The day provides the perfect excuse to relive the excitement of his prenatal journey to Bethlehem; to remember with suppressed arousal his everyday man carpenter aesthetic; to rejoice in all his boundless prophesies and miracles; and to mourn his untimely and unjust persecution. But, most importantly, it allows us to recall the crescendo of his life, the apotheosis of his messianic rise, as the man who made the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. And with the amount of sinning us communists do, we could really make the most of a guy like Jesus.
This all begs an obvious question though: even if the Movement for Marxmas is successful and triumphantly sweeps across the world, is it really worth replacing Jesus Christ with Karl Marx? Is it really necessary to wipe the slate clean and forget the man who, let's be honest, the movement could not exist without?
Jesus is often sold to us as an upstanding, honorable man; a true paragon of virtue. He usually has a six-pack, dreamy blue eyes, and wears a tunic that shows just the right amount of skin. Some have even taken it so far as to call him a socialist. And hey, he did tip over all those bankers' tables in a fit of rage that one time, and what’s not to like about that? This is a man who healed the blind and the paralyzed, advocated for the poor every now and again, and whose life has served as a moral beacon, its guiding light still shining bright on billions today. He could even do magic tricks like walk on water and then turn that water into wine.
However, the way Jesus is remembered is, somewhat expectedly, slightly hagiographic. In short, his decency and probity are solidly overstated.
Jesus inarguably possesses many moral failings that emerge intermittently throughout his journey upon this Earth. There is that time in the Book of Mark when he petulantly murders a fig tree. Now that's not very nice, is it? Or there is the way he repeatedly meets enslaved people and repeatedly says nothing of it, almost as if he doesn't have a problem with slavery. That's especially not nice, Jesus.
There is the fact that Jesus is very possibly the world’s first anti-Semite to gain any renown too. In his rejection of Judaism and the historical revisionism that claims it was the Jews who crucified him (it was the Romans), Jesus’ anti-Jew legacy has led to some very, very dark places. His father too, who he had an undying/dying loyalty to, was a special kind of lunatic, killing whole cities of people in one fell swoop, just because some of the townsfolk were sexually inquisitive, carnally adventurous individuals.
Truly horrendous acts have been done in the name of Jesus as well, from the deep sexism and misogyny, and support for institutions like slavery Christianity has historically defended and upheld, to more modern phenomena like Protestant justifications for class distinctions and that whole Catholic Church child rape thing.
Contrast this, on the other hand, with the one and only Karl Heinrich Marx.
Outside the miasma of those pungent, smoke-filled leftist reading groups we all know and love, Marx is often presented to us in a starkly negative light. He is a prickly social theorist, anti-democratic, a determinist with failed predictions and a strong, bloodthirsty predilection for violence. In our identitarian times, he’s also a homophobe, a racist and, with a beard like that, a symbol of patriarchal rule.
And, just like Jesus Christ, horrible things have been done in his name too. Things like torturing innocent civilians, murderously and malevolently warmongering, and starving to death millions of people all across the globe; things so horrid that not even the Christian Christmas capitalists would be seen doing them. (Correction: please see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).
But let's be clear: such horrid acts are undeniable bastardizations of Marx, aberrations that have been ruinous to a legacy that’s impact could still yet be profound.
But, wait. Hold on a minute. Couldn’t the exact same thing be said of all those horrible acts done in the name of Jesus Christ over the years? Can we really blame Jesus, for example, every time an American president invokes his or his dad's name to justify some horrendous act of American imperialism?
Yes, we can. See the important difference here is that within the legacy of Jesus Christ, within the Bible and the history of Christianity, there are immutable connections to appallingly dreadful deeds and to deeply immoral core principles that, although slowly modified over the years in line with social acceptability, if eliminated would undermine the very function the Gospel has served in our society for millennia: to uphold a profoundly unequal and oppressive status quo.
However, within Marx, the exact opposite is true. There exists a core set of principles based around equality, liberation and freedom for all, and a scientific approach to achieving it. Anything more than a cursory look at Marx should tell you he would have disapproved of the inequality within the Soviet Union, he would have been dispirited by the lack of worker's power in almost every ‘Marxist’ regime that has existed, and that he would have been deeply disappointed by the weak economic growth numbers delivered by the Communist Party of China year after year - a GDP-per-hour-worked labor productivity metric growing at less than 7% annually!? This is Communism, goddamnit!
If these associations with deeply flawed and immoral sociopolitical structures are done away with though, unlike the story of Jesus Christ where the entire foundation risks falling away, Marxism reveals itself as a coherent, practical philosophy and is given the freedom to truly flourish.
See, where in Marx is the call to create a one party state and oppress your people? Nowhere.
Where in Marx is the instruction relating to the proper architecture for Siberian Gulags? Nowhere.
Yet in the Bible we can find how much it should cost to purchase a male or female slave, how long we have to wait before we can touch a woman after she menstruates, and how having sex with an absolutely ripped babe of a guy named Tristan is wrong if you too are a man. The main character in that Bible is Jesus Christ.
When it comes to Marx and Jesus there really is no competition. Marx presents a worldview that is coherent and progressive. He presents a revolutionary, scientific method of understanding the world that, at its core, is deeply instructive and moral. Jesus Christ’s legacy on the other hand is one not simply mired by reactionary perspectives and abuses in his name, but one deeply entrenched in social stagnation and moral regression.
This is why on the 25th of December we should all be celebrating Marxmas, not Christmas. And it is why, after the Marxmas revolution spreads across this godforsaken earth, that that God's son, Jesus, will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
And for all of those Christians out there who think it would be a sin to disown Jesus, remember: Jesus died for our sins, don’t let him die in vain.