Jesus was no Marxist
by Will Jones, The Conservative Woman:
You’ve got to hand it to him. Anyone else and 100million deaths as a result of attempting to implement your ideas would consign you to the gulag of history. But not dogged old Karl Marx, whose ideas just keep on resurfacing no matter how many lives are sacrificed in the cause of showing how miserably they fail.
[…] It is often suggested by Left-wing apologists that the failures of Marxism and communism are only those of the political leaders and their circumstances, and not of the pure theory penned by Marx himself. Such a defence cannot be credited, however, when it is abundantly clear that Marx personally envisaged and agitated for violent revolution, in which the labouring classes would overthrow the property-owning classes and establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. He expressly had no interest in small-scale socialist experiments and communes, as were not uncommon in 19th century Europe and America, which he criticised for their lack of ambition and failure to make a systemic difference to the exploitation of workers. The driving point of his theory was that capitalist society contained inherent class conflict which could only and would necessarily be resolved by violent crisis and revolution. Whether or not this violence can, under his determinist theory of history, fairly be described as his aim or goal, certainly he foresaw it, did not counsel to avoid it, and personally agitated for it. The charge of culpability most definitely sticks.
Some Christians have argued that Marx’s philosophy has a lot in common with the teaching of Christ and his vision of the kingdom of God. Liberation theology is heavily Marx-inspired, and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, was unequivocal in 2015 that the ‘extremely Left-wing’ maxim of Marx, from each according to his resources, to each according to his need, was the ‘theology of where I am coming from’. A considerable number of Christians see in the communist ideal of a classless and stateless society a secularised version of Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven.
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