Marxism

Karl Marx, the creator of Marxism

See also: Socialism

Marxism is a political theory of social studies that began as a revolutionary movement characterised by Karl Marx, a German scholar and his cowriter Friedrich Engels. Marx's approach is indicated by the opening line of the Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx believed that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism supposedly replaced feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by communism, a classless society which would emerge after a transitional period in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxists are said to await "the revolution" with a religious fervor reminiscent of Christians awaiting the Rapture.

Though inspired by French socialist and sociological thought, Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that their favoured small-scale socialistic communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty and that only a large-scale change in the economic system can bring about real change. In his article "The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna" in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (No. 136, 7 November 1848), Karl Marx wrote that there is only one means to shorten, simplify and concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new, only one means—revolutionary terrorism.

Marx's work has been foundational to the ideologies of many governments in the 20th century, including China, the Soviet Union, Cuba and Chile.

Background

Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He married German theatre critic and political activist Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the British Museum Reading Room.

Ideology

Marx had a special concern with how people relate to their own labour power. He wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the Hegelian dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. Capitalism mediates social relationships of production (such as among workers or between workers and capitalists) through commodities, including labour, that are bought and sold on the market. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour – one's capacity to transform the world – is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behaviour merely adapt.

Commodity fetishism provides an example of what Engels called "false consciousness", which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels's point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths, as they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production include not only the production of food or manufactured goods but also the production of ideas (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). An example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:

'Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.'

Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis at the Gymnasium zu Trier argued that religion had as its primary social aim the promotion of solidarity, here Marx sees the social function of religion in terms of highlighting/preserving political and economic status quo and inequality.

Marx was an outspoken opponent of child labour, saying that British industries "could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood too", and that U.S. capital was financed by the "capitalized blood of children".

Marxists also teach that historical forces are a cause of oppression, having been forced upon them without their consent, thus leading them toward the need for complete revolution to throw off these forces. "The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch ...... this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it, without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles"

Cultural Marxism

Herbert Marcuse with his student Angela Davis.

For a more detailed treatment, see Cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture. The theory claims that an elite of Marxist theorists and Frankfurt School intellectuals are subverting Western society with a culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and promotes the cultural liberal values of the 1960s counterculture and multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness, misrepresented as identity politics created by critical theory. Marx was noted as being a Communist socialist, not a liberal which at the time was associated with the Whig Party in the UK.

A contemporary revival of the Nazi propaganda term "Cultural Bolshevism",[5] the conspiracy theory originated in the United States during the 1990s.While originally found only on the far-right political fringe, the term began to enter mainstream discourse in the 2010s and is now found globally.[7] The conspiracy theory of a Marxist culture war is promoted by right-wing politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, political commentators in mainstream print and television media, and white supremacist terrorists. Scholarly analysis of the conspiracy theory has concluded that it has no basis in fact.

The conspiracy theory of Marxist cultural warfare originated in the essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'" (1992) by Michael Minnicino published in the Schiller Institute's Fidelio magazine, a journal associated with the fringe American right-wing political activist, conspiracy theorist, and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.

Cultural Marxism is a branch of Marxist ideology formulated by the Frankfurt School, which had its origins the early part of the twentieth century. Cultural Marxism comprises much of the foundation of political correctness. It emerged as a response of European Marxist intellectuals disillusioned by the early political failures of conventional economic Marxist ideology. While Marx's Communist Manifesto focused on the alleged class struggle between bourgeois (owners of the means of production) and proletariat (workers), Marx did address culture, which he intimated would change after his economic vision was implemented. Patrick Buchanan argues that Cultural Marxism succeeded where Marx failed.

The central idea of Cultural Marxism is to soften up and prepare Western Civilization for economic Marxism after a gradual, relentless, sustained attack on every institution of Western culture, including schools, literature, art, film, the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, the family, sexual mores, national sovereignty, etc. The attacks are usually framed in Marxist terms as a class struggle between oppressors and oppressed; the members of the latter class allegedly include women, minorities, homosexuals, and adherents of non-Western religions such as Islam.

Violent Marxism

See also: Democratic Socialists of America and Vanguardism

While the Occupy Wall Street and Obama riots had failed to bring about a violent Marxist overthrow of the existing social order and governmental system, the same organizers and groups attempted again, this time in a nationwide coordinated effort during the 2020 Leftist insurrection. Black Lives Matter (BLM), following the model of the 1960s Black Panthers, was anointed as the spearhead of revolution with Antifa playing the supporting role of the Weather Underground to bring about a national liberation movement from "capitalist oppression." BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors assured The Real News Network when questioned about the ideological direction of the movement in a 2015 interview:

Black Lives Matter protesters murdered 8 year old Secoriea Turner on July 5, 2020 in Atlanta.

