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ICE is Trump’s Gestapo or SS. They have no proper function, no constitutional authorization, and are loyal to Trump personally.
In Minneapolis on Wednesday, an ICE agent murdered a woman in her car.
The next day another shooting by federal border patrol agents (not ICE) occurred in Portland.
Trump and Vance have stated palpable untruths about what happened, to defend their goons. Both the videos of the incident and an eyewitness, less than 10 feet away with a good vantage point, make it clear that the ICE agent was gratuitously approaching, and trying to enter, the car. Trump and especially Vance have claimed the ICE goon shot in self-defense. Against what? You approach the driver-side of a car that is (apparently) trying to leave the area, you pull on the door handle, which doesn’t open, then you fire three shots at the driver through the window, killing her—and that’s somehow you defending yourself?! [Later edit: the killer was not the one who tried to open the door; he was standing in front of the front left edge of the car.]
Trump has claimed that the victim was part of a “far Left” network. Even if true, which I’ve heard no evidence to support, how does that justify killing her? If far Left organizations are protesting ICE and deportations, good for them.
The two young people shot in Portland were not killed and are in the hospital. The Trump line is that they were part of a criminal drug gang and were here illegally. Drug gangs exist only because of the drug Prohibition. There are no Gatorade gangs, no chocolate bar cartels. Why not? Because these things are not illegalized and their prices are such as earn an average rate of profit.
The federal border agency was stopping vehicles in a “targeted” manner—meaning: stopping drivers who looked Hispanic.
All of this crime, violence, and now government goon squads, is due to the widespread fear of foreigners.
And it’s a perceptual-level mentality: there would be no ICE and no immigrant hysteria if the people entering this country were solely from Canada, the UK, and Scandinavia. Sure, the labor unions would still be yelling about lost jobs, but that is not sufficient to galvanize a group as large as MAGA.
The public’s wrong view of immigrants and wrong ideas regarding drugs are enabling a power-mad low-life to change America into a police state.
The public’s wrong view could not have happened without the destruction of the concept of individual rights. That destruction began in the ivory towers of Europe in the early 19th century. The Progressive movement brought the anti-rights view to America at the turn of the 20th century.
The anti-rights view didn’t have to win. The reason that it won is that “rights” are a very abstract normative concept, and until Ayn Rand no one was able to defend the relation of abstractions to concretes or to ground morality in the facts.
The ultimate reason that ICE exists and that they murder is the lack of a theory of concept-formation, of free will, and of objectivity—including objectivity in ethics.
That ignorance, played upon by Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, permitted Jeremy Bentham to proclaim 20 years after Kant’s Critique that rights are “nonsense upon stilts.” And that has been the “settled science” about rights ever since.
Here are the essentials.
1. ICE men are not police officers. Disobeying them is not anarchistic because their function and raison d’etre are to grab people and deport them.
Yes, given the laws against immigration, their actions could be called “law enforcement” in the abstract, but as we have seen, ICE acts arbitrarily, violently, thuggishly. They do not restrict their actions to criminalized immigrants. Or, more precisely, they, not the law, decide what the scope of their actions are.
The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts. The nature of ICE as an entity is: arbitrary force. They are thugs. I would never refer to them as “law enforcement.”
(My use of “Gestapo” is figurative. Literally, ICE is the transition to that kind of evil agency.)
2. One of the goons tells Good to get out of her car. Why? Do they have the authority to pull protestors out of their cars? No.
Is it anarchy not to obey a senseless command from a paramilitary, non-police goon? No.
And one of the goons actually tries to open the car door! Where do they get off doing that?! In that situation, I too would try to drive away. As someone pointed out, officers had a license plate and could easily have arrested Mrs. Good subsequently. Instead, Ross killed her.
3. Stuart Feldman raises several factual issues, but there’s one thing left out of this one:
Did Ross see her turn right soon enough, or was he focused on the scene of his fellow agent starting to be pulled along with the car? I have no idea.
Later video shows that Ross looking through the windshield must have seen her turning the steering wheel to the right, away from him. That alone, if I saw it correctly, is enough to put the lie to the charge of self-defense.
