What is Marxism and why should I care about Marxist philosophies and ideals? - Podcast Episode 117

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be discussing something that we've been receiving quite a few questions about over the last several years.

We get a lot of questions about Marxism. What is Marxism? Or even we get questions where people are misusing the term

Marxism, almost using the exact opposite of what it actually means. Joining me today is

Professor Doug Grothuis. He's a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, and also the author of the new book,

Fire in the Streets, where Marxism is a major aspect of that book. Doug, welcome to the show today.

Thank you. Happy to be here. So, Doug, tell our listeners a little bit about you, your background, and maybe what led you to write a book on this topic.

Yes. Well, I'm a philosophy professor. This is the start of my 30th year at Denver Seminary, so very interested in apologetics, social issues, things in that neighborhood.

And especially after the riots of 2020, I began to receive a lot of questions for interviews and podcasts and so on about, what's the philosophy behind this?

What is critical race theory? So I did a number of these interviews. I wrote a few articles, and I realized that I needed to write a book about it as a

Christian philosopher. So the book was written fairly quickly, not on the cheap.

I think it's solid. It's about 200 pages of text and about 500 footnotes.

So I wanted to equip the church to think well about these issues of racial injustice.

What is the meaning of America? Do we have what it takes in our founding principles to address the kind of problems that we face?

And I wanted people to see the philosophical background and basis for critical race theory, which really comes out of Marxism.

So let's make that my intro question to you. What is

Marxism, and maybe why should we care? Right. Well, Marxism has been one of the most influential philosophies in the history of the world.

It animated the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was the philosophy of Lenin and Stalin.

And that led to the deaths of God only knows how many people who were executed by the state because they were not sufficiently revolutionary.

So if you consider all the political killing of the

Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and so on in the 20th century, some people have put that number at 100 million.

Mao Zedong is the worst of all. He is responsible perhaps for 60 -70 million deaths of his own people during his 50 -year reign of terror.

So all these governments were influenced by Marxism. Now there were different versions of Marxism.

And really, whenever you see a Marxist root for a philosophy, that should catch your attention.

Because Marxism originally is certainly based on atheism. Marx said the foundation of all criticism is the criticism of religion.

And he really meant Judaism and Christianity. So that has to be gotten out of the way.

So his idea was that religion puts people to sleep and it makes them passive in the face of injustice.

And Marxism is a conflict -oriented worldview. It's understood in terms of economic conflict.

So the owners, those who control the means of production, the bourgeois, are always exploiting the workers or the proletariat.

And eventually tensions will get so high that this will result in a revolution where the workers overthrow the owners, the factory owners, the people that own lots of property and control production.

And this will lead to something called the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is supposedly short -lived.

And then there will result a classless, completely fair and equitable society.

So this vision is really a utopian hope that somehow the injustices and the unfairness of this world can be overcome through political revolution.

And Marxism is not a reformist perspective. It's a revolutionary perspective.

So a revolution wants to completely overturn what came beforehand.

And if you're a reformer, you're trying to bring, let's say, the American civil government into alignment with its best ideals.

Someone like Martin Luther King did that. In his famous speech in Washington, he talked about the glorious documents of the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So he didn't say, overthrow them and let's burn down the whole system and start over again.

He wanted the United States to stay true to its best ideals.

Now that's very different than any form of Marxism. And Marxism always promises much more than it can deliver.

Marxism in the 20th century, as I said, has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

Now, I mean deaths where the civil government executes its own people for not being revolutionary enough, for being counter -revolutionary and so on.

Because the way it's set up is that this dictatorship of the proletariat stage of Marxism never makes a transition into a peaceful, equitable society with no private property and no class structure.

It just means that a certain number of people, that is the politicians who are not accountable to the people, unlike in a republic that we have, the politicians gain the power and they have to forever be rooting out counter -revolutionary ideas, ideas that are not true to the vision of the society.

So when we get to critical race theory, the essential idea of society being incessant conflict is retained.

But what's added to the economic factor is basically race and sexual orientation.

So the idea is you still have the oppressors, but the oppressors are not just those who own the means of production, the bourgeois, but the oppressors are white males.

And so being white gives you privilege, it makes you part of a white supremacist society.

And by virtue of simply being white, you are an oppressor over people of color, principally black people, but they consider

Hispanics and other racial minorities in the United States. So the idea is that society is always racist.

Also that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s were not very effective. Derrick Bell makes that claim.

And so the revolution has to continue and we can't be pacified with supposed progress that has been made previously.

So there's a continuity between Marxism and critical race theory and a pivotal figure there would be the philosopher of the left,

Herbert Marcuse, who died in 1979. He basically took

Marx's ideas and added some ideas of Freud and said the way to really liberate people is not merely economic liberation, getting rid of private property and capitalism, but also sexual liberation, a sexual revolution that lets loose this pent up energy that the bourgeois class has imposed, or rather the sexual restrictions that the bourgeois class has imposed on people.

