Marxism constitutes a significant aspect of modern Nihilism, functioning as an official doctrine and a force for revolutionary change. It represents the most extreme manifestation of the realist mentality, extending nihilism from an intellectual elite to the general populace.
Ideological Foundations and Nature
As an official doctrine, Marxism is a form of "[[Naive Realism]]" or "[[Naturalism]]", which asserts the absolute truth of Materialism and determinism, while not explicitly denying absolute truth.
This approach equates scientific knowledge with the sole truth, and dismisses higher truths. The doctrine is unequivocally anti-religious in character.
Marx's ideas are simplistic yet underpin much of contemporary thought and life. Marxist realism leads to its own negation, becoming an enemy of truth and order. It is "prostituted to an irrational cause", resulting in lies and deceptions for the sake of a revolutionary millennium. Some humanist perspectives have incorrectly viewed Marxism as a form of humanism.
Marxism is understood as a religion of revolution, exhibiting a pseudo-religious character stemming from the misplaced fervour of its enthusiastic adherents. It is also known as the mystery religion of dialectical materialism.
The philosophical roots of Marxism are deeply embedded in dialectics, an approach going back to Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, who posited that multiplicity or distinction implies tension or opposition.
Modern philosophies, especially in the West, including Marxism, are built upon these dialectical presuppositions. A specific and crucial influence is Heraclitus, whose view that all reality is essentially flux, with constant change being the only permanence, is a fundamental presupposition of Marxism.
This concept, along with the unity of opposites (everything is constantly changing and opposites are actually identical, meaning everything is and is not at the same time), entails a denial of the law of non-contradiction, which is absolutely applicable to Marxism.
Marxism itself is a system building project. It embraces contradictions, as contradictions are seen as the furtherance of Marxism. This allows Marxists to intentionally contradict themselves and modify their system.
Furthermore, Marxism is described as an unfalsifiable system, because any argument against it is immediately invalidated by claiming it originates from a bourgeois opposition.
Unfalsifiable systems are always false systems. Despite its claims to be anti-metaphysics, Marxism continually affirms metaphysical claims whenever it discusses universal states of reality. It also requires coherent ideas and laws but lacks a justification for the belief in them, thus embracing contradictions.
Origins and Influences
Key intellectual influences on early Marx include Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Feuerbach. Marx was significantly influenced by Hegel's process philosophy, which involves the mystical worship of dialectical process itself.
Hegel, in turn, was influenced by Renaissance hermetic figures and cabalists. Later, Marx incorporated the ideas of Darwin, dedicating _Das Kapital_ to him, seeing his system as the perfect science of human action (praxiology) and sociology.
The historical trajectory of revolutionary philosophy, symbolised by fire, can be traced back to Heraclitus and ancient Zoroastrians, influencing figures such as Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati, was a communist before Marx.
Proto-communistic ideas are also found in the works of Pythagoras and Plato, with Plato's Republic advocating for a guardian class that holds all things in common, including wives and children.
The Illuminists provided a fundamental structural model for revolutionary organisation, functioning as a radical secular occult movement with a three-tiered secret hierarchy, resembling an alter church.
This Illuminati structure, founded on 1 May 1776, was secret, hierarchical, and modelled on the Jesuits. Its goal was to "remodel the entire world" by transforming individuals into loyal servants of the "universal mission of Revolution," often employing deception at lower levels to cultivate psychological dependence.
The French Revolution, for instance, was instigated by circles connected to the Duke of Orleans and his Masonic lodges, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man being a Freemasonic document. Freemasonry supplied the milieu and symbolic vocabulary for revolution organisation, aiming to reshape the secular order by rebuilding Solomon's Temple, which meant establishing a properly orchestrated society.
The ultimate objective of these revolutionaries, including Pythagoreans, was the overthrow of Christian Orthodoxy and the destruction of throne and altar (church and state). There is a direct ideological lineage from Plethon's atheistic Platonism to Spinoza and to Weishaupt.
Methods and Practice
Marxism is characterised by its advocacy for revolutionary terror as the primary method to accelerate communism.
It posits that "force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one". Lenin defined the *"dictatorship of the proletariat"* as "domination that is untrammelled by law and based on violence".
Bolshevism, a practical application of Marxist principles, was an explicit war to the death against God and all his works. Standard Nihilist tactics employed by Marxism include the incitement of masses and the arousal of basest passions for revolutionary ends.
Marxists embrace contradictions, resulting in a lack of consistency and coherence in their system. Agitprop (agitation propaganda) is a crucial technique, involving the use of popular media, plays, literature, pamphlets, and various forms of art to disseminate their message, irrespective of its truth or falsehood.
For Marxists, debate is not a pursuit of truth but rather a means of intentional conflict and emotional manipulation. Marxism fundamentally promotes creative destruction, viewing the revolution as an end in itself, a perpetual revolution that serves as both the journey and the destination, leading to the tearing down of all existing structures.
Goals and the "New Man"
Marxists envision a "totally new order"* constructed entirely by human beings *"liberated from the yoke of God" upon the ruins of the divinely established old order. This "new earth," fashioned by men without God, aims for the absolute despotism of worldliness.