4. How on earth could any sane man fear for his life when a car that is stopped a few feet away from you starts to move? You are not squarely in front of the car, but at its front edge. As everyone knows, intuitively, the car can’t get up to any reasonable speed to clip you before you can hop back out of the way. This was not a dragster but an ordinary sedan. The bullet hole I saw was on the corner of the windshield, showing that he was not in front of the car.
Further, the time Ross spends drawing his gun he could have spent stepping away to avoid being hit. Look at the frames of the video that show Ross standing still and drawing his gun.
This was not self-defense. Fear of being run over could not have been his motivation in standing still, drawing his gun, and killing Good.
I repeat that there is eyewitness testimony:
an eyewitness, less than 10 feet away with a good vantage point, make it clear that the ICE agents were gratuitously approaching, and trying to enter, the car.
If it wasn’t self-defense, then it was an execution. That’s what it looks like to me.
5. Skepticism. Distinguish a court finding from a private judgment. There is ample evidence for anyone who looks into it to conclude privately that this is murder. If you have grounds to think that a trial may bring out exculpatory evidence, then you can qualify it and even retreat to “highly likely.”
But the big picture is: Trump’s goon squad, created out of xenophobia, shot a non-violent protestor three times in the face, killing her.
***The audio file for this essay is at the bottom.
“I swear by Christ—the greatest socialist in history.”—Hugo Chavez, Second Inauguration Speech, 2007
“Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.”—Mikhail Gorbachev, Daily Telegraph, 1992
This essay, along with the two previous essays (“Communism as Christian Heresy” and “The Death of God and the Birth of Socialism”), is an attempt to understand how and why so many Christians are or have become socialists over the course of the last century and a half. To repeat: this is simply a fact—a demonstrable fact that cannot and must not be evaded by those Christians who consider themselves to be politically conservative, libertarian, or classical liberal. More to the point, the important question that must be answered by conservative Christians is: what is the moral foundation of socialism and does that foundation have anything to do with Christianity?
Everything depends upon how we answer this question.
ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS FROM COMMUNISM TO CHRISTIANITY
Consider another observable fact: the Christian convert to socialism and communism almost always begins with residual guilt toward the poor and resentment toward the wealthy that he or she was taught as a child in Sunday school. Exploiting Christian guilt is the specialty of the Left.
This fact more than any other explains why Republicans so often support the welfare State. Last year, Georgia Lieutenant Governor and Republican, Geoff Duncan, switched parties because, as he said, his Christian belief to love his neighbor was better achieved by supporting the policies of the socialist welfare State promoted by the Democrats. A decade earlier, former conservative congressman and Ohio Governor, John Kasich, lectured fellow Republicans imploring them to support expanding the welfare State because “when you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”
Weaponized guilt—Christian guilt—is and has been the source of the Left’s extraordinary psychological power and political success in advancing their cause. We can clearly see this in Marx’s first great disciple after Engels, Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), often called the “Pope of Marxism,” who demonstrated the ethical connections between Christianity and communism in his influential Foundations of Christianity (1908).
From a communist perspective, according to Kautsky, The Holy Bible’s New Testament teaches pity for the poor and resentment toward the rich. To be clear, both the communist and the Christian typically distinguish between the collective wealth of a nation, which they don’t oppose per se, and differentiating or the relative wealth of individuals, which they do oppose. Both the communist and the Christian would presumably be supportive of all men being wealthy (or all men being poor), but they oppose individuals who are wealthier than others. They would prefer all men to be poor than for some to be rich and some poor, and this is of course the reality in all communist nations throughout history. This means that what they really hate is inequality of wealth, and what they love is equality of wealth. The communist and the Christian assume that all differentiating wealth is the result of theft and exploitation. To be rich therefore is to be unjust, which means wicked. They want all men to be the same: either equally wealthy or equally poor. Differences or inequality are not to be tolerated. This is Kautsky’s major point in the Foundations of Christianity.
