For example, there are classical Marxists (those who seek to follow strictly the ideas of Karl Marx), Marxist-Leninists (those who seek to follow the ideas of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin), Stalinists (those who identify with the regime of Joseph Stalin, a Georgian revolutionary), Trotskyists (those who follow the ideas of Leon Trotsky, one of the most intellectual of the Russian revolutionaries), Maoists (those who follow the ideas of Western European Marxist intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci). This is not an exhaustive list of all the different types of Marxists but it is a list of the most politically significant and numerous types. In the western world today most Marxists tend to be either in the Eurocommunist category or they to subscribe to some version of Trotskyist thought.
What are the major principles of Marxism?
Karl Marx's most important idea is described as 'dialectical materialism'. A short-hand way of understanding the principle is to consider it as a composite of Hegelian dialectics and Feuberbachain materialism. Both Hegel and Feuerbach, like Marx, were nineteenth century German philosophers. Feuerbach was intensely anti-Christian. He argues that all of reality is materialistic, that is, mere matter in motion, and thus there is no spiritual reality. The idea of a spiritual reality, is, he argued, a mere myth, concocted by priests to keep people in a state where they accept authority and do not try to rebel to create an alternative social order. According to Feuerbach, belief in God is a kind of security blanket people carry around with them. If there is no God then there is no final system of rewards and punishments and no life after death. Feuerbach argued that once people realized that God was nothing more than a myth created to satisfy their psychological needs for a belief in an afterlife, they would stop being so complacent about injustice on earth and would become revolutionaries. Marx agreed with this argument and tied it to Hegel's idea of dialectics.
According to Hegel the history of the world is the history of ideological conflict. In any given time he argued there is a dominant set of ideas. He calls this the 'thesis'. There is also a set of alternative and conflicting ideas, which challenge the dominant set of ideas for ideological supremacy. This he called the 'antithesis'. He believed that the whole of human history could be characterized as a battle between successive theses and antitheses. This battle is called a 'dialectical struggle'. The word 'dialectical' means that there are two antagonistic forces.
Marx rejected Hegel's belief that social battles are primary battles about ideas. He argued that ideas are mere 'epiphenomena' or 'symptoms' of underlying economic struggles. Thus Marx argues in the very first sentence of his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, that 'the history of the world is hitherto the history of the class struggle'. Whereas Hegel had divided the world into successive periods of ideological conflict, Marx divided world history into successive periods of class conflict which in turn gives rise to ideological conflict. In other words, for Marx, class conflict is primary, and ideological conflict is secondary, or the result of class conflict.
Marx believed that capitalism was the second last stage of class conflict. Once capitalism is destroyed a new order would emerge called 'communism' in which there would no longer be class divisions, nor poverty or other social problems. Scientific progress would be the vehicle which brought about this transition, along with an international uprising of the working classes.
Marxism is therefore fundamentally atheistic, believing that human perfection can be brought about through a combination of scientific progress and revolutionary class struggle.
What happened in history?
Although Marx believed that it was not possible for the world to develop a Communist system until after countries had reached the highest stage of capitalist development, in the late nineteenth century many intellectuals were inspired by his ideas to try and bring about a communist order in individual countries. At the turn of the century in Russia a group of Marxist revolutionaries set about bringing a communist order into being, regardless of the fact that Russia was still very feudal and had not reached a stage of capitalist development at all. In fact, one group of Russian intellectuals, known as the 'Slavophiles', argued that the Russian economic order based on a quasi-feudal model was in fact morally superior to capitalism and that the Russian people should avoid capitalism altogether.
In 1917 a group of Russian Marxist revolutionaries under the direction of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky instigated a coup in Moscow and St Petersburg, murdered the Russian Royal family and seized control of the government of the Russian empire. They were called 'Bolsheviks' which is a Russian word meaning 'majority'. The word comes from an earlier meeting where there was a split within the Marxist intellectual camp between those who thought that Russia needed to go through a capitalist stage of development with a parliamentary democracy and those who believed it possible to proceed straight to the Communist phase. The first group are called the 'Mensheviks' which means minority. As a matter of historical fact the intellectual's whos supported the Menshevik position had more numbers at that meeting then the 'Bolsheviks', but Lenin, being a brilliant propagandist, called his camp the 'Bolsheviks' which made them sound like winners.
Vladimir Lenin died in 1924 and thereafter there followed an internal battle within the Communist Party for the leadership position. This battle was won by Joseph Stalin who was the least intellectual of the Bolshevik leaders and who was valuable to the Bolsheviks largely because of his fund raising activities which included robbing banks. In this battle Trotsky was exiled to Central Asia, Turkey, Norway and finally Mexico. In 1940 he was assassinated in Mexico by an agent sent from Stalinist Russia.
