As an 80’s child, I grew up in the height of the Cold War. I knew the Russians were bad because of WWF wrestling and Rocky IV.
My elementary school performed drills, teaching us hide under our desks in case the communists decided to invade Seville, Ohio, population 1,800.
When a Russian exchange student came to my junior high I panicked. I was pretty sure she was going back as a spy. I didn’t know much. As an adult, I really didn’t know much more.
With the acceptance and promotion of Marxist ideas from prominent groups like BLM, the ideology is facing a resurgence in the US and world wide (www.marxist.com/unitedstates/). I felt like I needed to know more.
If I want to explain Christianity to someone I start with Christ. I figured that was the best place to start with Marxism. Who was Karl Marx? What influenced him? What did he teach? Is it compatible with my faith?
You can read and watch a short bio of him here.
I knew that Marx fathered some bad ideas politically and economically. The fruits of the movement speak for themselves. In Venezuela you will find starvation. In China you will find state sponsored atrocities. In Cuba you will find people so desperate to escape they set sail on makeshift rafts.
But what if the Communist Manifesto is worse than a bad idea? What if Das Kaptial was really about killing more than the free market?
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. Carl Schmitt
When you boil down any philosophy, theology remains. Who was Marx theologically? I will let his words speak for themselves.
Marx held disdain for religion.
“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.”
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction…, p. 1 (1843).
Marx was boldly antisemitic and racist.
“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.” The Russian Loan, New York Daily Tribune, 04 January 1856
“The Jewish Nigger, Lasalle… It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.” Marx to Engles in Manchester (30 July 1862), MECW Volume 41, p. 388
“The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” On the Jewish Question 1843
Marx advocated elimination of private property by force.
“In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property.” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
“The unity is brought about by force.” Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 70.
Marx poetry and plays reflect his Satanic beliefs.
“I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above …”
“The idea of God is the keynote of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed.” Marx and Satan; Richard Wurmbrand
“The hellish vapours rise and fill the brain,
Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See this sword?
The prince of darkness
Sold it to me.
For me he beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.”( See more at Marx: Prophet of Darkness by Richard Wurmbrand)
Marx’s Christian father believe he was governed by a demon.
“At times my heart delights in thinking of you and your future. And yet at times I cannot rid myself of ideas which arouse in me sad forebodings and fear when I am struck as if by lightning by the thought: is your heart in accord with your head, your talents? Has it room for the earthly but gentler sentiments which in this vale of sorrow are so essentially consoling for a man of feeling? And since that heart is obviously animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men, is that demon heavenly or Faustian? Will you ever — and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart — will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness? Will — and this doubt has no less tortured me recently since I have come to love a certain person [Marx’s then-fiancee, Jenny von Westfalen] like my own child — will you ever be capable of imparting happiness to those immediately around you?Letter from Heinrich Marx to his son Karl (2 March 1837)
For more information:
The past few days I have scoured works by Marx and about him. I have shared only a small portion of what I have read. There is no way a Christian can follow an ideology sewn in this soil. It is rotten at the source. Whatever the movement, however it is described, anything with connection to this history cannot be endorsed by God’s people.
Do all things to the glory of God. 1 Cor. 10:31
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