Socialism has become a dominant topic of discussion in American culture recently. Since the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders (b. 1941), many Democrats across America have made public their affinity for socialism and socialist policies. No one who has spent time on a state or liberal private university campus in recent years should be surprised by this development. Democrats are simply playing to a significant portion of their base.
However, more surprising, some evangelicals have become enamored with socialism.[1] Some are moving toward the economic left because of their experience during the Great Recession.[2] Others are intrigued by ideas and policies that seem to redress real and perceived injustices in the world.[3] We should take such concerns seriously and rebut them carefully.
This article will address one aspect of the broader argument that socialism cannot be adapted to Christianity by examining some historical and philosophical background that people are often unaware of, or willingly overlook.
Industrialization and Early Socialism
Much of the economic and social discontent that underlies modern socialism began to surface during the Industrial Revolution, which first developed in eighteenth-century England. From there, industrialization moved to the European continent, to America, and then to the rest of the world. While industrialization eventually brought wide economic benefits (the standard of living, for the average British person doubled between 1750 and 1850), it also destroyed much along the way, including traditional rural society.[4]
For a variety of reasons, mass migration began from the European countryside into overcrowded urban centers. Former peasants became common laborers, living in squalid apartment tenements and working low-paying, dangerous jobs under the command of strangers. Disconnected from their families and home communities, these new urbanites found that the anonymity of urban life bred crime and dissatisfaction with the state and society.
The discontent of industrialization took several forms, but one of the most prominent and influential was the political movement known as socialism. Socialists came in many varieties, but all looked to redress some of the problems (both real and imagined) of industrialization. Radical egalitarianism, including equality of wealth and social activity, was a primary goal shared by these groups. Most argued that the state should be given the power to redistribute wealth in one way or another.
Many, like Claude de Saint Simon (1760–1825), Robert Owen (1771–1858), and Charles Fourier (1772–1837) believed that their policies would bring about a completely restructured and utopian society, where people would live in perfect harmony. As an aspect of reordering society, they also usually advocated the abandonment of the traditional monogamous marriage in favor of open sexual relationships. During the second half of the nineteenth century, socialism gained popularity, especially in excessively repressive, politically unresponsive, or economically underdeveloped areas of Europe like Germany and Russia. In addition, Karl Marx’s (1818–83) specific approach to socialism came to dominate the movement.
Karl Marx
Born into a middle-class German family, Marx was highly educated in philosophy. However, because his atheism was a barrier to his advancement in nineteenth-century Germany, he became a journalist for radical and socialist political movements. His radicalism soon brought him to the attention of the German authorities, and he fled his homeland in 1843. For the rest of his life, Marx lived outside Germany, mostly in Britain (the center of capitalism and industrialization).
Marx and his long-time friend Friedrich Engels (1820–95) worked from Britain to build international support for socialism. They were strongly influenced by the utopian socialism of Saint Simon, Owen, and Fourier. However, for Marx, democratic socialism was only a halfway point between capitalism and his vision of communism. He saw his “view of communism as the most rational outworking of a democratic society advocated by the French Enlightenment.”[5]
Marx’s philosophy did not appear in an intellectual vacuum. Nineteenth-century philosophy was a potent cocktail of Empiricism, Romanticism, and a secular religious spirit that Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) referred to as “concealed theology.”[6] However, German Idealism and English economics were the most formidable influences on Marx’s thinking. He brought these elements together with some modifications to create a comprehensive economic and political philosophy that has dominated much of the intellectual and political world up to the present.
German Idealism
German Idealism provided the general framework and mechanics of Marx’s thought. The small, but gregarious, Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) provided the intellectual foundation of what later became German Idealism and Romanticism. In an attempt to heal the philosophical division between the material world and immaterial world of ideas created by Rene Descartes (1596–1650), Kant argued that human knowledge is the result of a synthesis of material experiences and immaterial concepts. While Kant, as Roger Scruton (b. 1944) notes, argued that the process of this synthesis “could never be observed . . . but must always be presupposed as a result,” his follower Johann Fichte (1762–1814) had no such qualms.[7]
Fichte developed a sweeping but vague description of Kant’s synthesis that united knowledge of the self with knowledge of the world. Thus, as a person discovers objects that are outside of himself, he also gains understanding of himself. The unfortunate consequence of this process of self-revelation is that the individual also becomes alienated from himself. Fichte’s ambiguous narrative of self-revelation found a more appealing form in Georg Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) dialectic.
As official philosopher of the Prussian state and the primary defender of late German Romanticism, Hegel’s modification of Kant and Fichte was received with “a prolonged breath of admiration from the intellectual world.”[8] Hegel argued that history itself was a dialectical process of self-revelation for what William Dennnison (b. 1949) refers to as the “pantheistic Divine Reason” of the world.[9]
By dialectical self-revelation, Hegel meant that all concepts were prone to come under attack from competing concepts. Eventually, these concepts would form a synthesis that would serve as a new dominant concept until it too was challenged, at which time the process of synthesis would repeat.[10] Unsurprisingly, Hegel believed that the dialectical self-revelation of the world had reached its culmination in the free, Protestant, Germanic world he inhabited.[11]
In this way, Hegel and the German Idealists made history, rather than God, the source of meaning and salvation. Continental intellectuals found this change intoxicating, and the discipline of history became a dominant force in late-nineteenth-century Germany.
