One of the most common charges leveled at Marxists is that, for all their atheistic pretensions, they retain a quasi-religious faith in the revolutionary dispensation of working class dictatorship. “It’s become an almost compulsory figure of speech to refer to Marxism as a Church,” observed the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1951. Barthes was reviewing a book by the surrealist author Roger Caillois, which had just been released, but if anything the use of this lazy metaphor has grown more frequent over time. Just a few years after Barthes’ review was published, the public intellectual Raymond Aron came out with a polemic cuttingly titled The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). He’d lifted the title from a bon mot by the philosopher Simone Weil, who despite her youthful Bolshevism in the twenties had gone on to publicly debate Leon Trotsky during the thirties. Repeating this old anticommunist jibe, Aron quipped that “in Marxist eschatology, the proletariat is cast in the role of collective savior… that is, the class elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” Evidently, in Aron’s understanding, workers were held up as an object of mythic exaltation among the socialists.
To be sure, some of the language adopted by Marxists — e.g., heresies, dogma, sects, orthodoxy, schisms — is clearly borrowed from theological disputes. Furthermore, the recantations made by ex-communists at times seems to lend credence to this view. You need look no further than the famous 1949 essay collection The God that Failed for proof of this fact. Wolfgang Eckhardt’s newly-translated study of The First Socialist Schism (2016), on the split between Bakunin and Marx in the Workingmen’s International, is only the latest in a very long line of examples. André Gorz opened his Farewell to the Working Class (1980) with a chapter on “The Working Class According to Saint Marx,” riffing on the section of The German Ideology dedicated to a critique of “German socialism according to its prophets.” Gorz thus concluded that “orthodoxy, dogmatism, and religiosity are not accidental features of Marxism, since the philosophy of the proletariat is a religion.” More recently, the former Situationist TJ Clark confessed that his own Farewell to an Idea (1999) will likely be seen “as a vestige of early twentieth-century messianism.” Clark sardonically added that “if I can’t have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan” (though he got this last part a bit mixed up, as we shall see).
Socialism, however, is not about worshiping but rather abolishing the worker. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perhaps the two most prominent theorists of proletarian revolution during the nineteenth century, by no means deified the class they felt might lead to the socialization of humanity. In their first written collaboration, from 1845, the young firebrands maintained:
When socialist writers ascribe [a] world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all… because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. In the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, and even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete. The conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, and at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need — the practical expression of necessity — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life, and cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation.
Expanding on this passage, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted on the terrestrial foundations of the Marxist hypothesis. “If [Marxism] accords a privilege to the proletariat, it does so because on the basis of the internal logic of its condition… apart from any messianic illusion,” he claimed in Humanism and Terror (1947). “Proletarians, ‘who are not gods,’ are the only ones in a position to realize humanity. Marxists discern a mission in the proletariat — not a providential, but an historical one — and this means that, if we take the proletariat’s role in the present social constellation, it moves toward the recognition of man by man…” Nevertheless, in the meantime workers are hardly godlike; indeed, they’re barely even human, if Marx and Engels are to be believed. As the former would later explain in Capital (1867), “manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent worker to the discipline and command of capital, but converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity.” His description is reminiscent of the lyrics to that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons,” written about a Kentucky coal miner in 1947: “Some people say a man is made outta’ mud / A poor man’s made outta’ muscle and blood / Muscle and blood and skin and bones / A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong / You load sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt / Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go / I owe my soul to the company store.”
Over and above the image of the proletariat as divine redeemer, here emerges a picture of the proletariat as beyond redemption. Workers have sold their souls to the company store. Consider the following lines from Marx’s Capital on the topic of automation: “An organized system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic center, is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, instead of the isolated machine, a vast mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power [dämonische Kraft], at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.” Little wonder that the Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga drew upon these words in elaborating his own “Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil,” from 1951. Quoting Marx, who in turn was quoting Goethe, Bordiga explained how, “by incorporating living labor into capital’s lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labor in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if possessed by the devil’.” The dispossessed (which is, after all, just another word for “proletariat”) are thus demonically possessed by the alienated products of their labor. For Marx, this was all part of “the magic and necromancy [der Zauber und Spuk] that surrounds the products of labor on the basis of commodity production.”
