21st Century Revolution

By Ted Glick

21st Century Revolution was written based upon the author's 53 years of continuous involvement in the movement for fundamental, justice grounded, political, social, economic and cultural change--revolution. He was driven to write it because of deep concern about the systemic threats to the possibility of a decent life fo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Future Hope Publications
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780970514325

Book preview

Introduction

21 years ago I self-published a book with similarities to this one. That book’s title was Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society.

This book is also about strategy for a just society, and there are definitely some similarities between the two of them. Chapter Four of this one, in particular, is essentially an updated version of Chapter Four in Future Hope. A good number of the ideas I put forward 21 years ago are very much in this one. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a logical process of evolution and deepening from then until today as far as what I now believe and have written.

One very big difference, however, is the amount of focus I give in 21st Century Revolution to issues of spirituality and religion. This is the primary focus of both chapters one and two.

I expect that some who read this will find those reflections of less value than the last three chapters, which are much more focused on the practical issues of bringing about fundamental social, political, economic and cultural transformation—revolution. But I couldn’t have written those last three chapters if I hadn’t taken time to do the study and thinking and writing of one and two.

My study for chapter two, for example, led to the discovery of this very astute observation by Albert Einstein, a socialist and a scientist, as the concluding words of that chapter: A positive aspiration and effort for an ethical-moral configuration of our common life is of overriding importance. Here no science can save us.

I hope that those who might be tempted to scan chapters one and two, people who see themselves as not needing to seriously consider spiritual and religious questions, will reconsider that temptation.

For those reading this who are there with the importance of spirituality and/or religion, it’s pretty much the same. My view is that the important thing for believers is what you do with your beliefs, very practically. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said from prison not long before he was killed by the Nazis in the spring of 1945, It is not the beyond that we are concerned with, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the Gospel, intended to exist for this world.

This introduction is being written several months after Trump has been removed from the White House and the Biden administration is taking action significantly different than its predecessor. The third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is showing signs of receding, but it is far from clear if and when we will completely eradicate this deadly virus. It’s a sobering time.

I pray that this book will contribute to a 21st century revolution, one based upon higher love, a deep and unshakeable commitment to the centrality of racial justice, and a democratic and cooperative politics and culture that by force of example literally changes the world. It must. We really must.

Chapter One:

Religion, Revolution and Higher Love

Introduction

Between 2016 and 2018 I read a lot about religion and revolution. It began when I found the New Oxford Annotated Bible that was my father’s bible in his last 25 or so years. I found it about a year after he died among a pile of books of his I had brought home from his funeral.

I was first struck by the fact that my mother had given it to him as a Christmas present in 1990 with the inscription, For your enjoyment and illumination, Love, Barbara. I was further struck by the underlining, markings and pieces of paper all throughout it which made clear he had used it a lot.

And so, finally, about 66 years after I started going (being taken) to church at a very early age, I decided to read the Bible from beginning to end, and I did, over a period of 4-5 months.

This experience got me going with what became my religion and revolution, long-term reading and writing project. I read about 30 other books after that, some about the Bible and religion, especially liberation theology, some about the historic practice and theoretical debate and interaction between God believers and secular socialists and revolutionaries over the last 170 years, since the publication by Marx and Engels of The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

As I did this reading I began to focus on one key personal objective for all of this past and future reading: to try to pinpoint what is at the root of the failure, by and large, of both organized religion and organized Marxism/socialism to do what Marx called for in words inscribed on his grave: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

Neither those who follow the teachings of Jesus, the Hebrew Prophets, the Prophet Mohammed or Buddha, nor those who use Marxist tools of analysis and see themselves as socialists, have been able to prevent the destructive and dehumanizing corporatization of much of the world. More urgently, the world as a whole is facing the very real and immediate threat of societal and ecological unraveling as extreme weather events grow both in frequency and in destructive impact. These are happening as the atmosphere and oceans are heated up, primarily because of the production and burning of oil, gas and coal. Tens of millions of people worldwide, predominantly people of color and low wealth, have died, been made homeless or displaced, or suffered significantly in other ways because of this deepening climate emergency.

Despite this very serious reality, our situation is not hopeless. There is concrete evidence that large numbers of people around the world want and are willing to organize for much more just, democratic and earth-protective societies. Two of the most recent examples are the 2015-2016 and 2019-2020 Bernie Sanders for President campaigns, happening within a country that has been leading the corporatization and imperialist charge for a long, long time.

Then there is Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, saying this, and so much more, about our situation:

All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution. Science and technology are not neutral; from the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. We need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur. ¹

Fidel Castro, unquestionably the most prominent Marxist revolutionary of the Western Hemisphere, had this to say about religion and revolution:

The Church says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself;’ this is exactly what we preach through feelings of human solidarity, which is the essence of socialism and communism, the spirit of fraternity among people, which is one of our most valued goals. The Church says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness;’ well, lying and deceit are among the things that we most severely criticize and censor.’ ²

I hope that this essay helps to advance the unity in action between those for whom spiritual beliefs are core personal beliefs, those who identify with one of the several secular, revolutionary traditions going back to 1848, and all those who fall into both categories or neither but who agree that revolutionary change is badly needed in our beautiful, wounded, struggling world.

