Communism

Communism is the sociopolitical ideal that aims to create a society based on common ownership of goods and property. Throughout human history, from the influence of religious mysteries in Plato's conception of society to the early modern vision of a utopia in Thomas Moore's Christian conception, the ideal of a society without social and economic divisions has been a powerful political idea. During the 20th century, Marxist communism was the most global and ambitious sociopolitical project that attempted to implement a real egalitarian society.

Across the globe, Marxist communist parties were highly disciplined and committed to the cause of creating an earthly brotherhood. Communist followers created saints and sacred texts. Karl Marx, the ideological founder, did not propound a religious doctrine, but he believed in remarkable forces that operate in human history as engines of change and revolution. Those forces were related with the nature of human beings as transformers of nature.

In their work, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels assert that with the rise of capitalism, the sacred has changed irremediably as a consequence of a society that reduces everything to commodities. For Marx and Engels, the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of a given period of time; religion, law, and morality are only the superstructure of a society whose role is the maintenance of the status quo. For them, religion is the ideological tool of the dominant class. They thought that religion would be obsolete in the communist stage of society, since the need for an ideological justification of social injustice would be superfluous. Despite these conclusions, Engels did perceive the revolutionary power of some moral-religious concepts such as equality.

The notion of equality was not the mere product of economic considerations or the social interest of the ruling class. Nevertheless, neither Marx nor Engels was able to explain the nature of equality or their trust in the final emancipation of humanity in the communist stage from the bondage of traditional religion and capitalism. This was a hope and a religious narrative that had its roots in the early intellectual formation of Marxist communism.

Marx wanted to create a scientific framework to explain the past and predict the future of human societies. But he also wanted to criticize their current [Page 239]social conditions. He had to sustain an ethical vision to explain the existence of an unjust world. Marx did not need the existence of a transcendental god to defend his moral vision. He created a new form of theodicy in which God was a mere reflection of human longings. Marx wanted to liberate human beings from their superfluous mythologies, along with their reified divinities.