To support his claim, Kautsky makes much of the story of Lazarus in the Gospel according to St. Luke, which clearly states that the rich man, simply because he is rich (not because he’s unjust or uncharitable), goes to Hades, while the poor man, Lazarus, is taken by the angels to sit with Abraham in heaven simply because he is poor and suffering. The moral status of neither man is stated. Whether they are deserving of their condition is not stated, but the assumption is that neither is deserving. The rich man does not deserve his wealth, and the poor man does not deserve his poverty. Nothing is said about the rich man being a sinner or the poor man being a saint. In fact, it’s not even stated whether the rich man refused to feed Lazarus or even to allow him to eat scraps from the rich man’s table. Instead, the wealthy man is condemned solely because he is well off, and the poor man is praised simply because he is poor. When the rich man cries out to Abraham for help, he is told: “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented (16:25).” It is not enough to demand of the wealthy man that he share; no, he must be punished and made to suffer by virtue of his having become wealthy with no concern for how his wealth was created. Nor are we to morally evaluate and judge Lazarus. This is worse than moral relativism. It is the moral inversion of good and bad.
The story of Lazarus is important for Kautsky because it demonstrates the similarity between the Christian and communist evaluations of the poor and rich and the relationship between the two. Both Christian and communist believe that the poor man is good because he is poor, and they believe the rich man is bad because he is rich. What that means, of course, is that the poor man must be rewarded simply because he is poor, and the rich man must be punished simply because he is rich (see Luke 6:20-25; Luke 16:19-25; James 5:1-6). In the twentieth century, Marx’s descendants found a quick and easy way to punish the rich: torture and then kill them.
The question of who can and cannot enter the earthly community being founded by Jesus (“the kingdom of God is at hand,” Mark 1:15) is clear: the poor may enter (see Luke 6:20) and the rich may not, or at least it is hard for them to do so. The only hope that the rich man has to pass through the gates of the New Jerusalem is to give his wealth voluntarily to the poor man. But even then, it may not be enough, for “beside all this, between us [those in heaven] and you [those in Hades] there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. (Luke 16:26).” This new society will be without socio-economic classes. All men shall be the same or at least relatively similar in terms of wealth.
The last line of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus clearly suggests that the teaching of Jesus would have been approved by “Moses and the prophets (Luke 16:31).” Indeed, the New Testament seems to echo the moral viewpoint of the Old Testament both in what it judges as wicked and praises as good. The alleged or assumed crimes of the wealthy (e.g., violence, fraud, and exploitation) are committed against the poor, the lame, the suffering, the widow, and the orphan who are innocent by virtue of their status (from the Old Testament, see Job 20:10, 18, 19, 24: 3, 6, 10, 11; Psalms 10:2, 14-15, 62:10, 74:19, 82:3-4, 86:1, 94:3, 6, 146:9; Isaiah 5:8, 52:3, 53:9, 58:7-12, 59:2-4, 65:2, 5, 13, 17-18, 25; Jeremiah 5:27-28, 6:6-7; Amos 3:10, 5:7, 11; Micah 2:1-2; and Habakkuk 1:1-3, 14-1). In Psalms 55:11, for instance, the idea of market transactions, which presuppose self-interest, private property, division of labor, competition, trade, and profit, is said to be anathema to a Godly man and a just society, for there “deceit and guile depart not from her streets [i.e., the market place].” In the Psalter, there are over 51 references to either the “poor,” the “needy,” the “lowly,” or the “indigent,” all of whom suffer at the hands of the wicked.
And who are the wicked?
We are told in Psalms that the wicked are those who are rich and who “persecute the poor” and who are “boasteth of his hearts desire, and blesseth the covetous.” The greedy, rich man’s “eyes privily set against the poor. He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net (Psalms 10:2-3, 8-9).” The bodies of the greedy rich men are “fat and sleek,” their “pride is their necklace; violence covers them are a garment,” and “they threaten oppression.” These men, says the Psalter, “are the wicked.” They are “always at ease” and they “increase in riches (Psalms 73:3-12).” One is here, of course, reminded of Marx’s discussion of Jews and capitalists in “On the Jewish Question,” where he describes them in morally derogatory terms as “hucksters.”
