No Middle Ground

You Can Either Be A Christian Or  You Can Be A Marxist

But You Can't Be Both . . . 

Collective guilt ideology that’s incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Joshua Lawson
The Federalist

It’s unclear how many Christians are going along with the current neo-Marxist collective guilt movement out of fear, a misunderstanding of what they’ve signed onto, or an authentic conversion to the cause. What is clear, however, is that you can’t be a Christian and a Marxist at the same time—not without irresolvable contradictions.

Whereas traditional garden-variety Marxism views history as a struggle between the wealthy and the working class “proletariat,” neo-Marxism cranks up the heat and redefines the fight to incorporate biological sex, race, ethnicity, and a whole gambit of various “identity” badges.

The grand unifying principle for the Marxists behind the Black Lives Matter movement is that everything—and they mean everything—can be reduced to “oppressors” versus the “oppressed.” If you happen to be a member of one of the “oppressor” groups, then expect to see all sorts of punishments heading your way until the neo-Marxists are satisfied. Except they never are.

Too many Christians are falling into a trap of expressing solidarity with an ideology that is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Right now, they need our prayers. Then, they need to wake up.

Collective Guilt Is Not Biblical

Whether the sins were committed yesterday, last week, or 400 years ago, all Caucasians are now told to bear the guilt for the sins committed by all other Caucasians; if they remain silent, Caucasians are accused of “violence.”

This is the opposite of Christianity as it is revealed in the Bible.  Christianity states you are accountable to God alone for your sins and inequities. You must go to Jesus to atone for the sins that result from your reality as a flawed human being. As for my brother, it is up to him to reconcile his sin with God or any specific individuals that he directly slights, attacks, or transgresses.

While the Old Testament tells of entire peoples or nations found guilty and castigated, they are punished by God, on His direct orders, or through His power, not by the whims of other individual men or women. Scripture does not instruct believers to thrust their guilt, sins, or suffering on to others.

When we read of “group solidarity” in the Old Testament it is important to remember it is always entirely voluntary and covenantal in nature. When God freed the Israelites from Egypt and then gave him His law, he didn’t force it upon them.

The concept of collective guilt is explicitly rejected in Ezekiel 18:20:

The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

We receive salvation one at a time, through a solitary and sincere prayer to God. Those who take Christ as Lord and Savior are saved personally, not collectively with others. Only Jesus Christ can provide the ultimate forgiveness for the sins of our fellow brothers and sisters. Thankfully, on the cross at Calvary, he did just that.

Christianity Rejects the Materialism of Neo-Marxism

Historical Marxism peddles the materialistic notion that if everyone could just be wealthy enough so that economic status is meaningless, then the earth could be transformed into a utopian fantasy. Neo-Marxism adds the dimension of “identity” to this formula, but the problem of inequality remains.

Yet Christ teaches us not to concern ourselves with questions of wealth, who has it, and how we can “reclaim” more of it for ourselves. To the contrary, in Matthew 6, Jesus says:

That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? … So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

In truth, we can never be satisfied with earthly possessions, or have enough “comfort.” Indeed, too much comfort can breed the circumstances for sin just as easy as hard times. There’s a reason for the maxim “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

All this isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to better our conditions on this side of heaven. But this world is never meant to be anything approaching paradise. Courting that goal brings disaster. The millions killed at the hands of Marxist totalitarian dictatorships are all the evidence one should need.

Marxism Fuels Covetousness, Envy, and Resentment

Instead of spreading peace and forgiveness, the neo-Marxists running the Black Lives Matter movement have exacerbated anger and resentment. Instead of preaching thankfulness, the movement has caused many Americans to covet their neighbor’s status.

The Old Testament, however, implores us in Exodus 20:17 not to covet anything our neighbor possesses that we do not. The New Testament renews that sentiment in Philippians 4:11-13, which encourages us to be content “in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little.”