Gáspár Miklós Tamás, the Hungarian communist dissident turned born-again Marxist, is one of the only theorists in recent memory to have grasped the demonic character of the working class. In his brilliant 2006 essay “Telling the Truth About Class,” Tamás framed his view by contrasting it with that of the British cultural historian EP Thompson:
There is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl Polányi, E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy, destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the word, a “falling away of the veils” which reveals all the social mechanisms in their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable to sustain illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancien régime as “natural”) to hurl them onto the labor market where their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on demand — in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or “inner worth.” In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochastic; there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the permanent reevaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of everything, determined by — among other contingent factors — random developments in science and technology. What makes the whole thing demonic indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the incomprehensibility, of “fate,” “the stars,” participants in the capitalist economy are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by a series of choices and compulsions that are obviously manmade. To be born noble and ignoble is nobody’s fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation appears self-inflicted.
Marx is the poet of that Faustian demonism: only capitalism reveals the social, and the final unmasking; the final apocalypse, the final revelation can be reached by wading through the murk of estrangement which, seen historically, is unique in its energy, in its diabolical force. Marx does not “oppose” capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rousseau, it is evil.
Here Tamás was somewhat unfair to Thompson — not to mention Rousseau — but his caricatured presentation served to throw their perspectives into sharper relief. Thompson may have been guilty, from time to time, of romanticizing the English working class, but he entertained no illusions as to the hellish conditions out of which it emerged. After all, it was Thompson who wrote of “the denizens of ‘Satan’s strongholds’ [inhabitants of proletarian neighborhoods in industrial cities], of the ‘harlots, publicans, and thieves’ whose souls the evangelists wrestled for in a state of civil war against the ale-houses.” Every religious doctrine of the age, stated Thompson, had to be “held up to a Satanic light and read backwards” so as to properly grasp their context. One popular Methodist refrain, which he noted in his Making of the English Working Class (1963), spoke of factories as follows: “There is a dreadful Hell, / And everlasting pains, / Where sinners must with devils dwell, / In darkness, fire, and chains.” Regarding “that monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve” (to quote Capital), Thompson echoed Marx’s military metaphor in describing “…an unsettling element in the formative working-class community, a seemingly inexhaustible flow of reinforcements to man the battlements.”
It could scarcely have been otherwise. William Blake, Thompson’s favorite Romantic, had coined the phrase about the “dark, Satanic mills” that came to symbolize the Industrial Revolution. Engels’ recollections of the “great towns” of England, written just a couple decades on, were very much in keeping with Blake’s overall vision: from the “narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar dwellings” of Manchester, “ordinarily very dirty and inhabited almost exclusively by proletarians,” to the “planless, knotted chaos of houses… more or less on the verge of uninhabitability” in Irk, i.e. “whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings.” And so on down the line, since “what is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. There is barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand and nameless misery on the other, social warfare and reciprocal plundering all under the protection of the law, so shameless, so openly avowed that one wonders how the whole crazy fabric hangs together.” But if Marx’s proposition that social consciousness reflects social being is correct, and not the other way around, then it is to be expected that these demoniacal qualities would eventually migrate from the object to the subject.
Jean-François Lyotard’s infamous contention in Libidinal Economy, his “evil book” from 1971, can even be endorsed within such strict limits. Given this proviso, Lyotard was fully justified in making this controversial claim:
Look at the English proletariat, at what capital, that is to say their labor, has done to their body. You will tell me, however, that it was that or die. But it is always that or die, this is the law of libidinal economy, no, not the law: this is its provisional, very provisional, definition in the form of the cry, of intensities of desire; “that or die,” i.e. that and dying from it, death always in it, as its internal bark, its thin skin, not yet as its price, on the contrary as that which renders it unpayable. And perhaps you believe that “that or die” is an alternative?! And that if they choose that, if they become the slave of the machine, the machine of the machine, fucker fucked by it, eight hours, twelve hours, a day, year after year, it is because they are forced into it, constrained, because they cling to life? Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they — hang on tight and spit on me — enjoyed [ils ont joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.