The Prophets of the Old Testament detest how the rich acquire and accumulate property, which can only be explained by the chicanery, exploitation, abuse, and violence perpetrated by the wealthy on the destitute. The Prophets’ motive in condemning the wealthy is their alleged knowledge of how and why the wealthy have committed an injustice. But the ultimate judgment against the rich is not that they committed a particular crime or sin to gain their wealth, but rather that they simply accumulated one thing after another. The wickedness of the wealthy consists in their having grown rich because they are selfish. And what shall be God’s punishment for the crime of accumulating riches? The answer, which appears first in Isaiah 5:9-1 and then most brutally in Micah 2:3, is annihilation: “Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, against this family do I devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks.” The Lord’s Prophets seek to bring into being a society where there are no differences of wealth between men, and this can only come about by eliminating self-interest from human nature and reconstituting it with a moral philosophy of universal self-sacrifice.
But we are still left wondering how the wealthy become rich if they have not lied, cheated, or stolen. What is the nature of their accumulated wealth?
For millennia, the rich have become wealthy because they have sold something for a price either higher than they either paid for it or produced it. In other words, they have made a profit.
And what does the Old Testament say about profit?
In the Book of Isaiah, the Prophet warns the powerful men of Israel who “are greedy dogs which can never have enough” and who “all look to their own way, every one for his gain (56:11). And in Proverbs 1:19 and 15:27, King Solomon says, “So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof,” and “He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house.” Profit seeking is morally wicked, according to the Old Testament, because it creates wealth differentiation, and, most importantly, it is motivated by greed or selfishness. This interpretation of the Old Testament is supported by the Church Fathers, including Saint Jerome, who said: “Avarice, the root of all evils, has such a hold on us that we do not consider the mouths of those who come to us, but the hands.”
Likewise, in the Apocryphal Book of Tobit (4:7), Tobit advises his son Tobias to “Give alms of thy goods to all that live justly; and turn not away thy face from any poor man: for so it shall come to pass that the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee.” Furthermore, the Old Testament disapproves of profit associated with commerce (Ecclesiasticus 27:1-2) and interest (see Exodus 22:44; Leviticus 25:36, 37, Deuteronomy 23:19, Ezekiel 18:8, 13, 17, 22:12, Psalms 15:15; and Proverbs 28:8).
And in the New Testament (James 5:1-6), wealth qua wealth is cursed for its own sake and condemned with no reason or evidence given to justify the judgment: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.” Like modern Leftists today, James accuses the wealthy of crimes (e.g., fraud and murder) with no evidence. If—and I repeat if—James’s accusations are nothing more than false accusations (and why should a just person accept them on faith), then what he is really condemning is not only commerce and interest for profit but also production for profit. In other words, the origin of profits and wealth created by production of one kind or another is unjust and therefore immoral.
Later in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a wealthy ruler he must sell all he has and turn over his wealth to the poor if is to receive eternal life in heaven. The wealthy ruler is not being asked to give some of his wealth to the poor but all of it. This is because, according to Jesus, it is difficult for those who have wealth to “enter into the kingdom of God!” The truth is, according to Jesus, that “it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Luke 18:24-25).” Note that the rich man is damned not because he has sinned but simply because he is rich, and the clear suggestion is that differentiating wealth is a sin per se. Otherwise, why condemn it without evidence of a crime?
In the end, Christianity forces men to make a choice: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon [riches, property, wealth].” (Matthew 6:24)” and of course 1 Timothy famously asserts that “the love of money is the root of all evil (6:10).” In fact, Jesus says that any man who “forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple (Luke:14:33).”
And then of course, there is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus passes judgment on the poor and the rich:
Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . . But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep (Luke 6:20-25).
Returning to Karl Kautsky, we note that he highlighted these passages (and many more), to demonstrate to the Christians of his time that their principles share common features with those of the communists. He is teaching them that wealth and the enjoyment of one’s wealth are sins and therefore to be condemned, while also teaching them that poverty and suffering are virtues and therefore to be praised. According to Kautsky, the sufferings, deprivations, and humiliations suffered by the poor are thoroughly unmerited. The wealthy (i.e., the bourgeoisie) must therefore atone for their crimes against the poor, while the poor (i.e., the proletariat) shall pass through the needle’s eye on the way to God’s kingdom of eternal bliss.
