[Incomplete]
From Engles's The Book of Revelation (1883):
“When you want to get a distinct 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 Men’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,... but all opposed to the ruling system, to 'the powers that be.'"
From Bentrad Russell's History of Philosophy (1945):
"The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the oppressed and unfortunate at all times. St. Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism . To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:
Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth
The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx's eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis, but their conceptions are more purely Old Testament and less Christian than those of Marx, and their Messiah is more analogous to the Maccabees than to Christ."
From Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (Vol 5, 1939):
"The true hall-marks of the proletarian is neither poverty nor humble birth but a consciousness- and the resentment that this consciousness inspires- of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society."
"The German Jew Karl Marx... has painted, in colours borrowed from the apocalyptic visions of a repudiated religious tradition, a tremendous picture of the secession of a proliteriat and the ensuing class war. The immense impression which the Marxian materialist apocalypse has mde upon so many millions of minds is in part due to the political militancy of the Marxian diagram; for, while this 'blue-print' is the kernel of a general philosophy of history, it is also a revolutionary call to arms. Whether the invention and vogue of this Marxian formula of the class war are to be taken as signs that our Western Society has its feet already set upon the path of disintegration, is a question which will occupy us in a later part of this Study, when we come to look into the prospects of this Western Civilization of ours. In this place we have cited Marx... because he is the classic exponent of class war for our world in our age; and, second, because his formula conforms to the traditional Zoroastrian and Jewish and Christian apocalyptic pattern... .
According to the Communist prophet... the class war is bound to issue in a victorious proletarian revolution; but this bloody culmination of the struggle will also be the end of it, for the victory of the proletariat will be decisive and definitive and the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat', by which the fruits of the victory are to be harvested during the post-revolutionary period, is not to be a permanent institution. A time is to come when a new society which has been classless from birth will be old enough and strong enough to dispense with the dictatorship. Indeed, in its final and permanet acme of well-being the New Society of the Marxian Millennium will be able to cast away not only the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but also every other institutional crutch, including the state itself.
The interest of the Marxian eschatology for our present inquiry lies in the surprising fact that this lingering political shadow of a vanished religious belief does accurately plot out the actual course which the class war or horizontal schism in a broken-down society is apt to follow as a matter of historical fact."
From Engles's The Book of Revelation (1883):
“When you want to get a distinct 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 Men’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,... but all opposed to the ruling system, to 'the powers that be.'"
From Bentrad Russell's History of Philosophy (1945):
"The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the oppressed and unfortunate at all times. St. Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism . To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:
Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth
The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx's eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis, but their conceptions are more purely Old Testament and less Christian than those of Marx, and their Messiah is more analogous to the Maccabees than to Christ."
From Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (Vol 5, 1939):
"The true hall-marks of the proletarian is neither poverty nor humble birth but a consciousness- and the resentment that this consciousness inspires- of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society."
"The German Jew Karl Marx... has painted, in colours borrowed from the apocalyptic visions of a repudiated religious tradition, a tremendous picture of the secession of a proliteriat and the ensuing class war. The immense impression which the Marxian materialist apocalypse has mde upon so many millions of minds is in part due to the political militancy of the Marxian diagram; for, while this 'blue-print' is the kernel of a general philosophy of history, it is also a revolutionary call to arms. Whether the invention and vogue of this Marxian formula of the class war are to be taken as signs that our Western Society has its feet already set upon the path of disintegration, is a question which will occupy us in a later part of this Study, when we come to look into the prospects of this Western Civilization of ours. In this place we have cited Marx... because he is the classic exponent of class war for our world in our age; and, second, because his formula conforms to the traditional Zoroastrian and Jewish and Christian apocalyptic pattern... .
According to the Communist prophet... the class war is bound to issue in a victorious proletarian revolution; but this bloody culmination of the struggle will also be the end of it, for the victory of the proletariat will be decisive and definitive and the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat', by which the fruits of the victory are to be harvested during the post-revolutionary period, is not to be a permanent institution. A time is to come when a new society which has been classless from birth will be old enough and strong enough to dispense with the dictatorship. Indeed, in its final and permanet acme of well-being the New Society of the Marxian Millennium will be able to cast away not only the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but also every other institutional crutch, including the state itself.
The interest of the Marxian eschatology for our present inquiry lies in the surprising fact that this lingering political shadow of a vanished religious belief does accurately plot out the actual course which the class war or horizontal schism in a broken-down society is apt to follow as a matter of historical fact."
