Did American Reformer Really Republish Karl Marx?

Hey guys, it's John. I want to weigh in today on this controversy over whether or not

American Reformer, a Christian conservative publication, in fact published a rewritten portion of the

Communist Manifesto under the title The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right on November 18th by someone who we know now is

James Lindsay, but wrote under the pseudonym Marcus Carlson. Now James Lindsay, who is an atheist, a,

I guess you could call him a popular philosopher, who has been very critical of social justice and has gotten some things right in the past, but he is no conservative and he's told me that personally, he is touting online the fact that he was able to get this piece past the gatekeepers as an example of how certain elements of the right wing and the

Christian right in particular are in fact quote -unquote woke. So they're no different than their left -wing counterparts.

They say that they are opposed to wokeness and social justice, but in fact, they are arguing the same things.

They're a Chevy, social justice is a Ford. It's the same kind of thing, only the parts are called different names.

And I want to expose in this video how utterly ridiculous sounding this actually is once you understand what

Lindsay did. Lindsay rewrote this and the way he rewrote it to appeal to, and actually,

I don't even know if I want to say rewrote because about 85 % of it were Lindsay's words.

I mean, it's very sparse. I was thinking back to my days of grading undergrad papers and would

I even catch that this is a portion from the Communist Manifesto, maybe a few sentences, but it would be challenging.

So Lindsay essentially borrowed, and this is the claim that's being made now because this has been pointed out,

Lindsay borrowed the concepts and showed how parallel they are. That's the claim.

So I'm gonna engage it on that level. Now in a nutshell, I'll just tell you where I'm going with this and then

I'll get into the nitty -gritty details. Where I'm going is this. Lindsay's article actually argues the opposite of what

Karl Marx is arguing in the Communist Manifesto. Marx has two components that Lindsay, first, one of them

Lindsay leaves out, and then the second one Lindsay, I think, explicitly argues against. And those components are ideology and the second component is hierarchy.

Lindsay argues for a traditional, hierarchical, religious society.

Premodern society, you could say. Whereas Marx argues against those things.

And the similarity between the quote -unquote woke right, or what really is the

Christian conservative right, and wokeness or social justice or Marxism, perhaps you could say is this.

They both look at modernity and they have a critique of it. I think their critiques are even different, but there are some parallels.

And you could also say that both of them, when they look at politics, they see friends, they see enemies.

And this is something that liberals, and Lindsay is a liberal, tend to think that they transcend.

They don't think in terms of groups. They don't believe in identity politics. They don't see these rigid oppressor -oppressed or friend -enemy or binary categories.

They're just for individual freedoms, right? And they think they get a pass. Now, here's the thing. Every political outlook must understand there are those opposed to their program or their vision and those who are for it.

That is inescapable. And those people who are against it and for it will take the shape of groups.

So it is inescapable that even liberals must think in terms of those who are challenging their idea for the good, those who challenged freedom of movement and choice and autonomy, are in fact enemies.

They are, and you wouldn't want them in control. Liberals don't want them having any ascendancy in politics.

So, and they have to also think in terms of groups. Lindsay's even doing that here by looking at a group of people, the

Christian right, and identifying them as enemies, okay? He can't escape that whether he wants to or not.

And I don't I don't want to comment on whether he does or not. I just know that's a tendency among liberals. So, getting back to the issue at hand and going through it in more precise detail,

I aim to show you that in the fundamental ways that political approaches would differ from each other, social justice, wokeness,

Marxism does differ quite a bit from conservatism, Christian right outlooks.

And that in the ways that they are parallel, they would share that parallel nature with other political outlooks, including liberalism, because those kinds of things are unmistakable.

Nate Fisher actually had something good to say about this. I noticed yesterday, and I haven't seen anything online today, so I don't know what's going on now, but I know yesterday when this started to break out,

Nate Fisher said, and he started American Reformer, that you could have two parallel statements, one being

Satan should be worshipped and one being God should be worshipped. Now, those sound the same except for the fact that the object of worship is different.

And the object of worship renders those two statements entirely different, like night and day different.

You wouldn't say, well, Christianity is just Satanism, because they also think there should be an ultimate object of worship, or Satanism is just Christianity, right?