English Economics
A second major influence on Marx was that of English economics. English intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focused much of their thinking on the interrelationship between politics and economics.
John Locke (1632–1704), who attempted to secularize Samuel Rutherford’s (1600–61) theological articulation of just governance, directly connected economics with politics through his concept of natural rights.[12] According to Locke, property is the product of mixing labor with an object. When a farmer plows a field, or a carpenter plains a board, he is mixing his labor with the object, thereby creating property that is his. Thus, property ownership, for Locke, is a natural right that exists prior to the claims of a community’s social contract. Importantly, this theory “implies a connection between a person’s freedom and his control over the product of his labor.”[13] Further, governments that do not fulfill their expected responsibility to protect property rights are illegitimate and prone to reform or replacement.
The Scottish thinker Adam Smith (1723–90) focused more directly on economics, but his important essay The Wealth of Nations (1776) also has important political implications for Marx’s thought. According to Smith, economically robust societies protect and promote the freedom of individuals to specialize their labor and turn it into marketable property, which they can trade for other goods. In the end, each person becomes a form of merchant, and a commercial society is born.[14]
As self-interest guides the free exchange of goods, Smith argued, justice and the social well-being of the community is preserved, “satisfying existing needs and guaranteeing stability.”[15] Smith’s ideas of economic freedom and labor expanded on Locke and provided a rousing critique of the mercantilist policies of eighteenth-century Britain. These concepts of labor particularly influenced Marx, though he questioned certain assumptions underlying Smith’s concept of the just free market.
Marxist History
Marx brought together aspects of German Idealism and English economics to form a totalizing materialist philosophy. Dennison rightly describes the result as a secular religion featuring a state of innocence, sin, salvation, and utopian eschatology.[16] However, despite Marx’s utopian claims, his philosophy brought only murder and mayhem.
Marx picked up the German Idealists’s deification of history but rejected their concern for a spiritual component to reality. Where Hegel had posited a pantheistic world spirit, Marx argued that nothing exceeded the bounds of the material world. Rather, drawing from Locke, Marx saw labor and property as central to life. The process of dialectic self-revelation was turned into dialectical materialism founded on property and economics.
In the preface of his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx argued that economics and economic relationships are the true foundation of human life. Other aspects of human existence and society, such as religion, law, government, and class structures, are superstructure that arise from specific material contexts and have no purpose other than to justify the economic order of the moment.[17]
Thus, under this theory, when feudalism was the economic order of France, the French government (absolutist monarchy), religion (Roman Catholicism), law, and class structure served to maintain feudalism. These institutions created the illusion that common people were part of a mutually beneficial social order when, to Marx’s thinking, they were in fact being “exploited” by those who were more powerful than them.
According to Marx, when the economic order becomes unbalanced, violent revolution results in the birth of a new economic order. In this way, human action, specifically violent revolution, creates and pushes forward history.
Realizing the Eschaton
Christians believe that history has a metanarrative of God’s redemption that encapsulates the state of innocence in the Garden, the Fall, redemption in Christ, and the coming Kingdom of Christ.
Marx posited a secularized metanarrative of history that included roughly five economic arrangements:
- Primitive communism (with no individual property ownership);
- Slavery;
- Feudalism;
- Capitalism; and
- Communism.
Each of the first four arrangements is a system of exploitation in which one group exploits the labor of another. Primitive communism (Marx’s hypothetical primitive economic arrangement with no historical validity) was a state of innocence because labor was limited to the necessities of survival. However, even here Marx perceived exploitation because women and children were relegated to “slavery” by the headship of their husbands and fathers.
When mankind began producing surplus fruit from his labor, “sin” entered into the world. After this shift, the economic order moved toward slavery. Masters exploited slaves, and landlords exploited serfs. In each case, Marx argued that any sense of mutual social responsibility was superstructure and illusory. But he was able to see behind the illusion and expose the exploitation that had remained hidden from everyone who had gone before him. He was like a prophet who had received special revelation about the truth of the world.
Capitalism, like its predecessors, exploited the weakest in society. Here Marx was specially influenced by the thinking of political economist David Ricardo (1772–1823). Ricardo posited that the value of a good was the sum total of the labor that went into that good.[18] Thus, Marx argued, if a good sold for more than the value of the labor that went in to it, the capitalist who owned and operated the company must have exploited the laborers.
