“In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as ‘we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology’. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion” — Nobel laureate and author of The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in St. Austin Review interview with Joseph Pearce, Sr., February 2003.
“To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots… Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it’s coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.” — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Socialism in reality is very different from Socialism in dreams. It is often proposed as a more or less simple centralized “economic” option, but in Marxist theory is in fact seen as the transition period between Capitalism and inexorable Communism.
Socialism is far more than a mere economic system of choice. It is comprehensive, internationalist and collectivist in scope and is built on envy and the will to power. It proposes the total “liberation” of individuals, family members(1), even human nature (e.g., gender) itself, from its “structures of oppression”. Often, though not always at first, private property is viewed with suspicion and is restricted or ultimately abolished, and whole industries can be nationalized by oligarchs in the name of “the people”.
History tells the sorry story: Socialism, under the pretext of speaking on behalf of the “disenfranchised” in society, is an adaptive, (and, at bottom, atheistic[2]) explanation of reality and seeks to increasingly control and direct “the herd” from the top down in the interests and direction of “equality”. Communism is its logical economic goal.
Free Markets by contrast cannot really amount to a world view or to a politics. It is not built on theory. Free markets are simply the non-coercive way to allow for both the free production and exchange of goods, while protecting individualist significance and freedom, unlike Communism / Marxism. And the Free Market works very effectively as history shows, even if at times it has been adulterated by forms of individual or corporate greed, e.g, violating Antitrust principles or the unjust exploitation of workers or territories. Where this exists it can and should be corrected in the interests of the common good. Such adulterations can actually serve to provoke the Socialist response.
Even China eventually had to cave to Free Market principles to sustain an economy, while retaining its Marxist authoritarianism in order to farm the human person.
Nonetheless, the Free Market, must serve the whole human person made in the image and likeness of the Creator. Without men and women who understand and truly care about people, peace, and spiritual values (and not just the almighty dollar) it can easily fall prey to the greed of heartless materialists and money manipulators. Neither should those of us who believe in the infinite superiority of a Free Market’s strengths over Socialism’s trajectories impulsively label every form of social security for the truly weak as “Socialism’. Not every kind of moral social assistance, it should go without saying, violates the best principles of the Free Market, the interests of peace, and the Common Good. — SH
Dreams
— The Frankfurt School. Herbert Marcuse’s World.
— The Theology of Marxism
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]
(1) “Abolition of the family! … The bourgeois family will disappear, in the course of history as its supplement [private property] disappears, and both will vanish with the destruction of capital.” – The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels.
Too, Marxists know that if the family as a foundational societal institution is destroyed then it will be the centralized State that will regulate the numbers of human births “allowed” to be born.
[2] Representing itself as respecting all religions, it actually hates them all and seeks to undermine them, and substitute itself for the only true religion. Socialism, again, tends towards Communism, and will brook no rival Ultimate for very long once in power. This is what makes the “religious socialist” either the most naive or the most pernicious of persons.
— Jordan Peterson’s surprise over a Putin quote
— April 11, 2022: Shanghai Total Covid dystopia
—See also, Paulo Freire “the prophet of the Marxist Faith” in U.S. education today. And his connection to Liberation Theologies, Don Helder Camara, and the “liberation” of the convents and Catholic schools. The cynical inversion of real, traditional, education.— James Lindsay
Making excuses for violence for political ends. The book at Amazon
Note: In days of old only those could inherit property who were capable of defending it; in general, men. There was a reason for it. Today’s aristocrats by contrast, the mega-rich corporations, promote free sex and rainbow ideology and surgeries, even to children, in exchange for their monied class privileges and to depopulate human populations. And they radically restrict dissent.
Wokeness is corporate driven. The corporations use race and gender as their pretended moral high ground. It is their battering ram. If history is any judge, if the rainbow corporations ever get their New World they’ll likely turn on all dissent of whatever race, ethnicity and political view, just as China and the Soviets turned against their own useful “activists” once they were finished with them.
Updated November 2022
Catholic Critique 