The battle between Marxian-socialism cannot be reduced to a political or economic discussion devoid of spiritual consequences.[1] Two things that are decided in the political and economic realm do affect evangelism and worldwide missions. The first is the freedom granted by our constitution and laws to speak freely, evangelize according to the Christian faith, and organize our churches and lives to spread the Christian faith in our own country and around the world. The second is to live where the economic system provides people with sufficient financial freedom and discretionary income to support Christian ministries and missions at home and around the world. These two essentials exist in America but are nonexistent in Marxian-socialist countries with even tighter future restrictions as the Marxian-socialism government determines. Therefore, the fight to maintain capitalism and against communism and socialism is indeed a spiritual battle and one worth fighting.
A growing trend among young people, which started in the early 1940s, is a preference for socialism over capitalism.[2] This movement toward socialism is confirmed in several publications. See my blog Marxism and Critical Race Theory Have Taken Aim at Your Child and Your Church.
This shift is not surprising when we consider the continually growing popularity of Marxian-socialist values in academia, primary and secondary education, and the media. These values include equal outcomes, redistribution of wealth, collective ownership rather than private property, equity, widespread rejection of absolutes, objective knowledge, and meritocracy.[3]
A person can read hundreds, or even thousands, of pages of neo-Marxists and the leading critical theorists, which includes the leading thinkers in such areas as critical legal theory, critical race theory (CRT), and critical social justice (SJ), without seeing one positive statement about capitalism. These negative statements about capitalism are in contrast to the constant positive declarations about Marxian-Socialism. This is because they all rely on critical theory (CT) developed by neo-Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. CT is the mechanism Marxism uses to destroy capitalist societies and replace them with Marxism.
Do not be misled; when they speak of improving society, they do not mean making America or capitalism better. Instead, they seek to totally destroy it and replace it with Marxian-socialism. Destroying capitalism in America necessitates the destruction of the USA, with its republican form of government, including our civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Both Marxists and critical race theorists believe individual rights and capitalism are oppressive.
This hatred of capitalism and love for socialism comes into our public schools by training neo-Marxist pedagogues (teaching theorists) such as Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Isaac Gottesman, and, of course, Herbert Marcuse. Although not all are still living, their works live on in academia, and they have many proteges. This is often referred to as critical pedagogy or critical education. Critical signifies that it is built on using Horkheimer’s critical theory.
For example, in his book, On Critical Pedagogy, neo-Marxist Henry Giroux says, “Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it. Neoliberal capitalism creates the foundation for what I have called neoliberal fascism.”[4] While socialists such as the Democratic Socialists of America desire to make capitalism more socialistic, their changes, such as centralized control of production or distribution, or both, and their animus toward free market capitalism have the same result: more government control, forced redistribution of wealth, and less personal freedom and discretionary income, thereby diminishing the opportunity to spread the gospel. The truth is that the more centralized control over either production or distribution does ipso-facto result in a stronger centralized control over the other.
Neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse regularly derides capitalism as an “economy of waste, planned obsolescence, and pollution,” [5] although he has at times spoken of the success of capitalism. For example, when Marcuse was giving a speech in defense of Marxist Angela Davis at Berkley in 1969, in the context of America’s oppression and the need for a revolution, he spoke of the success of capitalism. He said, “The question which I want to raise very briefly today is, can the society, without radical change, abolish the conditions on which its very security and on which its very prosperity rest? And I suggest a negative answer. A negative answer because, and as a Marxist, I must confess it to you, I have great faith, bad faith, in the capitalist system. I know that this system is a very business-like, a very rational system and that it does not like waste and destruction unless this waste and destruction are considered necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist system.”[6]
His bad faith is because American capitalism’s success precludes a revolution unless America undergoes a change so radical that it undermines the security and prosperity of our country and its economic system.[7] This revolution, which replaces our capitalist republic, is the aim of Marxian-socialism. Here and elsewhere, he references American capitalism’s success and how it has helped so many people. But, viewing it with the CT lens, capitalism is never enough and must be replaced with communism. Note he recognized that capitalism, because of profits, does not want waste unless it is planned obsolescence, as previously mentioned. However, waste that is not desired is a reality in any system, and the more the system produces for its citizens, the more waste there will be. The idea of a society with no waste is utopic.
