Ackbach
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2016
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- 158
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- Rochester, MN
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- Religious Affiliation
- Calvinist
- Political Affiliation
- Conservative
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- Married
I just finished reading Marx's The Communist Manifesto, and have come to the following conclusion:
Why anyone takes him seriously today is beyond me. The very first sentence in the book is simply factually incorrect:
No, not really. Have there been class struggles? Undeniably. But to reduce all of history to class struggles is incorrect. History is a lot more about the struggle just to survive against mighty obstacles like famine, natural disasters, etc. There's lots of war, to be sure; but there were few wars I could call "class struggle". In addition, you find classes, as often as not, cooperating instead of competing (maybe not in India).
Marx implements his ideas of class struggle and identity politics (you are primarily a member of your group or class, and not an individual) in the economic sphere. More on that below. His ideas have proven not only without value, but it is valuable actively to reject them.
He bases the whole pamphlet on this seriously flawed premise.
But today, alive and well, we have the critical theorists, radical leftists, and post-modernists using the same, tired, WRONG philosophy, only applied to power instead of economics. It's still wrong! All you have to do to debunk identity politics is to examine the logical outcome of identity politics: intersectionality. This is the idea that as you are a member of more groups, you partake of the same oppressed/oppressor status as those groups. I, of course, as an adult white male, have only "privileged status", and am therefore classified only as an oppressor. I would be allowed zero voice on anything by the critical theorists. If, on the other hand, I was a young black female, I could talk about things (unless I didn't tow the line of the radical left, in which case I would again be ostracized like Candace Owens Farmer). The problem with intersectionality, of course, is that by the time you compute all the characteristics of all the groups to which you belong (and there's no logical reason to leave any out), you are the ONLY member of the resulting class. So you're down to the individual, anyway.
From a biblical perspective, the idea of not punishing a man for his father's sins would seem to apply here. For example, as far as I know, no one in my relatively immediate ancestry owned slaves. I certainly have not owned slaves, nor do I condone slavery. I am therefore NOT GUILTY of slavery in any sense whatsoever. To lump me in with the white male slaveowners of previous centuries is WRONG.
Marx also wrote the following:
This is one of the more dangerously wrong ideas he put forth. All you need to debunk this lie is to conduct a thought experiment. Suppose a man wants to sell sewing pins. So he goes to the mine, mines coal and iron, smelts the iron into steel, and finally hammers out a few dozen pins on his blacksmith's anvil. Because his cost of production is so high, he decides to sell the pins for $100 each. Meanwhile, his neighbor, taking advantage of the division of labor, is selling sewing pins, 100 to the box, at the price of $3 per box. How many pins is our industrious entrepreneur going to sell? Zero! Evidently, then, the pins he makes are not worth $100 each.
The answer to Marx here is that people assign value to goods and services. What is a good or service worth? Answer: what people are willing to pay for it. It's that simple.
We need to reject Marxism actively, including its ugly offshoots of critical theory, postmodernism, and the radical left. Misinterpretations of Christianity have killed their thousands, but Marxism has killed its hundreds of millions.
Christians of all countries, unite!
Why anyone takes him seriously today is beyond me. The very first sentence in the book is simply factually incorrect:
No, not really. Have there been class struggles? Undeniably. But to reduce all of history to class struggles is incorrect. History is a lot more about the struggle just to survive against mighty obstacles like famine, natural disasters, etc. There's lots of war, to be sure; but there were few wars I could call "class struggle". In addition, you find classes, as often as not, cooperating instead of competing (maybe not in India).
Marx implements his ideas of class struggle and identity politics (you are primarily a member of your group or class, and not an individual) in the economic sphere. More on that below. His ideas have proven not only without value, but it is valuable actively to reject them.
He bases the whole pamphlet on this seriously flawed premise.
But today, alive and well, we have the critical theorists, radical leftists, and post-modernists using the same, tired, WRONG philosophy, only applied to power instead of economics. It's still wrong! All you have to do to debunk identity politics is to examine the logical outcome of identity politics: intersectionality. This is the idea that as you are a member of more groups, you partake of the same oppressed/oppressor status as those groups. I, of course, as an adult white male, have only "privileged status", and am therefore classified only as an oppressor. I would be allowed zero voice on anything by the critical theorists. If, on the other hand, I was a young black female, I could talk about things (unless I didn't tow the line of the radical left, in which case I would again be ostracized like Candace Owens Farmer). The problem with intersectionality, of course, is that by the time you compute all the characteristics of all the groups to which you belong (and there's no logical reason to leave any out), you are the ONLY member of the resulting class. So you're down to the individual, anyway.
From a biblical perspective, the idea of not punishing a man for his father's sins would seem to apply here. For example, as far as I know, no one in my relatively immediate ancestry owned slaves. I certainly have not owned slaves, nor do I condone slavery. I am therefore NOT GUILTY of slavery in any sense whatsoever. To lump me in with the white male slaveowners of previous centuries is WRONG.
Marx also wrote the following:
This is one of the more dangerously wrong ideas he put forth. All you need to debunk this lie is to conduct a thought experiment. Suppose a man wants to sell sewing pins. So he goes to the mine, mines coal and iron, smelts the iron into steel, and finally hammers out a few dozen pins on his blacksmith's anvil. Because his cost of production is so high, he decides to sell the pins for $100 each. Meanwhile, his neighbor, taking advantage of the division of labor, is selling sewing pins, 100 to the box, at the price of $3 per box. How many pins is our industrious entrepreneur going to sell? Zero! Evidently, then, the pins he makes are not worth $100 each.
The answer to Marx here is that people assign value to goods and services. What is a good or service worth? Answer: what people are willing to pay for it. It's that simple.
We need to reject Marxism actively, including its ugly offshoots of critical theory, postmodernism, and the radical left. Misinterpretations of Christianity have killed their thousands, but Marxism has killed its hundreds of millions.
Christians of all countries, unite!
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