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Whisper Transcript | Transcript Only Page

00:00:00.000 | I am James Hong and welcome to the Surpassing Value Podcast.
00:00:15.620 | The fuel and desire for this podcast was born out of a compulsion to flesh out what's
00:00:19.740 | been going on in the midst of an ocean of megaphones that may not actually withstand
00:00:24.600 | the test of scrutiny.
00:00:26.620 | As a signpost theologian, I will do my best to filter out the impurities and point people
00:00:32.320 | in the right direction.
00:00:38.320 | For episodes 7 and 8, I wanted to spend some time and talk about Karl Marx and Marxism.
00:00:47.060 | I initially tried to make this one episode, but once I put the episode together, I realized
00:00:52.680 | it was way too big of a beast, so I cut it up into two different episodes.
00:00:59.300 | If possible, the best thing to do will be listen to the episodes back to back only because
00:01:05.980 | these ideas are so dense and they're so interlinked.
00:01:13.720 | On to Marxism.
00:01:16.000 | Marxism has been thrown around quite a bit recently.
00:01:20.500 | In conservative circles, it's become a scarlet letter of sorts and my perception is that
00:01:26.600 | many people who throw the term might not have the tightest grasp of what it is.
00:01:34.120 | There are others who immediately upon hearing the word decry it as some kind of scapegoat
00:01:39.080 | only used to defend ruthless capitalism.
00:01:44.280 | With respect to social justice issues, Patrice Collors, one of the co-founders of the organization
00:01:49.920 | called BLM, described herself as a "trained Marxist."
00:01:56.080 | So what exactly is it?
00:01:58.120 | Is it merely an economic philosophy that's either harmful, benign, or neutral?
00:02:03.440 | If it is an economic philosophy, what's the danger in embracing it?
00:02:07.560 | Shouldn't good-hearted people such as Christians be compassionate and isn't one way to be
00:02:13.160 | compassionate and embrace of Marxism?
00:02:16.840 | Moreover, the dialectic that is typically framed is Marxism versus capitalism.
00:02:24.600 | So as Christians, we need not be worried since we are above this dialectic, or so the narrative
00:02:33.240 | seems to be.
00:02:35.280 | Then there are others who will be quick to assail you even if you attempt to levy some
00:02:39.600 | type of critique of Marxism because somehow that just seems to be the morally superior
00:02:46.440 | thing to do while somehow displaying their own cognitive dissonance of their own attitude.
00:02:53.800 | Whatever the case, Marxism, once thought to be completely dormant by the majority, has
00:02:59.760 | found renewed interest for differing motivations while evoking differing sentiments.
00:03:07.900 | For that reason alone, it might be wise to see for ourselves what this is and go to the
00:03:13.320 | source.
00:03:14.320 | My plan this episode is to lay out for you exactly what it is by going to the source.
00:03:20.040 | But in order for the source to make more sense, I want to take a little bit of time talking
00:03:25.720 | about the Industrial Revolution.
00:03:28.000 | It was during the Industrial Revolution that the Communist Manifesto, aka Marxism, was
00:03:33.040 | birthed.
00:03:34.460 | It was during the Industrial Revolution that goods that were outside the reach of the masses
00:03:41.360 | started to become much more affordable.
00:03:43.720 | Modern labor was able to be allocated much more efficiently because of the inventions
00:03:47.940 | of the time of various different machinery like the telegraph and the spindle.
00:03:53.960 | Importing and exporting around the globe began to abound for the first time.
00:03:58.520 | Modern medicine was able to make leaps.
00:04:01.300 | It created a diversified panel of jobs, allowing for greater opportunity.
00:04:07.160 | It just created more economic opportunities for more people, vastly more people.
00:04:14.400 | At the very same time, it led to massive overcrowding in urban cities since that's where the epicenters
00:04:22.280 | of the revolution was, massive amounts of pollution in those areas, and extremely poor
00:04:29.880 | working conditions for these masses.
00:04:33.880 | In order to meet the demand for labor, it was typical to have very poorly constructed
00:04:39.060 | housing for these workers right next to the epicenters.
00:04:46.600 | Let's not even talk about child labor laws since they just didn't exist back then.
00:04:51.180 | The prevailing ideology during this explosion, during the Industrial Revolution, was laissez-faire
00:04:58.280 | capitalism which could be defined as an economic system in which transactions between private
00:05:03.600 | parties are absent of any form of economic interventionism such as regulation and subsidies.
00:05:12.640 | To put the Industrial Revolution in one sentence, it would not be unfair to say it was the best
00:05:19.800 | of times and it was the worst of times, just like most of history.
00:05:27.360 | That was the Industrial Revolution.
00:05:30.720 | Karl Marx himself was born in 1818 in Prussia.
00:05:39.360 | Marx grew to love philosophy with a passion, particularly the works of George Hegel.