“Myself and Alicia [Garrza] , in particular, are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.

The goal is to push the communist agenda while comfortably hiding behind black Americans who are suffering and in need of actual help. BLM incorporates nearly all forms of modern marginalization—

“including but not limited to those who are women, queer, trans, femmes, gender nonconforming, Muslim, formerly and currently incarcerated, cash poor and working class, differently-abled, undocumented, and immigrant”

—into blackness. Conversely, whiteness represents all forms of privilege (economic, social, and legal) throughout their 2017 platform. BLM simply substitutes Marx’s class conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie for class conflict between blackness and whiteness.

The “racist” narrative was turbocharged with the advent of slavery in America from 1626-1875. The accusations that America has a problem with racism also originate from the Jim Crow laws of 1865-1965, as well as voting laws that have been shown to disproportionally discourage black people from voting in America. . The accusations may also have arisen from the emprirical proof black people serve longer prison sentences for the same crime compared to white convicts .

Black Lives Matter has explicitly called for dead cops and the “lynching” of white people. Communist countries including Stalinist USSR and Maoist China were responsible for many millions of deaths, although it should be noted these forms of Communism are not Marxist, but a separate branch of Communism.

Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York (BLMNY) outlined a “pathway forward”: “We pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers, after the Nation of Islam, we believe that we need an army to defend ourselves." Newsome told FOX News, "If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. Cirvona Newsome, BLMNY co-founder and Democrat 2020 primary challenger for Congress (NY-15) said, “For far too long our institutions have protected the abusers and victimized the innocent while trapping people of color in the quicksand of racism, poverty and despair.”

The phrase "Black Lives Matter" can refer to a Twitter hashtag, a slogan, a social movement, a political action committee, or a loose confederation of groups advocating for racial justice. As a movement, Black Lives Matter is grassroots and decentralized, and leaders have emphasized the importance of local organizing over national leadership. The structure differs from previous black movements, like the Civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Such differences have been the subject of scholarly literature. Activist DeRay McKesson has commented that the movement "encompasses all who publicly declare that black lives matter and devote their time and energy accordingly."

In 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network. Garza described the network as an online platform that existed to provide activists with a shared set of principles and goals. Local Black Lives Matter chapters are asked to commit to the organization's list of guiding principles but operate without a central structure or hierarchy. Garza has commented that the Network was not interested in "policing who is and who is not part of the movement."

Critical Race Theory

Bernell Tremmell was murdered in Milwaukee in July 2020, although the suspects have not been caught. Bernell Trammell, 60, whose sometimes contradictory political views included supporting Black Lives Matter and many liberals, was killed outside his office in the eclectic and diverse Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee on July 23. With a graying beard and dreadlocks, he was an outspoken character known for his peaceful demeanor and religious proselytizing.

See also: Critical race theory and White privilege

Derrick Bell, a prominent Harvard professor, devised Critical Race Theory, which exemplifies Critical Theory applied to racial inequality in the justice system. According to Discover the Networks:

Critical race theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently the nation’s legal structures are, by definition, racist and invalid … members of “oppressed” racial groups are entitled—in fact obligated—to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and are worth observing. …

Bell’s theory is in turn an innovation of Critical Theory, which was developed by Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923. The Institute’s left-wing scholars fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, relocating to Columbia University in New York. Critical Theory, which discredits all aspects of Western society, we know today as political correctness. One of its most famous purveyors was the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, longtime associate of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Julian Bond. Marcuse invented the concept of “partisan tolerance,” that is, tolerance for leftist ideas and intolerance of all others. The Southern Poverty Law Center applied Marcuse’s strategy in developing its “Hate Watch” list, and Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky used it in his own life’s work.

Communism

“	We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. … We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.	”
—Vladimir Lenin

Communism, as it emerged around 1918–20, was a late political manifestation of Marxist philosophy. Lenin in Russia and later Mao Tse-tung in China tailored Marx's ideas to fit their expedient political needs.

Soviet experience

According to the formal ideology of Marxism, private ownership in industry is to be eliminated—control is to be wrested by the masses as a whole. The crucial revolutionary act, therefore, would presumably be the actual taking of control in industry by the workers themselves. In the course of the Bolshevik revolution, the workers ousted not only the owners but all the directing staff and supervisors. The workers thought, in their own way, that the revolution was designed to rid them of all rulers and exploiters. They recognized that the managers, as well as the owners, were among the rulers and exploiters both of the past and, above all, of the future. The workers set about running the factories themselves.

