Marx and Satan by Richard Wurmbrand

Posted by admin_akashic on Feb 15th, 2022 in History, Human

Marx did not often speak publicly about metaphysics, but we can gather his views from the men with whom he associated. One of his partners in the First International was Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist, who wrote:

The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognise each other by the words “In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done.”

Satan [is] the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

Bakunin does more than praise Lucifer. He has a concrete program of revolution, but not one that would free the poor from exploitation. He writes:

In this revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions. Our mission is to destroy, not to edify. The passion of destruction is a creative passion.

Marx, along with Bakunin, formed the First International and endorsed this strange program. Marx and Engels said in The Communist Manifesto that the proletarian sees law, morality, and religion as “so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”

Bakunin reveals that Proudhon, another major Socialist thinker and at that time a friend of Karl Marx, also “worshiped Satan.” Hess had introduced Marx to Proudhon, who wore the same hair style typical of the nineteenth-century Satanist sect of Joanna Southcott.

Proudhon, in The Philosophy of Misery, declared that God was the prototype for injustice.

We reach knowledge in spite of him, we reach society in spite of him. Every step forward is a victory in which we overcome the Divine.

He exclaims,

Come, Satan, slandered by the small and by kings. God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil. Where humanity bows before an altar, humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned…. I swear, God, with my hand stretched out towards the heavens, that you are nothing more than the executioner of my reason, the sceptre of my conscience God is essentially anticivilized, antiliberal, antihuman.

Proudhon declares God to be evil because man, His creation, is evil. Such thoughts are not original; they are the usual content of sermons delivered in Satanist worship.

Marx later quarreled with Proudhon and wrote a book to refute his Philosophy of Misery. But Marx contradicted only minor economic doctrines. He had no objection to Proudhon’s demonic anti-God rebellion.