That would be absurd. They share a quality that all religions, all faith outlooks, would share.

There's nothing unique about that. That's just a part and parcel definitional to the fact that there's a religious outlook we're talking about.

But they are completely different religions, completely different systems, right? And I think that's what's going on here.

You can find some parallels that would be parallel with other political philosophies, but on the major things that you would look for to determine whether their goals are similar or whether or not they think of the problems in the same way and approach it the same way, you're going to have massive differences.

And so, James Lindsay, when he crafted his article, which was supposedly a rewrite of the Communist Manifesto, he took that into account, and that's why

I consider this very deceptive to say they republished part of the Communist Manifesto. They did not.

What they republished was something that was crafted to mean the opposite of what

Marx meant, to support hierarchy, tradition, religion, and not to tear those things down.

So I will make the point and then we'll talk about maybe a few other things before the end of the podcast, but I want to get into it because I know that a lot of people are wanting me to say something about this.

Let's read some portions from the Communist Manifesto first. To make this all clear. Here's the way that the

Communist Manifesto opens. A specter is haunting Europe, Karl Marx says. The specter of communism, all the powers of old

Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this specter. Now, he talks about the pope and the czar and all and these traditional elements that are opposing communism, essentially.

Now, James Lindsay opens his piece in a similar fashion. He talks about the Christian right is this force to be reckoned with and I think there's a difference between Karl Marx and the way that the

Christians think about their political movement. Okay, so Karl Marx thinks in terms of a very rigid ideology where there's a certain inevitability to the fact that he will, the proletariat will prevail, there will be an equal society eventually.

And this is a law of history. This can't be abrogated. This is just going to happen.

So it's like Saruman, you might as well just be on the side that's going to win. Whereas in Christianity, though there is an eschatology that God wins in the end.

Christ is going to come back. He is going to reign. Jesus is king. Christ is Lord.

Those things are very true. And there's different ways, different eschatologies conceive of how that is going to take place.

And when it is going to take place, but all of them agree that is going to happen. What you do not see on the

Christian right is this sense that their particular brand of politics, their vision for a good society in this sin -cursed world, on this side of heaven, on this side of Christ coming back, is somehow inevitable.

You may hear them say encouraging things that make it sound inevitable, but they're not thinking of it ideologically.

They want to win the culture war, but they don't think it's this inevitable law of history that everything is culminating towards.

It's not the arc of history bending towards them necessarily. Some post -millennialists might start to dabble in that, but that has never been a feature of Christian conservative political thought as a general rule in the

United States, and I would argue probably in Europe as well. So, that might seem like a smaller difference, but it's worth pointing out.

Now, this is the portion that James Lindsay took most of his material from. It says this from the

Communist Manifesto. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Now, think about that for a moment. That's a total critique. The history of all existing society, every impulse, everything you do, brushing your teeth.

I mean, all existing society is the history of class struggles. Everything boils down to that.

Just like in Nazi ideology, everything boils down to biological determinism. Just like in feminism, everything boils down to patriarchy.

And there's some shared feeling between some of these ideologies, but this is a total critique, which is very different than what you're about to find from the article

Lindsay wrote and got American Reformer to publish. Now, I'll give some examples.

It says freemen and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on in an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Now, these are examples of labor hierarchies that have existed, and what Marx is saying is that these have always existed, and they've taken on different forms, but in general, this is all oppressors and oppressed, and the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which were the terms he used to designate the break or the separation in society and social groups during the time he lived, represented those who owned the means of production and those who worked.

And so those who owned the means of production were the bourgeoisie. Those who worked were the proletariat.

So they were essentially a slave class. So he's saying that things have always been this way.

And he says, in earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders.

And he talks about social rank. He talks about knights and patricians and plebeians and slaves. In the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guildmasters.

So he goes on and on and he talks about these different subordinate roles and then roles that had more power.

And so we're talking still about hierarchy. The modern bourgeois society, he says, has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society and has not done away with class antagonisms.

It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

So his argument here is that nothing has essentially changed. Even though we realize if you read the manifesto, everything's arcing towards this revolution, but he wants people to understand there's still oppression going on because there's hierarchy, because there's disparity.

