With all that explained, we now move to the class that will write the future, the class that cannot help but take power one day, if historical forces are even remotely predictable: the proletariat. This class is the most oppressed, the most desperate, and so its ethics revolve around doing what works and shunning what doesn't, because they cannot afford failure or utopianism. Proles with class consciousness call this ethic the dialectic, or dialectical materialism. Proles without class consciousness call it either tradition or the organic principle. This ethic bears further explanation, but it is what prole socialists and prole conservatives share in common.
Have you ever been exasperated by a conservative who refuses to countenance gay rights, because "society never had that before, so for all we know society will fall apart if we let Adam and Steve get married"? While the application of this argument to gay rights is woefully misguided, there is more wisdom in this concept than appears at first glance. This is a conservative applying the dialectic as best they know how. All conservatives usually know about gayness is that their religious faith says it's bad. But in the darkness of false consciousness, their faith nonetheless distinguishes them from liberals and fascists, and provides them with a community, with material support, with life guidance that may lead to an occasionally boring, but usually sustainable way of life they can pass on to their children. So if their faith says gay people are bad (which it typically does for its own self-interested reasons, as a sort of blackmail to gay people and also pedophiles to get them to join their ranks and help perpetuate the faith, as we're starting to see with the fallout of the global Catholic sex abuse crisis), then these devout conservative proles have no real reason to question advice that usually steers their lives correctly.
Marxist-Leninists have a checkered history in regards to religious faith. Marx called it the "opiate of the masses," as it consoled and dulled the senses of the workers with false consciousness. In those days, religious faith was a far greater crutch for the bougies, a far greater way to insert false consciousness into the minds of proles. In those material conditions, it was understandable for Lenin and Stalin to desire to root out this false consciousness. Imagine if your local neighborhood priest, rabbi, or imam was also Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow - it was this context in which they acted against religion, trying to quarantine believers' children against its influence and advocating a militantly godless body politic. In the process, cultural damage was done - irreplaceable churches were demolished, ancient icons and relics destroyed, in order that the workers might no longer be rallied to the old bourgeois order but instead to the new proletarian one. But in a demonstration of communist openmindedness, and of the changing material conditions of the world, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has jettisoned its anticlericalism. Embracing workers who find solace in religious faith is the correct line and an overdue change in Marxist-Leninist theory. Sneering at workers finding joy in something harmless is what bougies and petties do, and cannot be defended on socialist grounds.
But what Stalin missed was that rallying the workers at all was difficult enough. When he realized that he had banned and sidelined the most effective method to get the workers organized towards a single goal with all their heart, he had to create a new civil religion of sorts - the personality cult. He reportedly hated this cult, but he and more importantly the Politburo recognized the importance of it. Without a god to rally the workers, they would have to invent one, and name it Stalin. Nonetheless, behind closed doors, his real attitude towards it was apparent. "Comrades!" he began at a New Year's party in 1935, "I want to propose a toast to our patriarch, life and sun, liberator of nations, architect of socialism [...] Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, and I hope this is the first and last speech made to that genius this evening" (Arvo Tuominen, The Bells of the Kremlin, p. 162). The Stalinist cult of personality was an unpleasant necessity for Stalin, one that could have been sidelined if the Soviet Union could have made a lasting alliance with the various Orthodox churches. In the then-recent context of the Black Hundreds, this was not possible, but now it is.
But all the same, when into the motherland the German army marched (put some headphones in and play that video to the right, you won't regret it), Stalin reversed course and welcomed the Patriarch of Moscow to make a broadcast goading the Soviet people to resistance on July 20. The organic institution of religious faith was a necessary tool after all for the guardians of the dialectic.
The obvious problem with a personality cult is that most of its objects are not so humble. Khrushchev, after denouncing Stalin's personality cult, became the first Soviet leader to get fired when he tried to create his own. Mao's personality cult led the Chinese nation straight off a cliff, giving him the clout to push his disastrous Great Leap Forward and then his last gasp at power, the Cultural Revolution. But given the potential for organized religion to serve as a source of reaction in many societies, and the failure of most red petty leaders to live up to their personality cults, a more stable basis for organizing workers to great feats is needed. Strangely to American ears, the two most viable answers have come out of countries our media has trained us to hate and fear: Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
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