Can we who believe in capitalism do better? Yes, and we have improved within the system of capitalism. The capitalist waste to which he refers must be considered in light of the economic system that has produced the world’s greatest products and standard of living. Not to mention the aid from capitalist countries to many other countries in their trials. It is not a perfect system, but comparing it to a non-existent ideal system (Marxism’s utopia) makes it no less successful.
The catastrophe of which he speaks is not the implementation or existence of socialism, but instead, it would come about by trying to take people directly from a capitalist system that he admits “overall has succeeded”[8] and insert them into a Marxian-socialist managed society where individuality is submersed in the collective managed less provisional society; a place where only people’s basic needs are met, and the leaders decide what constitutes a need. This is while our needs, wants, and personhood have been acclimated to a capitalist society where they can be met and exceeded if we are willing to work for them.
The catastrophe happens because of shifting people and an entire free culture into a communist-managed culture wherein the people are deprived of normal everyday freedoms, met needs, and met desires. To avoid this catastrophe, every person in society must somehow be changed to desire only their basic needs to be met. Those of us who appreciate a capitalist system are considered too competitive, individualistic, and aggressive to find contentment in a Marxian-socialist utopia; therefore, we have to be reprogrammed to accommodate a Marxist economy and values. In his essay on Liberation, Marcuse contends that humans living in a capitalist system must be changed at the “biological and instinctual” level to make them suitable (happy) for this new existence. Marxists regularly use the idea or term utopia. When comparing terms, capitalism is always pictured as “a struggle for existence” and utopic communism as “such a society” that will end our struggle, enslavement, false consciousness, crime, and every other evil supposedly spawned from capitalism.[9]
Of this change needed to make people who have lived in a capitalist society suitable for a planned, controlled socialist society, he writes, “It follows that the radical change which is to transform the existing society into a free society must reach into a dimension of the human existence hardly considered in Marxian theory – the -biological-dimension in which the vital, imperative needs and satisfactions of man assert themselves. In as much as these needs and satisfactions reproduce life in servitude, liberation presupposes changes in this biological dimension, that is to say, different instinctual needs, different reactions of the body as well as the mind.”[10]
Importantly, by “liberation” and “free society,” he means being liberated to a communist society, and by “servitude,” Marcuse means living in a capitalist society or any non-communist society. It is difficult to know if he used the term “biological” to mean physical existence, which would involve possibly some form of eugenics, or used it somewhat synonymously with psychological. Either way, he proposes a necessary “instinctual transition to make most people coming from a capitalist society accept communism’s life of only basic needs being met, and what those basic needs are will be determined by the Marxist leaders of the society.
Martin Luther King contended that capitalism did not grow out of Christianity, but it was built and existed by slavery, the exploitation of black people. Therefore, he rejected the idea that it grew out of the Puritan work ethic. He said, “It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human realities around us and encourages us in the greed and exploitation which create the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth. Again, we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is, capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.”[11]
In contrast, Economist Thomas Sowell comments, “What is truly more reprehensible are attempts to pull down those who have achieved more, instead of facilitating the rise of those less fortunate who seek to rise through their own achievements. The idea that those who have less can be presumed to be victims of those who have more is an idea whose consequences have a worldwide history written in the blood of millions.”[12] In light of everyone knowing King was a black man, it seems worth mentioning that Sowell is also.
