04.25.11
Luther to Marx
Comment on Marx was NOT Jewish:
Kirby Olson
lutheransurrealism.blogspot.com
Marx was raised as a Lutheran. He often cites Luther. Luther was against the indulgences of the Papacy, and Marx was against the indulgences of the capitalist entrepreneurs of his time, making a false equivalency between them and the Papacy. Luther wanted to get rid of the false product of the Popes of his time: the indulgences sold to get dead relatives out of Purgatory, which were in fact used by the Pope and his minions to party down. Marx saw an equivalence among the grande bourgeoisie and their wishing to party down with the money taken from the proletariat.Luther understood people better than Marx did, and limited the role of the church, and meanwhile set the economy free to do its own thing.
Marx’s central mistake may have been to try to centralize the economy on the government (which he thought was pure, or could be pure, if run by the proletariat for their own ends), but he didn’t count on a professional class arising in the name of the Party to play the role of the stand-in for the workers, and thus formed a true Dictatorship that never withered until the Revolutions of 1989 brought most of the Marxist states back to an economic democracy. We still don’t understand exactly why Luther’s revolution worked (the proof is Scandinavia), whereas the Marxist revolutions inevitably went bad (something was wrong in Marx’s description/prescription, that wasn’t wrong in the original Lutheran model).
Agree or disagree you raise some interesting points: the revolutionary left was an attempt, after Kant and Hegel, to complete the Reformation, perhaps they failed, but the Lutheran era, despite its compromises with authority, next to Thomas Muntzer (during the German Peasant Revolution period) does indeed contain some deep and subtle elements. It is not accident Engels went back to study this period.