In short, the Left has moved away from Marx’s neo-pagan dialectical materialism (revamped and revised Greek Atomism positing only the existence of physical animated ‘thinking’ matter) toward embrace of Westernized Hindu Advaita (mystical pantheism) which posits the opposite of the former. Now all that exists is Mind (divine energy). In this view, earth is a sacred World Soul (Gaia), the cosmos is the Quantum Void, Singularity, Omega, or Brahman for example, and certain chosen men are gods in process of spiritual evolution.
He has it all wrong about environmentalism, which at its root is not at all an ideology, but a series of situational conveniences for the benefit of its corporate sponsors. From their perspective, it’s simply, “more for me” and that means less of you.
Gnoticism teaches that human spirit was God, was cast to earth as a million points of light and is now trapped in the evil material. Only through the sufficient knowledge, can we return to be God. The process of being removed from God is called “alienation”, a theme that should be familiar to students of Marx, even as he put a secular interpretation on it. Humanity could return to God when it achieved the perfect socialist condition. The foundational ideas of Gnosticism go back to the time of Plato.
“The more we come to know about the gnosis of antiquity, the more it becomes certain that modern movements of thought, such as progressivism, positivism, Hegelianism, and Marxism, are variants of gnosticism.”
— Eric Voegelin, Science Politics and Gnosticism, Two Essays, 1968.
Here is a succinct explanation of this process from British philosopher R.T. Allen:
“To understand [alienation] we have to go back behind Hegel, the immediate source of Marx’s ideas, to Hegel’s own ultimate source: viz. Gnosticism. For alienation is the central theme of Gnosticism, along with the saving knowledge of how we became alienated, and from what, and of how we can escape from it. That theme is summarized in the Valentinian formula:
‘What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we came; what birth is and what rebirth.’
All the Gnostic texts, though they differ in details, declare that we are strangers, aliens, sparks of Light or Spirit trapped in evil matter. They recount the cosmic process whereby the circles of the world have been created, by ignorant or evil creators and not by the Light, and whereby we have become entrapped in the midmost or deepest dungeon. Finally they impart the knowledge needed to escape back to the one Light whence we have come and which is our real home.
This is the pattern of thought that Hegel took over. But, rejecting all other-worldliness, he sought to reconcile men to this world, of nature and society, from which they had become estranged. We are the vehicles of a self-creating Geist which, in order to become and to know
itself, has gone out into what is most alien to itself—the merely physical world of Newtonian science—and is progressively coming thence to its full self-realization and self-knowledge in and through human life and history. With this knowledge, given by Hegel’s own philosophy, man’s alienation from the world is in principle, overcome although Geist has not yet fully realized itself in the world.
Marx took from Hegel two basic themes of Gnosticism, which Hegel had secularized, and re-interpreted them in his own way: viz. the cosmic drama of a fall into alienation from nature and one’s fellow men, and the saving knowledge, Marxism, which explains this and the way out of alienation back to an unalienated existence. But in one central respect Marx did not fully learn the lesson that Hegel had to teach him about modifying ancient Gnosticism.
The Gnostic texts state that we are sparks of Light or fragments of Spirit (pneuma), and imply that we are distinct from each other and from the Light or Spirit only because of our fall or seduction into the circles of the world. As we fell through each circle, we were clothed with an outer covering. The return to the Light will be a reversal of that process, so that, as we pass back through each circle we shall strip off each coating. Consequently, but this is never stated, as far as I know, at the end of that process each spark or fragment will cease to be distinct and will merge back into the One Light or Spirit. Hence the End will be the same as the Beginning.”
From Flew, Marx and Gnosticism, by R.T. Allen,
Philosophy Vol 68, No 263, (Jan, 1993), pp. 94-98
The full article is available on Jstore and others behind a paywall.
(”Flew” is Antony Flew, 1923-2010, a British philosopher)
see also:
Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/daily/3769
or
http://mises.org/library/karl-marx-communist-religious-eschatologist
Early Secular Communism by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/library/early-secular-communism
bump for later
I’m so behind on my reading, but this will just have to wait. Thanks for the post.
Good article.
I respectfully differ from the author's philosophical jump straight to Heidegger. What actually led to the bizarre trek toward Postmodernism was a major philosophical change promulgated by the Frankfurt School (circa 1923) in which class signifiers were no longer strictly economic, but could include such things as race, sex, ethnicity, etc, etc. The principal descriptor there is in terms of power relationships, clarified quite a bit later (circa 1950s) by the post-structuralist Michael Foucault (who, incidentally, denied that he was a postmodernist). It was a change anticipated by Marx himself, who furiously condemned it because he could see where it would lead. For Marx the only significant class signifier was economic. All else was false class consciousness.
Where it led was straight back to radical individualism, in which a single individual's membership in multiple classes thwarted his or her ability to advance class interests because they inevitably ended up (as they have) conflicting. That is, again in Marxian terms, a fatal internal contradiction. If one's individual identity subsumes membership in such classes as black, male, bourgeois, and Yankee fans, then the advancement of one's political interest finds itself torn between the various class interests. In fact, this is a fair working description of the real world, and the reason that the true repository of political rights resides within the individual, not in the collective. In short, as soon as class signifier becomes anything but economic, the whole collective edifice comes crashing down, as it has.
This has real-world consequences in the transformation of power relationships in the post-Communist world from Party straight to the weird Mafia seen in Russia and the heavily crony capitalism in China. Marx was wrong: the State did not wither away, it merely morphed to an openly criminal organization from a covert one. Communism never was anything more than Strong Men and their little fiefdoms. That is the New Class that Djilas mocked.