American Thinker | AWR Hawkins | Jun. 21, 2008
Karl Marx, (1818-1883), believed capitalism was the next to last stage in the evolution to an earthly utopia, which would be ushered in through revolution; a revolution resulting from the tensions that existed between workers and the owners of production. According to Marx, the final stage of this evolution toward utopia would result when workers rose up in revolution to overthrow the business owners who were exploiting them through a capitalistic economy. We know Marx’s “utopia” and other aspects of his philosophy by their more prominent name: communism.
Marx’s predictions grew out of his atheistic worldview; a worldview that made him hostile toward private property and the accumulation of wealth through capitalistic means. Although his perceptions of the exploitation of workers and his solidarity with those workers has been rigorously tested and found wanting by historian Paul Johnson, his support for communism and his hatred of privatization and its corresponding freedoms have been a mainstay of the Left since at least 1917, when Vladimir Lenin took them to heart and threw Russia into revolution.
Like Marx, Lenin pointed to the struggles and dichotomies in Russian society in order to postulate solutions; solutions to problems that were not always there. From roughly 1915 through 1917, Lenin repeatedly decried the exploitation of the Russian workers by the land and business owners. This “crisis” not only justified, according to Lenin’s rhetoric, but demanded a revolution that would take power away from the land owners and give “power to the people.”
Lenin’s revolution against the “greedy” landowners was carried out at the end of a gun. The gun was necessary because the crisis Lenin saw was not a crisis that every Russian believed to be real. But as Crane Briton has pointed out in his work on revolutionaries, Lenin was willing to use force to move his countrymen toward what he thought was best for them, whether they agreed with him or not. Lenin’s implementation of Marxism was so stringent, so accurately in tune with Marx’s own predilections for government intervention in every facet of life that Marxism came to be referred to as Marxism/Leninism.
Sadly, this practice of creating a crisis in order to implement a solution has become a staple in today’s Democratic Party. Although each individual Democrat may not hold Marxism/Leninism as his or her political and ideological paradigm, many Democrats in Congress hold to the resulting methodology and have adopted passing legislation as their method for revolution and their solution for every type of crisis known to man, be it healthcare, the environment, gun violence or energy problems. For the Democrats, every crisis is but a segue toward the passage of more and more legislation, furthering the revolution while enslaving the very people they claim to be liberating.
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Recognizable Marxism is becoming very distinguishable. It is very prevalent today. That world order philosophy is symptomatic to be sure.
It sounds good on paper to the weak, but to the others the results are clear. Keeping these editorials front and center will help.
They will not call themselves Marxists, but we know them by their fruits-even by their thoughts, words, and actions. They are easy reads.
They are not above anything to gain power. And money!!!!
Statism is not always Marxist or Socialist. It can be Fascist as well. Historically, Fascism has had more allure in the United States than socialism.
However, the real ruling political philosophies today is either secular statism or secular individualism. Neither takes into account human beings as we really are. They are poles of the same degraded idea of humanity. Consequently, both the Libertarians and the Leftists tend to support the amoral social agenda of abortion and homosexual equivalence. Neither has the capability of addressing real governance issues. Both will result in tryanny as both are fundamentally nihilistic in spirit.
As long as we allow ourselves the twin fantasies of eqalitarism and utoptianism, we will be seduced by the fake promises from one “side” or the other.
No government can fix what is wrong with our world. Many things are simply not fixable. The moment we place any authority into the hands of government or politicians to “give us a better life” we have sacrificed a bit of our humanity and a lot of our freedom. Our life and our freedom are dependent upon one thing only–our love for God reflected in our love for each other (not in a general sense but in a specific sense, i.e., the most irritating person you know). It is incumbant upon us to have a deep skepticism of anything government says or does and not give our trust or our loyalty easily.
As Christians we must avoid the trap of substituing political ideology for the Gospel. Such a substitution is frightfully easy to do and we generally feel righteous when we do so. That is not the case of course, as we have abandoned the one we purport to serve. Our choice is not between a plethora of political idols, it is between God in Christ or nothing. In our world, the nothing is horribly seductive and most try to grasp its lying promises much of the time as it is tailor made to fit and inflame our desires.