The oppression of the Stalinist years which lasted until 1954 is legendary and perhaps unprecedented in the entire history of the world. Stalin's rule is called by historians a 'reign of terror' during which political control was exercised by Stalin and the KGB. In the years 1930-33 between 12 and 18 million peasants, mostly in Ukraine, were deliberately starved to death. Stalin wanted to industrialise the Soviet Union but lacked the financial capital to do so. His solution was to sell all the grain produced within the Soviet Union on western markets, thereby acquiring western capital for his industrialization projects. This meant however that there was no grain to be made into bread for his own people to eat. In addition to the starvation of the peasants, Stalin also established networks of concentration camps where ordinary citizens were sent to do hard labour. From time to time Stalin suffered from outbursts of paranoia and members of his own inner circle were accused of treasons and forced to confess to treason in public 'show trials' after which they were executed. Stalin's only real intellectual contribution to the tradition of Marxism is his theory that as the working class gets closer to pure Communism the hostility of the capitalists increases. The theory was used to justify the power of the KGB.
In Asia Communism became an issue in the 1940's. At the end of World War II Soviet troops occupied Korea as far south as the 38th parallel. A month later the United States occupied the southern peninsula. The Communists set up a Russian-style dictatorship in the North and in June of 1950 Communist armies invaded the south. This led to the Korean War which lasted for 3 years. North Korea remains Communist.
Between 1946 and 1949 Chinese communists under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung fought and won a civil war. China has since been a Communist country. Mao's contribution to Marxist thought was to come up with a theory of how the peasant class, rather than the working class, could be a vehicle for the transmission to a communist order. The Catholic Church is persecuted in China and has been forced to operate 'underground'. Priests are trained in secret seminaries and Catholic people, like all other Chinese people are persecuted by the Communist government if they have more than one child.
In 1954 a Communist dictatorship took over what has become known as North Vietnam. From the early 1960s onwards until 1974 South Vietnam was a battle zone between anti-Communist forces and the 'Viet Cong' (communist guerillas). Both the United States and Australia sent their own troops to Vietnam to fight against the Viet Cong. They were ultimately defeated and Vietnam has remained a Communist country since that time. Over 50,000 American soldiers dies in the war in Vietnam and 520 Australian soldiers also died. Many Vietnamese people, including many Catholics, have since come to Australia to escape the Communist regime. Many risked their lives to travel to Australia on small boats. Since Vietnam had been a colony of France, French missionaries had converted many Vietnamese to Catholicism. In Australia a high proportion of the Vietnamese community is Catholic.
In Australia the Communist Party played a significant role in the political affairs in the 1950s through the 1970s. Communist activists gained control of many significant trade unions leading to an historical battle between their members and anti-Communist groups led by the Catholic layman led by Bob Santamaria who acted under the patronage of the Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix. The Communists also sought to obtain influence within the Australian Labour Party, a situation which led to the 1955 'split' within the ALP. Anti-Communist members of the party left the ALP and formed the Deomcratic Labor Party ' the DLP. The DLP was particularly strong in Victoria and Queensland though weak in New South Wales. The preferences of the DLP had the effect of keeping the ALP out of office throughout the 1960's until the election of Gough Whitlam's Labor government in 1972. Communist influence in the trade union movement continued to dwindle throughout the 1970's and 1980's. In the mid-1980's many former Communist trade union leaders re-joined the ALP.
Throughout the 1980's the major Communist influence within Australian politics was exercised through the national student union ' the Australian Union of Students. (AUS). The AUS leadership was comprised of an assortment of Trotskyists, Maoists, Eurocommunists, anarchists, Gay Rights activists and radical vegetarians. In 1983 AUS activists declared 1983 to be 'International Year of the Lesbian', spent $20,000 of student monies producing posters of lesbians engaged in oral sex for distribution to campuses across Australia, and declared all married women to be prostitutes, that is, people who allegedly sell their bodies to their husbands in return for financial security.
In the period of Communist control of key trade unions working class Catholic men who opposed the Communist influence were frequently beaten up and subjected to other forms of harassment and intimidation by Communist thugs. Catholic students who were involved in the Australian Union of Students were similarly harassed and assaulted by Marxist students.
The countries of Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia), the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and the Balkans (Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria) as well as Romania, all came within the Soviet sphere of influence after the end of World War II. This was due to the Yalta Agreement of 1945, so named after the town in Crimea where Joseph Stalin, the United States President Franklin Roosevelt, and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, met to discuss the post-war settlement. In what remains as one of the most ignoble acts of modern history, the American and English leaders agreed to Stalin's request (demand for Soviet influence and control) over the above-mentioned countries after the end of the War. In the remaining years of the 1940's each of the countries which themselves were controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1956 when the Hungarian Communists sought to go their own way, and in 1968 when the Czech Communists attempted to find their own path to communism, the Soviet leaders responded by invading Hungary and Czechoslovakia with troops drawn predominantly from the Asian Republics of the Soviet Union. Throughout this period those who dissented were either murdered or sent to concentration camps.