And that sounds very similar to the social justice language. There's disparities between social groups, right? By the way, there are oppressors and there are oppressed even in the bible.

That's inescapable, right? There's always going to be this side of heaven, people who oppress other people.

There's a few differences though between that kind of legitimate critique of oppression and what we see from social justice where it's rigid, it's ideological, it's based on social location.

And across the board, it doesn't matter if you were from wealth because you have a certain identity that means you are oppressed in some kind of a matrix.

So that's one difference between them. It's that rigidity, I suppose. Another difference is the requirement, especially

I'm thinking in the Me Too movement, of believing people who say they're oppressed whether or not there is evidence for that.

So you can't really have a bird's eye view and examine things. You have to just believe what they say about their oppression.

Another thing is this idea that oppression creates certain kinds of knowledge that are unavailable to those who are doing the quote -unquote oppressing.

So there's a lot more read into this. It is much more, it is ideological. They break

Marx, broke society down into these two elements and then said that was the only impulse.

That's obviously not true. There's more impulses than just oppressing others or being oppressed, right?

So that's the problem with the oppressor -oppressor dynamic. It's not that there aren't people who oppress others.

That of course exists and I've tried to make that point many times. So that's not something that the

Christian right even says. They're not saying that in rigid ways that this is the primary impulse is oppression and we're the ones that are being oppressed.

They look at conditions on the ground and say at these certain points in history, this point being one of them, perhaps we are under in certain countries a level of persecution or opposition.

All right, moving on. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie possesses, however, this distinct feature.

It is simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other, bourgeoisie and proletariat.

So everything culminates in this division. You're either you're, you know, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are two sides in this epic struggle that's been going on for a long time.

And then he talks about globalism and the market economy and the different forces, commerce, navigation, industry that have given rise to the proletariat.

Now think about it this way. In serfdom, you had those who owned the land and those who worked the land and there was a mutually beneficial relationship and even an affection that existed in many cases between these two groups.

Read something like Washington Irving's Old Christmas and you'll see that kind of relationship.

That's more of a feudalism and not a serfdom, but you'll see what I'm talking about. The lord of the manor has a very paternal relationship with those who work under him, work the land, that kind of thing, the servants.

And this was something that in a christian society people took very seriously. If you were the master or the lord of the manor, then you had a responsibility, you had an obligation to the people under you.

That obligation was taken away during the industrial revolution in large part.

You had at that point people, this is what Marx is talking about, you have people who own factories who are making calculations based on whatever currency exists in their land, so in our land that would be dollars and cents, and they're treating people like numbers and there's an alienation people have from their work now.

They're just cogs in a machine. And you find during that time all kinds of different political philosophies, whether conservative political philosophies, even catholic critiques, all had to reckon with this.

In fact, the catholic church tried to say, look, if you own a factory, then you still have an obligation to the people who work under you to provide for them.

That obligation doesn't go away just because they're not working the land that you live on. So this is the kind of thing that Marx is reckoning with.

Now Marx is promoting ideology, which is a product of modernity, but in so doing he's critiquing a portion of modernity, namely the industrial revolution.

And that's important to recognize, that these guys who are critiquing elements of modernity are themselves importing portions of it, namely for Marx this impulse to reduce everything down to a single impulse, a scientific law, right?

So just as he doesn't like the workers being subject to this scientific treatment where they're just a part in a machine, he reduces all of society down to a singular impulse as if it's some scientific law or a part in a machine, okay?

So this is much different than a holistic christian conservative critique. The feudal system of industry in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, he says, now no longer suffice for the growing wants of the new markets.

The manufacturing system took its place. The guild masters were pushed on by the side of manufacturing, middle class, division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Now i'm going to go on a little bit here to get to some relevant sections. He talks about the negative effects of some of this, and this is where James Lindsay likes to camp out a bit.

Marx says that each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class, an oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self -governing association in the medieval commune, here independent urban republic as in Italy and Germany, their taxable third estate of the monarchy as in France, afterward in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi -feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility.

And in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself in the modern representative state exclusive political sway.

And so they have, there's a political movement that accompanies this economic move.

