Free PDF: My First Book, Marx's Religion of Revolution (1968)
Karl Marx was a personal failure.
He never had a job after 1850. He had lost two jobs as the editor of revolutionary newspapers that were shut down by the government. He was supported by his colleague Frederick Engels, the son of a capitalist and the manager of his father's textile factory.
He seduced his wife's lifelong servant lady. He persuaded Engels to take the blame. He never had any contact with his son, Fred Demuth.
He was unknown at the time of his death in 1883. Only a dozen people attended his funeral, mostly family members.
Two of his three daughters later committed suicide.
His theology of revolution led to the murder of 100 million people.
In 1966, I began writing the book. I was a graduate student. I was working on my master's degree. I had been anti-Communist by that time for a decade. I was convinced that the heart of Communism was not its economic theory. On the contrary, its economic theory was incoherent. Its appeal was overwhelmingly the appeal of social revolution. This was a theology that stretched back for over two millennia. It was a theology of regeneration through chaos.
Marx offered no theory of how Communist society would operate. He offered no theory of how pre-Communist socialist society would operate so as to bring in the final stage of Communism.
He cobbled together a theory of historical development that he called scientific, but it proved to be completely erroneous in the 20th century. He said that the development of the mode of production went from primitivism to feudalism to capitalism, and it would result inevitably in proletarian revolutions in capitalist countries. Yet in all capitalist countries in which there were brief Communist revolutions after World War I, they were successfully suppressed. The Communist revolutions that survived took place only in rural societies: Russia, China, and the Far East.
All this was well-known by 1950. It was ignored by Communists.
When I wrote the book, there was no academic critique of original Marxism by any evangelical Protestant scholar. I was appalled by this fact. There should have been dozens of critiques. So, I decided to write one. It took me a little under two years.
In reviewing the book, I regarded it as a decent effort by a graduate student. It won me a Weaver fellowship in 1968 from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, so writing the book paid off. The tax-free money paid for over a year of graduate school.
As far as I know, my book was the first to trace the origin of Marx's religion of revolution back to its origins in primitive society. How anyone could have taken this theory seriously remains a mystery. Marx captured the minds of generations of well-educated people who committed their lives to his religion of revolution, all in the name of anti-religion. Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses. But his religion was the opiate of well-educated middle-class and upper-middle-class intellectuals.
Two decades after I wrote the book, I republished it with a few minor changes in 1988. That edition is here. Three years later, the Soviet Union went belly-up. Gorbachev shut it down on December 25, 1991.
This is the original first edition. I do not recommend that you read all of it. I do recommend that you read two or three pages in each of the three major sections: III, IV, V. You will get some idea of what Marxism was all about. You will also get some idea of how I wrote in my early days.
I ask once again, just as I asked over half a century ago: "How could such nonsense have been taken seriously?"
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