Eugene McCarraher - The People’s Republic of Heaven
The People’s Republic
of Heaven:
From the Protestant Reformation to the Russian Revolution, 1517–1917
By Eugene McCarraher
This year marks the
centenary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Toppling the provisional
government that had overthrown the Romanov dynasty in February, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks did more than deal a coup de grâce to the old regime; they sparked a
wave of revolutionary upheaval that eventually washed over almost every
continent. (The Cold War, usually dated from 1945, arguably began with the
seizure of the Winter Palace.) The fear of revolution among bourgeois elites in
the North Atlantic world induced them either to support fascist movements or to
compromise with the working classes.
The fascist alternative culminated in
tyranny, genocide, and global warfare; the compromise enabled the “golden age
of capitalism,” when high wages and widespread access to disposable
income - ensured by labor unions and welfare states -fueled rates of economic
growth and underwrote a level of social equality never before (and not since)
seen in the Western democracies. In the Soviet Union itself, “really existing
socialism” ended a feckless and brutal monarchy; provided education, medical
care, and other public services; and (despite the images of queues served up
for propaganda in the capitalist nations) raised the standard of living for
ordinary people through rapid industrialization - all at the price of a ferocious
oligarchy and its apparatus of murder and repression. The “Soviet experiment”
would seem to have been either the tragic miscarriage of a passion for justice
or a barbarous attempt to bring heaven to earth that proves the folly of
utopian ambition.
Because the Russian
Revolution and its consequences are still relatively fresh in historical
memory, its centenary can easily overshadow the anniversary of another, perhaps
even more consequential upheaval: the quincentennial of the Protestant
Reformation, which commenced in October 1517. When Martin Luther posted the
Ninety-Five Theses on a church door in Wittenberg, “out of love for the truth
and desire to elucidate it,” he set off a chain of events that ultimately
demolished the unity of medieval Christendom. Luther and his fellow reformers
triggered a radiating tremor that would shake not only the Roman Catholic
Church but all subsequent Protestant denominations, as the “priesthood of all
believers” sanctioned the centrifugal energy of Protestantism. (The protest in
Protestant hides in plain sight.)
If the most hallowed doctrines and even the
Bible itself could now be arraigned before the bar of individual judgment, then
Christianity could be endlessly transformed and perhaps even ultimately
repudiated. While the Russian Revolution launched what E.J. Hobsbawm once
dubbed “the short twentieth century,” the Protestant Reformation incited five
centuries of turbulence: religious liberty, liberal democracy, capitalist
economics, and the “disenchantment of the world” supposedly wrought by the
erosion of belief in magic, sacrament, and the occult.
Were the Reformation
and the Revolution connected, despite the chasm of 400 years? The
British-Pakistani writer and activist Tariq Ali sees a parallel, opening his
new book on Lenin by citing Luther’s intransigent (and probably apocryphal)
declaration to the Diet of Worms in 1521: “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
Shortly after the Bolshevik victory, the young German philosopher Ernst Bloch
suggested an even longer historical lineage for Lenin. In The Spirit of
Utopia (1920), Bloch sketched a genealogy of revolution that included
the Jewish prophets, St. John of the Apocalypse, medieval heretics and millenarians
such as Joachim of Fiore, and radical Protestants such as Thomas Müntzer and
John of Leyden (John Bockelson). Speaking the language of theology, this
pre-Marxist vanguard had imagined the kingdom of God as a communist paradise.
Bloch linked the Protestant and Soviet moments even more pointedly in Thomas
Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921), whose protagonist
envisioned “a pure community of love, without judicial and state
institutions” - in marked contrast to the conservative and submissive Luther, who
by supporting the German nobles’ suppression of the peasants’ rebellion of
1524–25 had consecrated the “hard and impious materiality of the State.” If
Müntzer’s political theology was mired in mythopoeic conceptions of time,
Lenin’s scientific appraisal of history ensured the fulfilment of Christian
hope. The Soviet state heralded “the time that is to come,” Bloch declared with
eschatological flourish. “It is impossible for the time of the Kingdom not to
come now,” he concluded; hope “will not be disappointed in any way.” (“Where
Lenin is, there is Jerusalem,” Bloch would later write in The Principle
of Hope.)
But hope was disappointed, paradise was postponed, and in 1991 the “pure community of love” was exiled to a neoliberal gulag of dreams. With the revolutionary jitters of the ruling class relieved, capital unilaterally abrogated its burdensome and disingenuous truce with labor, and Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” became the ukase of plutocrats and incremental reformers. Real wages flatlined, growth rates decelerated, and the welfare states deteriorated. The golden age passed into a fiber-optic era of high-tech toil, gig work, and working-class demoralization... read more:
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 19 NO. 3 (FALL 2017)
