When Marx adopted the Hegelian dialectic he stood it on its head by converting Hegel’s idealistic dialectics to a materialistic dialectics. Hegel believed that ideas were the moving forces in history. These ideas wrought change by way of the dialectical process. Marx, on the contrary held that material conditions were the moving forces in history. Hence Marx’s emphasis on Economics as Theology (Queen of the sciences). The shift that resulted is a shift from the contest of ideas to the contest over control of material things.
However Marx not only stood Hegel on his head, but he also stood the Christian faith on its head. Marx retained the historic postmillennial eschatology of Christianity and merely put it in service of the Utopian Kingdom of man. The idea of Christian conversion was kept but put into the service of delivering men from their false consciousness. The incarnation was retained but instead of a heaven sent Messiah being sent it was the socially conscious proletariat that was the incarnated Messiah sent to save mankind from the sin of the Bourgeoisie Devil. Marxism holds out a second coming as well with the promise of social revolution filling the role of a coming Messiah. As in Christianity, Communism provides a hope of redemption as man is redeemed from the bondage of Christianity replete with its sinister Capitalism, private property, familial connections and just weight and measures to the freedom of Communism with its glorious Statism, public property, sexual and gender familial perversions and redistributionist weight and measures. Marx retained eternity, but he did so by absolutizing time, and he likewise retained spirit by converting it into matter. Marxism, has it has evolved, likewise has retained the importance of justice that you find in Christianity. Only for Marxism justice is the social justice of egalitarianism where not only are all men economically the same but all men are to be socially, sexually, psychologically and ethnically the same. Marx was the “John the Baptist” of anti-religion religion of Communism, spending his life in the wilderness heralding the imminent coming of the social revolution.
Like Christianity, Marx was interested in resolving the alienation that is characteristic of fallen men. Only for Marx the alienation that man suffered was because man had absorbed the rudiments of a Christian world view. The ultimate aim of Marx’s social revolution was to end the alienation of man from himself and his true nature. Marx believed that man was alienated from himself, first by religion (read Christianity), which subjected him to mediating powers. Further man is alienated from himself by private property due to the fact that private property sets him at odds with others and so alienates him from his social nature. The alienation begins to pile up for Marx as man is alienated by the State which was a instrument of class rule and man is alienated from the product of his labor by the theft of the Capitalist. Notice in all this Marx appeals to the creation of the Commune that the individual might be set free of the alienation that results from the sin of not being rightly related to the social order. For Marx, The abolition of Christianity, and the culture it creates is the end of man’s alienation. Christianity, likewise speaks of alienation but the alienation that it speaks of begins with fallen man’s alienation from God, and Christianity likewise insists that only a conversion can set men free from their alienation, but the conversion Christianity insists upon will eventually result in the very things (free markets, private property, particular normative extended families, States that rule according to God’s standards of justice, etc.) that Marx insists is the embodiment of alienation.
Marx is just Christianity turned inside out. It is the perfect humanist religion because it so well apes Christianity. What is saddening is that currently so many in the Church today are defining Christianity with Marxist type thinking. To be sure, nobody in the Church uses the words “Marxism,” “Cultural Marxism,” “Socialism,” etc. but the policies that the Church pursues (normalizing Homosexuality, supporting Statism whether through Global warming or redistribution of wealth schemes, participating in the guilt complex brought forth by assorted race pimps, etc.) indicates that the Church is calling Karl Marx, “Jesus Christ.”
