Marxism Kills the Soul

Conservatives must remember not to make their economic arguments in purely material terms.

Many people on the “right,” especially among “classical liberals,” have spent the better of a century arguing against Marxism on purely material grounds, rather than metaphysical ones. As a result, many today people assume that Marxism is merely an ineffective economic system — which it definitively is — though in doing so they make a shallow critique of it and forget that it is an ideology that is spiritually suicidal, and separates man from both his Creator and from natural law. As Gary Houchens points out, liberalism leads to Marxism, and “conservatives have no need to look to leftist economic models for inspiration.”

The central economic critique against Marxism accepted the same material assumptions about man as the Marxists did, missing another critical reason why Marxism had to be defeated: Marxism and the Marxist worldview are irreconcilable with both Christianity and classical philosophy, the two pillars of the Western world.

Due to its “historical relativism,” Marxism, as shall be discussed, has no room for objective morality or virtue, both of which are necessary for a civilization to avoid barbarism and are major elements in a Christian or classical understanding of the world. Furthermore, the Marxist denial of these things leads to a disregard for the dignity of the human person.

The West, while correct in attacking the folly of Marxist economics, ultimately only aided in allowing parts of the Marxist worldview to infiltrate the West and propagate its ideology onto unsuspecting populations who viewed communism as merely an economic system instead of also a spiritual one. As a result, large parts of the modern West stand in contrast to the Christian and classical roots of our civilization, and have been consumed by Marxist ideas, even if those who profess them are themselves not economic Marxists.

This has resulted in the death of religion in the West, as well as the death of natural law, as Marxist presuppositions run rampant through society. This can even be seen among so-called “conservatives” — many of them who are actually right-liberals — who accept Marxist presuppositions about man being purely economic and as a result end up sabotaging.

One of the most dangerous aspects of Marxism is its belief in “historicism,” which can also be described as “historical relativism.” Historicism is a belief not unique to Marx, but instead one inherited by Hegel, and holds that history is the unraveling of various deterministic processes and that human action is not due to free will, but is instead predetermined by the historical (for Hegel) and material (for Marx) context that one inhabits.

Race, gender and sex, age, and countless other categories of “power imbalance” have been added by various intersectional and postmodern authors. The result of this is the belief is that there is no such thing as objective morality, virtue or even reality because all truth is subjective and determined by factors beyond ones control, and that there is likewise no free-will as human action is predetermined by context. As a result, the shaping of societal factors through politics becomes necessary, and the value of human dignity is likewise diminished, as human life is deemed as less important by the Marxists than the “progress” that may be achieved.

Much as there is nothing rational about the philosophy known as “rationalism,” there is equally nothing historical about “historicism” and indeed many of its beliefs have been debunked both by historians and scientists alike. For instance, the scientific work on cognition done by Tversky and Kahneman both show that decision making (whether intuitive or rational) is universal, and thus not predetermined by whatever supposed context that Marxists seek to claim.

However, historical relativism is still alive and well in academia. For instance, in a recent, heavily publicized and acclaimed attack on free-will, Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford academic, claimed that because involuntary factors can influence our actions, we therefore lack free-will. This is, of course, absurd, and as the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has written, it is necessary to distinguish between the agent (the person acting with free will) and the arena (the setting in which he acts and influences him), and that the latter, though influencing the former, does not actually diminish free-will nor is it deterministic, as the Marxists would claim.

Another example of this Hegelian and Marxist influence on the popular imagination is the leftist obsession with supposedly intangible but omnipresent “socioeconomic factors” on any human action, which likewise takes a deterministic view of human action and denies individual agency. 

Even things as ostensibly apolitical as Shakespearean studies have been severly damaged by Marxism and its Hegelian “historicist” presuppositions. For instance, as recounted in his book Shakespeare and Cognition, Neema Parvini discusses how things such as character analysis in Shakespeare studies have been destroyed by Hegelian and Marxist “historicist” and historical relativist beliefs, including their successors in postmodern theory.

The depth of Shakespeare’s work and the effort put into the characters is ignored by mainstream academia in favor of a deterministic analysis that focuses purely on class, race, and gender. Scholars who try to instead focus on things that are as intuitively necessary to the study of literature, such as character analysis, are by contrast branded as “backwards” and shut out from academia, just as Parvini was for speaking positively about the renowned Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley and Bradley’s work on character analysis.

While this focus on Marx’s deterministic philosophy and its impact on modern academia may seem tangential to the discussion of an ideology that produced monsters such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, it is indeed a necessary one as it shows the depth with which Marxist ideas have infiltrated academia and the popular imagination.

Furthermore, these deterministic and relativistic ultimately deny the existence of free-will, a position which puts them both at odds with classical philosophy and the perennial teaching of the Church, thus leading the Marxists to deny a belief in virtue and the human ability to choose what is good. These beliefs also deny objective morality and even objective reality, thus again contradicting both the Church and classical philosophy, and creating a world without right or wrong.

This lack of belief in objective morality and in virtue leads to the jettisoning of any morality or limits on human action, and results in a “ends-justify-the-means” approach to politics, the fruits of which one can see in the hundred-million dead caused by Marxism. After all, if morality is purely subjective, God does not exist, and power is all that matters, what is to prevent the slaughter of millions in the name of “progress.”

It was a mistake for the West to oppose Marxism on purely economic grounds. Marxist economics are disastrous for a country’s wealth and the common good and it is just as damaging to the soul of a people. Marxism remains popular in the West despite the untold misery that it has inflicted onto the planet because the philosophical tenets that it posits have become normative for the Western world.

The true evil manifested in various Leftist regimes of the 20th century was not solely due to economic inefficiency, but instead due to the willful destruction of human life and denial of morality in order to pursue “progress.” Even the famines caused by collectivization in the USSR or China cannot be viewed as economic in origin, as both Stalin and Mao both knew that their policies would lead to millions of deaths, but viewed those deaths as a prerequisite to “progress.”

Today, many liberals, of both a left-liberal and right-liberal disposition, end up aiding Marxism and deny a real promulgation of the common good by accepting the material presuppositions of the Marxists, even if they simultaneously make correct economic critiques of Marxism. If the West seeks to truly defeat Marxism, we need to stop talking about the free market absolutism and instead focus on how Marxism is an ideology that runs counter to any morality and to natural law.

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