Because it is steeped in neo-Marxist ideology, the Black Lives Matter movement sees every disparity as a sign of racism and every inequality as evidence of injustice. But not only is this demonstrably false, even if all inequalities could be eliminated evil and malevolence would still exist in the world. Due to our sinful nature, we would still fight with our family, our friends, and strangers.

Instead of keeping the anger flowing as the neo-Marxists require, the Bible offers a guide on how to combat the fallen nature of the world as well as the evil we’ll inevitably encounter in our lives.

Ultimately, Marxism has no answer for questions of purpose, meaning, and what we’re to do here on earth. For its adherents, everything is a struggle for power; one to be resolved either by redistribution or the sword.

Christianity Seeks to Unify, Neo-Marxism Seeks to Divide

One’s “group identity” is everything in neo-Marxism. The key idea is that “majority” identity groups in any nation have historically oppressed those in the “minority” position. Therefore, a revolution is needed to create the type of society where no majority group holds all the power.

What Christians cajoled into supporting this ideology have temporarily forgotten is that this was accomplished at the cross.

In Christianity, you are seen as an individual. Christ has already done the work of erasing all cultural or ethnic barriers to God. Grace is available to all those who put their faith in Jesus Christ, regardless of status, race, ethnicity, or sex. The only “group” that should matter to Christians is the multi-ethnic world community of believers: the Body of Christ.

As the Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:28-29, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you.”

Christians supporting neo-Marxist viewpoints should remember what Karl Marx himself had to say about religion. For Marx, the abolition of religion was “the first requisite for the happiness of the people.” Perhaps most famously, Marx slandered religion by comparing it to opium. Worse, like Satan himself, Marx claimed, “My object in life is to dethrone God.” This is not a man Christians should have anything to do with.

In every nation that adopted Marxism as its ideological model, Christians have been oppressed. But Christians conned into neo-Marxist group-think can be comforted in the reminder that they don’t need a divisive ideology to fulfill Christ’s teachings to be charitable, care for the poor, and love thy neighbor as thyself.

Christians can take up their cross and follow Jesus, or they can pick up a hammer in one hand, a sickle in the other, and seek to create the permanent revolution sought by today’s radical leftists. But to spout neo-Marxist talking points while claiming to walk with Jesus Christ does a gross disservice to the Good News of the Gospel.

Joshua Lawson is managing editor of The Federalist. He is a graduate of Queen's University as well as the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College where he received a master's degree in American politics and political philosophy. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMLawson.

Karl Marx--A Horseman of the Apocalypse

Titan of Terror

The left-wing acolytes who say Karl Marx can't be blamed for the millions slaughtered in his name are deluded - bloodshed was at the heart of his philosophy.

Karl Marx, founder of communism, was born in Germany 200 years ago today.  His ideology was used by mass killers like Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong.  Fans claim he's not responsible but his name is synonymous with death.  Millions were killed by communist leaders across the world last century

By Dominic Sandbrook
Daily Mail

Two hundred years ago today, the most controversial thinker of the modern age was born in the German city of Trier.

When, on May 5, 1818, Heinrich and Henriette Marx welcomed their little boy into the world, they could never have imagined the utopian hopes and blood-soaked horrors that would become associated with his name.

Two centuries later, the very words 'Karl Marx' still carry an unmistakable charge. No modern intellectual, no economist or philosopher can match the combustible power of the rabbi's grandson who fled into poverty-stricken exile in leafy North London.

Most of the regimes based on Marx's ideas may have crumbled, yet his name remains synonymous with violent revolution, idealistic utopianism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.   It conjures up images of chanting crowds and glowering statues, collective farms and prison camps, tanks in Red Square and red flags over the Kremlin.

To his critics, Marx was a fanatic whose ideas inspired some of the cruellest regimes in history, from Stalin's Siberian gulags to the killing fields of Cambodia.  Yet, to his admirers — who include the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who recently called him a 'great economist', and the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, who has named Das Kapital as his favourite book — he remains a visionary prophet whose ideas will, one day, lead mankind to a classless utopia.

Only Fools and Horses.