Whether or not the workers enjoyed the mad rush of industrialism is rather beside the point, however. It is enough to say that they endured this oblivion and were shaped by the experience. “Bathed in the fire of labor, the English working men are the firstborn sons of modern industry,” Marx proclaimed in a landmark 1856 speech. “The newfangled forces of society… want only to be mastered by newfangled men. Such are the working men, who are as much the invention of the times as machinery itself…” Next to them, Marx subsequently maintained, “the so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents, small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. Yet they denounced the abyss. Underneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter… only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock. Loudly and confusedly they declared the emancipation of the proletarian (i.e., the secret of the nineteenth century, and of the revolution of that century).” For Marx, this proletariat was not just Promethean but Luciferian, as well. Henri Lefebvre’s comment that “the children of the nineteenth century loved the gods Prometheus and Satan” seems especially apt here.
Reactionaries had suspected the demonic origins of revolution for some time, of course. Joseph de Maistre thus already noted in his 1796 Considerations on France that “there is a satanic quality [un caractère satanique] to the French Revolution that distinguishes it from everything we have ever seen.” Marx and Engels themselves were known to admire Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 history of the same. Though widely known as a traditionalist, he nevertheless wrote “in a manner that [was] at times even revolutionary.” Carlyle showed how the 1789 revolutionaries finally “got to that black precipitous abyss whither all things had long been tending. Having arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down in confused ruin till sansculottism has consummated itself. And in this wondrous French Revolution, as in a doomsday, an entire world will have been rapidly destroyed and engulfed. Que la Terreur soit à l’ordre du jour.” Later, Carlyle inquired into its uncanny essence: “What then is this thing called la Révolution that hangs over France like an angel of death, which is noyading, fusillading, gun-boring, tanning human skins? It is the madness dwelling in the hearts of men, invisible and impalpable. Yet no black Azrael, with wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer reality.”
Following the suppression of the Paris Commune, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin described the “universal proletariat” [le prolétariat universel] as “the modern Satan, the great rebel — vanquished, but not pacified” [«le Satan moderne, le grand révolté vaincu mais non pacifié»]. This was not the first time the Satanic aspect of the modern proletariat had disclosed itself to revolutionaries… Charles Baudelaire wrote his Litanies of Satan amidst the 1848 uprising, in which he had participated, along with many others. (Louis Auguste Blanqui was among them, it so happens, Baudelaire even drew a sketch of him). He concluded his litanies with a prayer to Satan, “wisest of the angels”: “Glory and praise to You, Satan, on high, / Where You once reigned, in Hell where You now lie, / Vanquished, silent, dreaming eternally. / Grant my soul some day rest close to You / Under the Tree of Knowledge that will spread / Its branches like a Temple overhead…” Walter Benjamin analyzed this poem in his Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire (1938):
Baudelaire’s satanism should not be taken too seriously. If it has any genuine significance, it is as the only attitude in which Baudelaire was able to sustain a nonconformist position for any length of time. Among the upper classes cynicism was part of the accepted style; in the lower classes, rebellious pugnacity was the norm. Baudelaire was thoroughly familiar with this dual aspect of Satan. To him, Satan spoke not only for the upper crust but for the lower classes as well.
Marx could hardly have wished for a better reader of the following lines from The Eighteenth Brumaire: “When the Puritans complained at the Council of Constance about the wicked lives of the popes, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: ‘Only the devil incarnate can save the Catholic church, and you demand angels!’ Thus, the French bourgeoisie cried after the coup d’état: ‘Only the head of the Society of the Tenth of December can save bourgeois society! Only theft can save property, perjury religion, bastardy the family, and disorder order’.”