And how, according to Jesus, can the wealthy seek or receive forgiveness for the sin of being wealthy and assuage their guilt? He tells them to “Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again (Luke 6:30).” Luke’s Jesus then strips men of all judgment, the kind of judgment that might ask how and why some men are wealthy and some are poor. Instead, the wealthy man is commanded to “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven (Luke 6:37).” In other words, it doesn’t matter if the wealthy man made his wealth through rationality, hard work, thrift, honesty, benevolence, and entrepreneurial skill, and nor does it matter if the poor man became poor because of his irrationality, laziness, profligacy, dishonesty, malevolence, and stupor. Such things are not to be known. The rich are sinners just because and the poor are saints just because. We are not to judge the ideas, motives, or actions of men. Instead, we are to accept them simply for what they are, which is good or bad simply based on the status of their wealth.
Not surprisingly, communists such as Kautsky loved Jesus’s teaching. They used it to manipulate and convert Christians to communism, which is precisely what happened starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continued throughout the entirety of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first. The journey from the poor to the proletariat, from the rich to the bourgeoisie, and from Christian to communist, was neither long nor arduous. Socialism is a guilt-relief program.
CHRISTIAN COMMUNISM
Communism and Christianity also share a positive moral-political vision, and that vision is self-sacrificial, collectivist, and redistributionist in nature. In the Book of Luke, Jesus describes the terms, conditions and costs of discipleship by enunciating what individuals must sacrifice to be true followers of Christ. First, they must renounce—indeed, “hate”—their fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers and sisters, and, most of all, they must give up and hate even their own lives (Luke 14:26). The total sacrifice of one’s life and loved ones is at the heart of Christian discipleship. Christian love, particularly as it is explained by St. John, means sacrifice. A disciple must, in the words of Jesus, “whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:33),” which means one’s property and loved ones. The followers of Jesus must, above all else, “deny” themselves (Matthew 16:24). In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the “perfect” follower of Jesus must sell his possessions and “give to the poor (Matthew 19:21, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25).” Self-sacrifice is a Christian’s highest virtue and commandment. The sacrifice of self is a Christian’s highest duty.
Instead of loving people for selfish reasons (i.e., for the happiness and joy they give us), Christians are commanded by Jesus (his “new commandment” beyond God’s original ten) to “love one another (John 13:34),” which means to love indiscriminately as duty and a sacrifice. Christians are commanded to “Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again (Luke 6:30).” Thou shalt giveth and not receiveth. This is the indispensable condition for being a disciple of Christ. Indeed, so radical is Christ’s moral teaching that he commands us to love our enemies:
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth . . . Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; . . . Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:38, 43-44, 48)
It should be noted that Jesus’s “good tidings” or “good news” are not directed only to his Apostles or to monks in a monastery; instead, he spoke to any man, woman, or child that would listen and follow him. The Apostle Luke tells us that Jesus spoke to the “great multitudes with him.”
In the Old Testament, God speaks through Isaiah not only to the Babylonian exiled Israelites but to all men everywhere when he says, “Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.” This vision of a good society is replicated in Marx’s communist society. Marx envisioned an entirely marketless society controlled and directed from the top-down by an elite corps of social engineers, who replace God or the Apostles. These central planners determine production outputs (i.e., “From each according to his ability”), and then how goods and services are redistributed for the common good (i.e., “to each according to his needs”). The production and distribution of material goods in a Marxian society is thus guided by two principles: first, material goods are to be produced for direct use or use-value (i.e., need) only; second, material goods are to be redistributed for the benefit of the whole community. In the place of money, the State pays workers by giving them vouchers to be redeemed at government-owned stores so that its citizens will not have more material goods than they can use at any given time. After all, the enemy of being is having. Poverty is not simply the unfortunate result of Marxism—it is the goal.