Why Marxist Teleology Failed in England

Karl Marx believed he had profound insight when it came to predicting what would happen throughout the West (and, indeed, the world).  Drawing from Hegel, Marx and colleagues developed the theory that human history would progress by means of a "dialectic" of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Marx argued that the West would develop according to this pattern.  The property owners and employers (the "capitalists") would eventually be overthrown by means of a violent revolution of the oppressed and exploited "working class".  Then the synthesis would emerge: peace like a river would flow over all.  Marx, living in England, had high hopes that it would lead the way.  After all, England was the leading economic power in the nineteenth century; the capitalists were clearly exploiting the working classes.  The prospects for violent overthrow of the wealthy classes were excellent.

Except, Marx's theories failed to emerge in reality.  One wonders why the dialectic of capital versus labour failed to deliver, not only a violent revolution  in England, but the eternal synthesis of Communism.  Doubtless there were many reasons.  One, however, is striking.  The poor in England did not hate the rich.  In other words, the "dialectic" of capital versus labour failed to materialise.   Historian A. N. Wilson--a self-professed Marxist--gives an insight into why Marxism failed to take hold in England:

One of History's Greats

A Paragon of Mendacity and Hypocrisy

Paul Johnson demonstrates repeatedly that the rise of "intellectuals" to be an influential caste in the West has been characterised by their general veneration.  In life, however, their  actual practice belies their principles.  [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988)]  Many of them lived repugnant family lives.  Many practised a very different ethic from the one they advocated for the rest of mankind.

Karl Marx typifies the kind of perversity so common amongst those who regard themselves as too smart for the ordinary pleb.   Marx had numerous children with his wife, Jenny.  He lived as an intellectual in London, in poverty and squalor, choosing not to support his family.  He insisted that his high calling as a seer and revolutionary justified the suffering and deprivation of his wife and children by his hand.  Johnson reproduces a description of Marx's family life as observed by visitors, written around 1850:

Charlatans and Snake-oilers

A Dishonest Man, But Useful Idiot

Karl Marx had a theory that capital exploits workers. His theory was derived from the ramblings of the idealist or rationalistic philosopher, Hegel.  That particular luminary propounded the idea that history moved forward by a mechanism of a "dialectic" (love those big technical terms).  A concept or idea (a thesis) would be opposed by its opposite (an anti-thesis), resulting in conflict and struggle, leading to a temporary resolution (the synthesis), whereupon the whole process started over again.  The synthesis became the new thesis, which would be confronted by its antithesis, and so forth. 

Karl Marx studied in the German universities and became enamoured with Hegel.  He sought to apply Hegel's dialectic to the economic history of mankind.  Actually, he cherry picked a whole cluster of economic facts, figures and data, made up heaps more, then fitted them into Hegel's rationalistic scheme.  In short, Karl Marx was a fraud.

Strange Bedfellows

The Metamorphosis of Marx

They say that politics make strange bedfellows.  Never is this more evident in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  There is a strong current of support for Palestinians and Islamic causes generally in the West.  Often-times the support comes from "progressive" components of the political spectrum.  But echoes can also be found in residual anti-semitic groups, the main stream media, and the universities. 

Strangely, what is being defended and implicitly promoted is a cause which has overtly fostered and promoted the killing of innocents to make a political point and to terrorise others.  It is a cause notorious for its authoritarianism, its subjugation of women, its maltreatment of homosexuals, and its authoritarian subjugation of all under its sway.  How come?  How does it come about that Western feminists, homosexuals, libertines, and the licentious apparently are relaxed and comfortable supporting and advocating for those who would snap their necks in a second if they had the chance? 

One possible cause is ignorance and condescension.  Often times progressives in the West are so ideologically hidebound they remain remarkably ignorant of actual humanity and reality.

The Twilight Years, Part IV

A Nutty Idea Still Believed

In this series of posts we are blogging on Richard Overy's new book, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), in which he documents the pervasive pessimistic outlook that gripped Britain for over twenty years. People everywhere in the twenties and thirties believed that Western civilization was going to come to an end, and Britain, the beacon of light for civilization itself, was going to disappear, Atlantis-like, sunk in the ceaseless repetitive tides of history.

