Excerpts from the book "Reflections on the Failure of Socialism" Part 2

The Communists believe in man not as an independent power, but as a constituent part of the superhumanly ordained movement of the universe. That dialectic movement is their God, and it is that God who exempts them from the laws of morality. The difference between Christianity and Communism—the difference, I [the author] mean, that is vital in this connection—is between a religion which teaches personal salvation through sympathy and loving-kindness and a religion which teaches social salvation through bringing the morals of war into the peacetime relations of men.

Marx was so sure that the world was going to be redeemed by its own dialectic evolution that he would not permit his disciples to invoke the guidance of moral ideals. He really meant it when he said the workers have “no ideal to realize,” they have only to participate in the contemporary struggle. He expelled people from his Communist party for mentioning programmatically such things as “love,” “justice,” “humanity,” even “morality” itself. “Soulful ravings,” “sloppy sentimentality,” he called such expressions, and purged the astonished authors as though they had committed the most dastardly crimes.

Later in life, when Marx founded the First International, he felt compelled for the sake of a big membership to soft-pedal his highbrow insight into the purposes of the universe. He wrote privately to Engels: “I was obliged to insert in the preamble two phrases about ‘duty and right,’ ditto ‘truth, morality, and justice.’” But these lamentable phrases—he assured his friend—“are placed in such a way that they can do no harm.”

This mystic faith in evolution set Marx’s mind free, and, alas, his natural disposition, to replace the honest campaign of public persuasion by which other gospels have been propagated, with schemes for deceiving the public and tricking his way into positions of power. It was Marx, not Lenin, who invented the technique of the “front organization,” the device of pretending to be a democrat in order to destroy democracy*, the ruthless purging of dissident party members, the employment of false personal slander in this task.

It was Marx and Engels who adopted “scorn and contempt” as the major key in which to attack the opponents of socialism, introducing a literature of vituperation that has few parallels in history. Even the political masterstroke of giving the land to the peasants “initially” in order to take it away from them when the power is secure came from the same source.^ The introduction of such unprincipled behavior into a movement toward the highest ends of man was entirely the work of Marx and Engels. Lenin added nothing to it but skill, and Stalin nothing but total instinctive indifference to the ends.

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955) by Max Eastman.

 

* So, that’s where the Left came with this deceptive tactic. Faking to the right.

^ Evil bastards!