Social Salvation. It is quite impossible to have a stagnate society. It is human nature to change, progress

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1 Christine Pattison MC 370 Final Paper Social Salvation It is quite impossible to have a stagnate society. It is human nature to change, progress and evolve. Every single human being seeks their own happiness and when the government is no longer protecting that ability then a revolution is inevitable. This has been a theme throughout all of history. Different regimes and ideologies have flitted in and out of the last 2000 years. There is always a new person claiming to know a better way to live, a better way to construct society. Traditional liberalism grew parallel with the enlightenment age. A time of science, logic and reasoning and the ideas that stemmed from such an era seemed infallible. But the socioeconomic inequalities, the class divisions, could be considered an error of the ideology. A new idea came along to try and solve the problems that a liberal society created. Karl Marx and Fridrich Engls wrote the Communist Manifesto as what they viewed as the next step in the evolution of history. This was the pinnacle, the salvation, the utopian ideal that would fix all the wrongs. As the gap between classes was widening and the economy was favoring a specific group of people there were many upset individuals. Communism was the fix to this situation. It put everyone on an equal ground, it emphasized equality over liberty. And as the enlightenment age was ending, science was chosen over religion and more and more people were separating from their beliefs. Religion was no longer the main factor in determining morals or ideals and was influencing the private life less. Where there was once a text and a leader determining how a person lived their life there was only science. Religion

2 combined the political and private sphere and now that the two were separate there was a sense a loss. And then Communism was introduced and it once again combined the public and private lives in a secular religion. The Communist Manifesto is a widely debated text but two authors that readily investigate it s claims are Vladimir Tismaneanu and Pierre Manent. In Manent s book, A World Beyond Politics he investigates the shortcomings of a democracy and how Communism tried to fix the liberal faults. Timsmaneanu writes a convincing argument that Communism became a political theology in his book, The Devil in History. There are several conclusions to be drawn from the aforementioned books but there is one idea that outshines the rest. Communism was created to cure the ills of a democracy and the result was a political theology that still lingers in today s world. To understand how Communism filled the void that a liberal regime made, it would prudent to review the basics of this new ideology. The problems in a liberal society were exacerbated by the rise of the industrial era. Before were just feudalistic institutions but with the growth of business and an independent economy a new system was formed. Marx defined the two new classes that burgeoned from the industrial revolution as the bourgeois and the proletariat. The bourgeois was the economically favored and used this advantage to gain political power and rise above the others. The proletariat, was forced to sell their labor for cheap and perpetually lived a life of struggle. The classes become more divided as the bourgeois continuously gained wealth and power at the expense of the proletariat, creating a revolutionary spark within the lower class.

3 The inevitable revolution of the proletariat will bring the destruction of private property because that is what keeps them enslaved. Without it, the power the bourgeois class holds over the proletariat will be destroyed. Private property is needed to fuel capitalism and the abolishment of both leads to the emancipation of the lower class. Marx even refutes the argument that freedom equals private property because it just increases class antagonism. It allows the bourgeois to exploit the laborer by giving him a wage only large enough for survival. Once the revolutionary goal is accomplished there can be no regression to older models of civilization, a new path must be emblazoned on the trail of history. As more revolutions occur around the world, antagonism between nations will fade as the class divisions disappear. And then the world has reached the pinnacle of its evolution. This romantic notion invites the workers everywhere to unite and fight the class oppression that is making them miserable. It creates a utopian world that promises equality to the most desperate people. The promise of such a salvation is too tempting for most people to deny. Especially because it gives them hope for a better life, a promise religion once offered. Pierre Manent expands on this argument. Throughout the book, Manent looks at the separations in individual lives and one separation in particular expounds on this idea. As a result of the enlightenment there is a separation between church and state and it has influenced the development of democracy. The church has always been a deciding factor in determining how to live. It is something that identifies every person and categorizes their morals. It naturally overrides a political community:

4 Thus tis nonpolitical community necessarily comes into contact and competition with all political communities, not by directly providing political laws, but indirectly by addressing every man and every woman, claiming him or her for itself, promising him or her membership in a perfect community (Manent 27). In the past the church was the ruler and the savior. Religion had been an indomitable force that has pushed back against the state. Yet with the rise of the age of reason, the church was pushed to state affairs and dwelled in the private lives of individuals. Thus making another separation democratic people had to live with. Religion has lost most of its authority and it was difficult for individuals to deal with the two directions the political sphere and individual religions were pulling. Communism blazoned onto the scene and fixed the isolation the separation created. In an extraordinarily primitive and brutal manner, Communism answered a real difficulty of our political regime. A regime that is founded on separations, which have in them something abstract and artificial, naturally invites projects aimed at abolishing these very separations (Manent 30). Communism brought all of the different separations, classes, religions, private/ public lives, together and created a new walk of life. Communism was a wholly encompassing ideal that took over every aspect of society. You had to totally and completely believe in the ideals and revolutionary goals or it would be a failure. Communism as Marx and Engels wrote it is not entirely realistic or practical. It took some modification to enact its policies into reality. Lenin took it, bastardized it and then

