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Theory of Marxism (Communist Manifesto – 1848). Karl Marx had concluded, like humanists, that all would be much better if religious influence could be irradiated and common governance be based on materialism, if not communism. Writes Ramsay Cook: “For Marx, religious belief, particularly the Christian claim that man’s ultimate relief from his sufferings in ‘this vale of tears’ would come in the eternal life hereafter, was nothing more than an opiate, sure evidence of alienation. Only in a world unfettered by such illusions, a secular world, would men and women be free to concentrate on mundane conditions and eventually realize that those conditions could be changed. Secularism would not only destroy the claims of religion, it would also challenge the legitimacy of the social order.”[i] Communism and feminism are rife with ideology taken from Marx and Engel. And the dismal record of Marxism as a route to freedom from oppression speaks for itself. Are women any more liberated in Cuba; are the men there any less masculine, if not chauvinistic? Has China any less grievous human rights record than the capitalist counterpart? Did the Soviet Union collapse? [i] Cook, p. 7, cited from Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1975, pp.48-87. |