seized upon it as his “scientific” proof that there was no kingdom of Heaven, only the kingdom of Matter. Darwin had vindicated Marx in his rejection of Hegel’s belief in the soul, in the spirit and in God as the ultimate goal of human history.
So elated was Marx at the idea that man had actually evolved from stuff and matter that, had he been of a different mind, he might have hailed Darwin as a godsend. As it was, he wrote a self-congratulatory letter, in which he hailed Darwin as the one who had accomplished for anthropology what Marx himself was accomplishing for sociology.
It might have been foreseen that Marx would find no congenial home in the continental Europe of his day. In 1843, he had married Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he remained deeply in love all his life. Circumstances never allowed him to settle his family as he would surely have liked, however. He shuttled back and forth between Germany, France and Belgium. Finally, in 1849, he migrated to London, where, as the supreme irony of his life, he eked out a sustenance for himself and his family in total dependence on the generosity of members of the capitalist class he hated so thoroughly. His own beloved Jenny was a member of that class. Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Herald Tribune, literally protected Marx and his family from starvation. And his friend Friedrich Engels helped out too, with his own capitalist earnings from the Manchester affiliate of his father’s textile industry.
To add to Marx’s trials, he lost several of his children to death, including his only son, Edgar. His greatest consolation was his love for Jenny. And his only triumph was that, by the time he joined his children in death, on March 14, 1883, Marx had established himself as the foundational theoretician of what we now call Communism.
Marx was primarily a student of social developments and a compiler of the views of others. He was saddled with the impossible desire, but not the necessary mental ability, to be a metaphysician. He was frustrated in his lifelong wish to hold a professorship at a prestigious university. In no way a doer of deeds, however, Marx kept to his books and his writing. He devoted his energies to outlining, if not exactly refining, his new process of social engineering.
Because of his virulent opposition to religion, and his quasi devotion to the scientific requirements of his day, Marx watered down
his messianic persuasion that the proletariat would very soon be supremely dominant in human society. At least, he rationalized away the more mystical elements of that messianism, in order to produce a mentally satisfying synthesis of Hegelian dialectics, Darwinian evolutionary theory and the brutal facts of life in the world that lay outside the cocoon in which he came to live.
What he saw and tried to grapple with in that world were such burgeoning and hardheaded problems as the decline at one and the same time of both the ancien régime and the middle class, the start of galloping urbanization, labor relations, commodity pricing systems, the rise of colonialist empires and the inevitable politicization of the working classes by the heady leaven of nationalism.
Ignoring the fact that Darwin’s theory of evolution was just that—a theory—and ignoring the fact that in any case what might be feasible anthropologically cannot be presumed to hold sociologically, Marx adapted Darwin’s ideas to the social classes of his day. He asserted that a social class was definable solely in terms of its relation to the ownership, the production and the exploitation of all natural economic goods. By such reasoning, the social class with the greatest control over those material processes and goods would be the dominant class at any given stage of history. Owners, workers, entrepreneurs, politicians, aristocrats—even artists, intellectuals and religionists—were all defined exclusively in those terms.
Darwin’s theory of evolution being what it was, Marx reasoned that the social classes, like all matter, must always be in a struggle with each other for survival and dominance. A struggle, in other words, for those economic goods. That much had to be so. For mankind was and would always be exclusively material; and history was and would always be exclusively materialistic.
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