Last week, Pope Francis spent 40 minutes – a long time for a busy man – with representatives of DIALOP, a group that engages in Christian-Marxist “dialogue.” It was formed in 2014 after he met with some of the founders. It will probably only be remembered as a mere blip compared with much more momentous things that he’s done. But for the hundreds of millions of people who suffered and are still suffering under Communist regimes – and for many of us who worked with St. John Paul II towards the demise of the Soviet Union and other murderous Marxist outposts – the disinterment of this long-dead corpse is no small matter.
Given Marxism’s record of tyranny and death – a body count three times as great as Nazism’s (itself National Socialism) – where was the pope’s principle in Evangelii gaudium [231] that, “Realities are greater than ideas”? There are good reasons why there’s no Christian-Nazi dialogue. Why does Communism get a pass?
Even in its heyday a half-century ago, the Christian-Marxist “dialogue” did little other than weaken Christian resistance to what every modern pope has condemned as a fundamentally evil ideology. Leo XIII prophesied in Rerum novarum (1891), just a few years after Marx’s death, that if socialist ideas were “carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer.” [4]
It’s a great historical irony that it was the largely Catholic workers of Polish Solidarność who lit the fuse that blew up Communism. In Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio sometimes argued that “God’s faithful people” didn’t want Marxism. But at the recent Vatican meeting, he praised the search for a kind of common humanitarian project, “instead of rigid approaches that divide, let us cultivate, with open hearts, discussion and listening.”
Who takes Communism seriously today, real Communism as we know it from history – a nightmare, not the “dreaming of a better world” that Pope Francis and others see in humanitarian initiatives of this sort? It’s precisely sentimental dreaming that enabled unprecedented carnage.
You have to wonder what Marx would have thought of all this. Anyone familiar with his “scientific socialism” knows that he scorned the softheaded humanitarian socialisms that existed in his day – and still do in ours. Marx, with typical Enlightenment hubris about the powers of atheist reason, believed that he’d demonstrated how the revolution would take place by inexorable laws of history: The forces of capitalist production would increasingly exploit the workers, large numbers of the poor would rise up and, almost without the need for violence, simply “expropriate the expropriators.”
Of course, this never happened despite Marx’s “science of history,” because there is no such science. Communism conquered places where “capitalism” hardly existed: primarily Russia and China (then Laos, North Korea, Vietnam). You might try to argue that Cuba sort of resembled what Marx thought would happen everywhere under capitalism. But that has to be balanced against the fact that Cuba was wealthier – and even less oppressive – before Communism than in its current disastrous state. (I’ve been there and seen it.)
Eastern European countries had Communism imposed on them by the USSR after World War II. The Soviets almost succeeded via proxy wars in Africa and Latin America. But the actual Marxist vision about the “arc of history” didn’t go as expected. It was monstrous everywhere it’s been tried, producing over 100 million dead in the course of a century or so.
Yet the dream – the deadly illusion – continues. It’s interesting that Communism and the social justice movements more generally have moved away from their classic foci – politics and economics – and into the realm of culture. They had to.
During the 1980s, as the Cold War was coming to an end, you sometimes heard complaints from Marxists that the embourgeoisement of workers – i.e., greater prosperity – in capitalist countries was undermining revolutionary fervor. But that had been going on for a long time.
One of TCT’s founders, Michael Novak, often pointed out that the real wages of workers under “capitalist” systems doubled within years after Marx wrote, then doubled again, and again, and again. Whatever inequalities, both economic and political, remained – they’ve been growing in recent decades for complex reasons – there’s realism behind the large waves of illegal immigrants risking their lives to come to America and Europe, places Francis seems to think are “dictated to by finance and market mechanisms,” while almost no one is seeking to enter China or Cuba – or any of the Marxist-adjacent regimes, like Venezuela.
Which is why we now have the “cultural Marxism” of campus hothouses, absurdly sensitive about racial and ethnic “micro-aggressions,” but mostly blind to socialist macro-aggressions. Cultural Marxism has roots in Antonio Gramsci, who exerted great influence over Euro-Communism via the notebooks he wrote in a Fascist prison. He developed a concept that he called “capillary culture” – a Marxism so pervasive that, like the capillaries in the body, it would be carried into every nook and cranny of society and therefore be impossible to remove – or resist. Interestingly, he praised the Jesuits during the Counter-Reformation as a model for how to carry out this re-education project. Perhaps that’s why our Jesuit pope says he’s been influenced by him.
Populist reactions against the centralizing, globalist currents around the world today are an indication that this new collectivism, like the old, is having a difficult time selling itself. Hence, the various forms of internationalist and domestic coercion.
It’s annoying to have to recall what should need no recalling, but there’s a willed historical amnesia dominant these days. And so we have to keep reminding people of the historically verified results of human experience, realities much bigger than Marxist ideas.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.” Which is to say, hate more than love lies at its heart.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