What were the signs of the coming collapse of civilization? Clearly, the pointless and senseless World War was one sign. Civilization was crumbing from within as the West went to war with itself. But another sign that the end was nigh was the prophesied death and expected collapse of the capitalist system. The recitation of the last rites over capitalism came most frequently and stridently from the intellectual socialists of the day: particularly Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw.
Underlying the conviction that capitalism was about to collapse lay the particular eschatology of Karl Marx which argued that the internal and inherent contradictions within any capitalist system would ultimately lead to its destruction.

Marx's jeremiad was grounded in his nutty view of the labour theory of value. The idea was that the value (and therefore the correct or just price) of any particular good was the cost of the labour to produce it in the first place. But capitalists wanted to make a profit over and above the actual costs of production, which to Marx was theft. Profit was exploitation in Marx's economic lexicon—specifically the exploitation of labour. By charging more for a good than it cost to produce, labour was kept in a state of impoverishment. They could never afford to buy goods and services produced under the capitalist system: they could not afford them because they were priced above what they earned. Moreover, the more machines (that is, capital) employed, and the less labour, the poorer workers became, while the richer became richer. In the end, the workers would rise up and violently destroy capitalism and the civilization upon which it had been built.

Jay Richards “runs the numbers” on Marx's nutty labour theory of value:

Of course, labor often adds value to a produce, as long as that labor creates what someone wants. But you can't define economic value in terms of labor. Someone can dig a ditch in a field until his hands are bloody and raw, and then fill it back in again, without making anything that anyone wants. In that case there is a lot of labor, but no economic value . . . .

This may have been Marx's biggest blunder. I say this because Marx's prophecy that capitalism would destroy itself hinged on his labor theory of value. According to Marx, when a factory owner hires a worker to build a chair and then sells the chair for more than it cost to produce, the owner has taken more than the good is actually worth. He's taken its “surplus value”. Such profit is basically theft, since, on Marx's terms, the chair is worth exactly what it cost to produce it. So the factory owner has gotten more than it's really worth. This is why Marx speaks of capitalists “exploiting” workers, even if the workers have chosen to work for the salary they are given.

Without his definition of value, however, Marx's argument collapses. The workers have received what they agreed to. The factory owner has wisely combined their labor with his resources. He then markets and sells the chairs for more than they cost to produce but not more than others will freely pay. He's rewarded with profit for his entrepreneurial effort. There's no injustice here, no exploitation, no contradiction that will inevitably lead to class warfare and revolution.” Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem, (New York: Harper/Collins Publishers, 2009), pp. 66,67

All predictions and rife expectations of the collapse of the economic order in the UK during the Inter-War years were grounded to one extent or another upon Marx's labour theory of value.

The labour theory of value is still subscribed to widely in our modern world. One common manifestation is the ideological resistance to government privatising or selling off state owned businesses or services. Out trots the labour theory of value. The introduction of the profit motivation of the capitalist into something like managing prisons, or schools, or utilities will result in exploitation, not only of staff, but also of consumers of those services. They would need to pay an exploitative price we are told. And, if the consumers were actually willing to pay the price, it only serves to “prove” that labour is being exploited and underpaid. The workers should have been paid more in the first place. Strip profit out, and businesses can be run far more efficiently, and staff get much higher rewards. And consumers get told what they are to buy, when, how, and for what price. The long term result: everyone is "employed", but there is nothing attractive or useful to buy. Meanwhile, the bread-lines lengthen by the day. The "black market" flourishes. And so it came to pass in the Soviet Union, the great experimental workshop of Marxist economics.

But, according to Marx's labour theory of value, capitalism is morally bankrupt, is inherently diseased, and will collapse and die—just like any other organism that has a cancer eating away at its vitals. This notion that capitalism was decaying from within became widely accepted in Britain in the Inter-War years. Capitalism was grounded in exploitation, theft, and selfishness—and as such it would drive the world into anarchy and barbarism because, in the end, the exploited working classes would not tolerate it. These ideas gained much wider credence as a result of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed, giving them an apparent empirical weight.

