Why
I’m Not a Communist
Rev.
Dr. Tom Sorenson
July
14, 2021
1.
Introduction
It frequently
happens these days that some uninformed but misguidedly passionate person will
accuse people who advocate public policies that are inclusive and actually care
for ordinary people Communists. Liberal, progressive Christians get called
Communists too. I recently saw someone in effect call Rev. Chuck Currie, an
ordained UCC minister and Director of the Center for Peace and Spirituality at
Pacific University in Oregon, a Communist. No one who knows the first thing
about Rev. Currie and Communism could possibly call Currie a Communist. It
won’t do any harm and may do some good for me here to explain why Rev. Currie
and I are not Communists.
Let me first
state my credentials for writing about Communism. Like Rev. Currie I am an
ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Earlier in my life, however,
I obtained a PhD in Russian history. At the time that I earned that degree
Russia was the dominant part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Understanding Russia and especially understanding Leninism, which the Soviet
Communists said was their guiding philosophy, required knowledge of the
philosophy of Karl Marx. I acquired that knowledge. In addition I lived in
Russia, mostly in Moscow, for the 1975-76 academic year doing dissertation
research.
I saw and worked within the society and economy that the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union had created. I got to know a fifth year journalism student at
Moscow State University and heard some of the things he said about his country.
I have thus had more exposure to post-Marxist Communism than have all but a
small handful of American scholars and diplomats. I have been called a
Communist, mostly I think because I spent that academic year in Soviet Russia.
I believe that I am well qualified to offer the following exposition of what
Communism really is.
2.
Karl Marx
Communism as it
existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere grew out of the materialist
philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx combined two seemingly contradictory
philosophies that were current in Europe in the nineteenth century. He was on
the one hand a disciple of the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and on the
other hand a disciple of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831). Comte was a positivist. For him only the physical was real, and
all knowledge came from the observation of natural phenomena. Comte’s
philosophy was atheistic. God played no role it.
Hegel’s
philosophy was far more complex than Comte’s. Hegel analyzed the development of
human society and culture using a system he called dialectic. In dialectic
development progress begins with a given reality, a starting point that Hegel
called the thesis. Every thesis would eventually generate its opposite, what
Hegel called the antithesis. The thesis and the antithesis would eventually
produce something new that contained elements of both the thesis and the
antithesis. Hegel called this new thing the synthesis.
Perhaps an
example will help here. A major thesis of European civilization before the
mid-seventeenth century was that God was real, had created all that is, and
made Godself known to us through divine revelation. All truth was grounded in
and proceeded from God. Beginning in the 1630s (and before that in the realm of
astronomy) European civilization produced the antithesis of that thesis. Human
reason replaced divine revelation as the source of all truth. In the
development of that antithesis God first got pushed to the margins of reality.
Eventually in the philosophy of Comte and others God was denied altogether in a
rationalistic atheism in which only the material, that is, the physical, was
considered real. Today many of us live and function in a new vision of reality
that is a synthesis of those two earlier views. We fully accept the reality of
God as creator of all that is, but we also value and accept the tremendous
advances in the sciences and other areas of human life that have come from the
application of human reason to any question to which one seeks an answer. The
progression here was theism (the thesis), atheism (the antithesis), and post-modern
theism (the synthesis).
Marx took
Comte’s positivism as his philosophy,
combined it with Hegel’s dialectic, and posited what he called dialectical
materialism. Marx was an atheist, and Marxism is an atheistic philosophy. Marxism
denies the reality of God altogether. Only the material is real. Yet although
reality lacks any spiritual element it nonetheless progresses in a dialectical
fashion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Somehow Marx understood
capitalism as a synthesis of two earlier models of life, slavery and feudalism.
We needn’t worry about just how he did that.
Marx taught that the
process of dialectical materialism would eventually produce an ideal sort of
society that he called communism.
That’s where the word comes from. For Marx all aspects of human life arose from
a society’s class structure. Classes were determined by their relationship to
the means of production. In Marx’s day the most significant classes were the
capitalists and the workers, a class Marx called the proletariat. The
proletarians, that is, the members of the proletariat, worked for the
capitalists. Everything in life was determined by the capitalists as the dominant
class. The capitalists oppressed the proletariat for the capitalists’ economic
benefit. Wages were low. Working conditions were often unsafe. Marx believed in
something called the labor theory of value, that is, that it was the labor of
the proletarians not the work of the capitalists that produced value. The
proletariat however did not benefit from the value Marx thought they produced.
Nearly all of that value went to the capitalists, who were the owners of the
means of production. Workers were, Marx thought, alienated from the value they
produced. That alienation created a contradiction within the capitalist system
that would eventually have world changing significance, or so Marx thought.