A comparison between a communist economy and America’s capitalism can be seen in this example of Cuban refugees who fled from Cuba to America. Sowell tells us, “Refugees who fled Cuba after the Communist takeover in the mid-twentieth century likewise arrived in the United States destitute and survived by taking low-level, poorly paid jobs. But, in later years, the total revenue of Cuban-owned businesses in the United States exceeded the total revenue of the nation of Cuba.”[13] Regarding the difference between human capital and material capital (countries can seize material capital but not human capital–the ability to produce wealth), we find the same experiences with other groups who were stripped of their material wealth and then expelled from their land.
For example, the Gujaratis from India who, according to Sowell, “were expelled from Uganda in the 1970s[and] the Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia following the Second World War . . . In these and other cases, tangible physical wealth could be seized, but not the human capital that had created that wealth before and could create it again. Meanwhile, the seized wealth gets used up by the nation that seized it, and those who created it are no longer there to replenish it.”[14] He gives many such examples. Capitalism keeps the freedom to spread the gospel worldwide and discretionary income to do so, which cannot be said of Marxian-socialist countries.
Thomas Sowell reminds us of two crucial facts; each explains why socialism never works. The first one is that when we speak of wealth, we should think of the human mind because that is the source of wealth. You can take material wealth or raw materials away from people and give it to others, but the people who created that wealth are the real source of wealth; material wealth alone does not create wealth. Physical wealth can be stolen, redistributed, and depleted, but human capital (the mind), which is the source of wealth, is inseparable from the person. Therefore, we see the welfare state and socialism stop human capital development, ultimately leading to diminished creativity, product supply, and even poverty.[15]The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Venezuela come to mind.
The second is that while it is possible to offer equality of opportunity, it is impossible to provide equality of the probability of success.[16] Yet, that is what social justice, socialism, Black Liberation Theology, and Marxism promise and demand.[17]
[1] I use Marxian-socialism to refer to the common traits of Marxism, socialism, and communism.
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/socialism-america-gallup-poll-1431266.
[3] Equity aims to make everyone have the same wealth, broadly defined.
[4] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 225.
[5] AfroMarxist, “Angela Davis & Herbert Marcuse at UC Berkeley (1969) Full Audio,” 2:51–3:57, YouTube, Feb 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuyWj8BtjKc. Accessed 2/29/2020.
[6] AfroMarxist, “Angela Davis & Herbert Marcuse at UC Berkeley (1969) Full Audio,” 4:23–5:28, YouTube, Feb 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuyWj8BtjKc. Accessed 2/29/2020.
[7] Marxists speak of two kinds of revolution. The more familiar kind, which includes violence, and the more likely kind they work toward today is one of gaining Marxian control and influence in society and culture. This approach is often referred to as the long march through the institutions.
[8] “Herbert Marcuse Interview about One Dimensional Man (1964),” 29:17–30:35, YouTube, October 2, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gyL5ie6-x0.
[9] “Herbert Marcuse Interview about One Dimensional Man (1964),” 29:17–30:35, YouTube, October 2, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gyL5ie6-x0.
[10] An Essay on Liberation by Herbert Marcuse 1969, p17, https://www.readkong.com/page/an-essay-on-liberation-1301888.
[11] The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, “#MLK: The Three Evils of Society // #Nonviolence365,” 22:55–23:53, YouTube, July 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6sT9Hjh0cHM. Accessed 10/23/21.
[12] Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 422.
[13] Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York: Basic, 2019), 217.
[14] Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 417–18.
[15] We should not confuse the wealth of the leaders in socialistic states with what happens to the people, which is poverty. From an interview of Thomas Sowell on 12/8/15 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGYl17DiEwo accessed 7/1/20. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICsPQnGJEpY; accessed 7/1/20.
[16] Equality of opportunity does not mean every human can get the exact same opportunity because that is impossible in a time and space continuum. It does mean that each person who receives the same opportunity as someone else should be treated equally. For example, if a black person and a white person apply for a job, each should be treated equally and evaluated on their abilities, not their skin color.
[17] Thomas Sowell, “Thomas Sowell talks about his new book Economic Facts and Fallacies,” Hoover Institution YouTube, 9/26/08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0MaY33LJZ0, accessed 6/25/20.
