Karl Kautsky is probably the first Marxist to interest himself both
in the movement and the enigmatic personality of the crucified
prophet. His 1908 book The Foundations of Christianity is a rather
impressive attempt at a Marxist analysis. The book is rather
original, innovative and has been rranslated into nine languages.
Kaustky made his Foundations of Christianity into one of the most
popular Marxist theoretical works. Its popular success is probably
due to the interest of socialist militants to see a vision of the
origins of Christianity which permits the modern workers' movement
to appropriate to itself the figure of Jesus as a prophet and
martyr for the proletarian cause. Kautsky wanted to interpret early
Christianity as a precursor of the contemporary working class
socialist movement. His friend, and later his opponent, Rosa
Luxemburg, in an article of 1905 called "The Church and Socialism
insisted that the first Christian apostles were Communists who
denounced injustice and the cult of the Golden Calf," He
counterposed a materialist account of the new religion against the
Christian mythology and showed the capacity of the Marxist method
to give an account of a complex historical process, interpreting a
religious phenomenon in terms of the class struggle. The book is
divided into four sections: 1) Society at the time of the Roman
Empire: the slave economy, the absolutist forms of the state, the
different manifestations of cultural and religious crisis. 2)
Judaism: the class conflicts of Israelite society and the various
political-religious currents (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and
Essene. 3) The beginnings of Christianity: the early Christian
communities, the idea of themessianic Christ and Christian
communism. 4) The fourth section is dedicated to the "personality
of Jesus," According to Kautsky, what distinguishes Jesus'
messianism from the other rebellious Jewish prophets of the era -
all of whom had a strictly national character - is its social
character, its calling as an international redeemer. "Only the
social Messiah, not the national, could transcend the limits of
Judaism," survive the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and,
above all, find a hearing among the poor of all nations. By
associating the hostility of the oppressed classes to the rich with
proletarian solidarity, the messianism of the Christian communities
promised the redemption of the poor, and so it could gain followers
beyond the Jewish world. In the last analysis, Jesus, "the
crucified proletarian Messiah" managed to defeat Rome and conquer
the world, but in the course of this process the Christian movement
suffered an "inverse dialectic": it lost its proletarian and
communist character and was transformed into a state religion,
under the control of a vast dominating and exploiting apparatus -
the Church.
General
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