FOR GOD'S SAKE

FOR GOD'S SAKE

When Karl Marx, exasperated by his followers and their misrepresentation of his ideas, declaimed, 'Thank God, I am not a Marxist,' he unwittingly opened up a space in which belief in god and communism could co-exist albeit in contest. The reverberations of this tension-fraught relationship can be heard in 21st century Kerala, where a couple of legislators belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) did not hesitate to take the oath 'in the name of God'. They chose not to take the secular oath. One of them saw no contradiction between his membership of the communist party and his belief in God. He said that he was committed to communism and the party but he had never given up his faith while being active in the revolutionary movement. The point that the legislator made should not be dismissed or laughed at. Obviously, he was trying in his own way to make a distinction between his private belief, that is, his faith, and his public avowal of a political ideology. For him, communism represents only a political ideology which is divorced from its grounding in a materialist philosophy. This approach to communism is a direct outcome of the kind of praxis perpetuated by most 20th-century communist leaders. The practice of communism as distinct from its theory has been devoid of any notion of ethics and of theoretical grounding. Witness the unscrupulousness and the intellectual vacuity of all that went in the name of communism under the leadership of Josef Stalin, Mao Ze Dong, Enver Hoxha and others. The mindless violence and the corruption embedded in the communist regimes of the 20th century mocked at the original ideals of communism. If anything ' from murder to sexual perversion ' could go in the name of communism, why not religion' In fact, in China, Soviet Russia and in the countries of Eastern Europe, communism became the opiate of the masses. It was the new religion till that god failed with momentous consequences for history. The dialogue between religion and Marxism has had more profound implications. In Latin America, Roman Catholic priests have found in the message of Marx a mode of reaching out to people whose lives are imbued with Christianity. They have used both communism and Christianity to fight oppression and authoritarianism and to introduce a programme for social and economic change. To these practitioners of the Christian faith, both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx appeared to address similar problems of the common people. The messages were not contradictory but complementary. Some of the leading scientists of the world have been believers in god. They successfully separated their practice of science from their personal faith in a divine power or presence. Perhaps, in a small way in a small state in India, communists are also coming round to the same view.