Only with Marx and Jesus

Book excerpt: This book focuses on Jesus before Christianity and Marx before Communism. It argues not only that both men sought to end moral and economic estrangement forever, but that Jesus' relational revolution failed because it lacked the foundation of Marx's emancipatory revolution. The absence of the emancipatory conditions for moral regeneration encouraged Jesus' followers to transform his teachings and practices into fetishes and illusions of the Christian Church. Jesus made the same mistake as the later Young Hegelians, who assumed that a change of mind (in Jesus' case, a change of heart) would change the world. Marx's emancipatory revolution also failed, partly because the conditions for abolishing estrangement were absent, and partly because his theories had been misunderstood. The result was the "crude and thoughtless communism" he warned against in the Ecomonic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Now that Marx's theory has been recovered in full and most of the conditions for liberation are present in the West, the stage has been set for the renewal of the emancipatory revolution, which should dissolve what remains of existing Communism at the same time it lifts the burdens of estrangement, spiritual impoverishment, and statism from the shoulders of those living in the bourgeois nations of the West and Third World.