00:05:45.080 | It would be accurate to say that his entire worldview was shaped by his thought.
00:05:49.720 | George Hegel was a recently deceased philosopher and his works were widely discussed in Europe
00:05:56.080 | at the time and he was the father of the Hegelian dialectic.
00:06:02.120 | Marx himself had somewhat of an up-and-down life.
00:06:04.520 | He eventually ended up penniless, dying from illness with about 13 people attending his
00:06:10.680 | funeral.
00:06:11.680 | Interestingly, being a lifelong atheist, he was buried in East London in Highgate Cemetery
00:06:16.560 | in an area reserved for atheists and agnostics.
00:06:20.680 | It was in between this time he befriended Friedrich Engels and wrote Das Kapital, which
00:06:27.040 | was a critique of capitalism, and The Communist Manifesto.
00:06:31.720 | The Communist Manifesto begins with the proposition that the entirety of human history is one
00:06:38.400 | group exploiting another.
00:06:41.240 | This building block is axiomatic for Karl Marx.
00:06:47.720 | Let me quote to you from the Communist Manifesto.
00:06:53.680 | The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggles.
00:06:59.120 | Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman,
00:07:04.720 | in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried
00:07:11.200 | on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either
00:07:16.980 | in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
00:07:23.480 | classes.
00:07:26.520 | So again, we have two classes here.
00:07:28.800 | You are either oppressor or the oppressed.
00:07:32.980 | In other words, and he's going to state this in The Communist Manifesto, you are either
00:07:36.400 | the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
00:07:39.280 | The bourgeoisie is not some fancy name for the 1%.
00:07:42.280 | The bourgeoisie is just the middle class.
00:07:45.480 | The proletariat is the working class.
00:07:48.720 | The working class, don't think of a contemporary blue collar worker.
00:07:52.960 | The working class during that time will be something more akin to someone working, let's
00:07:58.480 | say, in a sweatshop in some part of Southeast Asia.
00:08:03.120 | The proletariat, according to Karl Marx, is at the mercy of the bourgeoisie.
00:08:07.880 | The bourgeoisie has and continues to oppress the proletariat, and the continuity of oppression
00:08:14.140 | is easy to see, according to Karl Marx.
00:08:17.080 | Again, the bourgeoisie is not the king.
00:08:20.360 | The bourgeoisie is just what we would think of as the middle class.
00:08:27.080 | So according to Karl Marx, because of the rise of global imports and exports, we just
00:08:33.500 | talked about the Industrial Revolution, because of the rise of global imports, exports, the
00:08:38.880 | bourgeoisie will always continue to maintain their dominance over the proletariat.
00:08:44.840 | Less civilized nations will eventually be subsumed within the civilized nations, resulting
00:08:51.040 | in only an increase of power to the bourgeoisie.
00:08:54.600 | Despite all this, Marx predicts that the bourgeoisie will eventually be overthrown by the proletariat.
00:09:01.760 | Because of overproduction and overconsumption, resentment between the two classes will spill
00:09:06.400 | over into a new revolution.
00:09:10.600 | What Marx misses in the Communist Manifesto is that in reality, people typically move
00:09:25.240 | from the proletariat class to the bourgeoisie class.
00:09:29.400 | That's how freedom works.
00:09:32.660 | According to Marx though, a person is stagnant, meaning once you're in the proletariat class,
00:09:38.280 | you stay there.
00:09:39.280 | Once you're in the bourgeoisie class, you stay there.
00:09:41.480 | But in reality, even back then, what he missed was that people will typically start in the
00:09:46.920 | proletariat class, and in a free society, you have the room and you have the ability
00:09:54.200 | to move into the bourgeoisie class.
00:09:57.440 | This phenomenon is documented and proven heavily by the economist Thomas Sowell.
00:10:12.120 | Because of Marx's own philosophy, one of his goals is the abolition of private property.
00:10:26.880 | And I quote, "In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
00:10:32.020 | single sentence, "Abolition of private property."
00:10:36.040 | We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally
00:10:40.540 | acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be
00:10:45.680 | the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence.
00:10:50.080 | In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property.
00:10:56.000 | Precisely so.
00:10:57.680 | That is just what we intend."
00:11:03.960 | So Marx understood the accusation levied at him was that he wanted to abolish private
00:11:10.640 | property.
00:11:11.640 | And he says, "You are exactly right.
00:11:14.360 | That is exactly what I want to do."
00:11:17.880 | For Marx, private property is inherently linked with power.
00:11:29.680 | Marx then goes on to define what he perceives to be the bourgeoisie definition of individuality
00:11:35.880 | and freedom.
00:11:38.500 | He goes on to define it because he does not like individuality or freedom.
00:11:43.120 | So he is going to assign some exclusive meanings, "And the abolition of this state of things
00:11:52.540 | is called by the bourgeoisie abolition of individuality and freedom, and rightly so.