In every country and every institution were Communism took hold, people were persecuted, murdered and intimidated. In particular Catholics were regarded as the most dangerous types since they both believed in God and had the organizational ability to form a united front against the Communists.
The following is a list compiled by the National Centre for Scientific Research in France on the numbers of people who have died in Communist wars and persecutions:
China: 72 Million
Soviet Union: 20 Million
Cambodia: 2.3 Million
North Korea 2 Million
Africa 1.7 Million
Afghanistan 1.5 Million
Vietnam 1 Million
Eastern Europe 1 Million
Latin America 150,000
It was in such an era of persecution that Pope John Paul II was ordained a priest in what was then Communist Poland. When elected Pope in 1978 Poland was still a Communist country. In his very first encyclical entitled Redemptor Hominis, Pope John Paul II launched an intellectual attack on the Marxist principle that all of history is governed by class struggle. He opened the encyclical with the sentence: 'Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the Man, is the Centre and Purpose of Human History'. This, of course, is a direct reply to Marx's argument that the center and purpose of human history is class struggle and material progress.
In 1980 a group of Polish Catholic workers and intellectuals formed a non-Communist trade union called 'Solidarity'. The formation of this trade union received the moral support of Pope John Paul II. Between 1980 and 1989 the Solidarity leaders fought political battles against the Polish Communist government under the leadership of General Jaruselzki ' a Soviet government quisling. Many Solidarity leaders were imprisoned and their chaplain, Fr Jerzy Popielusko, was bashed up and drowned in the Wisla river. Ultimately however in the summer of 1989 the Solidarity leaders were victorious. By this time the Soviet Union was in a state of extreme economic crisis and could no longer afford its extensive international Communist empire. One by one the Communist governments of Europe fell. The Communist governments of Asia however remain in power and Catholics as well as other citizens continue to be imprisoned and tortured. In particular the Chinese government enforces a 'one child policy' by which parents who have more than one child are persecuted and many undergo forced abortions.
The persecution of people by Communist idealogues was one of the issues which Our Lady raised with the three children of Fatima (two of whom ' Jacinta and Francisco ' have now been beatified) in her apparitions in Portugal during 1917. She told the children that 'Russia would spread its errors throughout the world', and that the 'Holy Father would have much to suffer'. The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish terrorist may have been Soviet organized, and there is no doubt that the popes of the twentieth century suffered much from the knowledge of the persecution of the Church in countries controlled by Communists.
Catholic Social Teaching:
At a philosophical level where the Marxist and Catholic traditions differ most profoundly and fundamentally is at the level of philosophical anthropology. Marxist anthropology is a mixture of Enlightenment and Romantic elements ' there is an Enlightenment concept of social progress and a Romantic belief in the perfectibility of human nature and when the two are taken together the vision is one of the perfectibility of human nature through scientifically-driven social progress. This is in stark contrast to the Catholic perspective, according to which perfection (both individual and social) is the result of virtuous practices and the work of grace. Political institutions may in their structure and ethos either hinder or encourage virtuous practices, and thus there is a relationship between the nature of political institutions and the practice of virtue. The relationship operates both ways: virtuous practices encourage the establishment of healthy institutions and healthy institutions encourage virtuous practices, while pathological practices give rise to pathological institutions, and pathological institutions discourage virtuous practices. However the development of a virtuous disposition is fundamentally a matter of self-mastery and can never be achieved, as Marx hoped, by a reordering of the political and economic orders alone. As Pope John Paul II argues, the dignity of the human person lies in his or her status as a child of God since 'Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of Man, is the center and purpose of human history.' This means that the human person can only find the truth about himself through finding Christ. This principle which has been reiterated by Pope John Paul II on countless occasions throughout his Pontificate is found in paragraph 22 of Gaudium et spes, a document of the Second Vatican Council:
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the final revelation of the mystery of the Father, and His Love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.
In effect this means that human social problems can never be resolved by economics alone.
The social justice teaching of the Church seeks to defend the dignity of human labour and demands that workers be paid just wages and work within safe environments. Pope John Paul II has also contributed significantly to the development of the Church's social justice teaching through his three encyclicals: Laborem Exercens, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Centessimus Annus. The Catholic tradition thereby offers an alternative intellectual defence of the dignity of human labour and just social order to that offered by the fundamentally atheistic Marxist tradition.
© kwl.com.au 1993