- The Record Archives
- Volume CXVIII, No. XXII - December 1, 2005 -
Marxism is still alive and dangerous
Guest columnist
Last week, I read the following passage: "And how do we know at what point the character of a people weakens?"
The answer was: "When they give over to government those duties which they should be pleased to perform themselves.
"When they are told they will be fed and sheltered even when they won't work, when they are promised security from the cradle to the grave, when they are told the state will take over the supervision of their children and say what schooling they should receive and where.
"When they are told all these things and supinely accept them."
This passage was describing the pagan Roman empire.
Sharing these thoughts with my colleagues made me realize how little people learn from history.
Looking back at my childhood in Bulgaria, I found that it also described the atheistic Soviet empire.
And it may be describing other empires too.
The 20th century saw the rise and fall of socialism.
It sought to save the world from chaos and immorality of the market.
Instead it brought death, poverty and moral decay to billions of people.
As we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, a hope was born — the hope that the red spectre would never haunt our world again.
This is a warning to my readers that celebrating the victory over the empire of evil might be a bit premature.
Socialism is far from dead.
The free and brave can never be safe in their lands and homes while the ideas of Marx are being disseminated in one form or another.
The most vulnerable to communist poison are undergraduate students exposed to the influence of anti-capitalist professors in the fields of economics, philosophy, history and political science.
A person once observed that if you are not a socialist at the age of 20 you have no heart.
It is also true, however, that if you are still a socialist at the age of 30 you have no brain.
Any social policy founded on mistaken representation of life, even operating under the best intentions, will be doomed to failure.
"Modern" leftists redefine, often unaware, Marxist ramblings for class struggle as a fight for race, ethnic and gender equality, even as Christian efforts to help the poor.
The worst consequence of the infiltration of failed ideas in these movements is that millions of potential supporters of such vital causes are driven away.
We cannot celebrate the death of socialism until we accept one simple truth — Uncle Sam is not Santa Claus. The government is just another body of self-interested individuals.
Do we really want to let them monopolize help for the needy, or education of our children or environmental protection?
Does my article mean that we have to ignore the social problems of the day?
Of course not.
But we cannot afford to close our eyes to the grave dangers from delegating to bureaucrats those duties that we should be pleased to perform ourselves.
We are called to love our neighbor.
And loving means helping voluntarily — with a joyful heart. Christ preached individual responsibility, not delegating care for the needy to Caesar.
Let us think about that as we wish each other Merry Christmas.
This is the opinion of Alex Tokarev, an assistant professor of economics at CSB/SJU. Contact him at atokarev@csbsju.edu.