5 enforced Communism in Russia. The ideology took over and controlled the Soviet Union for decades and the people are still feeling the aftermath today. From the very beginning, Lenin recognized that that old world order needed to be demolished so that a new type of social system and a new type of man could emerge. The Russian revolution obliterated the czar and his institutions. Only then could Communism be threaded throughout the nation, Never was a political doctrine so ambitious, never a revolutionary project so much imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatically heroic predestination. Many radicals considered this revolution the start of many and that this utopia would be the pinnacle of evolution. To completely rid people of the old ways a total revolution took place and nothing else mattered but the party and its goals, Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion- the revolution (Tismaneau 93). To be a part of the movement, to believe in Lenin meant to accept the claims of the Party and the absolute power it had. The Party was omnipotent and omniscience and to think otherwise was a horrible sin. This was the start of the political theology that Lenin developed from Communism. There were three characteristics of Communism and the Bolshevik party that created a secular religion in Soviet Russia; the leader, the text and the ideological worship of the ultimate goal. In order for Communism to be a practical plan for Russia, everyone had to believe in the ideology. It was advertised, manipulated and enforced around the country to the point where every person was a revolutionary, completely dedicated to the formation of a Communist society, Always and everywhere he must become not what his own personal inclination would have him become, but what the general interest of the revolution demands (Tismaneanu 94). The revolution and the good of the community had to be a priority for every individual. There

6 could be no room for anything else, family, religion, possessions, individual goals, the Party determined everything: Ideological absolutism, worship of the ultimate goal, voluntary suspension of critical faculties, and the cult of the party line as the perfect expression of the gnarl will were imbedded in the original Bolshevik project (Tismaneanu 101). Communism threaded together the separations that Manent described in his book. It brought the private and public life together by destroying private property and religion. Religion was destroyed even more than in a democracy because if an individual put religion above the party then that person was eliminated. Instead the ideals, morals and purpose in life were decided by the Party. Communism filled that religious zeal that was missing in a liberal society. People honestly believed that this was a utopia that transcended heaven to earth. The creation of the party was the First Coming, which was not completely appreciated until the Second Coming and everyone had class consciousness and joined the revolution and believed that this was the pinnacle of history. The ideology, the party, the leader, the text, all had to be truly worshiped, there was no other option, Leninism was a form of modern messianism intolerant of realities escaping its ideological panorama (Tismaneanu 115). The people had a new set of values, a new culture, language and customs that separated them from the old ways and into a new society, a new human being. The text that supported Communism in the Soviet Union was a huge part of the theology that developed in the country. The Communist Manifesto and the Leninist texts were sacred fountains of knowledge that fueled the revolution and the Party. The Manifesto ideas

7 helped spark a new way of thinking, a class consciousness and a proletariat revolution, Marxism- Leninism was the formula used to reconcile the ever-expanding rational mastery of the world with the aspiration for individual liberation ( Tismanenau 116). This text was the salvation of the wrongs of a liberal society. It was the way out of suffering and presented itself as the eventual evolution of mankind. However, texts need a certain kind of reader and a specific leader to put the revolutionary theory into practice. Indeed Lenin carried to an extreme the idea of a privileged relation between revolutionary theory and practice. The latter constitutes itself in the figure of the presumably infallible party, custodian of an omniscience that defines and exorcises any doubt as a form of treason (Tismaneanu 119). The Communist society as Marx wrote it needed a practical application and Lenin s interpretation and activation was needed for the implementation. Lenin justified his leadership because he had the notion that the majority of the population wanted him as the leader, therefore he wasn t exactly a dictator. It was a proletarian dictatorship in which Lenin look out for the greater good of the masses. Many people may argue that Lenin s ideas were a bastardization of Marxism. However, Leninism was a successful reinvention of the social and political community. His interpretation stuck to core values that defines communism. Things like the recognition of class consciousness, the abolishment of private property and the down fall of the bourgeois. And many of the sentiments installed by Lenin linger in the country today, despite the fall of

8 Communism. They both promised salvation to the distraught worker and claimed to be the inevitable evolution of the society. To have a Communist society there ideology must be control every aspect of the individual s life. It is their new guide to how to live, what their morals are and the purpose of life. It has a text to provide the ideas, a leader to enforce them and the revolutionary spirit to entrance them. Communism was supposed to the height of all social politics. It promised equality and the fix all the wrongs of a liberal government. This was glue that was going to bind all of the different separations together. The utopian ideals would have been difficult to enact and the interpretation of Marx that Lenin brought to the Soviet Union made it more realistic. And Lenin thought that his revolution would be the first of many, that eventually the whole world would see the light and history as we know it would alter. The ideology became a consuming force in the Soviet Union and the strength of the Party and the absolute belief in the ideals made for a unique political theology.