Marx taught that
eventually the proletariat would rebel against capitalism in what he called a
socialist revolution. The proletariat would supplant the capitalists as the
dominant class. They would take ownership of the means of production and would
create a socialist society, economy, social structure, political structure, and
culture. The task of the now dominant proletariat would be to eliminate classes
altogether. It was to create a society of only one class that was called a
classless society, there being only one class meaning that there were actually
no classes. That classless society, which was the ultimate goal of the
socialist revolution, Marx called communism. Since for Marx all of history had
been driven by class conflict, history would cease developing because with no
class conflict the action of the dialectic of history would stop. The function
of the government in this socialist phase was precisely to create that
classless society that would exist in an idealized earthly paradise of
communism.
In this communist
utopia everyone would be cared and provided for. If a mantra of capitalism had
been “from each according to their ability, to each according to their ability”
with the “each” that received being only the owners of the means of production,
the mantra of communism would be “from each according to their ability, to each
according to their need,” with the each here meaning everyone in the society.
Marx’s vision of
the communist society was a lot like and probably owed a good deal to a vision
of an idealistic society from the New Testament book of Acts. In that book we
read:
Now the whole group of those who believed
were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any
possessions, but everything they owned was held in common….There was not a
needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and
brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it
was distributed to each as any had need. Acts 4:32-35 NRSV.
That is a vision of a classless
society. No one owned anything personally. Everything was held in common, and
resources were distributed not according to what anyone had earned but
according to what each member of the community needed. That was the vision of
the unknown author of the book of Acts. It was Marx’s vision of communism too.
That’s the
theory. As philosophically problematic as the theory was, it was at least
motivated by a legitimate concern. The lives of the workers in the
industrialized nations of western Europe really were quite miserable. In films
and on TV we see images of life in Victorian England in which everyone has a
beautiful home, beautiful clothes (by the standards of the day anyway), and
clearly plenty of money. There were such people in Victorian England, but they
were a small percentage of the population. A great many more people lived in
squalor and worked for meager wages in unsafe conditions in factories and
mines. Marx and many other people were sympathetic to the plight of the workers
and angry at the capitalists, who created and perpetuated those conditions.
Fair enough. We
can share Marx’s concern for the living conditions of the workers in Victorian
England and elsewhere, but if we are to understand Marx’s theories in any depth
we must consider two things. They are the philosophical flaws in Marxist
ideology and the horror Marxists in Russia and elsewhere created when they
tried to put that ideology into practice in the real world.
Marx’s theory of
dialectical materialism was flawed from the beginning. There were several
things wrong with it. Economists today say that Marx was wrong when he said it
was the labor of the workers that creates economic value. More significantly, Marx
contended that the merely physical has a metaphysic, that it acts and changes
through time in a way we can discover and describe. He saw history proceed through
a dialectical progression. For him all reality was material, but it wasn’t
static. There was no spirit behind it, but it functioned as though there were.
That contention simply makes no sense.
Spirit may have a dialectic. Humanity may develop in a dialectical manner, but
the material is just there. It’s static. There is nothing in it that could
generate a dialectic. Even if Marx were correct that history progresses in a
dialectical fashion, he was profoundly wrong about the nature of reality. His
ontology was all wrong. His philosophical materialism was simply inconsistent
with the contention that history progresses through time.
Then there is
Marx’s atheism. It is related to but distinct from his philosophical
materialism. Marx clearly thought in ethical terms. His concern for the welfare
of the working class was a moral concern. To him something was morally wrong
about the way the economy, society, and political structures of his day
functioned. Whatever else he may have gotten wrong, he was right about that
one. Yet where in his materialist ontology does that moral concern come from? In
what is it grounded? What in philosophical materialism leads us to have any
moral concern at all? The answer is that truly nothing does. In any purely
materialist ontology people’s moral concerns are simply left hanging in mid
air. They have no support, and because they don’t they are easily abandoned
when it seems expedient to do so. Marx’s philosophical materialism led him to
deny the reality of God and of any spiritual dimension to life. That aspect of
his philosophy would come to have tragic consequences.
Then there is
Marx’s exclusive focus on class. Marx had a moral concern about the class he
called the proletariat, but it was a concern about a whole tier of society with
little or no focus on individuals. In Marxism class matters, individuals don’t.
The combination of this characteristic of Marxism with its atheism would
produce tragedy of worldwide significance in the decades after Marx’s death. If
individuals aren’t what matter, if they have no moral standing as individuals,
it is easy for those with power to dispose of them at will with no moral qualms.
