More than a hundred years ago, prominent Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote: "Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. [Socialism is] religion in the sense that it too is a faith with its mystics and rituals; religion because it has substituted for the consciousness of the transcendental God of the Catholics, the faith in man and in his great strengths as a unique spiritual reality".
Equalizing an ideology with religion was pretty novel back then. However, Gramsci was talking about religion not as it is commonly understood — i.e., the relationship between God and men — but as a collection of religious attributes and rituals. In his point of view, socialism was godless religion, the cult of the messianic Marx.
At the same time, Gramsci understood that socialism (and leftism in general), like any other dogma, is immune to empirical, rational challenges because, by definition, its postulates are untestable — untestable not because it is impossible to conduct such tests, but because followers of leftist ideology reject any idea of such a test in principle.By the way, this is something leftists have in common with Muslims.) They are mostly true believers; they aggressively reject any attempts to test the foundations of their dogmatic beliefs.
Leftists' behavior is utterly illogical to a degree one might call unscientific. Their irrationality is based on illusory knowledge — i.e., knowledge acquired through a system of beliefs, expressed by well known authorities (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bernstein, Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky, Mao, and many others). Left-wingers acquired their false, Utopian beliefs throughout the entire history of human civilization. Their undisputed belief of multiplying wealth by dividing it (i.e., by redistributing it by force) was the basis of numerous failed social experiments.
To avoid any confusion, let us provide adequate definitions of socialism (promoted by left-wing ideology) and its antithesis, capitalism (promoted by the free-market, or conservative, ideology).
- Socialism is a state of society where most wealth, either de jure or de facto, belongs to a government.
- Capitalism is a state of society where most wealth, both de jure and de facto, belongs to its citizens.
- Communism is a Utopian state of society where all wealth, both de jure and de facto, belongs to a government............To Read More.....
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