So the engine of revolution is not merely economic discontent because he and the other people in the

Frankfurt School realized that a lot of the workers in the West were fairly content with their lives. They didn't cause a revolution the way

Marx thought they should. And so Marcuse and others had to say, well, you're really more oppressed than you think.

You are sexually repressed and that needs to be let loose in order to create a better, more harmonious, freer, more hedonistically engaged society.

And one thing I like to point to, to make this connection between Marx and critical race theory, is some of the leaders of the

Black Lives Matter movement, they're kind of an activist wing of critical race theory. One of them went on a

YouTube video a few years ago and said, we are trained Marxists. And several of the leaders were actually mentored by Angela Davis, who is a 60s radical

Black professor, still alive, I think she's in her 70s or 80s now. And she was mentored by the man

I just mentioned, Herbert Marcuse. So you have Marx influencing Marcuse, Marcuse influencing

Angela Davis, Angela Davis influencing Black Lives Matter. And when you really get down to the core ideas of critical race theory, you see that rootage in this

Marxist conflict worldview. And there's another aspect I could add to it, and that is the idea that the people who are the oppressors, that is the bourgeois owners, those that control the means of production.

And then also you add to that racial factors in critical race theory. These folks are not to be trusted, their viewpoints are disqualified, because they are the oppressors, they see everything through a lens of how to benefit themselves and extract wealth and goods from other people.

So there's the claim in critical race theory, it's called standpoint epistemology, that only the oppressed understand the way society is.

So especially, let's say, if you're Black, a woman, a sexual minority, this is called intersectionality, you have three points of oppression.

You have the proper vantage point on the status of minorities, people of color, in the

American system, just by virtue of your ethnicity or your sexual orientation.

Now that's of great concern to me as a philosopher, and I think it should be to anyone, because that's not how knowledge works.

Now I don't understand what it's like to be a Black man or a Black female, obviously, but if you have experienced prejudice and racism, let's say as a

Black female, your experience matters, and I should listen to that, but that doesn't mean you're an expert on American history, or on the history of slavery, or in economics, or political theory, or anything else.

We've got to do more research to talk about those kind of things, but the way critical race theory works is that the oppressors have controlled everything, and they've squelched and silenced the oppressed, and so now it's the oppressed's turn to grab the microphone, so to speak, and tell the oppressors the way the world really works.

That's interesting. I keep hearing, in addition to Marxism thrown out there, a lot of people use critical race theory almost like as a boogeyman, this is critical race theory, so help us with a,

I don't know, I know there's no real simple way to define it, but what are some examples of critical race theory that are happening in our culture, and why is it important that we are cognizant of them?

The term critical race theory is thrown around a lot now, especially with respect to public schools, because the issue is how do you teach

American history? How do we talk about racism, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, things like that, and sometimes it's set up as a false dichotomy, which is a fallacy.

It's basically thought that if you teach critical race theory, you are honest about the racial sins of America, and if you're critical of critical race theory, you want to whitewash

American history and not talk about our national sins. Well, you should talk about the sins of the

United States, but also the virtues of the United States, and you can address the evils of racism and the

Jim Crow period, especially in the South, lynchings and so on, without buying into this neo -Marxist, cultural

Marxist worldview. You can just do good history, and then also teach the principles of the

American founding, which is the equality of all people as made by God, given life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These rights are given by God, the five freedoms of the First Amendment, the freedom of religion and speech and press and assembly and petitioning the government for the redress of wrongs.

So it's not an either -or, but when you start talking about American society as intrinsically racist, racism as America's original sin, this is what the 1619

Project argues, that America is not really based on a vision of freedom, but on slavery, period.

I think that's a very one -sided, inaccurate view. When you start talking about things as systemically racist, systemically oppressive, when you talk about things like white privilege, all whites are racist and need to confess their racism, when you talk about the standpoint epistemology, and when race becomes the most significant thing about everybody, then you're talking about the basic ideas of critical race and I critique those assumptions, those ideas in my book pretty thoroughly.

So the title of your book is Fire in the Streets. Why that title and why do you think it's important for us to view what's going on as so vitally important?

Well, I was reflecting on the literal fire in the streets in the 2020 riots, which were extensive, they went on for about seven months, there were billions of dollars of damage, many businesses were destroyed, between 20 and 30 people were killed, police officers were attacked, wounded, injured, and that unnerved me.

In fact, when that was happening, I was living in Willow, Alaska with my wife for the summer and we really wondered if we should come back to Denver, because we thought

Denver would be way more dangerous than rural Alaska. But I talked to friends and I was trying to watch the news and get a sense of what was going on, we decided to come back, but I had never felt that way before in my life.