This state of affairs did not, however, last long. Two issues were at stake. In the first place, the separate factories and other instruments of production were not run very well under workers' control; and there were even greater difficulties in the coordination of the efforts of various factories. It was even harder for them to collaborate in the theory of economic planning effectively to direct entire branches of industry. Workers' control would also mean the elimination of all privilege, or a 'classless society". The drive for class power needed to get rid of workers' control, and found justification in the inefficiency of workers' control.

Hence workers' control was replaced by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin by the de facto managerial control in a new kind of state. The technical direction of factory operations was turned over to "specialists", or managers, with the Factory Committees remaining in existence and still exercising substantial control through a veto power over the managers and jurisdiction over labor conditions. Meanwhile, bureaus and commissions and individuals appointed from above by the Soviet regime were beginning to take over the job of coordinating the efforts of various factories and branches of industry. The powers of the managers and technicians increased at the expense of "workers' control" and the Factory Committees. The Factory Committee lost their veto powers. Their prerogative, labor conditions, became more and more narrowly interpreted. The Committee composition was changed to include one state representative, one managerial representative, and one man nominally representing the workers. Finally, even these Committees lost all their real power and remained as mere formalities, to be dropped altogether in during the Great Purge of 1938.

Nomenklatura

The freedom and end of privilege, which the oppressed thought the revolution was to bring, was giving way to a new form of class rule by the nomenklatura. At each decisive step, the "workers' socialist state" under Lenin and Stalin, backed not the workers but the managers. A wide campaign of "education" was undertaken to show the people why "workers' rule" meant, in practice, managers' rule. Where necessary, the education by the word was supplemented with education by firing squad, concentration camp or forced labor battalion.

Lenin and Trotsky, both, in the early years of the revolution, wrote pamphlets and speeches arguing the case of the specialists, the technicians, the managers. Lenin, in his forceful way, used to declare that the manager had to be a dictator in the factory. "Workers' democracy" in the state, Lenin said in effect, was to be founded upon a managerial dictatorship in the factory.

Lenin, as the head of the state, helped to smash workers' popular, control over those instruments and to substitute for it control by the managers. And, of course, the managers of individual plants became subordinate to the big managers, to the boards and bureaus directing entire sectors of industry and governing industry as a whole. The managers under the new state included many who had been managers under the old "capitalist rule". Lenin and Trotsky poured scorn on "infantile leftists" who were against making use of the "services" of the "bourgeois specialists.". Favorable terms were given to foreign "bourgeois specialists" who were willing to come to work under the new regime.

The control, and the social rule which goes with it, when it leaves the hands of the capitalists, goes not to the workers, the people, but to the managers, the new ruling class. A parallel of the Russian process can be observed with particular clarity in connection with the events in Loyalist territories during the Spanish Civil War, above all in Catalonia. There, just as in Russia, the workers and peasants began taking over direct control of the factories and railroads and firms. There too, not at once, but during the course of the first two years of the Civil War, the de facto power slipped from the workers' hands, sometimes voluntarily given up at the persuasion of a political party, sometimes smashed by arms and prison. It was not the troops of Franco who took control away from the people of Catalonia; they had lost control well before Franco's army conquered.

Current Marxist states

• China
• North Korea
• Cuba
• Zimbabwe

Quotes on Marxism

Comparative quotes are given from the top Left-wing - Socialist - Marxist - Communist leaders and their critics in order to better understand the commonality of the end result of their philosophy taken to its fruition by the Big government Welfare state-by leftist Globalist-Statist-Socialist-Communists. From these quotes one may see little difference between Socialists, Nazis, Communists. However it should be noted that Communism is based on the foundation that all men should be equal whilst Nazism is an extreme form of conservativism that wants a strictly stratified society and the genocide of Jewish people (N.B. Marx was Jewish). It should also be noted that the Nazi Party executed Communists and sent them to concentration camps. Communist regimes killed 60 million in the 20th century through genocide, according to Le Monde and more than 100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.

Quotes from Karl Marx

• "There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."-Marx, Karl, “The Victory of the Counterrevolution in Vienna”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 1848.
• "Once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to reenact the year 1793…"-Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503–505, final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 18, 1849. Quoted in Thomas G. West, Marx and Lenin, The Claremont Institute
• "The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envisage it."-Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503–505, final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 18, 1849. Quoted in Thomas G. West, Marx and Lenin, The Claremont Institute
• "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.""
• "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole
• "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
• "There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery"
• "Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex."
• "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
• "In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."

