Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) succeeded in interpreting Marxist thought from the standpoint of Marx's virulent atheism. Historical materialism and the inexorable evolution of universal history in the direction of victorious communism are therefore shown by him to be the fruits of Marx's atheism and of the influence exerted on him by Hegel's ideas, and nothing else.
Marx was also the one who subordinated philosophy to politics. In his view, as we all remember, philosophy was not meant to interpret the world, but to change it. This is also the fundamental reason why Marxism cannot even be considered a proper philosophical system and why Marx is not a philosopher in the true sense of the word: from a melange of ideas from different philosophers - some materialists, others idealists - one cannot build a truly original philosophical system.
The same can be said of Marx the "economist", who had little to add to Adam Smith's labour theory of value or to the economic ideas borrowed from David Ricardo. The analysis of the mechanism of exploitation of the proletarians by the owners of capital is more pertinent in the work of Eugene Buret, whom Marx plagiarized copiously, and so on.
But Del Noce's analysis shows that the political philosophy of the affluent and technocratic West was also influenced by Marxism, although Western atheism is based on eroticism, not class struggle. ( at this point it is important to note the essential role played by neo-marxists like Herbert Marcuse in igniting the sexual revolution during the sixties in the West ).
Soviet communism - or today's Chinese communism - was therefore only the revolutionary version of Marxist thought, as it was put into practice by Lenin.
Marx's belief that science and technology would emancipate man from faith in God was adopted in the West by liberalism, thus spawning today's technocratic societies. The two traditional enemies of liberalism - revolutionary ideology and religion - were thus eliminated in the wake of an ideological fusion between liberalism and Marxism, whose messianic dimension got amputated. The result, says Del Noce, was the emergence of Western neo-totalitarian societies, which only retain the appearance of democratic societies.