00:11:58.520 | The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom
00:12:04.600 | is undoubtedly aimed at.
00:12:07.360 | By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free
00:12:12.600 | selling and buying.
00:12:14.280 | But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also.
00:12:19.320 | This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other brave words of our bourgeois
00:12:23.880 | about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling
00:12:29.240 | and buying, with the unfettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when
00:12:34.240 | opposed to the communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of
00:12:39.700 | production and the bourgeoisie itself."
00:12:45.120 | According to Marx, the bourgeoisie definition of individuality is inextricably linked to
00:12:52.800 | free trade which is in turn inextricably linked to bourgeoisie power.
00:13:01.200 | Only the bourgeoisie have individuality since the laborer to him is nameless and faceless.
00:13:08.440 | According to Marx, freedom is the ability to buy, sell, and trade and only the bourgeoisie
00:13:12.320 | have that, so that must be dissolved too.
00:13:16.000 | So in order to abolish private property, the proletariat must use the vehicle of democracy
00:13:24.040 | since there are more in the proletariat class than there are in the bourgeoisie class.
00:13:30.760 | "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital
00:13:38.280 | from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, of
00:13:44.440 | the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total productive forces
00:13:50.140 | as rapidly as possible.
00:13:52.040 | Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads
00:13:57.280 | on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production by means of measure
00:14:02.240 | therefore which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of
00:14:07.360 | the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order,
00:14:13.400 | and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
00:14:20.480 | These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
00:14:23.440 | Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
00:14:30.080 | Abolition of property and land, and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
00:14:35.560 | A heavy, progressive, or graduated income tax.
00:14:39.680 | Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
00:14:43.080 | Confiscation of the property of all immigrants and rebels.
00:14:47.180 | Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank, with state
00:14:51.840 | capital and an exclusive monopoly.
00:14:55.520 | Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
00:15:00.080 | Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state.
00:15:03.240 | The bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally
00:15:07.860 | in accordance with a common plan.
00:15:10.360 | Equal liability of all to work.
00:15:12.840 | Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
00:15:16.600 | Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries.
00:15:20.400 | Equal abolition of all the distinction between the town and country, by a more equitable
00:15:25.360 | distribution of the populace over the country.
00:15:28.600 | Free education for all children in public schools.
00:15:32.200 | Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form.
00:15:35.200 | Combination of education with industrial production."
00:15:41.680 | According to Marx, once property is abolished, everything, everything will belong to the
00:15:49.120 | state and be centralized.
00:15:52.560 | There will be heavy taxation, and former property owners who fled because of the rise of this
00:15:59.840 | centralized government will have their property taken from them and now owned by the state.
00:16:05.960 | Every aspect of life is going to be centralized and belongs to the state, including the banking
00:16:14.120 | system and transportation.
00:16:16.520 | In order to keep continuity, the state will have close guards on education and the nuclear
00:16:23.480 | family as well.
00:16:26.000 | Since the current status of the family by the bourgeoisie has relegated it to nothing
00:16:31.460 | more than economics, according to Marx, the family must be abolished.
00:16:40.880 | According to Marx, the family must be abolished.
00:16:47.840 | Abolition of the family.
00:16:50.200 | Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists.
00:16:55.520 | On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
00:17:00.360 | On capital.
00:17:01.400 | On private gain.
00:17:03.400 | In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.
00:17:09.420 | But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among
00:17:14.280 | the proletarians and in public prostitution.
00:17:17.920 | The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and
00:17:23.680 | both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
00:17:31.760 | According to Marx, any fault of fractured familial relations within the proletariat
00:17:39.580 | are due to the current capitalistic system held onto by the bourgeoisie.
00:17:48.820 | Let me say it a different way.
00:17:51.840 | Any issue within the nuclear family, if you're part of the proletariat class, is completely
00:18:00.480 | the fault of the other class of people.
00:18:08.320 | Based on that reasoning, we need to do completely with the nuclear family.
00:18:15.460 | We need to completely do away with it.
00:18:18.440 | And I quote, "But," you say, "we destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace
00:18:25.160 | home education by social.
00:18:27.520 | But your education is not that also social and determined by the social conditions under
00:18:32.760 | which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools.
00:18:39.520 | The communists have not invented the intervention of society and education, and they do but
00:18:45.200 | seek to alter the character of that intervention and to rescue education from the influence
00:18:50.120 | of the ruling class.
00:18:51.840 | The bourgeoisie claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation
00:18:57.520 | of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more by the action of modern
00:19:02.520 | industry."
00:19:07.400 | According to Marx, the state will indoctrinate the children since there will be no more nuclear
00:19:15.600 | family and we need to keep communism going so the state needs to be in charge of raising
00:19:24.640 | children.