Marx’s disregard of the moral worth of individuals is one of his ideology’s
tragic flaws.
3.
The Soviet Experience
Then there is the
matter of the horror Marxists produced when they tried to organize their
reality around Marxist principles. On October 25, 1917 (old style, November 7
new style) a small group of Russian Marxists, called Bolsheviks at the time,
led by Vladimir Ilych Lenin, staged a coup d’état in St. Petersburg. They
seized control of the government, such as it was, of the enormous Russian
Empire. It wasn’t a coup against the tsars. Russian autocracy had ended the
previous March when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the member of his Romanov
family he had designated as his successor declined to take the position.
Lenin’s coup was against something called the Provisional Government. That
entity was made up of well-intentioned but utterly ineffective Russian liberals.
Pushing them aside was relatively easy. They had little or no support among the
Russian people. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the Bolsheviks
became called what happened that day the Great October Revolution, and they
celebrated it every November 5.
It wasn’t really a revolution at that point at all. It was merely a coup d’état
by a small but tightly organized and committed group against a small group of
men who were hardly organized at all and who seemed to be committed to nothing
other than calling a constitutional convention to form a new government,
something they never did.
The horror of
Soviet Communism began at the very start of the Bolshevik regime. One of the
first things Lenin did after he assumed power was create something called the
Cheka, from the first letters of the Russian words for Extraordinary Committee.
It would eventually become the NKVD and then the KGB. Its function was to
eliminate all internal threats to the Soviet regime.
To them eliminate mostly meant kill. The Bolsheviks had to fight a long civil
war against tsarist and other opponents.
Somehow the Bolsheviks managed to win that civil war. They were able to do it
in large part because the various factions fighting against them never
organized themselves into a unified force. Be that as it may, by 1921 the
Bolsheviks had consolidated their power over most if not quite all of the
former Russian Empire.
Lenin died on
January 21, 1924, after he had suffered a series of debilitating strokes. It
has been fashionable in some circles in our country and in Russia to portray
Lenin as the good Communist and Stalin as the bad Communist. Lenin may in a
sense have been a good Communist, but he was not a good man. He presided over
the creation of the instruments of terror that Stalin would use so brutally in
the years after Lenin’s death. Lenin had no qualms about murdering people who
he saw as a threat. He created the one party state that would rule Russia and
all of the USSR until December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved
itself. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the government it created
and controlled tolerated no political opposition and for much of its existence
was perfectly happy to eliminate it brutally.
Now we come to
Stalin. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, nee Dzhugashvili (1878-1953) was a
Georgian not a Russian. Stalin was the name he took as his revolutionary name.
He had been around for quite a while before Lenin died. He had played a minor
role in the Bolshevik coup of 1917 serving for a time as Lenin’s bodyguard. He
fought in the civil war particularly around a city on the southern reaches of
the Volga that was called Tsaritsyn at the time. It would later be named
Stalingrad and today is the city of Volgograd. He became Secretary General of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1922, possibly against Lenin’s
wishes. In any event Lenin very probably came to regret the choice of Stalin
for that position. After Lenin’s death Stalin maneuvered himself into a
position of total power.
What Lenin had
added to Marxism facilitated Stalin’s rise. Lenin added to Marxism the notion
that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. More importantly, he
defined the Communist Party as the one and only party of the proletariat. It
was the party of the socialist revolution. It consisted of the most class
conscious members of the proletariat. Any act against the Party was an act
against the revolution. Stalin accused the men known as the Old Bolsheviks, the
men who had served with Lenin, both to his left and to his right in the
Communist Party of being counterrevolutionaries. They were unable to thwart
Stalin’s grab for total power. Stalin became in effect the dictator of the
Soviet Union, all under the guise of heading the Communist Party and
representing the interests of the proletariat. In the 1930s Stalin staged the
famous show trials of several Old Bolsheviks, who one after another confessed
to horrendous crimes against the Communist Party and the Soviet state. Each was
promptly executed after the end of their show trial.
Stalin created
one of the most oppressive and violent political systems the world has ever
seen. All dissent was crushed. Thousands upon thousands of people if not more
were arrested, usually on trumped up charges of counterrevolutionary activity.
