Word: marxisms
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Nothing so maddens Marxists as to have Marxism called a religion (hence by their definition, opium). Nevertheless, Marxism has its bible (Das Kapital), its god (dialectical materialism), its pope (Stalin), saints (Marx, Engels, Lenin), martyrs (Liebknecht, Luxemburg), doctrine (communist "line"). As in other religions, heresies and schisms occasionally crop up. Heretics are sometimes exiled, often handed over to the secular arm (shot), always excommunicated. Most serious heresy in the eyes of Stalinist true believers is Trotskyism, whose heresiarch is Leon Trotsky, now an exile in Mexico. Trotsky's heretical sect styles itself the Fourth International (5,000 communicants). Until...
Heresy's chief weakness is that it begets further heresies. Last week the heretical Trotskyites read their own heretics out of the fold. Schism started when orthodox Russian Communists invaded Poland and Finland. Schachtmanites declared that the Stalinists had thus blasphemed against the revolutionary religious content of Marxism, made an imperialist mockery of the holy Marxist doctrine. Comrade Cannon sided with Prophet Trotsky, who in long epistles to the infidels condemned the Stalinists' means but condoned their ends. Soon Marxists Cannon and Schachtman were as doctrinally tangled as two Fundamentalist preachers, one of whom is a dipper...
Skimming through history and throwing off such names as Proudhon, Bakunin, Sorel, Kropotkin, like a shower of sparks, Chamberlain contrasts the lively diversity of pre-war political theory with the postwar hypnosis of Marxism. He thinks most liberal thinking since 1933 has been "pretty silly" because merely a reaction from that spell. As for effective liberal organizations, the Democratic Party has been the best of a bad lot: "a loose federation of southern cotton snobs, western dirt farmers (the real heirs of Jefferson) and the machines of Jersey City's Frank Hague, Chicago's Pat Nash...
...radical peak, was headed back toward Godkin. Wrote Max Lerner in a survey of U. S. reform: ". . . Marxian influence . . . led to an ac cent on faith which . . . could result only in a drastic disillusionment. . . . The only possible focus for an American Left is America. . . . We must re-examine Marxism...
...persistent defense of Russia and" Communism. Said Fellow Traveler Ward at the conference dinner: "The holy war abroad to save civilization and God from the atheist barbarians is also the holy war at home to save democracy from the Reds, to rescue Christ from the anti-Christ of materialistic Marxism. These are more powerful slogans than those which deceived and betrayed us into the slaughter of 1917. The leading voices of European imperialism, our own profiteering patriots and pothouse politicians, have suddenly all become pious...