A RED SQUARE REFORMATION

The most remarkable aspect of the communist reformation is its orchestration by a man who, in effect, presides over his own abdication as ruler of an ideological empire. It is as if, in history’s only comparable upheaval, Martin Luther had been elected Pope and implemented the Protestant Reformation from the Vatican.

Though separated by 4 1/2 centuries, the communist reformation has roots in the Protestant Reformation. The underlying dynamics are much the same: technological revolution, expansion of education and the middle class-- replacement of an international ideology by nationalism.

Through the Dark Ages of illiteracy, when so-called “great” libraries contained no more than a score of hand-lettered manuscripts, the Roman Catholic Church with its oral, Latin tradition was the arbiter of laws and morals everywhere and had a monopoly on education.

The church’s hierarchical structure had no inkling that when Johann Gutenberg produced the first book from movable type at Mainz in 1456--fewer than 30 years before and 200 miles distant from Luther’s birth--it would soon be faced with a challenge to its very existence.

Within a few decades, printing burgeoned into the first mass-production industry, facilitating the dissemination of knowledge and the diffusion of education, shattering the church’s special claim to omniscience. Luther became the first of his family to learn to read. And his reading was not limited to a few books in Latin, but included Greek and Hebrew. He thus discovered that some key claims of church authority had no basis in the original sources.

All this might have been academic were it not for the sale of “indulgences”--an economic as well as theological issue. Indulgences enabled one to purchase remission of past, present and future sins--all the way from a white lie to murder--at prescribed prices. They were a principal means of financing the opulence of Rome--where, at the time, Michelangelo and Raphael were at work. When Luther attacked indulgences, he was jeopardizing the financial lifeblood of the church. On the other hand, he immediately won support from the nascent middle class and from hundreds of petty rulers that governed Germany; the export of funds to Rome was the time’s equivalent of an unfavorable balance of payments. Germans thought the money could be put to better use at home.

When Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the castle church door at Wittenberg in 1517, they were soon broadcast through the medium of printing. Luther, who wrote in German as well as in Latin, became the world’s first best-seller. His voice was that of the middle class, of individual reasoning and individual conscience versus the dogma promulgated in Latin by a distant curia.

By translating the Bible into German, Luther became the father of German nationalism. Printing facilitated the shaping of European nations along language lines. Roman liturgy was cast out of northern and much of central Europe. Catholicism and Protestantism generally divided along the borders of Romance- and non-Romance-speaking lands. Luther was thus the spiritual precursor of the middle-class political upheavals that followed--the English Civil War of the 17th Century and the American and French revolutions of the 18th. They brought to full flower the free-enterprise system, with its premium on individual initiative, ability and competitive spirit.

While the excesses and social hardships of laissez-faire capitalism later gave birth to communism, a good argument can be made that communism was a movement divided against itself from the very beginning--an attempt at social reform through political and economic action.

Communism has made little headway in the West because industrialized countries took the positive elements of Marxism, called them social welfare and incorporated them into the democratic political structure and competitive economic order. The economic and sexual liberation of women; an end to child-labor exploitation; public education; a graduated income tax; centralization of credit through a national bank; national agriculture and land policies--all were theses of Karl Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto.

Communism, conversely, stagnated because it failed to recognize the negative political impact and economic impracticality of Marxism. Marx failed to realize--and it became the fatal flaw of communism everywhere--that the class-against-class society he viewed as static was in fact in a state of rapid evolution.

The despised haute bourgeoisie was constantly being infused with new members from the petty bourgeoisie, and the petty bourgeoisie was replenished by workers and peasants. Had he come to the United States, prototype of the new society, Marx would have seen the development of mass capitalism through individual achievement and acuity--not to mention luck, ruthlessness and occasional crookedness. His greatest failure was not perceiving that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” represented the same kind of hierarchical order--with its uniformity of thought and autocratic paternalism--that had been so instrumental in precipitating the Protestant Reformation. For bureaucracies, whether in religion, government or business, are dedicated primarily to preserving and perpetuating themselves.

Communism was a throwback to the mercantile system of economic centralization. So it took root not in the industrialized world, as posited by Marx, but in emerging, still largely rural, nations--the Soviet Union and China--as a bridge to development of an industrial society.

It was, however, inevitable that by educating the masses, communism would undermine its own autocratic structure--a process of democratization under way since the 15th Century. In the age of an electronic revolution, communism was attempting the impossible--trying to create an advanced technological society while mandating ideological uniformity.

Like Luther, Mikhail S. Gorbachev is a product of the broadening of education and innovations in communication; and he may indeed go down as the Luther of communism--architect of its reformation--if he succeeds in incorporating the positive elements of Western politics and economics into the Marxist social structure, the converse of what the West has done but producing similar results. Pure communism is moribund, just as pure capitalism no longer exists. But communism will not disappear, any more than Catholicism did. What we will surely see is the same kind of fragmentation and shadings of every degree that the Protestant Reformation produced.

So the communist reformation cannot be perceived as the harbinger of halcyon days of peace and prosperity, any more than the Protestant Reformation was. Quite the opposite. As reprehensible as repression is, uniformity tends to ensure order and stability. n

Nor will the attenuation of communism prove a panacea for the economic difficulties of Eastern Europe, any more than was its imposition. Though there is likely to be a generally rising economic tide, it will be accompanied by individual struggles, increased economic disparities, group antagonisms and a reversion to national rivalries. These are part and parcel of freedom. We seem to approach the 21st Century on the same kind of roiling seas that buffeted the 20th. It would be no great surprise if, in a decade or two, we looked back nostalgically at the the Cold War in the midst of a hot peace.