Everything boils down to these economic relationships, but politics propel the power of the bourgeoisie to enact their oppression.

That's what he's saying. And James Lindsay likes to camp on that, this idea that the

Christian right also wants to use power. Well, I know that liberals tend to think that they're absolved of this, but guess what?

Liberals also need power for their political agenda to maintain it, even if it's not to and sustain it, even if it's not to gain, you know, new avenues to promote liberalism.

They still, even if it's the status quo, have to use power to maintain that. So the other thing here that I wanted to point out, and I thought

I was actually at this section, but I'll keep reading, and this is the section I think I was thinking of, it talks about, okay, it is drowned the most heavily ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and it is in the place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom, free trade, and one word for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions.

It has substituted naked shameless direct brutal exploitation. Now, James Lindsay camps out on this in the piece

I'm about to read for you, because what you see Mark's doing is he says, look, the bourgeoisie has eradicated religion.

They've eradicated these traditional hierarchies. They've eradicated some natural relationships and, you know, things that used to exist and be traditional.

They've eradicated it. They still, though, careful here, because Mark still says they use some of these things to still control, religion being one of them.

They still use these things, but they've fleshed them out and eradicated them. And he brings this up not to lament about what's been lost and how we should go back to the past.

He brings this up to say that, and you'll read it in the rest of the manifesto, that we should actually, in a sense, go farther.

That, yes, they've gotten rid of some of these things, but it's up to the proletariat to put the final nail in the coffin to religion.

Recognize this is a mechanism the upper class has used to control you. Put the final nail in the coffin to the bourgeois family, which conserves inheritance over the course of generations, which is a disparity, which is oppression.

Get rid of nation -states, borders, things that separate peoples in ways that aren't according to class, and instead workers of the world unite.

Okay, so all of these things, these creation order things,

Marx wants to get rid of. That's the crazy thing. Lindsay tries to make this out like, in his rewrite to appeal to American reformer, he tries to do this conservative move of back to the good old days.

We should recognize that the current world order is against hierarchy and tradition and religion, and we should get back to that stuff, but that's not what

Marx says. And I, there was a, let's see, I guess that was it.

That was all I wanted to read for you. So, yeah, let's get into what

Lindsay actually says himself. I actually, I don't know if I read this. All right, let me, last thing before we get to Lindsay.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class.

Those are conservatives, by the way. That, or at least that would be a reactionary kind of conservative move, right? He says, they are therefore not revolutionary.

Marx is revolutionary. He's saying these people aren't. But conservative, that's Marx. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.

If by chance they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat.

They thus defend not their present, but their future interests. They desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

What's he saying? He is arguing against conservatism. He's arguing against rolling the clock back.

He's arguing against tradition and religion. He is saying that we need a revolution and not to try to go back to a better time.

Which is the point Lindsay tries to make in his article, pretending to be Marx. So here's

Lindsay's article, all right? Lindsay starts this way. Now I'll ask you, is that true?

Think about that. Is what he's saying here true? Now, you heard me read the beginning of the

Communist Manifesto. There's similar language there. But again, Marx is talking about this in an ideological rigid fashion.

And saying that people are trying to suppress communism. Now, I think accurate, he is accurate, that people were trying to suppress communism.

The revolutions of 1848 were a failure. And are people also in influential positions trying to suppress

Christianity? Sure. So, whoa, it must be, you must be the same thing. You must be communist.

It makes no sense. You know, if someone says they're trying to suppress me, and they are being suppressed, and someone else says, yeah, they're trying to suppress me at a different time, in a different location, and in a different context, and it's true, then that doesn't mean that they share a worldview, an outlook, a philosophy.

It just means they're both, they both have conditions of being suppressed in some way. Okay. So I don't think this proves necessarily anything.

But that Lindsay seems to think so. He says there are two consequences of this unholy alliance.

First, the Christian right itself is recognized by all these forces to be a power and thus a threat. Second, it is time for this arranged order to end and for a new

Christian right to emerge and stake its rightful claim on 21st century American politics.

Since the end of the Second World War, a liberal post -war consensus has established itself in a position of global hegemony.