If they weren’t promptly executed they were sent into the Gulag, that vicious
collection of prison camps Stalin created and about which Solzhenitsyn has
written so powerfully. Most of the people sent into the Gulag were never seen
again. Stalin made it everyone’s duty to spy on everyone else and report
anything even slightly suspicious to the authorities. No one could trust
anyone, and nearly everyone kept their political opinions very much to themselves
while they mouthed the slogans of the Communist Party. It became common for
people to advance in their employment or profession by charging the person
ahead of them in the hierarchy of counterrevolutionary activity, which almost
invariably resulted in the person disappearing and the person making the charge
assuming the now vacant position that person had held. I have read one account
of a man in Leningrad whose job it was to spend eight hours a day shooting
people accused of counterrevolutionary activity in the back of the head. People
were sent into the Gulag for offenses as minor as telling a joke that poked a
little fun at Stalin. Stalin made a child who had turned in his parents a
national hero. The Soviet Union under Stalin was a living hell on earth.
And that wasn’t
the worst of it. The worse of it was what the Ukrainians call the Holodomor
(more correctly transliterated as Golodomor). In Russian “golod” means hunger
and “mor” refers to death. The word means death by starvation. There was a
famine throughout the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933. Stalin used the famine as a
vehicle for committing what the Ukrainians call genocide against them. Stalin
intentionally made the famine worse in Ukraine through such actions as refusing
foreign aid and confiscating food from private homes. He may have been trying
to force Ukrainian peasants into
complying with his policy of the collectivization of agriculture, or perhaps he
was punishing them for having opposed that policy when it was first instigated
in the late 1920s. The famine lasted nearly continuously from spring 1932, to
July 1933. The total number of deaths in the Holodomor is unknown, but we do know
that millions of Ukrainians had starved to death by the end of 1933. The
Holodomor is a tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust. The Soviets denied for
years that it had ever happened. Relevant information and documentation is only
now coming to light.
Stalin became a
human monster of the same order as Hitler, or perhaps even worse. Yet somehow
he got the Soviet people to believe that he was their dearest friend and
protector. Many of them still see him as a great wartime leader. In 1939 he
entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis in which the two
totalitarian nations pledged not to attack each other and to divide up Poland
between them. Stalin was taken completely by surprise by the Nazi invasion of
1941. It is true that the people of the USSR, or at least the Russians, rallied
to the national defense against the Germans. Soviet industry produced weapons
that were at least as good as the German weapons and often better. The United
States shipped a good deal of material support to the Soviets. Yet most of that
aid came after Stalin’s forces had turned the tide of the war in Europe against
the Germans in the almost inconceivably bloody battle of Stalingrad (23 August,
1942-2 February, 1943). Stalingrad had some military significance because it is
on the Volga and can control traffic up and down that river, Russia’s main
waterway for the transportation of people and goods. Yet Hitler probably
attacked it mostly because it was named at the time for Stalin. Stalin probably
ordered that it be defended to the last person standing for the same reason. The
Red Army scored a major military victory at Stalingrad through a brilliant
flanking maneuver that surrounded most of the German forces and forced them to
surrender. But the victory was won at a horrendous cost. The Germans and their
allies lost around 800,000 men, including those captured or missing. Soviet
forces lost around 1,100,000 men. Approximately 40,000 civilians died in the
battle.
The Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle of World War II, and the
Germans never recovered from their loss there. After Stalingrad they began
their retreat back to Germany. The Red Army pursued them all the way to Berlin.
The Stalinist
terror may have eased up some during the war but probably not by much. Even in
Leningrad under siege and blockade by the Germans in which one million or more
of the city’s residents died, mostly by starvation, the NKVD, a successor of
the Cheka and a predecessor of the KGB, kept at its work trumping up charges of
counterrevolutionary activity against innocent people. The terror continued
after the war too. It appears that before his death Stalin was preparing a
purge campaign against Jewish doctors, again on trumped up charges.
Stalin died on
March 5, 1953, and the country went into deep mourning. The people thought they
had lost their Dear Leader (he called himself Vozhd, the Russian equivalent of
the German Fȕhrer).
In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev began a destalinization program. He gave a famous
secret speech to the Party leadership in which he condemned Stalin for the way
he purged the Communist Party of most of its capable leadership and for
creating a cult of personality. He did not, however, condemn any of Stalin’s
national policies. Eventually all images of Stalin disappeared in the Soviet
Union except in Stalin’s native Georgia. When I was there in the summer of 1968
on a Russian language study tour Stalin’s picture was everywhere, even in taxi
cabs.
Stalinism
completely discredits Marxism, Leninism, and Communism, but we have to ask
whether a Stalin of some sort was inevitable or only possible in a system that
styled itself as Marxist-Leninist. The evidence suggests that it was
inevitable. Marxism-Leninism produced Mao Zedong in China, Castro in Cuba, and
the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Mao was if anything even more brutal in his
attacks on the Chinese people and Chinese culture than Stalin had been in
Russia. Lenin’s ideology of the Communist Party as the only legitimate party of
the proletariat certainly opened the door for Stalin. That ideology made it
easy for Stalin to convince people that any act against the Party, its
policies, or against Stalin himself was counterrevolutionary and deserving of
death.