To make matters worse, the common factory laborer (known as the proletariat) did not receive property as the fruit of his labor. Most of the proletariat owned little more than the clothes on their backs, since they worked with someone else’s tools and lived in rented apartments. Thus, according to Marx, capitalism produced a state of extreme alienation and servitude. In the end, Marx argued that the proletariat would rise up against the capitalist bourgeoisie (middle class) and create a new economic system known as communism.
The communist society would be formed by the dictatorship of the proletariat (working class). According to Marx, once the proletariat overthrew their bourgeoisie capitalist overlords, they would abolish all private property, giving ownership of all means of production to the state. This revolution might begin in specific nations, but it would end in a worldwide revolution that would erase all national borders and destroy all class structures.
The result would be a completely uniform world where the superstructure disappears. No one would own property or have specific responsibilities. Each person would be free to work as they chose, and everyone would receive the same benefits from the state. The family unit would also disappear, since it too is a system of exploitation. In the end, individuals lose their individual identity in communal commitment, and the state, religion, and class structure become unnecessary and wither away.[19] Marx’s utopian kingdom would be the culmination of history.
Conclusion
Marx’s philosophy is a symptom of the developing secularization of Europe. He took the dominant philosophical ideas of his day and subjected them to materialism. Yet he found himself stuck with the same inescapable questions of life. His solution was a utopian totalitarian state of the common man that would forcefully bring about total equality in society.
Many tried to realize Marx’s ideas in the twentieth century. Every time, whether in Russia, China, Cuba, or Venezuela, his theories ended in mass murder, starvation, and horrifying state control of the individual.[20] Even half-measures such as Venezuela’s attempt to nationalize only parts of the economy end in disaster.[21] Further, Marx’s historical analysis has been proven woefully inaccurate.
Still, Marxism and
socialism intrigue some evangelical Christians, thinking they may be able to
turn them to better ends. They are ignoring that Marxism and socialism are
inherently materialistic and atheistic. Simply papering over those facts will
not affect the ramifications for individual liberty, social health, and the
general welfare. The base assumptions of socialism will produce the same
results every time regardless of who is trying to carry them out.
[1]See Joe Carter, “Why is Socialism being Promoted by Conservative Christian Outlets?” Acton Institute, July 26, 2019; https://blog.acton.org/archives/96963-why-is-socialism-being-promoted-by-conservative-christian-outlets.html; accessed June 9, 2019; Internet.
[2]See Jake Meador, “Young Christians and the Specter of Socialism,” Mere Orthodoxy, July 27, 2017; https://mereorthodoxy.com/young-christians-socialism/#easy-footnote-1; accessed June 9, 2019; Internet.
[3]See Matthew Schmitz, “What I Saw at the Debate between Dissent and American Affairs,” First Things, May 30, 2017; https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/05/what-i-saw-at-the-debate-between-dissent-and-american-affairs; accessed June 9, 2019; Internet.
[4]For statistics regarding the increase in the standard of living see Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2014), 325.
[5]William D. Dennison, Karl Marx, Great Thinkers (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2017), 2.
[6]Friedrich Nietzsche in Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 220.
[7]Scruton, 143.
[8]Ibid., 184.
[9]Dennison, 48.
[10]Ronald Nash’s point that Hegel’s dialectical model involved myriad on-going competitions and syntheses is well taken. However, for the sake of brevity and clarity, most commentators provide the most basic three-step model that has been presented here. See Ronald H. Nash, The Meaning of History (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1998), 121.
[11]Scruton, 180–81.
[12]I have drawn directly from Francis Schaeffer regarding the secularization of Rutherford’s political thought. However, the portion of this sentence that regards the connection between Locke’s economic and political thinking is my analysis of Roger Scruton’s summary of Locke’s political thought. See Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, L’Abri 50th Anniversary ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 109; and Scruton, 207–11.
[13]Ibid., 209.
[14]Paul Heyne, A Student’s Guide to Economics, The Preston A. Wells Jr. Guides to the Major Disciplines (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2000), 2.
[15]Scruton, 224.
[16]See Dennison, 88–98.
[17]Ibid., 44.
[18]Scruton, 231.
[19]Dennison, 68–69.
[20]The generally accepted rough estimate of the total death toll resulting from communism during the twentieth century is nearly 100 million. See Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, Nicholas Werth, and Stephan Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.
[21]See Ivona Lacob, “Venezuela’s Failed Socialist Experiment,” Forbes, July 24, 2016; https://www.forbes.com/sites/ivonaiacob/2016/07/24/venezuelas-failed-socialist-experiment/#61f27f7141dd; accessed June 9, 2019; Internet; Andres Malave, “How Socialism Failed Venezuela: Venezuela is Burning and We’re Overlooking the Root Cause of Its Crisis,” U.S. News and World Report,June 6, 2016; https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-06/socialism-is-devastating-venezuela-and-americans-dont-seem-to-notice; accessed June 9, 2019; Internet; and Bret Stephens, “Yes, Venezuela is a Socialist Catastrophe,” New York Times, January 25, 2019; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/venezuela-maduro-socialism-government.html; accessed June 9, 2019; Internet.
Recent Comments