“By now in history, there’re a lotta isms that oughtta be wasms,” quipped the Baptist preacher at the first church I attended regularly. Thirty years on, the wisdom of that dear saint still rings in my ears, reminding me of the power of ideas: “Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.”1
Marxism promises a classless society in which everyone is equal. Marxism sees everything in terms of class struggle, rich against poor, and therefore suffering is the result of oppression by the rich and prosperous bourgeoisie. The solution is to overthrow capitalist society. Then a dictatorship of the proletariat (working class) must be set up to achieve the revolutionary goals of abolishing private property, nationalizing all industries, and suppressing opposition. Marx himself expressed the ruling ethic of his philosophy, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”2 The hoped-for utopia was a dream—a worker’s paradise.
Marxism has hopeful, attractive goals. As Francis Schaeffer once explained, “we cannot understand idealistic Marxism except as a Christian heresy…Communism has not won its converts by what Stalin did…but rather by the idealistic promises…that it would enhance the dignity of man.”3
But Marxism has to borrow the dignity of man from the Judeo-Christian worldview, because under atheistic materialism, there is no dignity of man—you need God for that.
British satirist Malcolm Muggeridge was born in 1903. His father was a Socialist and an enthusiastic participant in local politics. When the young Muggeridge married his wife Kitty, the niece of influential Socialist and feminist Beatrice Webb, he entered an elite social circle of liberal writers and thinkers. Later, against the backdrop of 1930s Britain during the Great Depression, young Muggeridge saw in the Communist way of life a legitimate alternative to the excesses of capitalism and its “industrial ugliness”. Early in his journalistic career, Muggeridge became a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian as he and Kitty took up residence in Moscow.
Their idealistic optimism was short-lived. Malcolm and Kitty arrived there “fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.”4 Stalin had ordered the mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants. From 1932-33, grain stores were destroyed, villages and homes were raided and robbed of food, and whole towns were prevented from receiving food from elsewhere. By 1934, the government-enforced famine had killed around 5 million in what is now known as the Holodomor. Muggeridge described the shocking inhumanity that distinguished this famine from others as “planned and deliberate; not due to any natural catastrophe like failure of rain, or cyclone, or flooding. An administrative famine brought about by the forced collectivisation of agriculture; an assault on the countryside by party apparatchiks—the very men I’d been chatting so amiably with in the train—supported by strong-arm squads from the military and the police.”5
Innumerable atrocities could be cited as evidence against Marxism. For example, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s massive work The Gulag Archipelago describes the Soviet Union’s vast system of repression, imprisonment, torture, violence, and death from an insider’s point of view. This is to say nothing of the mass killings ordered by Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Un and other Marxist despots.
It might be argued that Marxism, taking into account its political expressions as socialism and communism, its persistent cultural influence and propagation by western ideologues, its brutal dictators commanding armies of secret police, gulags, labor camps, and killing fields, did more damage to humankind in the 20th century than any other religion or philosophy.
The lamentable record of Marxism should be well-known, but alas, it is not. University of Hawaii professor R. J. Rummel has compiled extensive statistics showing that many millions of people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century. Hitler is notorious for killing 6 million Jews before and during World War II, but Marxist dictators and their henchmen have killed far more. We might quibble over the details, but the plain fact is that Marxism is a failure— if you consider human life to be valuable. In a cruel irony, Marxism promises a worker’s paradise where everyone is equal, but in practice it is perhaps history’s greatest ideological source of human-caused suffering, extinguishing the lives of more than one hundred million people in the 20th century.
Marx made an unwarranted assumption about the nature of humankind. As any student of the Bible should know, humans have a sin nature. “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” (Ecclesiastes 7:20)
Whatever the origins of this grave error on Marx’s part, it is impossibly naïve to think people will act consistently in the best interest of others, especially when given power over their fellows.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to be temporary. But revolutionary objectives included confiscation of all private property, and any property not willingly relinquished was taken by force. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ends justify the means; therefore, no means were excluded. With no moral compunctions limiting the means at their disposal, what then could prevent the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat from becoming a perpetual dictatorship led by the most violent and ruthless of the prols?
Marxism’s hoped-for utopia, a dictatorship of the proletariat followed by a workers’ paradise, utterly fails in the real world. Marxism is based on the philosophy of Hegelian dialectical materialism, an atheistic philosophy which assumes only the material world exists, thereby excluding everything supernatural, including the possibility of any God. If people believe there is no God, we can’t expect them to do what is best for their fellow humans. If people are to treat each other with compassion, their motivation must come from a source other than Marxism.
Marxism is a failure. Why do so many people believe it?
People believe what they want to believe. And if you find a political ideology that lets you satisfy your quest for power and in the meantime allows you to do what you like with your sex life, it can become an acceptable God-substitute.
Muggeridge warned against the credulity of western liberals, who “…all resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied upon to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.”6
In contrast to Marxism, the founding fathers of the United States stood in the tradition of the Protestant Reformation and knew quite well that mankind has a sin nature. This is why, through the influence of the Bible, our Constitution was laboriously crafted with built-in limits to constrain the power of government.
Christianity in the West led to freedom without chaos. But this blessing was not the result of mere political power. The seeds of spiritual fruit took root, grew, and bloomed. As souls willingly submitted themselves to the authority of Christ, their self-regulating behavior not only helped them flourish in the world, but exercised sanctifying influence over their fellow citizens.
1 A popular saying at Summit Ministries worldview training camp.
2www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.
3 Francis A. Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, Volume 1: A Christian View of Philosophy and Culture, Book 4: “Back to Freedom and Dignity”, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1982), 367.
4 Malcolm Muggeridge, “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” Imprimis Vol. 8, no. 5, (May, 1979).
5 Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Volume 1: The Green Stick (London: Collins, 1972), 257.
6 Ibid., 275-276.
Defending Your Faith 