The last poem in the cycle is, by virtue of its theological content, the miserere of an ophiolatrous liturgy. Satan appears with his Luciferian halo as the keeper of profound knowledge, as an instructor in Promethean skills, as the patron saint of the stubborn and unyielding. Here flashes the dark head of Blanqui: Toi qui fais au proscrit ce regard calme et haut / Qui damne tout un peuple autour d’un echafaud. [“You who give the outlaw that calm, proud look / Which can damn an entire multitude gathered around a scaffold”].
Yet Benjamin was not alone in seeing the silhouette of Blanqui as Satanic. Eugène de Mirecourt, the literary opponent of Alexandre Dumas, concurred with Benjamin on this score… Mirecourt dubbed Blanqui “the most cynical of demoniac conspirators for the loss of modern society” [«le plus cynique des démoniaques conjurés pour la perte de la société moderne»]. If the proletariat is demonic, as Tamás has argued, then it is only fitting that the first professional proletarian would be demonic as well. (Blanqui, in the proceedings taken against the Société des Amis du Peuple, was asked by the presiding judge to state his profession. He answered that he was a “proletarian.” When the judge expressed doubt whether this was a legitimate profession, Blanqui countered that “it’s the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live by their labor, yet are deprived of political rights…”) And so it goes with other great revolutionary theorists of the working class. Such as, for example… Karl Marx, to name only the most prominent.
“Lucifer was to hover behind Prometheus throughout the whole of Karl Marx’s life,” recorded Edmund Wilson in a memorable chapter from his 1940 masterpiece To the Finland Station, “the malevolent obverse side of the rebel benefactor of man. In a satirical poem by Engels and Edgar Bauer, written [around 1843], Marx is described as ‘the black fellow from Trier’: a savage and sinewy monster who does not creep, but rather leaps upon his prey, who stretches his arms toward the heavens as if he would tear down their canopy, who clenches his fist and raves as if a thousand devils had him by the hair. Toward the end of his life, Marx was familiarly known as ‘Old Nick.’ His little son used to call him ‘Devil.’ No doubt the devil, as well as the rebel, was one of the conventional masks of the romantic. But there is something other than romantic perversity in this assumption of a diabolic role.” Earlier, during Marx’s student years, he received a letter from his father worrying that “demonic genius” [dämonisches Genie] might get the better of him. Marx, ever the brooding weirdo, dedicated a poem in 1841 to his fiancée Jenny (which he somehow got published in Athenäum):
How so! I plunge, plunge without fail
My blood-black sabre into your soul.
……That art God neither wants nor wists,
……It leaps to the brain from Hell’s black mists.
’Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
……He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
……I play the death march fast and free.
Wilson attributed to Marx “the satanic genius of the satirist.” Once again, nearer the end of Wilson’s epic, Lucifer and Prometheus are made to appear as the twin avatars of Marx’s oeuvre:
“You see,” he had once written Engels, “that I’m the object of plagues just like Job, though I’m not so god-fearing as he was.” No: he is not so god-fearing. He sees himself also as “Old Nick,” the Goethean spirit that denies. But Old Nick is not the right symbol either: this Devil has been twisted and racked. Though he is capable of satanic mockery of the publisher who had sent Kriege on their necks and then fallen and broken his own, the mocker cannot jeer at such a doom without breaking, by a dialectical joke, his own neck as well; and, after all, had not the publisher buried Marx’s book alive? It is Prometheus who remains his favorite hero; for Prometheus is a Satan who suffers, a Job who never assents; and, unlike either Job or Satan, he brings liberation to mankind. Prometheus turns up in Capital to represent the proletariat chained to production. The Light-Bringer was tortured, we remember, by Zeus’ eagle tearing, precisely, his liver, as Karl Marx himself — who is said to have reread Aeschylus every year — was obsessed by the fear that his liver would be eaten like his father’s by cancer. And yet, if it is a devouring bird which Father Zeus has sent against the rebel, it is also a devourer, a destroyer, fire, which Prometheus has brought to man.