Marx and Engels on Religion

Karl Marx and early scientific socialism, beginning in 1848, were antagonistic to organized Christianity because, in the main, it was a supporter of an economic system which was exploitative, oppressive and dehumanizing. Yet Marx appreciated that for people weighed down by day-to-day realities of suffering, religion offered something.

In his famous opiate quote in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he explained it this way:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. ³

Something which embodies heart and spirit, even if a drug, can be a positive thing, something to hold on to at the least.

Marx himself had a religious background as a young person. Yet he saw no hope for world-changing for the suffering masses coming from religion. He saw criticism of it for its collaboration with injustice as a necessary thing: The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason. . . ⁴ And again: The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for men, hence with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence. ⁵

For the next 100 years or more, as scientific socialism took root and grew throughout Europe and elsewhere in the world, criticism of religion and, particularly after the Bolshevik revolution, atheism became a staple of the dominant political parties of that movement. Yet even Frederick Engels understood that from within organized religion there had been people and movements which were motivated by similar sentiments as those that motivated socialists.

In the book The Peasant War in Germany Engels wrote approvingly about the leadership given by a Catholic priest, Thomas Munzer, to a peasant movement in the 1520’s which emerged as an outgrowth of Martin Luther’s challenge to Papal authority with the 95 Theses posted on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517. Here is how Engels described Munzer:

"To hold up the Bible against reason, [Munzer] maintained, was to kill the spirit by the letter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Bible speaks is not something that exists outside; the Holy Spirit is our reason. Through this faith, through reason come to life, man became godlike and blessed. Heaven is, therefore, not a thing of another world, and is to be sought in this life and it is the task of believers to establish the kingdom of God here on earth. . . ⁶

Munzer’s political doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptions very closely. . . This programme demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God. . . By the kingdom of God Munzer understood a society in which there would be no class differences or private property and no state authority independent of or foreign to the members of society. All the existing authorities, insofar as they refused to submit and join the revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all property shared in common, and complete equality introduced. ⁷

Engels had more to say along these lines, in The Book of Revelation: [Quoting Ernest Renan] ’When you want to get an idea of what the first Christian communities were, do not compare them to the parish congregations of our day; they were rather like local sections of the International Working Man’s Association.’ And this is correct. Christianity got hold of the masses, exactly as modern socialism does, under the shape of a variety of sects, and still more of conflicting individual views. . . but all opposed to the ruling system, to the powers that be. ⁸

Karl Kautsky’s Analysis

Foundations of Christianity, a Marxist analysis of Christianity by Karl Kautsky published in 1908, is probably the most definitive work produced by the socialist movement on this question prior to the emergence of the Liberation Theology movement in the 1960’s. Kautsky at the time was a top theoretician and practical leader of the European socialist movement and a leader of the German Social Democratic Party.

The book, all 472 pages, is impressive and comprehensive. Before analyzing Christianity, Kautsky analyzes the economic, social and political dynamics of the Roman Empire within which Christianity emerged and developed in the first century AD. In the three chapters in this section, he analyzes the slave-holding system, the life of the state, and currents of thought in the Roman imperial period. In the section following, he analyzes the history of the Jewish people as they migrated to the Palestine area, militarily conquered other peoples, and created monotheistic, patriarchal, religiously-suffused societies.

Kautsky, like Engels, is clear that early Christianity was all about raising up the lives of the poor and oppressed. He comments favorably on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: The reader will observe to be rich and enjoy one’s wealth is regarded as a crime, worthy of the most cruel punishment. ⁹

More than this, Christianity, with its outspoken proletarian character, naturally "aim(ed) to achieve a communistic organization. We read in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘And all that believed were together and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as very man had need. Grace was among them, because none suffered lack, for the reason that they gave so generously that none remained poor. ¹⁰

Kautsky refers positively to the impact of early Christianity upon women: With the dissolving, or at least the loosening, of the traditional family ties, there necessarily resulted a change in the position of women. Once she ceased to be bound to the narrow family activities, she was enabled to devote her mind and her interests to other thoughts, outside the family sphere. Their unselfish solicitude for the daily satisfaction of the needs of husbands and children became a solicitude for the liberation of the human race from all its wretchedness. ¹¹

Kautsky, understanding the importance of organization to efforts to transform society, identified this reality of early Christianity as the reason why the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth had such an impact not just in the early first century AD but for the next 2000 years. If Jesus had merely gathered together bands for the purpose of insurrection, his name would have disappeared without a trace after his crucifixion. But Jesus was not merely a rebel, he was also a representative and a champion, perhaps even the founder of an organization which survived him and continued to increase in numbers and in strength. . . It was the organization of the congregation that served as a bond to hold together Jesus’ adherents after his death, and as a means of keeping alive the memory of their crucified champion. . . It was not the faith in the resurrection of the Crucified which created the Christian congregation and gave it its strength, but, on the contrary, it was the vigor and strength of the congregation that created the belief in the continued life of the Messiah. ¹²

Things began to change, however, over time. As Christianity grew, as more people were drawn to it, the demands on the organization increased. They needed to expand what Kautsky called their charity work, which he likened to "the system of insurances in a modern nation. In the Gospels, it is the observance of this mutual insurance system that entitles one to the life eternal. When the Messiah comes, he will divide men into those that are to share in the splendor of the state of the future and life eternal and those