“Every step in the ideological genealogy of Black Lives Matter is designed to remove those blocks that support government and society—religion, tradition, patriotism, education, etc.—until a tipping point is reached and a Marxist seizure of power is possible. It’s a tried-and-true formula. Just look at history. Dozens of lesser towers have already fallen into total Marxist ruin…”
(Larry Alex Taunton) “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” ~ Revelation 6:8
Last month’s keynote-address-turned-column, “Understanding What Is Happening in America: A Christian Response,” garnered a lot of attention. In those discussions I connected the dots from Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky to Black Lives Matter and the physical assaults on American cities. And the dots do connect.
But much remained unsaid, unwritten. Among them, what of “white privilege”? What is the connection with the LGBTQI movement? What is Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality? And what, if anything, has Karl Marx to do with them and should you care?
First, a bit of history.
What is “Marxism”?
Prussian political theorist and revolutionary Karl Marx (1818-1883) didn’t invent the idea of socialism any more than the French invented strikes, but each put their own stamp on these practices. That idea—loosely, that wealth should be redistributed equitably—has no absolute beginning. “Marxism” is Marx’s particular variation on a theme. His contributions to socialism were chiefly in systematizing it, popularizing it, and militarizing it.
Just as Darwin saw unguided biological processes at work in natural history, Marx likewise believed that human history was swept along by impersonal economic forces. History would move irresistibly from one economic stage to another until it reached the utopian stage called communism.
If, in the Christian paradigm, faith in Jesus Christ the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, Marx’s faith in these mysterious evolutionary forces of history (called dialectical materialism in Marx-speak) seems to have been something less than that. To help history along, Marx called for the violent overthrow of the ruling classes. But such revolts in continental Europe were easily put down, and Marx, rightly seen as an instigator, was expelled from Germany, Belgium, and finally France.
When he arrived in Britain in 1849, Marx and his equally fanatical colleague Friedrich Engels found a labor force that had been calling for some form of socialism long before anyone had heard of Karl Marx. Full of revolutionary fire, Marx preached his famous message of bloody revolution—“Workers of the world unite!”—in the expectation that the laborers (proletarians in Marx-speak) would rise up and burn the country to the ground.
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