Heisman’s suicide note, 8

Americanism is really a form of Judaism

Years after the death of his comrade, Karl Marx, and only about a year before his own death in 1895, Frederick Engels, co-founder of the communist movement, published an essay called “On the History of Early Christianity”. It began:

The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement.

Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society.
Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.

Engels thus believed that a form of socialism “did in fact, as far as it was possible at the time, exist and even became dominant—in Christianity.” Christianity had a “class” appeal comparable to monotheism’s earlier storybook appeal to a “class” of Pharaoh’s Hebrew slaves.
Of all the attempts that have been made to link Christianity and communism, this is among the most significant. Written soon before his own death, it was like Engels’ final confession. Yet one point that Engels avoided, a point that would have been impossible for him not to take mental note of, was the Judaic origins of both Jesus and Marx. This unspoken theme was handled by downplaying the significance of the Judaic background of Jesus, and thus seemingly implying that the same held for Marx…
Whereas Roman values synthesized the good with the virtues of the soldier, Biblical monotheism disassociated the good from the virtues of the soldier… While Caesar presumed god-status as the highest among humans, Jesus on his crucifix attempts to demonstrate a way in which the lowest can be highest… Christian values turned the political arena from the arena of highest human virtue to the arena of the lowest human virtue…
Jesus, like Marx, takes aim at an entire system of perceived injustice. The Kingdom of God represents Jesus’s “system”. The Kingdom of God is Jesus’s equivalent of Marx’s imagined successor to the capitalist system. Just as Jesus claimed that he came, not to abolish, but to fulfill the laws of Moses (Matt. 5:17), Marx saw communism, not as the absolute negation of capitalism, but as the fulfillment of the logic of history. In both Christianity and communism, taking the most leftward logic to the extreme led to the production of something new and ultimately opposite.
In his papers on the Jewish Question, Marx wrote:

Christianity sprang from Judaism; it has now dissolved itself back into Judaism. The Christian was from the start the theorizing Jew; the Jew therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has once more become Jew.

The classic “practical Christian” is the American. Americanism, then, is really a form of Judaism, not a form of Christianity. This implies that the capitalist age is a Jewish age, and that Karl Marx was a theorizing Jew who prophesized a new Christianity called communism.
Christianity collapsed into capitalism, in part, because Christianity attacked the patriarchal virtues of duty and family that override selfish individualism. Above all, it was the Christian valuation of a form of altruism that subverts kin selective altruism that helped pave the way towards capitalist individualism. In a sense, Christianity led the modern West to a state more like Jews. This means that Christianity inadvertently helped produce the capitalist world criticized by Marx.
Marx’s relatively superficial conception of “class” warfare has deeper roots in a more fundamental form of internal warfare—Jesus’s attack on the family:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.

Jesus’s sword was poised to divide kin, to divide the family, and to divide generations against themselves. This is a historical root of the Marxist “class” warfare that divides society on a higher level…
Jesus’s attacks on the Pharisees may have influenced Marx’s anti-Jewish tracts. Although Marx himself was born a German Jew, he was converted to Christianity at an early age. Just as Jesus was formally a Jew in an anti-Roman culture, Marx was formally a Christian in an anti-Jewish culture. But was Jesus treated as a full Jew? Was Marx treated as a full Christian? Just as Jesus became, in a theoretical sense, more Jewish than the Jews, Marx became, in a theoretical sense, more Christian than the Christians. For both Marx and Jesus, then, the issue of assimilation by law, but discrimination in fact, may have been a common impetus for world shattering prescriptions.
As Walter Kaufmann put it, Marx’s “impassioned interest in the salvation of wretched humanity made him the second Jew in history to be accepted by almost half of humanity as a messiah”…
Modern leftist causes would not have taken deep root without the fecund soil prepared by Christianity. The “Good News” of secular leftist revolutionary liberation was, in part, a reaping what Christianity had sown.
Hitler showed what can happen when the assumption of Christian influence is profoundly questioned. The difference between Roman altruism and Christian altruism is like the difference between National Socialism and Marxist socialism. The Nazis brought back the ancient pagan way that preceded Christianity as a corollary of bringing back the primacy of biological evolution.
[pages 463-470]