What solution did the economists offer? There were some who argued for the introduction of a communist economic system as quickly as possible. The majority of economists, however, argued for a mixed economy, where the worst excesses of capitalism could be curbed and controlled by central planning and by targeted State intervention.

The most popular solution suggested for the crisis which was capable of uniting individuals across the political divide, was planning. The belief that a planned economy was the necessary successor to the free market was widespread across Europe, from Stalin's Soviet Union to Mussolini's Italy. For the British left, planning was something which would make the tradition from capitalism to socialism possible and secure a measure of social justice without the need for a violent revolutionary politics. In her reflection on the diseases of the capitalist system broadcast by the BBC in 1932 Beatrice Webb pointed out that 'planlessness' was in her view 'the most intractable disease' suffered by contemporary capitalism, but also the one illness that capitalism could do nothing to cure.” (Overy, p.76,77. Emphasis, ours.)

Her solution was to turn to the public service (that is, government bureaucracies, to “plan the life of the community”. The idea was that capitalists could not do the planning: the conflict of interest was impossible to overcome. But “public servants” would be disinterested, and therefore, be able to plan for the greater good of the whole public.

Belief in the efficacy of planning came to be shared by both progressives and classical-liberals. In the case of the latter, whilst being fundamentally sympathetic to market forces and economic individualism, they argued that the worst excesses of capitalism and its inner contradictions could be assuaged by rational planning.

The mixed-economy model is the one which emerged post-World War Two. In part, the planned and state directed war-economy set Britain up for moving in this direction. We need to be clear, however, that this “solution” was promulgated out of deep and widely held beliefs that the economic model of minimal state interference was fatally flawed and immoral. Neither belief was correct. The mixed-economy model exists as the solution to a falsely diagnosed problem.

The alleged internal contradictions of an economy built upon universal private ownership of both capital and labour were fabrications. The crisis was a fiction. In classical economic systems based upon the rectitude and sovereignty of property rights, the Great Depression was a normal, expected correction. Government interference and overriding of sovereign property rights only served to make it many times worse.

The “solutions” which were finally adopted to a non-existent problem, and which are with us to this day, have wreaked a terrible cost, which is rising progressively as the decades pass. The parallels in our day of the reaction to the credit crisis of 2007-8 are eerie. In this most recent case, the “crisis” was amplified way and above a normal market correction by the distortions and excesses spawned by decades of government largesse, or planning. Once again, there have been many prophecies and pronouncements of the end of free-market economics. But the reality is that free-market, sovereign property economics died a long long time ago. But, as before, the proffered solution is more centralisation of government power to plan, tax, regulate, direct, and control how people deploy their own sovereign capital and labour. As always in such cases the cure is many, many times worse than the purported disease.

When pagan societies become fearful, dreading the future, believing that the end is nigh they are usually not disappointed. But the damage comes not from their fears but from their misdirected and ill conceived diagnoses and solutions. In effect, things do become much worse, but not for the reasons they expected. They become worse because their so-called solutions carry extremely damaging unintended consequences.

The consequences of the mixed planned-economy under which we now labour are ubiquitous and relentless: they have pushed us into a miasma of increasingly despotic smothering nannying government. They have also sufficiently undermined and therefore distorted the price setting power of the free consumer so that when inevitable corrections occur, they become so bad and so severe that entire collapse is a serious possibility--as the recent global credit crisis demonstrates.

It is deeply ironic that the “solution” to a non-existent, incorrectly diagnosed problem in the thirties led to the mixed-economy model throughout the West, which is really creeping state ownership and direction of an increasingly centrally planned economy. In the long run, this makes economic decrepitude, if not outright collapse inevitable.

When gilded idols are finally broken, maybe people will be “foolish” enough to return to the God of their fathers and to the sovereign rights of property ownership, which He commands.