(Lefebvre and Benjamin both brought up the comparison of Lucifer Prometheus, as we’ve seen. They were not the first to notice the similarities between these two great rebels; nor would they be the last. RJ Zwi Weblowsky wrote a whole book on the topic, A Study of Milton’s Satan, in 1951. It was the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who’d initially pointed out that “the only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus is Satan” in his 1820 preface to Prometheus Unbound.)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist, made his own contribution to counterrevolutionary demonological literature in 1871. Revolutionary possession was not the exclusive preserve of French or German radicals, as Dostoevsky was keen to point out. Demons [Бесы], sometimes translated as Devils or The Possessed, fictionalized the real-life tale of the Petersburg terrorist Sergei Nechaev, a former disciple of Bakunin. Nechaev at the time was the focus of an international manhunt, a fugitive from justice. He had murdered a fellow member of his anarchist cell in 1869 out of paranoia, believing his former comrade to be a police informant. After the authorities caught up with him in Switzerland three years later, Nechaev was extradited to Russia. Marx and Engels, both of whom he’d met, monitored the highly-publicized trial that followed from afar. Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky’s fictional Nechaev, is not at all the central character in Demons, however. That honor belongs to his mentor, Stavrogin, a vaguely Bakunin-like figure who asks: “Can one believe in a demon, without believing at all in God?” [«А можно-ли веровать в беса, не веруя совсем в Бога?»]. Keep this question in mind, since the Marxist theoretician Ernst Bloch would later claim that “Enlightenment and atheism do not overthrow ‘the Satanic’ along with the God-hypostasis.”
Nikolai Berdiaev, who briefly belonged to the RSDLP in the 1890s before becoming a conservative ideologue, asserted in his treatise on Dostoevsky’s Worldview (1923) that “a revolution is possession [одержимость], madness. This possession, this madness strikes at the personality and paralyzes its freedom, its moral accountability, which leads to loss of self, to one’s subjugation by impersonal and inhuman elements. Figures of revolution do not know what kind of spirits they possess. In their activity they are essentially passive, spiritually at the mercy of the demons [бесов] they’ve fashioned fashioned for themselves…” Dostoevsky thus augured the October Revolution, according to Berdiaev. And indeed, to their enemies, it certainly seemed the Bolsheviks were possessed by the devil. Leon Trotsky later recalled in his History of the Russian Revolution that “the word ‘Bolshevik’ became a synonym for demonic origin” (Max Eastman translated адского начала a bit less literally, as “Satanic origin”). He experienced enough of this firsthand, no doubt, since his image appeared on multiple counterrevolutionary posters with pentagram necklaces. More than seventy years later, the historian Dmitri Volkogonov — onetime Stalinist hagiographer turned bitter anticommunist — wrote an article entitled “Trotsky, Demon of the Revolution” (1988).
Some American workers were undeterred by scary stories even at the time, though, writing in February 1919:
Apparently we cannot get along without the devil. Nowadays it is clear to us that out worthy ancestors met an elemental need with Satan, who was to them an ever-present reality, in a way even their most orthodox descendants can scarcely imagine. In our more materialistic age, we have naturally passed from theological to nationalistic and now to economic demonology… Our newspaper editors have now set their vivid imaginations to work and have obligingly created for us a new and fearsome devil by the simple process of adding a Russian blouse, a ragged beard, and a few additional years to the figure [of Wilhelm Hohenzollern] that served so well during the war. Behold, the Bolshevik stands forth! What is Bolshevism? Those who mistake imagination for knowledge answer glibly with a string of words like anarchy, murder, rapine, massacre, free love, government ownership, and bloody revolution — or so say the pressmen, politicians, and profiteers, as well as some parsons.
