Marxism sparked most of the worst mass murders of modern times, erased culture, defiled religion, and has served as a great evil cloaked in the garb of a caring and compassionate good.
While the Left long ago abandoned overt professions of fealty to the ideas of Marx, Marxism itself transformed into a chameleon that infected a number of social movements with the end of using them to undermine and annihilate the free market system and ideal.
Marxism’s origins come in part from the work of Isaac Newton. His articulation of fundamental laws of nature provided an intellectually appealing and comfortable goal. Philosophers and other thinkers, until Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, sought to find similar basic and all-encompassing “laws” that would explain elements of the human experience.
The German idealist and educator, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, developed in the early 1800s a metatheory of the process of mankind’s development. Called the dialectic, simply put, it established a fundamental process of historical understanding. He posited that history features countless status quos both big and small, important and picayune. For each status quo comes a challenge. When the challenge occurs, it fundamentally changes the situation and creates a new status quo to be challenged later.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles came in the next generation and commenced their work in the 1840s. Both men came from prosperous, but indulgent, middle-class families. Marx married a wife with a noble bloodline, but not much family money. The two men lived in penury, subsisting on what they could get from their families, refusing to work for income and focusing all on writing – in the case of Marx, even as his family occasionally went hungry.
Both men studied Hegel’s dialectic in detail. Engles in his “Revolution Against Hegel” explained that, for them, Hegel fell short in its near inapplicability to the day to day living of people. He stated that “the dialectical development apparent in nature and history . . . is only a copy of the self-movement going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain.”
Rejecting the concept of history through “an endless series of seeming accidents,” Engles stated that the ideas of himself, Marx, and a worker named Joseph Dietzgen, turned the dialectic “off its head, on which it was standing, and placed (it) upon its feet.” He called the resulting economic philosophy “our best working tool and sharpest weapon.”
What they did was to place a different outcome at the end of the dialectical process. Hegel, as a Christian, envisioned a countdown to Judgement Day. Marx and Engles simply substituted a Communist “paradise” in the place of the Biblical New Jerusalem.
They went farther and also articulated a theory of historical development that best resembles the natural world’s stages of succession when a cleared field is left to its own devices. Just as one naturally sees development of grasses, shrubs, small trees, larger trees, then a canopied forest, Marxists state that societies also have natural development patterns. They start as nomadic tribesmen, then move to an agricultural and aristocratic framework. Next these societies evolve into some form of industrial democracy.
Marxists theorize that during that stage, wealth coalesces into smaller numbers of hands and business activity is drawn into monopolistic cartels. In the Communist Manifesto, they wrote that this “left remaining no other nexus . . . than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”
In this, one of Marxism’s most fervent critics, Ayn Rand, agreed, but saw self-interest and the pursuit of it as the only just morality that required no person to bow to the needs of another.
Neither Communists nor Rand’s Objectivists believe in God, an issue that warps the philosophy and mind sets of both movements..
Many middle-class people, according to Marx, start to fall into the category of common workers, called by Marxists the proletariat. These fallen middle class individuals lead the masses against the system, overthrow it, and then establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, during which the government ruthlessly roots out any aspect of human nature that does not lead society toward the Marxist promised land.
One prime goal exists during this period. “In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up by the single sentence: Abolish private property,” states its Manifesto.
Marxists do not stop there. Their founding document also preaches “abolition of the family” through the dissolution of the concept of marriage and removal of children as much as possible from parental influence. The education of children is seen as important, but only after they “alter the character of that intervention” to reflect their own desired outcomes.
Those outcomes arrive as a result of “despotic inroads” that Marxists see as “unavoidable.”
Marxism’s intuitiveness into the development of society before Marx and Engles lived does not mean that they had accurate perceptions about the world to come. They also underestimated the perseverance of other elements of humanity besides motivation for profit and/or power.
One of the most effective journalists in the American Communist world was Whittaker Chambers. His intelligence and impact as a journalist and storyteller made him more of interest to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union than the inept version in the United States. He adapted the very non Communist technique of telling individual stories rather than speak in terms of the masses.
Joseph Stalin deviated from purist Marxists on this type of messaging too, saying “the death of one man is a tragedy, that of a million is a statistic”
Chambers also actively managed some of the Soviet Union’s spies making their way into the United States government. Later, he worked with Congressman Richard Nixon to identify them and expel them from positions of importance.
Communist revolutionaries, which Chambers considered himself for a time, saw families as burdens to be avoided. Chambers wrote in “Witness” that “as an underground Communist, I took it for granted that children were out of the question.”
Then his wife conceived. A baby formed and grew inside of her, but the Communist solution was to abort the child and continue the work of the Party. Undeterred, she came to Chambers and pleaded “dear heart, we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby dear heart.”
He chose life and later said that this represented one of the major points leading to his rejection of Marxism and Communism. The next step lay in coming back to God, which Chambers said took place when he regarded the simple wonder and perfection of his infant daughter’s ear.
From then to the end of his life, Chambers remained a devout Roman Catholic. Family and faith will always resonate in most human hearts more powerfully than any other aspect of life.
Marx and Engles also failed to understand the ebbs and flows of the free market. Monopolies can only survive when protected by government power. Massive corporations have their own life cycle in that they appear, they grow, they gain market share and power, then dominate for a generation or two.
Also, the 21st century knows of the horrors that Marxism wrought from the USSR to Red China to Cambodia, Venezuela, and elsewhere over a century of totalitarian rule and aspirations to world acceptance of their system.
Different forces tend to break them down. They develop inertia in adapting to market forces and consumer needs. They ossify decision-making, as when IBM in its “Big Blue” period failed to recognize the potential offered by Bill Gates’ ideas to replace DOS with something easier. IBM at the time did not believe that the average person would want a computer in their home.
Technology changes break these forces down. At one point, AT&T served as the colossus of the telecommunications world when most only used land lines. Now they are one of many companies vying for the market.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, used to break up the near complete monopoly of Standard Oil, shows that democratic-republics see a benefit to breaking down monopolies overtly.
And then there is the concept of the proletariat. As government laws, regulations, rules, and actions consciously or inadvertently form barriers to advancement, sometimes at the behest of rent-seeking corporations, this has generated social angst. It did not lead to the Marxist dream of total and ruthless control, but to the election of Donald J. Trump.
The same political currents also led to the Republican Party identifying more with working-class Americans and Main Street while the Democratic Party courted and attracted a majority of the billionaire class of the nation – yet continued to move farther to the Left at the national level.
Vladimir Lenin, first ruler of the Communist Soviet Union, called the rich who supported him for whatever reason “deaf-mutes.”
It’s not resentment of the wealth of others that fuels the American version of what Marxists call the proletariat, but the manner in which (usually) government blocks the paths of social advancement with excessive rules, regulations, and following its own interests. Even Americans who struggle the most still understand that with the right idea, the right plan, hard work, and, sometimes, a bit of luck, they too can elevate themselves so long as they don’t find government in their path.
Though Marxism has adopted different covers, the ideals behind it remain a threat to natural rights and prosperity the world over.
