Marx, God & Hyperbole

The following happens to be the most subversive short essay of the 21st century, and by a miraculous coincidence is included in my collection of essays, Alt-Everything, published last year by Round Bend Press.

Simply amazing, isn't it?

The Essential Spirituality of The Communist Manifesto


The spiritual fervor of Marx and Engels is not often acknowledged in discussions of their 1848 Communist Manifesto, except in pejorative terms, as in—“they are religiously communistic.” Their spirituality has for decades been denied by corporate apologists, autocrats and tyrants, such as Lenin and Stalin, whose well-meaning but ultimately futile attempts to design a workers’ state centered on Marx’s and Engels’ ideals of a lasting proletarian revolution.

The authors were betrayed by ethnic and religious dysfunctions that swept through Europe at the turn of the nineteenth-century, and the document was most exclusively scrutinized as a political and economic tract, with limited consideration of its moral imperative and its roots in spiritual pragmatism.

Spiritual fervor? A paradox lies at the heart of the Manifesto’s earth-rattling economic philosophy. As a spiritual document of the first rank, it transcended the tenets of religious dogma in its quest to provide answers to the social ills of the nineteenth century. Among those who seriously wielded power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the polemic presented a grave threat because its spirituality evolved from Utopian decency. Decency, above all, is a spiritual quest, whether it is gleaned from religion or from a purely rhetorical rejection of religion—in favor of decency.

How strange and frightening it must have been for European elites to be slapped in the face with the truth of conviction, to be assaulted with such clarity and reason regarding the historical record of dispossession: “Almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank,” wrote Marx. Not even the biblical tale of Jesus attacking the moneychangers could have caused as much panic among…well, moneychangers.

Being a spiritual tract, the Manifesto exposed the hypocrisy of a bourgeois discernment of class structure within not just a papacy watching its political influence erode, but within Protestantism, as the outrageous and odious in England’s factories and Parliament were continuously exposed as conspiracies between the political gentry and proponents of the Industrial Revolution.

The Manifesto prophesied Bismarck’s leadership in the “Scramble for Africa,” and, later, the English and French “to-the-victor-go-the-spoils” division of the Middle East at the end of World War I. Those capitalist inspired transgressions were exemplary of imperial hubris and, despite the religious dialectic of war’s meaning, were certainly not spiritual.

As it became increasingly clear that within the structure of a growing nationalism nation-states and religion could not completely co-exist, the Manifesto provided relief from absurd notions that associated poverty and suffering with a divine creator, whose grand plan made misery expected, accepted and palatable among the elite strata of Europeans. The brewing social disasters of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were caused by an ever widening chasm between church and state. Leaders had utterly failed to merge and nurture spirituality inside burgeoning capitalism. This failure is obliquely addressed in the Manifesto. “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”

Marx and Engels saw the attacks by religious institutions coming and addressed the matter in their document. Arguing that religious institutions and their supporters would accuse communism of calling for the abolition of religion, they declared the point moot. “What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonism, antagonism that assumed different forms at different epochs.” The statement infers realism, that something as fundamental as spirituality cannot be abolished. Spirituality, even religion, might be transformed, yes. It might even be improved. But abolition was out of the equation.

In providing a basic analysis of The Communist Manifesto, cynical capitalists attacked. Cynical distortions arose soon after the document’s publication and in ongoing analyses of its fundamental message. The Manifesto attacks religion for its hypocrisy, but it was never the intent of Marx and Engels to propose that business moguls might be willfully stripped of their spirituality along with their obscene economic power over others. To imply that as its message was merely the rank obfuscation of the threatened. To point to tyrants who later denied religious freedom in the name of communism is to deny the essential truth of the Manifesto.

The document was a spiritual call for decency—an affirmation of the best of the human condition. Only later did it become a plaything for corrupt politicians, dictators, and religious fanatics.


This essay first appeared in 2008 in The Oregon Literary Review, edited by Charles Deemer.


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