Tom Holland, ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind ‘:
“…Marx had pondered the workings of capitalism as a man
unclouded by moral prejudices. Not so much as an incense-hint of the
epiphenomenal clung to his writings. All his evaluations, all his predictions,
derived from observable laws. ‘From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs.’ Here was a slogan with the clarity of a scientific
formula.
Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Its line of
descent was evident to anyone familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Selling
their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had need.’ Repeatedly
throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church
had served radicals as their inspiration. Marx, when he dismissed questions of
morality and justice as epiphenomena, was concealing the true germ of his
revolt against capitalism behind jargon. A beard, he had once joked, was
something ‘without which no prophet can succeed’. Famously hirsute himself, he had spoken more
truly, perhaps, than he knew. Dispassion was a tone that – despite his efforts
– he found impossible to maintain. The revulsion that he so patently felt at
the miseries of artisans evicted by their landlords to starve on the streets,
of children aged before their years by toiling night and day in factories, of
labourers worked to death in distant colonies so that the bourgeoisie might
have sugar in their tea, made a mockery of his claims to have outgrown moral
judgements. Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by certainties
that had no obvious source in his model of economics. They rose instead from
profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would
force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a
self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the
Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and
evil. Communism was a ‘spectre’: a thing of awful and potent spirit. Just as
demons had once haunted Origen, so the workings of capitalism haunted Marx.
‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living
labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’50 This was not the
language of a man emancipated from epiphenomena. The very words used by Marx to
construct his model of class struggle – ‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’,
‘avarice’ – owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something
far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he
insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was
one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it….”