Treatment of Left Wing Individuals from National Socialist Party

German communists were among the first to be imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. Their ties to the USSR concerned Hitler, and the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism. Rumors of communist violence were spread by the Nazis to justify the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler his first dictatorial powers. Hermann Göring testified at Nuremberg that Nazi willingness to repress German Communists prompted Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with them. Hitler and the Nazis also despised German leftists because of their resistance to Nazi racism. Hitler referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as means for "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity", stir up class tension and mobilize trade unions against the government and business. When the Nazis occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be repressed; this included summary executions. An example is Hitler's Commissar Order, in which he demanded the summary execution of all Soviet troops who were political commissars who offered resistance or were captured in battle.

Quotes from Lenin

• “The way to crush the middle class is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

• "The best revolutionary is youth devoid of morals."

• "A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

• "The goal of socialism is communism."

• "There are no morals in politics there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel."

• "Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever." (see Public school values and Professor values)

• "It matters not if 90% of the Russian people perish so long as 10% bring about a world revolution."

Quotes from Hitler

• "In Russian Bolshevism we must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination. "
• " How shall we explain Bolshevism to the German worker as an accursed crime against humanity if we ally ourselves with the organizations of this spawn of hell, thus recognising it in the larger sense?"
• "Germany is today the next great war aim of Bolshevism"
• "Capitalism and Bolshevism are the two sides of the same international Jewish coin."

Quotes from Stalin

The Darwin-Stalin connection describes the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin who murdered millions of people, giving credit to Darwin's book for his outlook in life. Although it may be noted Darwin's book refers to the evolution of human beings from apes.

• "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." ~ to Churchill, 1945.

• "Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem"

• "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"

• "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

• "The only real power comes out of a long rifle."

• "When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use."

Quotes from Leon Trotsky

• "Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship."
  • Leon Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism : A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920; 1975), p. 153
• "The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state … Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction...
  • Terrorism and Communism : A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920; 1975), p. 177
• "We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life."
  • Leon Trotsky in his book The Russian Revolution, 1930
• "Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service."
  • Statement of 1918, as quoted in Trotsky : The Eternal Revolutionary (1996) by Dmitri Volkogonov, p. 213

Quotes from Mao

• "Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."—The Little Red Book, 1964
• "Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party."

Quotes on Kim Il-sung

Kim Il-sung took the communist cult of personality to a new level. "In Korea, the Americans have far exceed the Hitlerites!"—by Kim Il-sung

• "When it comes to the orchestration of terror, Kim Jong-il is a natural born genius."
  • Kim Duk Hong quoted in BBC News (21 July 2003) "Inside the mind of Kim Jong-il"

Quotes from Pol Pot

As ruler of Cambodia Pol Pot was responsible for exterminating 2 million people by genocide. That's a quarter of the country's population:

• "Exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese... and purify the masses of the [Cambodian] people."
  • Phnom Penh radio broadcast by Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge (May 10, 1978) ([1])

Related Quotes from Others

• "Socialists ignore the side of man that is of the spirit. They can provide shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you are ill, all the things that are guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don't understand that we dream - yes, even of some time owning a yacht." -- President Ronald Reagan

• "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." -- Winston Churchill

• "I've always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually" -- Friedrich Hayek

• "The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy" -- L. Neil Smith

• "Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean — power over people, power to the State." -- Margaret Thatcher

• "All socialism involves slavery" -- Herbert Spencer

• "Socialism is based on envy and eventually always creates a very powerful big government controlled by very mediocre people who envy any success and destroy it." -- Vlad

See also

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• List of atheist and agnostic pseudosciences
• French Revolution and Reign of Terror
• Marxism and mysticism
• Dictatorship
  • Vladimir Lenin - Leon Trotsky - Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong - Ho Chi Minh - Kim Jong-Il - Pol Pot, Fidel Castro - Che Guevara
  • Dictatorship of the proletariat
  • List of Communist States
  • List of Socialist States
  • Death toll of communism
• Mobocracy, Social Effects of the Theory of Evolution, Anti-Semitism, Communist Racism, Genocide, Holocaust
• National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi)
• National Socialism - the Nazis were elitist Police state liberals not conservatives
• Big government Welfare state leads to Nanny state, leads to Police state: Globalist-Statist-Socialist-Communist
• Liberal totalitarianism
• Anarchism

External links

• Is Marxism compatible with the Christian faith?, at GotQuestions
• Marx and Lenin Clairemont paper at Hillsdale College.
• How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World. The Epoch Times.