What he's trying to do here is he's paralleling post -war consensus with bourgeoisie. So he's saying the oppressor class was the bourgeoisie for Marx, and for the folks at American Reformer, it's the post -war consensus.

That's the regime that represents an oppression or a force to reckon with and defeat that's producing negative effects on society.

Now, newsflash, every political approach is going to think in terms of threats.

Otherwise, what's the point of politics, right? So liberals also see nefarious threats at places like American Reformer, apparently.

They think that there are forces that want to limit individual choice. And so does that mean that there's an oppression going on?

Does that mean that there's the danger of an establishment that will be disfavorable to them?

Of course. And if that's true, what does that mean? Does that mean they're Marxist too? Because they recognize that there are forces capable of stamping out their political vision, right?

I mean, it gets a little silly, but he says its primary purpose is given as the development of a world market for which the hard labor in innovative capacities of America have paved the way.

This global market system has to be fair given an immense development to commerce, to travel, and to communication technologies.

As a result, industry and commerce have expanded into a multinational dimension. This development has had many effects.

For one thing, in proportion as industry, commerce, and transportation have extended themselves at home and globally.

In the same proportion, the ruling liberal consensus itself developed, increased its wealth and power, and pushed into the background every traditional idea handed down from the past, even those that allowed it to be built.

Now, what you're seeing here is a parallel with the way that Marx talks about how the bourgeoisie rose to power, and they eradicated some of the things that were before them, like religion.

They still used it, but they had essentially eradicated it. Lindsay's talking about, you know, oh, for the past, look at this market economy and look what it's done to tradition and religion.

Well, obviously, I've already pointed out Marx, though, his point is, yeah, they didn't go far enough.

Yeah, we need to really eradicate religion. That's a tool we got to take out of their hands because they're using it against us. It's not to pine for the good old days and try to get back to them or anything like that.

For one thing, in proportion, as industry, commerce, and transportation have extended themselves at home and globally, in the same proportion, the ruling liberal consensus itself developed, increased its wealth and power, and pushed into every background every traditional idea handed down.

We can see that modern liberalism, along with its post -war order, is itself the product of a long course of development in history, politics, and economics.

Now, this is interesting. I don't know if American reformer guys should have caught this, but you catch little glimpses of Marx's language, his rhetorical devices.

He says a series of revolutions in culture and against tradition, but these all share a common theme.

In fact, the post -war liberal consensus owes its very existence to that foundation, which is now demands we abandon in the name of its inexorable pursuit of what it calls progress.

Now, here's what I ask you. Is it true that, gradually speaking, we have seen a,

I wouldn't call it revolutions, you could, I suppose, right? I could see why they would have published this, perhaps, but is it true that these gradual chipping away at tradition, at religion, happened over time and not all at once?

Of course, that's true. Ask your parents and then talk to your grandparents to see all the changes that took place in American society that watered down religion and have left us in some areas post -Christian.

I was driving in Massachusetts today. That's why I'm actually on the road. I was meeting a friend to go hiking. In Massachusetts, I passed,

I think, two American flags the whole time, in rural areas included, at homes. I saw trans flags at every church or gay pride flags at every church.

If it was still a church, some of them were community centers or art and cultural centers. I did not see any explicitly

Christmas decorations, except perhaps a cultural center that had been a church with pillars that had red ribbons that made it look like they were candy cane.

I saw some snowflakes in one of the towns we went to. I did not see anything explicitly religious or even

Christmas in general, not even a Christmas tree. It was kind of crazy. Even where I went hiking with my friend, this was a state -run place with trans flags.

If you were self -identified, I kid you not, if you self -identified as an indigenous person, you got in free.

I couldn't, but I wouldn't have that ability. I guess maybe I could self -identify. I don't know, but it was weird.

You go to the restroom and they have explicitly non -binary restrooms and stuff. This is all state -mandated stuff too.

What is that? This is the land the Puritans and the Congregationalists settled.

Historic, beautiful homes, kept up well. What happened there? Well, that story would take some time to tell.

How did you get from the Puritans to this? That story is not going to be overnight.

That story is going to be over the course of centuries. We got to this point, and hopefully someone who knows what they're talking about would say, don't follow our example.

