pes of a Hungary, a Czechoslovakia, an Afghanistan, the faith of the committed Communist persists. All personal judgement is obscured in the name of faith; faith is absolutely essential if everything is not to come tumbling round his ears … . Logically, of course, there is no reason why a modern Communist should bother to work for a utopia in which he will never share: this is one of the surds in Communism. But he is inspired by the vision, attracted by the prospect, stimulated by the struggle and warmed by the companionship. The millennial utopia held out by … Communism … is both a pale imitation of and unconsciously inspired by the Christian teaching of the Kingdom of God which is partly realised in Christ and his people now, and will be consummated at the last day, when all who have worked for it, be they living or dead, will share in its joys.”13
Marxism and Darwinism
There is a close relation between Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and Karl Marx’s theory of revolutionary communism (figure 1). Darwin’s attempt to demonstrate how humans would have evolved from animals by a blind process of natural selection was deeply inspirational for Marx, who actually believed that the primacy of social classes somehow paralleled the alleged supremacy of the human races.
Whether viewed as the struggle of races or as the struggle of classes, Darwinism was the predominant form of socio-political thinking in the late nineteenth-century. As a philosopher of his time, Marx believed that the existence of God had been disproved by the inexorable forces of science, reason and progress. As such, Darwinism became an important element of Marxist theory.14 As his close friend and co-writer Friedrich Engels pointed out, “just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.”15 In a personal letter to him, Marx actually reveals that Darwin’s Origin of Species was indeed very important, as it had provided him “with the basis in natural science for the class struggle in history”.16 As a sign of gratitude, Marx sent Darwin the second German edition of Capital. On the title page he inscribed, “Mr. Charles Darwin/On the part of his sincere admirer/[signed] Karl Marx, London 16 June 1873.”17
Curiously, Marx adopted Darwinism not just to support his own racist theories, including his undeniable anti-Semitism (although he was ethnically Jewish himself). For instance, Marx argued that it was not so difficult to establish unions in barbarous Russia, a country where, as he put it, anybody could easily “build up successful unions with stupid young men and apostles”.18 Marx quite often resorted to phrases like “dirty Jew” and “Jewish Nigger” in order to describe his political enemies. About the famous German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle he wrote:
“It is not perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.”19
In his work On the Jewish Questions, Marx shared and endorsed the anti-Semitism of Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left who had published an essay demanding that the Jews abandon Judaism completely. In Marx’s opinion, the “money-Jew” had become “the universal anti-social element of the present time”. To make the Jew impossible, he argued, it was necessary to abolish the preconditions, the very possibility of the kind of money activities which produced him.20 Thus, he concluded that both the Jew and his religion should disappear if the world were finally able to abolish “the Jewish attitude to money”. As Marx put it, “in emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.”21
Marxism and Hegelianism
No one can deny the historical influence of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) upon the 