Marx and Engels’s oft-cited 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, penned in 1844 but not published until 1888, is perhaps the closest thing we have to words that function as holy scripture for communists: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”[1] Changing the world is allegedly what “matters,” but it’s dogmatically assumed, never argued for. It’s as de fide, as much a matter of faith, as, for example, the Immaculate Conception is for Catholics, and just as ungrounded in Scripture.
The aim of this series is to expose Marxism as an instance of the “foolishness of the wisdom of this world” (1 Corinthians 1:20) from the Bible’s standpoint. No Marxist as such has warrant for pontificating that “the point” is to change the world. The point of what? What can be “the point” in an ultimately pointless world, as distinct from the world in which God works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11)?
My focal points, as you know by now, are C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, and Herbert Aptheker, men who understandably (only because they lived in God’s world and were created in His image) raged against the indignities of racial subjugation, colonialism, and imperialism that they experienced, witnessed, or studied. (That’s an inclusive “or,” by the way.) For several decades of their lives, they believed that they found in Marxism the conceptual tools they needed for addressing those evils.
Their biographies make for stimulating reading, but how does Marxist revolution answer the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, especially since we know that it has only added to the history of moral outrage? How can Marxist theory articulate any ethical complaint without borrowing from the Christian worldview they thought was beneath their notice?
By their sheer assertion of an intelligible connection between racism and “capitalism,” for example, that is, between moral failing and the relations of production in any historical era (that is, to “class” in the Marxist sense), they believe they found the golden key.
That it was such a key is the conclusion which these three intellectuals drew from their experience of, say, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, peonage, and legalized racial segregation. But Marxist materialism, metaphysical or historical, has no way to deal with any norms, let alone moral ones: the universe is a collection of indifferent material facts or events assumed to be a system but never knowable as such on the basis of materialism.
But as the history of Marxism (and, for that matter, all systems of thought, even Christianity), one dialectical opposition only spawns another that aims to displace it. Only the wisdom of God transcends the impasse. But professing to be wise in their rejecting of God and His wisdom, they become fools (Romans 1:22-32), generating endless dialectical fission and fusion.
In 1963, Ayn Rand, whose pro-capitalist Objectivism ironically mirrors anti-capitalist Marxism in several ways,[2] famously labeled the use of a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the ideas on which it logically depends the “fallacy of the stolen concept.”[3] But she identified no new fallacious inference to be added to the catalog of recognized fallacies. What she was getting at, however, was the doomed forensic situation of whoever simultaneously borrows from and repudiates the worldview on which no human mind can help but operate. This is the situation that Objectivism (and Marxism) condemns its adherents to from its first utterances to its farthest-reaching conclusions.
That is, Rand suppressed (ignored, contradicted, or denied) the Christian worldview, even though every true proposition she presupposed as true to get her argument started depends on that worldview for its intelligibility. This is more than a fallacy, that is, an easily correctible blunder in reasoning (although it is at least that). As Ludwig Wittgenstein said in another context: “For a blunder, that is too big.”[4] That is, it is no mere blunder to fail to acknowledge, let alone deny, the worldview you’re surreptitiously and subconsciously “poaching” or “pilfering” or from which you’re “lifting” conceptual jewels. The failure is spiritual, not merely intellectual: it involves an existential disorientation that Scripture calls suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18).
A social system does not explain moral turpitude, which lies in the rebellious human heart to which Marxist rebellion has no answer, being itself an instance of human depravity. Marxists must borrow from the Christian worldview they reject to have any hope of understanding the roots of the moral outrage that sets them on their quixotic moralistic quest, over which they drape the mantle of “science.” One dialectical opposition spawns another that aims at displacing it. Only the wisdom of God transcends the impasse to which this-worldly thinking condemns us.
To be continued
Notes
[1] My emphasis. “Philosophen haben bisher nur die Welt anders interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.” In the most common English translation, “the point” renders “es kommt darauf an.” (Not “das Punkt.”)
[2] See John W. Robbins, Without a Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System, The Trinity Foundation, 1997. For a short refutation of aspects of Objectivism as expressed by George Smith, see Anthony Flood, Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God,” Kindle, 2019.
[3] “You will learn to recognize at a glance a given theory’s stand on these essentials [of Objectivism] and to reject the attacks without lengthy consideration—because you know (and will be able to prove) in what way any given attack, old or new, is made of contradictions and stolen concepts. . . they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, Signet, 1984, 30. That page’s footnote reads “[The ‘stolen concept’ fallacy, first identified by Ayn Rand, is the fallacy of using a concept while denying the validity of its objective roots, i.e., of an earlier concept(s) on which it logically depends. See The Objectivist Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 1, January 1963.”] Brackets in the original. The “essentials” of Objectivism are “in metaphysics, the Law of Identity—in epistemology, the supremacy of reason—in ethics, rational egoism—in politics, individual rights (i.e, capitalism)—in esthetics, individual values.” Rand, Philosophy, 30. Again, see my Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God,” Kindle, 2019.
[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Cyril Barrett, ed. University of California Press, 2007, 62