In the Acts of the Apostles in The Holy Bible, Jesus’s disciples form a Christian collectivist society where property is shared between all men. The Apostles’ acts deal with “all that Jesus began both to do and teach, . . . after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen” (Acts I:1-2).” The Apostle Peter then reminded his brothers that they were to fulfill the teachings of Scripture. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the 12 Apostles formed a community in Jerusalem based on Jesus’s conception of love, or agape, which taught all men to love their neighbor as themselves. To the Apostle’s community were added “about three thousand souls,” who “stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship (Acts 2: 41-42).”
But what did the principle of Christian love mean in practice?
This new Christian community, a form of primitive communism, had “all things common,” and they “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:44-45).
This Christian community, formed and guided by agape, was “of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” All the new members who joined the Apostle’s community sold their private property and turned all their wealth over to the Apostles (following Christ’s admonition to do so), who then “distributed to each as any had need (Acts 2:42-46, 3:32-35).” There was no private property in this ideal Christian community and all wealth was redistributed and shared by all. The moral intention of this new community was to replace a society in which there were rich and poor with a caring society in which all were the same. This was and is the model for how to live set by Jesus and his closest disciples.
Clearly drawing inspiration from the Apostle’s acts, Karl Marx sought to work out the meaning and challenges associated with the Apostles’ collectivist redistribution. In many ways the most revealing document in Marx’s oeuvre is his Critique of the Gotha Program published in 1875 in which he attempted to explain the moral parameters and mechanisms by which the new socialist society would redistribute the wealth of Peter to pay for Paul.
The challenge that Marx confronted was this: how to reconcile equality and inequality. In other words, Marx believed that men should be treated as equal in value (i.e., as the same), but he also recognized that there was an inequality of talents between men, and he furthermore recognized that some men have a greater capacity to produce more through their labor. Capitalism recognizes and rewards these differences leading to social, political, and economic inequality. Marx knew that the inequalities of abilities and capacities could never be eradicated, but his moral-political goal was equality by which he meant species-sameness. Thus, the question became: can men be made equal or the same? To that end, he shifted the standard of value from production to labor. In other words, workers would not be rewarded based on what they produced but rather on the amount of time that they labored. If two men in the same job both work the same number hours but one produces more than the other, they shall be rewarded equally for the equal time they worked and the equal labor they expended.
Time and labor become Marx’s standard of value. (This only makes sense, though, if both workers expend the same amount of labor in the same amount of time, which of course is never the case.) Marx then introduced a second standard of value by which to determine what is just and unjust in a community of sharing. The second standard is need. Marx recognized that the needs of a married man with eight children were unequal to the needs of a bachelor. If the bachelor’s time and labor working are the same as that of the married father of eight and if they are paid the same, there will be a profound inequality between the two workers, according to Marx. The bachelor will be much wealthier than the married father. If the bachelor is paid $100, then the married father is effectively receiving ten dollars by Marxian logic.
How does Marx solve this dilemma?
Almost as though it were paraphrased from The Bible, Marx described the communism’s moral-political ethic in language almost identical to that found in the Acts of the Apostles. In effect, Marx reinvented or revised the Christian ethic. He describes what a “co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production” that has advanced to the “higher phase of communist society” might look like and how it might work. This new communist society, the one that has restored man to his “species-being,” would take the following principle as its polestar: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Ability will be reduced to needs, which are, ironically, unequal. This is the moral ideal of communist society. (A near identical use of the phrase was employed by Stalin in the 1936 Soviet Constitution.)
In the same way that Jesus and Christianity had Saul of Tarsus (i.e., St. Paul), so Marx and communism had Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In his The State and Revolution (1918), Lenin argued (but of course only vaguely) that the transition from bourgeois man to the highest form of communist man requires a kind of spiritual purification. This requires that each man voluntarily work to the best of his ability (regardless of the return), and that each man accept only what he needs (regardless of his productivity). Such a moral-social system only works, of course, if men deny their “selfish” needs or wants and believe that to sacrifice their interests for the sake of others is their highest and most natural duty. Communist equality does not mean equality before the law; indeed, it is opposed to this bourgeois notion of equality. Instead, communist equality means equality of outcomes, and ultimately it means sameness regarding desires, needs, and ambitions. A new soul, indeed, a new man is needed. Human nature must be changed, and man’s original species-being must be restored. This is the communist new man envisioned by Marx and Lenin.
