Paradoxes of Unity and Diversity
Both Marx and Lenin were very much products of their time, and as such, they have much more faith in "nationality" issues --on the rise in XIX century -- than in religious ones, which were on decline in XIX century.
Marx goes on and on about Indians and English, about Jewish question, about all sorts of national issues, while condescendingly dismissing religion as some sort of temporary mechanism of cooping with unpleasant reality: opium of the people.
Same with his legacy in Lenin and Stalin, self-proclaimed specialist in "nationality question" and the first Commissar of the Ministry of Nationalities under Soviets. Consequently, and this is very important --that what unites people: believe in the common Father, which unites people in brotherhood, was dismissed, while that what separates them, began to be highlighted and exaggerated.
On the one hand, Lenin would recognize that "nationalities" are irrelevant: "there are two nations within a nation: rich and poor, exploited and exploiters" - -exactly how they were irrelevant for St. Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Yet, while recognize it, Lenin bend over backwards -- and Stalin went even further - -to highlight the "national." Why? Because for Lenin, "tsarism was the prison of nationalities." So let's push for more Ukrainians and Georgians. Let's give them more land, and more breaks, and more privileges, lets humor their superiority or inferiority complexes. Even people at the outskirts of Russian Empire, like those living in the Deep Siberia --people who had no written language-- were forced to study, write and read their local language known only to one Russian academician who wrote their textbook, and five thousand wild mountaineers or deer-riders.
Of course, it is this stress on particularity, on separate identity, that eventually pulled Soviet Union apart. Lenin and Stalin dismissed, squashed, crushed religion -- which could have easily unite people in brotherhood and solidarity, but brought in particularity and separateness in a vain hope, that somehow this separateness can be filled with "socialist content."
Why is it relevant? Identity politics, fixation on one group's ills and wrongs, promotion of particularity — are very dangerous instruments. One can try to make them serve some sort of fuzzy goals of "Americanism" or "Socialism" -- but it is like fighting fire with fire. And that's exactly what you do, when you try to achieve one set of secular goals with another. Not much different from "expropriation of expropriators."
Only when the sense of brotherhood is rooted not in something horizontal and earthly, but in vertical and transcendental, in such transcending and uniting qualities as love, sacrifice, empathy --only then it can be stable, viable, and long lasting. Otherwise, identity politics-- no matter which earthly categories form this identity--is the opium of the people. It can help some people achieve some of their goals, but eventually it would become self-contradictory and self-defeating.
