https://theamericansun.com/2019/08/21/augusto-del-noce-and-our-crisis/
Because Marxism and revolutionary progressivism are predicated on a historicism and immanentism which exclude metaphysical ends—whether classically religious or Kantian—a priori, and are thus inherently atheistic, Del Noce renders asunder the naive attempts by Left Catholics of his day to seek a rapprochement between Marxism and Christianity. The logic of revolutionary thought includes a necessary absorption of religion, especially Christianity, by politics. Transcendent order is precluded as the march of history becomes its own criterion of justice. When this happens the denunciation of violence, for example, becomes impossible as revolutionary ends are justified by the means. The atheism of the system is not a feature which can be abstracted from the rest, as to separate the chaff from the wheat, but is fundamental and essential to each part.
Del Noce doesn’t intend to thereby dismiss the possibility of fruitful engagement with revolutionary thought, but thinks it is most fruitful to engage it by way of focused and intense opposition.
This gets particularly interesting when Del Noce unmasks the underlying continuity and affinity between what he calls “the technological society” of the West (neoliberalism, essentially) and Marxist totalitarianism. This isn’t a new idea for those familiar with reactionary thought—think of Moldbug’s “America is a Communist Country” or Ryszard Legutko’s Demon in Democracy which recently advanced the same thesis—but is notable because Del Noce was writing in the 1970s and 80s in the midst of the Cold War. A time when these two apparently diametrically opposed forces were locked in existential conflict. Beneath the surface, Del Noce perceptively detects the reality of a deep continuity. The same logic of total immanentization, of a system predicated entirely on materialistic presuppositions and oriented toward material and revolutionary ends, is not only still present in “the technological society” of the West, but magnified and perfected.
Some of the key features of the West’s technological society are its positivism and scientism. Del Noce is insistent that this stance, elevating Science™ as the sole arbiter of truth, is not derived as a conclusion of some set of propositions, but is instead chosen arbitrarily from the start. This despite the impossibility of grounding this stance, given that the proposition itself (science is the sole arbiter of truth) is not scientifically verifiable. It is thus simply assumed and the alternative traditional means of acquiring knowledge are dismissed rather than debunked. This scientism necessarily results in a sort of pragmatism (toward the ends of ever greater ability to “master” the material world), which eventually relegates humans to the realm of means.
This dehumanizing infects the realm of sexuality where humans-as-means implies sexual libertinism. Sex is no longer ordered toward the end of procreation and family life, but becomes an end to itself and opposition to its absolute free expression becomes a hostile act by the forces of “repression.” Here we have seen Del Noce’s prescient views verified, as the technological society has increasingly “liberated” sexuality (via the pill, porn, and feminism), while growing progressively intolerant toward any forces that would dare oppose “liberation.”