But how does the new communist man come into being?
The answer for Lenin is clear and simple: the dictatorship of the proletariat via the Bolshevik Party and its absolute and total control of the State. The first phase of communism will be achieved by what Lenin calls “accounting and control,” by which he means an accounting of how men work (i.e., their hours and effort) and by controlling how resources are distributed and redistributed.
All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single countrywide state “syndicate”. All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations–which any literate person can perform–of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.
Lenin’s ideal communist man is a working automaton stripped of his abilities, motivations, and dreams and is driven by what Lenin calls “‘factory’ discipline” to the lowest common denominator. He becomes a field cow who eats, drinks, and produces labor at someone else’s accounting whim and for the collective good.
The problem, of course, is that the voluntarism of ability leads inevitably to the coercion of ability because those with ability will stop producing, and the voluntarism of taking only what one needs leads inevitably to taking beyond what one needs, which in turn requires coercion to investigate one’s legitimate needs. The coercion required to force those of ability to produce more and the coercion required to force those inflating needs to take less can only be monitored and controlled by the State. Still, Marx and Lenin think that all this species-love will lead to the classes society where men and women will enjoy the universal brotherhood of man.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Given the chaos, destruction, murder, torture, and genocide committed by socialism and communism in practice, surely it is necessary that good men and woman stand up and denounce these evil ideologies and denounce them unequivocally. Socialism and communism are obviously evil in theory and practice, and those who support them are morally wicked. These ideologies and their proponents are morally wicked because they want to hurt people (literally)—and they do. Deep in the soul of every socialist is a psychological urge to punish those who have worked hard and succeeded in life. They want to use the coercive force of the State to bend the wills of those who claim they have a right to keep what they have earned. They want to use the coercive force of the State to steal from those who produce and to force them to labor for others—and they do.
In what moral universe is slavery not wrong, even if it’s just a little bit of slavery? And in what moral universe is it ok to guilt people to live their lives for the sake of someone else—someone else they don’t even know—because a third party (usually someone they don’t know) demanded they do so? All decent, thinking, and moral people know this wrong—deeply and profoundly wrong.
It is also imperative that we judge and condemn all other moral-political philosophies that are separated from socialism and communism by degree only or which serve (knowingly or unknowingly) the interests of socialism and communism. Socialism and communism are Christian problems, or at least they should be treated as problems for conservative, libertarian, and classical liberal Christians who oppose all forms of socialism.
Certain mainline Christian churches are deeply compromised by socialism and communism. As we now know, for many socialists and communists Christianity is the gateway drug to support government coerced redistribution. Consider, for instance, the so-called “Seven Sisters,” namely, those mainline Protestant denominations—e.g., the United Methodist Church (UMC), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ (UCC), the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA), and the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church)—all of which actively support socialism to one degree or another. And it’s no less true that the Catholic Church has a socialism problem in its ranks. The vast majority of American Christians, across all major churches, believe the government (i.e., you) has a moral responsibility to provide a social safety net for the poor. The primary debate amongst Christian churches is not whether the government should have this role, but how large that role should be. In other words, they’re debating which hairs to split.
It’s no longer good enough for my conservative, libertarian, and classical-liberal Christian friends to tell me that these churches do not represent “true” Christianity, and so therefore we needn’t worry that they are corrupting the Gospel because they’re not Christians. This is an evasion. It doesn’t work because the Christian socialists say they’re the true Christians. Christianity can’t be both pro-socialism and anti-socialism. It’s one or the other.
To my Christian friends, I leave you with these last words: the ball is now in your court.
Have a great week!
**Audio file of “When Marx Met Jesus.” (The nice Englishman who has done my recording thus far was automatically replaced today by my audio creation team with the voice of a nice American woman.)
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