COMMENTARY: A beggar’s hand, a child’s birth — for committed communist Whittaker Chambers, these moments of love shattered the illusion of collectivist utopia.
In June, New York Democrats chose democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani over former Governor Andrew Cuomo in a surprising mayoral primary upset — the latest sign that socialism is gaining mainstream traction in the United States.
It’s a fitting moment to revisit the roots of socialist thought — and the fatal assumption that lies at its heart. Karl Marx was, more than anything else, an economist. But his zeal for the discipline that defines him overtook any concern he might have had for the individual person — a view fundamentally at odds with the Catholic understanding of the human person as created in the image and likeness of God.
The sanctity of the life of a single human being was far removed from his thought. From the viewpoint of economics, when there is an over-supply of a particular commodity, the price goes down. When we apply this principle to human beings, the value of an individual goes down when there is a super-abundance of them. Life becomes cheap when it is prodigious.
In Das Kapital, Marx writes, “I speak of individuals insofar as they are personifications of special classes of relations or interests.” The individual person is, thereby, swallowed up into the collective. It is the class to which he belongs that gives him his identity. Individuals are nothing more than pawns in a chess game.
Marx famously advocated hanging capitalists from the nearest lampposts. In the newspaper he edited, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he declared, “When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism.” Communism is inextricably intertwined with violence.
For Marx, then, the value of a single human being is exceedingly low. It is the class that counts and history is the evolution of a clash between classes, the opposition between thesis and antithesis that results ultimately in a synthesis that was communism.
Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) was a high-ranking and devoted member of the Communist Party. He knew from close experience what communism is all about. In his memoir, Witness, he describes an incident that reveals, both concisely and dramatically, the unbridgeable gap that exists between communism and Christianity concerning the value of the individual human being.
One day, Chambers and his associate Harry Freeman (who was a committed Stalinist) were walking up to the Bowery together. At that time, the Bowery was the dingiest section of Manhattan. Derelicts prowled the streets begging for handouts. It was bitter cold that day and the Bowery drifters, most of them without overcoats, were looking for shelter in doorways or warmth beside paltry fires.
Almost as expected, a shivering derelict approached the two asking for a handout. Harry Freeman glanced past him, which was, according to Whittaker, the right thing to do as a communist. Chambers, however, gave the man what change he had in his pocket. He was then shocked when the man seized his hand and kissed it. It was an experience that had a powerful impact on him. Harry drew him away and said to him, “You must not think about them. We can’t save them. They are lost. We can only save our generation, perhaps, and the children.”
The communist attitude scorns giving alms, for it allegedly dulls the revolutionary spirit. From a communist perspective, Harry Freeman’s attitude was right and that of Whittaker Chambers was wrong. Communist ideology holds that a real human being — especially one who is downtrodden — can be overlooked in favor of future generations not yet born. Let us turn away from the present, says the communist, and look to the future. The present is unacceptably imperfect; the future will be brighter.
The scene is a replay of the parable of the Good Samaritan. For the dedicated communist, the real must be sacrificed for the ideal. For the Christian, the Bowery drifter is my neighbor. The Samaritan was “good” because he tended to the critical needs of his neighbor. The neighbor meets us on the plane of immediacy. In the second general audience of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV reflected on the Good Samaritan. The essential message of the parable, Leo pointed out, is this: “If you want to help someone, you cannot think of keeping your distance; you have to get involved, get dirty yourself, perhaps be contaminated.”
Our neighbor is not a future prospect or a social failure who is bereft of value. He is not distant from us. And here is delineated the tragic flaw of communism. It is to trade the love of the individual person for a political power that will benefit people who have not yet come into being. According to communist arithmetic, 1,000 happy theoretical people are worth more than one shivering derelict.
The shivering derelict, however, was real. Moreover, his spirit lives on to emphasize the point and to argue from the dead that love is more practical than political schemes.
How important is one living individual? Chambers and his wife came close to aborting their daughter. She lived and had a decisive role to play in leading Whittaker Chambers away from communism and toward the light. Because of his child, he writes, “the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.” She was “the child we all yearn for, who, even before her birth, had begun, invisibly, to lead us out of that darkness, which we could not even realize, toward that light, which we could not even see.” Chambers subsequently converted to Christianity.
Politics deals with the collective. It relies chiefly on how well it can organize things. Love attends to the individual. It does not require a committee but is simply a way of promoting the good of others. In an address he gave on May 25, 2000, Pope John Paul II had this to say: “A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; and the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.”
Human beings are not mere economic factors or simply members of a class. They exist as individual persons, as beings who were created to love and be loved. Communism believes in the power of politics; Christianity believes in the power of love. The two can work together, but love is indispensable.