00:19:27.640 | In fact, this abolition of the nuclear family goes deep into the bonds of marriage itself.
00:19:35.520 | According to Marx, marriage itself is an impediment to the communist revolution.
00:19:43.440 | Marx ends with exactly that in the Communist Manifesto, a call to revolution.
00:19:51.240 | He bemoans how there have been softer versions of communism and that these softer versions
00:19:57.880 | only end up supporting the bourgeoisie.
00:20:01.080 | He then goes on to expand on this notion of the softer versions actually doing a disservice
00:20:07.080 | to the movement making it explicitly clear that nothing short of a revolution will do.
00:20:13.360 | According to Marx, nothing short of a revolution will do.
00:20:21.360 | The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
00:20:25.520 | They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of
00:20:31.360 | all existing social conditions.
00:20:34.040 | Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution.
00:20:38.480 | The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
00:20:42.040 | They have a world to win.
00:20:45.960 | Working men of all countries unite!
00:21:00.000 | The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
00:21:03.660 | They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of
00:21:08.240 | all existing social conditions.
00:21:10.320 | Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution.
00:21:13.660 | The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
00:21:16.580 | They have a world to win.
00:21:19.000 | Working men of all countries unite!
00:21:24.680 | The 1963 US Communist Party's Goals, this is verbatim, just put this into a search engine.
00:21:48.160 | There are 45, I'm going to read you a handful.
00:21:55.540 | Number 12 to number 23, these are their goals, 1960 US Communist Party's Goals.
00:22:02.400 | Number 12 to number 23.
00:22:04.840 | Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
00:22:09.000 | Do away with all loyalty oaths.
00:22:13.160 | Continue giving Russia access to the US Patent Office.
00:22:17.560 | Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
00:22:22.680 | Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their
00:22:28.320 | activities violate civil rights.
00:22:32.100 | Get control of the schools.
00:22:34.000 | Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda.
00:22:40.040 | Soften the curriculum.
00:22:41.500 | Get control of teachers' associations.
00:22:43.440 | Put the party line in textbooks.
00:22:46.640 | Gain control of all student newspapers.
00:22:49.440 | Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are
00:22:55.440 | under communist attack.
00:22:57.840 | Infiltrate the press.
00:22:59.600 | Get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
00:23:04.960 | Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
00:23:10.960 | Continue discrediting the American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression.
00:23:17.560 | An American communist cell was told to eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings,
00:23:23.840 | substitute shapeless, awkward, and meaningless forms.
00:23:28.240 | Control art critics and directors of art museums.
00:23:31.720 | Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.
00:23:38.400 | I quote it to you verbatim, 12 to 23 of the 45.
00:23:45.280 | Let me quote to you 27 to 31.
00:23:49.800 | Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with social religion.
00:23:56.160 | Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need
00:24:01.680 | a religious crutch.
00:24:04.320 | Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that
00:24:09.680 | it violates the principle of separation of church and state.
00:24:14.040 | Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step
00:24:18.920 | with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
00:24:24.820 | Discredit the American Founding Fathers.
00:24:26.920 | Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the common man.
00:24:31.200 | Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history
00:24:35.960 | on the ground that it was only a minor part of the big picture.
00:24:39.880 | Give more emphasis to Russian history since the communists took over.
00:24:46.560 | Number 39 to 43.
00:24:49.720 | Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive
00:24:54.840 | control over those who oppose communist goals.
00:24:58.940 | Discredit the family as an institution and encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
00:25:04.200 | Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents.
00:25:08.760 | Attribute prejudices, mental blocks, and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
00:25:15.480 | Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition
00:25:20.760 | that students and special interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve
00:25:26.200 | economic, political, or social problems.
00:25:29.680 | Overthrow all colonial governments before Native populations are ready for self-government.
00:25:35.120 | Wow.
00:25:47.840 | Maybe you're thinking, "Well, that's from 1963, right?"
00:25:54.960 | Does the listed communist goals from 1963 have any relevance to us today?
00:26:05.200 | I'm going to end this episode here, but I'll cover the rest in the next episode.
00:26:10.640 | So if possible, try to, again, as I stated in the beginning, try to listen to these episodes
00:26:14.320 | back to back because it is a little dense, just to whet your appetite a bit.
00:26:21.200 | I'll leave you with this question, along with the relevance of the U.S. Communist Party's
00:26:31.440 | goals from 1963, along with that, which I'll cover in the next episode.
00:26:39.760 | Did C.H. Spurgeon, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers, did he ever speak
00:26:49.360 | out on Marxism?
00:26:52.800 | Did he ever speak out on Marxism?
00:26:58.480 | Thanks for making it to the end.
00:27:01.040 | I'll continue to try to make the journey worth it.
00:27:04.920 | To him, the honor, glory, and eternal dominion, James Honga.
00:27:20.960 | [Music]
00:27:40.480 | (upbeat music)