If you’re tempted to think of Karl Marx as some wild-eyed theorist who lived centuries ago, forgotten and irrelevant today, think again. It’s true his ideas ran out of steam politically when the Soviet Union collapsed, and economically they’re not even dominant in the Communist regime of China today.
But Marx’s ideas are now culturally dominant on the commanding heights of key American institutions from the universities and schools, to mass media and popular entertainment, to major corporations and medicine, to the arts and the sciences. They’ve even seeped into many churches and seminaries. And of course they define the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi no less than Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.
I don’t mean such clunky ideas from Das Kapital as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the labor theory of value, or the withering away of the state. No, we’re talking about the immensely influential substratum of assumptions about reality and how the world works, underlying those discredited notions from bygone days.
The poisoned root of all of it is something called dialectical materialism, a concept Marx borrowed from Hegel. For our purposes here, without delving too deeply into brain-bending philosophy, suffice it to say the “materialism” part disallows all things spiritual, and the “dialectical” part disallows all things fixed or permanent or unchanging.
So we’re left with nothing but atoms in endless flux, physical forces violently colliding, in a grim world where might makes right and brutal will reigns supreme. If that sounds like the radical autonomous zone in Seattle, it’s no coincidence.
Lenin statue in Seattle stands unmolested as monuments to great Americans topple
Cultural Marxism, increasingly defining the worldview within which all debates and decision-making take place—even for most of those who rightly fear and despise Marx—is on an accelerating trajectory to deconstruct the American way of life from top to bottom, no sphere of our daily lives left untouched.
Its deconstruction agenda takes three main forms. Marxism dehumanizes all persons. Marxism demoralizes all relationships. And Marxism decivilizes all institutions. Let’s look at how each of these is occurring.
Dehumanizing all persons. No one is anything more than his or her DNA and appearance, plus whatever animal impulses and instincts they happen to feel at a given time. From this come identity politics, racial and sexual polarization, group victimhood, and group guilt. Which then logically results in—
Demoralizing all relationships. Individuals being mere meat in motion, existence being mere randomness, morality as all the world religions have known it is gone. No two persons can interact on the basis of objective right and wrong, objective good and evil.
What’s right or good is instead the mere product of quantitative mass (how many persons want it) times qualitative intensity (how much emotion they express). Dignity, property, marital and family ties, marketplace exchanges, contracts and promises, tradition and heritage, vulnerability, duty, love itself and life itself—all go to zero.
Decivilizing all institutions. Persons and relationships having thus been zeroed out, institutions of whatever sort—including communities or nations—obviously cannot stand either. An institution is but an agreement or understanding entered into by persons, meant to outlive them and endure through time, all of which is seen to be an absurdity and dissolved under the acid of dialectical materialism. All bets are off.
Civis, the Latin for city, giving rise to our ideas of civilization and civility, civics and the citizen, goes on the ash heap of history. Language, the institution enabling persons in communities to communicate—yes, even to seek truth and express truth—gets trashed as well.
Truth is whatever one wants it to be. Plain speaking must bow to political correctness—itself a purely Marxist term though seldom recognized as such by either its proponents or its opponents.
Let me repeat what I said a moment ago, about life being devalued to zero under this nightmare of deconstruction America is now experiencing, and draw a connection to George Orwell’s anti-Marxist masterpiece, Animal Farm. All animals are equal, says Napoleon the Pig reassuringly—it’s just that some animals are more equal than others.
In the same way, we’re now being told some lives matter more than others, by the leaders of a mass movement decivilizing our cities and seeking to incite race war. It shouldn’t surprise us that one of those leaders has bluntly and proudly said on camera, “We’re trained Marxists.”
Hearing that, do we shrug and make excuses for her, since after all there can be a lot of pain that goes along with being black in this country?
Or are we shocked at the cynicism that would so disserve the very people her movement claims to champion—and at the gullibility of so many of our fellow citizens of all colors who would trust a Marxist, of all people, to do anything but defame and damage the United States of America at every opportunity?
If we’re not shocked, angered, aroused, and utterly determined to turn back this and every attempt at deconstructing our country by the disciples and dupes of Karl Marx, that hater of humanity, that agent of evil, we are unworthy of the sacrifices of our forebears and the hopes of our descendants.
And if we’re inclined to glide past the Marxist fingerprints all over America’s current turmoil, chalking it up to “wokeness” or “cancel culture” or “the left” or some other vague fad that we assume will flare up for a while and then burn out, we’re not paying attention.
For it was specifically Karl Marx’s ideas, according to the Black Book of Communism, that took 100 million lives worldwide in the last century. How many more will they take in this century? That’s up to you and me. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Karl Marx, 1818-1883. His ideas took 100 million lives in the last century. And how many more in this century?