Shapiro, Ben - The Right Side of History by Shapiro Ben

Author:Shapiro, Ben [Shapiro, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE UTOPIA OF LEVELING

The French Revolution’s murder of the Judeo-Christian God meant substituting a supposedly more realistic materialism for transcendental values. The Bible contended that man could not live by bread alone; the French Revolution contended that without bread, nothing else mattered. Thomas Paine, author of the most important political pamphlet in modern history, Common Sense, saw the French Revolution as a powerful, necessary move in favor of social leveling. An ardent atheist, Paine rejected the value of Judeo-Christian morality, and instead promoted redistributionist materialism. In particular, Paine targeted the class distinctions that so characterized Europe. “The Aristocracy,” he wrote, “are not the farmers who work the land . . . but are the mere consumers of the rent.” And those aristocrats were living off the backs of a “great portion of mankind . . . [who suffer] in a state of poverty and wretchedness.” Paine wrote, “One extreme produces the other: to make one rich many must be made poor; neither can the system be supported by other means.” Paine would also argue that “the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” No wonder Revolutionary France made Paine an honorary citizen.

Paine quickly became a devotee of proto-socialist Gracchus Babeuf. “Property,” Babeuf’s followers argued, “is, therefore, the greatest scourge on society; it is a veritable public crime.” Paine quickly began to believe the same, and advocated for a system of “ground-rent” for property ownership, the proceeds from which would be distributed among the citizenry. Paine argued that private property was a mere convention, and that all private property was actually the work of society at large: “Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.” Thus the state is master over all private property. And a revolution would be necessary to effectuate that reality.23

The French Revolution didn’t end in a communist utopia. But according to Karl Marx, it was the first step in the gradual evolution of markets toward communism. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a pamphlet written in 1852 regarding the French coup of 1851, Marx wrote that the French Revolution had set for itself “the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society,” but that its own commitment to classical republican ideals had prevented the class uprising that could liberate its citizens from the shackles of class;24 that revolution, Marx thought, had nearly been achieved in the communist movements that spread across the continent of Europe like wildfire. And soon, that communist utopia would be achieved. As Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”

So, what was this specter?

Today, Marx’s more aphoristic credos have become legendary—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and “Workers of the world, unite!” and the like. But his philosophy represented a radical new attempt to find meaning in a world without God.

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