THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF THE FINAL STAGE OF HISTORY
Both the Baha’i Faith and Marxism are radical movements which arose in the nineteenth century in response to the corruption and injustice in the world. Marxism has already exploded on the world in the last century. The Baha’i Faith has the potential to explode. The fatal flaw of Marxism is its lack of a spiritual centre, although the concept of the oneness of life lies at the centre of all political messianisms. The urge to replace Christianity was also at the centre of Marxism. In time, the Baha’i world Order will replace all these systems, old and new. -Ron Price with thanks to J.L. Salmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase-The History of Totalitarian Democracy, Vol.2, London, Secker and Warburg, 1960, p.25.
Why I remember the New left striking out
across my path back in the mid-sixties, trying
to lay claim to my mind through its infinite
complexity and especially in One Dimensional
Man1 which I finally read by 1972 with the old
Marxism long dead. I had, by then, found another
transcendental cause that was not belabouring
hierarchy, coercive institutions and an apparent
servitude to technology and its labyrinthine state
apparatus. This Cause espoused a gradualist
revolution with a continual sense of urgency,
always urgency, always the drive to spread the
revolution which was essentially inner—and mystical,
but rooted in an Order and a System which was then,
in that decade of the sixties and early seventies, in the
first decade of the final stage, the tenth, of history.
The Kingdom of God was being estabished by
earthly activity and an unearthly Force, a millennial
Saviour, and a global proletariat from every walk of
life, involving global transformation and a liberation
associated with His law, His plan, His way, His day.
There was, too, an historical inevitability to peace,
to order and to a far-off golden age, achieved by
the work of a small force of foot-soldiers who were
then only beginning to accummulate in any significant
numerical force in those young and halcyon days.2
Ron Price
20 September 1997
2 There was a significant numerical increase in the size of the Baha’i community in the decade 1963 to 1973: from 400,000 to well over a million. It was also my first decade as a pioneer.
1 The most important theoretical book of the New left in the late 1960s and written by Herbert Marcuse.