But what about
Marxism itself? After all, Marx’s vision of the classless communist society,
unrealistic as it surely was, was a vision for an earthly paradise not the
earthly hell of Soviet Communism. I’ve already mentioned here the two aspects
of Marxism that played into the hands of the Soviet Communists as they
established a totalitarian system in the former Russian Empire. The first of
them is Marxism’s atheism. The Soviet Communists had significant success in
their campaign to turn the Russians and the other people of the Soviet Union
atheist. Churches, synagogues, and mosques always existed in the USSR, but
people always said that only old women go to church. That was largely true of
the Russians in the 1970s when I was there, but it seems there was generation
after generation of old women, so the church never died out completely. A
Russian student at Moscow State University my late wife and I got to know a
little bit asked us if we believed in God. We said yes. He said that was the
one thing about us westerners that he just couldn’t understand. He had had
atheism drilled into him by the Soviet education system. That was a heritage of
atheistic Marxism.
Then there was
the fact that Marx made a class, the proletariat, and not individual
people the object of his affection. In
Marxism individuals matter only to the extent that they belong to one class or
another. They have no intrinsic moral value in themselves. The combination of
atheism and a focus on class not on individuals created a deadly mixture under
the Soviets, especially under Stalin.
Consider: You are
a leader of a great country like Russia, great in geographic scope and in
cultural heritage. Your Marxist ideology tells you that your task as a leader
is to transform that country from what it had been into something new and
supposedly better. You face opposition, and you have neither a religious belief
that keeps you from doing horrible things nor do you place any value on
individual lives. So what do you do? You don’t go through the tedious, time
consuming, and uncertain process of trying to convince your opponents to support
your policies. No, you just take those opponents out. Why not? They stand in
the way of what you consider to be progress or at least in the way of a transformation
you wish to bring about whether you actually consider it progress or not. You
have no qualms about killing because you don’t believe in a God who tells you
not to kill. Those opponents of yours have no moral value as individuals. So
you kill them. Problem solved.
If you’re Joseph
Stalin you kill supposed opponents by the millions. Stalin famously said that
one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. A statistic about people who
don’t matter, who are expendable, who (you think at least) need to be gotten
out of the way. There is nothing in Marxism that tells you not to kill them. Marxism
tells you that what matters is the creation of communism. So you kill. You
build the Gulag and cause probably millions of people to disappear into it never
to be seen again. Why not? They don’t matter. They’re just in the way of what
you want to do. So kill them. Why not? You’re presented with an ethnic group of
many millions of people, and you don’t like them. They’re different, and they
are not willingly going along with your policies of transformation. So kill
them. Kill them by the millions. Why not? There’s nothing in your Marxism that
tells you that it’s wrong to do it. Marxism says create communism, so if you
think someone’s blocking the road to communism or can be made to look like
they’re blocking it take them out. Kill them, and it really doesn’t matter how
many you kill. They don’t matter. They’re only a statistic. Only communism
matters.
4.
Conclusion
That’s why I’m
not a Communist. I can’t speak for him, but it may be why Rev. Currie isn’t a
Communist either. We are Christians. We call ourselves liberal or progressive
Christians, and we are convinced that we understand the gospel of Jesus Christ
better than our conservative coreligionists do. Jesus Christ wasn’t about how
your soul gets to heaven when you die, or at least he wasn’t primarily about
that. He was about building the realm of God right here on earth. The realm of
God is what the world would be if God were in charge and the people who are in
charge weren’t, to paraphrase John Dominic Crossan. It is radically nonviolent.
It is a world in which everyone has enough because no one has too much. It is a
world of justice for the lowly, the least, and the lost. Not due process
justice, although surely it has that too. Distributive justice, justice that
works to assure that everyone is cared and provided for. I suppose Jesus’
vision of the realm of God has some similarities with Marx’s classless society
of communism, but only in the details. The realm of God is precisely the realm of
God.
Marx was an
atheist. We progressive Christians know that God is real every bit as much as
conservative Christians do. We are believers. We are people of faith.
Ultimately that is why I am not a Communist. Marx’s atheism, actually anybody’s
atheism, is just wrong. God is real. I don’t believe that God damns people who
don’t believe that, but I know that those people are wrong. God is real. Marx’s
focus on class rather than the individual contradicts the foundational tenets
of my faith. Each person is a child of God with immense individual moral value.
That in the end is why I am not a Communist.
