the proletariat is not the revolutionary class

To our shame, Marxism has had a better track record than Christianity in predicting and influencing utopian revolutions. The science of Karl Marx (as I type this, my train pulls into Marks, Mississippi, surely named after the great economist) and Friedrich Engels, in less than two centuries, has made hundreds of millions see with higher lucidity the amount of value they produce which they are unable to keep, and has granted them a vision of a future in which the capitalist mode of production, weakened by its internal contradictions, leaves its treasures open for the taking by the workers, who can manage production with greater dignity and retain all of the products which they produce.

Most importantly, some who have cherished the vision have let it move them into aggressive action and have successfully taken political power to build the world of their dreams. The fear and disgust for Bolshevism, while certainly lessened, still lingers to this day for that reason: the Bolsheviks were bold enough and arrogant enough not only to dream, but to take.

Many people outside of communist lands dream Marx’s dream today, but things have changed over the hundred and seven years since the October Revolution, and those changes have made the prophesied revolutionary force, The Proletariat, much less intimidating than it was back then.

For one, the same scientific-industrial progress which brought the proletariat into being has worked marvels in the field of agriculture. Food is so abundant and accessible that workers in highly capitalized countries have not been threatened with the great revolutionary motivator of true destitution and the hunger it brings. They face a different threat now in the form of epidemic obesity and diabetes due to the easily-satisfied temptation to eat ultra high calorie foods. This set of problems is less worrisome to those who wield power.

A second great contributor to proletarian defanging is the proliferation of cheap and (from my surely-soon-to-be-comical 2024 perspective) fantastically powerful personal computers, which occupy the attention of most potential revolutionaries for hours and hours every day. The games that they run are perfect for making someone useless. They’re addictive. They atrophy every muscle that isn’t in the hands or the eyes. They’re isolating. They lack the aesthetic power that lifts up the spirit. Perhaps Dance Dance Revolution players maintain some revolutionary potential, but alas, I doubt their ability to leaven the whole gamer dough.

The few positive aspects of video gaming are absent in social media scrolling, the other great contemporary pastime allowed by advancements in computing. The internet and the smartphone have made Marx’s works and socialist ideas more accessible than ever, but it does not matter. The ideas lack any force because the people who receive them are isolated, out-of-shape smartphone addicts who are on medication for a mood disorder.

The defanging seems to be almost universally complete within the great mass of workers.

Communists will surely scoff at my dismissal of the working class. That’s fine: history’s is the only word that matters. But no, I do not think we will ever see another revolution based on the proletarians as a class seizing power from the capital owners as a class. Dreamers will need to look for their savior elsewhere, engaged in a different conflict.

The savior will, finally, be Jesus of Nazareth. The conflict He is engaged in is not against capitalists specifically, but against the principalities and powers that order this world, to whom both capitalists and proletarians can be useful pawns. His will be the power that brings about the utopian future.

Christians have for a long time had their own power-nullifying disabilities: focus on a post-death Heaven, respect for the God-appointed political authorities, fear of excommunication. The last has, perhaps temporarily, gone out of style; the second has been eroded by the liberal movement of the past three centuries; the first is being corrected in our time by the Spirit of God.

The Body of Christ, mature and free and healthy, will make the perfect revolutionary. I’ll only point out two reasons for this.

First, because the Body cannot be without love and community. As fewer people participate in IRL, non-religious communities, even non-believers recognize the severity of the loss and consciously seek replacements for the Christian communities from which they are cut off. It seems that they do not have much success. But the Christian’s habit for being and remaining in a Body of believers will translate over to the revolutionary struggle for the Kingdom, to its strength.

Secondly, Christians have a taste for the Cross which is utterly foreign to the World. Christians long to be united to the Lord in the hardships that he bore, in the askesis that he undertook. These have a delectable sweetness for us. To face up for the Kingdom against an enemy whom the World thinks is unbeatable: what does this mean? To die is to be pierced by empire and mingle love’s blood with the Lord. To win is the sight of Salvation for the people, nations’ light and glory to Israel.

Anxiety for the Christian is to stay still while the Lord calls, to be unmoved by peoples’ cries. Peace comes with death, with exhaustive struggle and the abandonment of all comforts for the cause of Love and the Kingdom.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Such words are foolishness to the unspiritual masses, both bourgeois and proletarian, but in us who have been called, the words are living and true. This is why the Body of Jesus Christ, mature and free and healthy, awake to its true task, will be the greatest and the final revolutionary force.