Lenin's vision for this "new earth" dictated that society should become *"one office and one factory with equal work and equal pay".*
A core aim of Marxism is a mass change in human nature, necessitating revolution to produce "communist consciousness" and enable individuals to shed "the muck of ages" to reconstruct society.
This transformation of humankind into the "new human type" is achieved through violence, which concurrently transforms revolutionaries by indulging base passions. Marxism idealises this "new uprooted humanity".
In Marxist myth, the "Nihilist state" is predicted to wither away, leading to a unique world order described as a millennium and an anarchy populated by supermen. Like Nietzsche's concept of "beyond nihilism," Marxism promotes a programme envisioning completely new conditions of existence.
The end goal is a total world government. This culminates in a *"final Revolution"* against humankind itself, fostering an anti-natural philosophy where all distinctions are collapsed.
Following 1989, Marxism is considered to have served its course, evolving into [[Fabianism]], a reformed Marxism allied with Monopoly Capital. This "capitalist socialism" is the synthesis of previously opposed dialectical forces.
Critiques and Contradictions
A significant critique of Marxism is its internal contradiction: it claims to be anti-metaphysics while consistently making metaphysical assertions about reality. The "law of non-contradiction" is explicitly denied through its embrace of universal flux and the identity of opposites.
Marxism is argued to be less an economic system or science and more a conspiracy of perpetual revolution. It is alleged that Marxism intentionally generates misery and revolution through actions such as strikes, hunger, and inflation, which primarily harm workers rather than the capitalist elite, thereby secretly perpetuating the revolutionary process.
Marx is said to have concealed financial contradictions, while finance itself is described as inherently cosmopolitan, revolutionary, and an ally of Communism, actively struggling against the national state.
The money god is presented as the new deity of post-revolutionary societies, with the Fiat money system itself being considered inherently revolutionary. Finance is asserted to determine capitalist production, rather than the reverse, making it the most potent instrument of revolution.
The levers of Revolution are economics, war, and workers.
However, none of these are controlled by the proletariat, indicating that Communism is not, in practice, controlled by the workers. Historically, Western capitalist and banking houses are documented as having funded various revolutions, including the Russo-Japanese War and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Anthony Sutton's work details how Marxist socialist revolutions would not have been possible without substantial capital backing, often from Wall Street banks and industrialists who funded both sides of conflicts.
Eugen Böhm-Bawerk provided a devastating critique of Karl Marx's _Capital_ in 1896, from which Marxist theory has not fully recovered. His primary contribution to economic theory is his focus on time preference, which asserts that humans generally prefer present goods over future goods.
The accumulation of wealth necessitates saving and investment prior to production. Böhm-Bawerk argued that the relationship between capitalists and labourers is not exploitative due to differing time preferences: workers desire immediate wages (present goods), while capitalists are willing to wait for a return on their investment. Capitalists are incentivised to employ capital productively, not merely to hoard it.
While Marx predicted a dictatorship of the proletariat and the people seizing the means of production, these predictions have in some ways materialised, though not precisely as he envisioned, in the form of managerial capitalism - Managerialism.
In this system, traditional [[Capitalist]] entrepreneurs are replaced by passive mass investors, and corporations are managed rather than truly owned by shareholders.
There is minimal distinction between mass government and mass corporations, both sharing the common objective of growth. Large asset management firms (e.g., Vanguard, Blackrock, JP Morgan) own major corporations. These firms are themselves owned by pension funds and savings accounts of average citizens, implying that *"We the People"* in an abstracted and limited way own these entities.
The US government, which funds a substantial welfare state, issues bonds bought by these same firms, and will always bail them out when the inevitable financial crisis unfolds.
Consequently, the government, corporations, and media are viewed as all wings of the same dictatorship of the proletariat, nominally owned by "We the People" but operated by the managerial class. This managerial elite moves fluidly between government and corporate roles, propagating slogans such as "we believe in democracy and equality," "diversity is our strength," and "debt is money we owe ourselves".
Historical Context
Christian Rakovsky, a committed Trotskyite, provided significant insights into the true nature of Marxism during his interrogation, asserting that Marxism functions as an ancient esoteric religion and a conspiracy of perpetual revolution aimed at "total world government".
Rakovsky claimed that capitalism and communism are not genuine adversaries but rather interdependent forces whose clashes further the dialectic,
... leading to a synthetic outcome. Stalin's purges targeted Trotskyites, viewing them as linked to Western industrial and banking elites.
Bolshevism and National Socialism (Nazism) are Nihilist regimes that most fully embodied violence. Bolshevism is seen to have played a "more positive role" in the nihilist agenda, extending the "dictatorship of the proletariat" after Nazism's destructive phase.
The Cold Waris characterised as a "Manichean dialectic". The dissolution of the Soviet Union facilitated the emergence of a technocratic global order, which is regarded as the synthesis of Eurasian communism and Western capitalism.
The funding of Bolshevism, Marxism, and Nazism originated from a system described as Hegelianism, utilising the co-opted hermetic philosophy of dialectical process worship.
The Frankfurt School, encompassing figures such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas, represents a critical theory tradition within Marxism that perceives revolution as an unending, "perpetual revolution".