Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis Read Online Free PDF Page A

possibility. To remain within the boundaries of what is believed to be practicable is to abdicate hope and adopt an attitude of passive acceptance that amounts to complicity with oppression.
    According to many who accept this view, the disastrous consequences of utopian projects – in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, for example – do not flow from the projects themselves. Western utopian theories are guiltless; it is Russian or Chinese traditions that are at fault. In the next chapter I examine in greater detail the idea that actually existing communism was a deformation of Marx’s vision. At this point it need only be pointed out that Lenin’s readiness to use terror to bring about a new world was in no sense new. The use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the essence of revolutionary utopianism. The Bolshevik Revolution was the culmination of a European revolutionary tradition, beginning with the Jacobins and to which Marx belonged, that accepted systematic terror as a legitimate means of transforming society.
    Actually existing communism was not a noble humanist ideal corrupted by contact with backward peoples. Repression flowed from the ideal itself. In
The Communist Manifesto
Marx and Engels declared that communism was ‘the riddle of history solved’, but they were in no doubt that the solution would be reached only after much blood had been shed. Terror has been a feature not only of the Soviet and Maoist regimes but also of more recent communist movements such as the Shining Path in Peru, 16 which killed tens of thousands of people in pursuit of a world better than any that has ever existed. This vision animated every twentieth-century communist movement, and sustaining it led inescapably to repression.
    It was not Marx’s economic theory that led to this result. As an analyst of capitalism Marx has few rivals. It was Marx who understood before anyone else the advance of globalization that wouldrender the national economies of the nineteenth century obsolete and destroy bourgeois life as known in the past. Perhaps only the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, grasped the revolutionary character of capitalism quite as firmly. Marx perceived that capitalism is an economic system that unsettles every aspect of human life. Not only politics and government but also culture and society are continuously transformed under the impact of the anarchic energies of the market. Movements aiming to free up the market while reinstating ‘traditional values’ dominated much of late twentieth-century politics. While effectively reshaping society to serve the imperatives of the market, politicians such as Thatcher and Blair wanted at the same time to revive the virtues of bourgeois life. Yet, as Marx perceived, the actual effect of the unfettered market is to overturn established social relationships and forms of ethical life – including those of bourgeois societies.
    Marx showed how unreal are all visions of marrying the free market to bourgeois values. Far from being utopian, his account of capitalism is a vital corrective to the utopian visions that have distorted politics over the past generation. It is Marx’s vision of the alternative to capitalism that is utopian. Though he understood capitalism better than most economists in his day or ours, Marx’s conception of communism was dangerously impractical. Central planning was bound to fail: no one can know enough to plan a modern economy and no one is good enough to be entrusted with the power to govern it. Worse, Marx believed that with the arrival of communism the conflicts of values that had existed throughout history would cease, and society could be organized around a single conception of the good life. It was a belief that was to have disastrous consequences, as will be seen when the Soviet experiment is examined in Chapter 2 .
    Today as in the twentieth century the dangers of utopianism are denied.