Mormon Communists

A lifelong friend of mine, with whom I disagree on many ideological issues, recently wrote an impassioned defense of communism.

I quote relevant excerpts:

It troubles me immensely that there is no organized Communist power to oppose the complete capitalist depredation of discourse and the world.

And people have been so brainwashed by capitalist propaganda, and the reaction against communism is so kneejerk that it just demonstrates the complete idiocy of 99% of my fellows.

Please, don't bore me with your glib statements of "Communism is tyranny..." blah blah blah...

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that the Communist State was anything approaching ideal.

But on the other hand, some of the literature of the Communists is not only brilliant, it's extremely rational and logical. To anyone with a logical mind, it's very convincing...

Christ, for those who aren't aware, was a Communist. He advocated people selling all they had to give to the poor (a Robin Hood figure if there ever were one), and said that in his society, the have-nots would have everything the greedy have's had, in a complete, topsy-turvy shake-down of society. Jesus was a revolutionary.

That doesn't mean that I wanted to live in Russia. But I still want to listen to that era of Russia (and the larger Communist world), because I know that liberation cannot come without that dialogue, because they hold one of the pieces. They may very well be missing many of the pieces, but that they hold one or some of the pieces I know for certain.

I look forward to a day when these sorts of things can be discussed openly, publicly, and joyously in the United States without having some Fox News-rabble repeat the joyless ad nauseums of their John Birch demagogues.

I tried to post this response at his myspace page, but it didn't work. So, since I wasted so much time writing it, I post it here for your amusement.

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A few thoughts from a right-wing loon, offered in a playful and non-ideological spirit…

COMMUNISM IS TYRANNY!! BLAH BLAH BLAH!

Phew. Now that that’s out of the way…

Besides being a right-wing loon, I’m also a lifelong Mormon, and it may surprise you to learn that Mormons were initially criticized for their communitarian leanings. Joseph Smith, the first president of the Church, instituted a communal society with what came to be known as the United Order.

The idea was that members gave all of their wealth to the Church, which then returned to each member a “stewardship,” which they were to manage for the good of the community as a whole, with all surplus wealth generated to be returned to the Church for the benefit of the poor. The system was similar to what the early apostles attempted in the Book of Acts, and, according to additional LDS revelations, it was the law of Zion , in which people were “of one heart and one mind…and there were no poor among them.” (Moses 7:18)

It was a great idea. And it didn’t work.

Despite having the force of divine law behind it, the United Order was not backed up by the law of the land. As a result, when people decided they wanted to keep their own wealth, thank you very much, there wasn’t a whole lot the church could do about it. And once people started pulling out, the system collapsed.

And why did people start pulling out? Predictable reasons. You can call it greed or selfishness if you like. Many of them thought the Church was mismanaging their resources, and they thought they could do a better job. At times, they were probably right. Every community is made up of imperfect people, and when somebody has to make the decision as to how resources are to be dispensed, somebody else is going to disagree.

It’s important to note that the United Order differed from Marxism/Leninism in three key areas:

1. Members of the United Order, while accountable to the community as a whole, still preserved a measure of private property ownership, whereas Marxism requires all property to be owned by the state.
2. The United Order was only binding with regard to the faith of the participants, who could leave the Order without fear of governmental reprisal. Marxism, as practiced by the Soviets et al, is preserved by the military power of the state.
3. The United Order was predicated on each participant’s faith in the divine, whereas Marxism, by its very definition, is militantly atheistic.
   

So where am I going with all this?

When you say “Jesus was a Communist,” I think you’re absolutely right in the traditional, non-ideological definition of the term – i.e. he believed in building an economic community where all are equal and there are no poor among us. I would say that he was encouraging us to live the United Order. To say, however, that Jesus was a Marxist would be fundamentally incorrect. Certainly he would not have approved of an economic system that mandated the wholesale rejection of God.

Communitarian living is the divine ideal, but it only works when governed by divine principles. When a perfect person is the one who decides how resources are distributed without bias or self-interest, and everyone is in the order voluntarily and participating wholeheartedly, than a United Order works perfectly. But when real, imperfect people get involved, and when communitarian living is enforced at the end of a gun, you get big, messy, and, yes, bloody problems.

You state several times that you’re not defending the vile excesses of the Soviet state, and I ought to state that I am in no way ignorant of the weaknesses of capitalism. I feel about capitalism the way Winston Churchill felt about democracy, which he called “the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

If you doubt this, reflect on the fact that this simple discussion would be impossible in Soviet Russia. To express grave doubts about your own government in a public forum would be to invite imprisonment and death. For all its faults, the United States still allows you to criticize her without fear of reprisal. That, in and of itself, sets us apart from the Communist world.

Hope I haven’t ticked you off, and that you feel better soon!