What Lindsay's arguing here is true. Marx argues that there's these revolutions that take place, but what he's arguing for is that nothing really ever changes, that inevitably there's this, at least in the portion that we read, he's arguing that you have these hierarchical relationships that never actually go away.

They always reemerge with every revolution. But what Lindsay's arguing here isn't that.

Lindsay's arguing that there's this process of an ever -diminishing influence of Christianity.

It's not that, oh, Christianity just reemerges with this. It's that there's a constant strain of, a constant march towards Christianity being eroded in the recent past, and we would all say that's true.

So, this isn't Marxist. Come on. You might have borrowed some language from Marx, but you're not making the argument

Marx made. Each step of progress in the development of the hegemony of the post -war liberal consensus, however, was more than progress alone.

It was also accompanied by corresponding political advance of liberalism itself. Before the establishment of this consensus to liberalism and progress, a true right running under the sway of robust Christian values with an armed self -governing association of men keeping order and peace in their familiar communities was operating in more or less independent locales, fully aware of both people and place, and they kept their own organized hierarchies and their own customs and traditions.

So, he's saying that there was a more organized world that existed where Christians were operating with a knowledge of who they were as people.

Would anyone argue with this? It wasn't to last. Okay. The consensus view was that the

Second Great War was not to be repeated under any circumstances. As a result, the self -gratifying liberal order forced its way into national then international consensus.

And as it went, it had to at last conquer custom, tradition, faith, and the true right that kept them.

So, what he's saying is that there is this true conservative right that has been usurped by the neocons.

And, you know, I've talked about this before. There's specific examples of it. National Review, often

William F. Buckley is blamed for some of this. Anyway, more could be said, but I think there's some truth to the idea that there was a different group of conservatives that preceded

World War II and really namely before the 1980s, there was a different kind of group of conservatives that were actually conservative.

You don't see the neoconservatives until really the Cold War era. And they do reduce conservatism down to these more ideological impulses.

Market economy. What's good for the market is what's good for everyone. Strong national defense.

There usually is this attempt to fuse some traditional values, religious values in there somewhere.

But ultimately, it was reductionistic. And it wasn't situational.

It wasn't arguing for these timeless principles that according to the situation, you know, could be supported in various different ways with different mechanisms depending on the situation you were in.

It was more of a rigid kind of formulaic approach. And if that's what

Lindsay's talking about, then, I mean, I don't see why American Reformer wouldn't publish this because that's true.

He says that, let's see, all that was left for the right to do under consensus was to serve either the new liberal war machine or its military industrial complex as a flimsy counterpoise against the dying world because never again.

All right. So using the Holocaust narrative to say that Christians basically shouldn't be self -consciously

Christian in the state because to be self -consciously Christian, to be self -consciously a member of a

European people somehow is going to lead to great harm. And I don't think anyone would argue that that is not the prevailing attitude today in most academic and influential sectors of America.

In so capitulating the post -war right established for itself the modern representative managerial state even while the left positioned then built a sprawling liberal civil rights bureaucracy thus granting liberalism exclusive political sway.

Now in each place of America over each of its peoples the executive of the modern liberal state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole liberal order and its global consensus against the right.

Liberalism itself speaking historically has therefore played a most revolutionary part in its own rise and eventual ironic demise.

See how much longer this isn't much longer. It saws from beneath its own bottom the limb upon which it sits and provides the necessary impetus for the re -emergence of the right that has always existed to oppose it.

Speaking historically liberalism wherever it has the upper hand puts an end to all previous social and religious relations.

However stabilizing and enriching they may be it has pitilessly torn asunder the motley hierarchical ties that bound man to the natural superiors and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man the naked self -interest that soulless cash payment and hollow individual fulfillment.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious worship of chivalrous enthusiasm by men for their women a philistine sentimentalism this is directly quoting

Marx here but remember the quote from Marx is not a quote of you know let's just blame the bourgeoisie for taking all the things that we want right the quote from Marx is uh the bourgeoisie have to be defeated and then all of and society has to be flattened um all of you know religious worship and those kinds of things these things that we consider to be rich and so forth are actually also tools of oppression.