Is it safe to go home? Is it safe to go back to Denver? So the riots were extensive, they were very militant, and I wanted to understand what was really behind this.

Of course, the George Floyd killing sparked it, but that was not the whole story. The whole story involves

Marxism, cultural Marxism, what's called critical race theory.

It involves certain assumptions about race and economics and fairness and so on. So what

I wanted to do is explain the fire in the streets on the basis of the fire in the minds of certain philosophers, politicians, activists, and so on, and try to get to the root of that, and then also present a better view, present a better hope for the

United States in our race relations and economic possibilities and so on. Yeah.

We've talked a lot about what's going on in the United States and obviously that's where we live. Hopefully there's not an

American who didn't see what was going on and were distressed by it or pained by seeing both the anger at very bad things that have happened, and even politically saying that what we've been taught our whole lives about the history of America is inaccurate.

But also, I know one point in your book that to me is particularly interesting is something that we've been presented with that got questions several times.

It's basically the line of argument that Christianity is basically a white man's religion.

How do you respond when someone makes that accusation and how does that question or that statement play into this whole discussion that we're having?

Right. I do address that in the book because people will say America has always been racist,

America has been controlled by white males, many of them Christians. So if we want to get to the bottom of everything, we have to refute and deny

Christianity, whiteness, and the whole idea of America and basically start over again.

So it really took me a whole book to address that. But if you talk about Christianity and being white, the gospel message is for all people.

Certainly, the biblical categories are Jew and Gentile, and that covers every human being.

The biblical teaching is that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. There's no hierarchy of one race over another.

And all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So we're all sinners. And sin takes different shapes and patterns throughout world history.

Now in the United States, whites were terribly guilty of bringing slaves over and enslaving blacks, particularly in the

South. But slavery is not a unique province of white people.

Slavery has been going on pretty much ever since the fall. And you even had blacks in the

United States before the Civil War who owned slaves, and there weren't very many.

And of course, you had many whites owning slaves. And then you had the whole Islamic slave trade that predates the transatlantic slave trade in the

United States. So all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. All can come to Christ by faith.

And we don't want to say that one race is any more sinful than any other race, although as I mentioned, some races at some times have proclivities to particular sins that can form into systems, like slavery, like the more unofficial system of Jim Crow in the

South, and so on. So those need to be addressed. But they're not essentially white issues, or black issues, or yellow issues, or brown issues, or whatever.

They're issues of sin and social righteousness. So I have two chapters in the book defending

American ideals. So I look at the Declaration and the Constitution, particularly the

First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. And some people say the Constitution was illegitimate because it was written by white slave owners.

And there is this idea that in the Constitution, blacks are only worth three -fifths of a person.

Now, I refute that because the idea was that the South would receive three -fifths representation for, they never used the word slave or black, but essentially the black slaves.

And that was a compromise between the North and the South, because the North wanted to limit the representational power of the

South by giving the slaves less than full credit for being citizens, or being part of the population of So this was a way, actually, of cutting back on the

South's political power. It was a compromise. It was not saying that African Americans are worth three -fifths of whites.

You hear that all the time. I even hear conservative commentators, even black commentators say this, conservative black commentators.

And I thoroughly refute that in the book. That's simply not true. So I think the

American experiment is about living up to our founding ideals in the Declaration, which says all men are created equal and given by their creator certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And that civil government should try to secure these rights, not create them, but secure them, because the rights ultimately come from God and are written in our conscience.

So I'm very much concerned about people who would want to blow up the whole idea of America and say that the

Declaration was a fraud and the Constitution was written by slave owners. No, the

Constitution was a kind of a compromise, and into the Constitution is built the idea of amendments.

So the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are the anti -slavery amendments, and they give, they should give, or they say they're giving full rights to all

Americans. So when you look at America, you have to look at it over time in accordance with the founding ideals, and then try to make for a better America for everybody on the basis of those ideals, not to tear them down.

See, the Marxist, neo -Marxist view is it's all corrupt, it's all a matter of illegitimate usurpation of power, and the way to change it is not to critique it or to reform it, but to tear it down.

And that's what I'm very concerned about. That's, um,

I've been familiar with the three -fifths problem as well, and um, I get how it reads poorly.

I guess that's a way to say it, but no, I'm very familiar with the fact that that's, they were not saying that Africans are only three -fifths of a human being.

They're saying, look, no, the South wanted to count all their slaves and determine how much voting power they had in Congress.

The North said, no, you can't do that. So the three -fifths was a compromise. I don't think, I've never read any person actually saying in that time that they only viewed them as three -fifths of a human being.

So it's like, again, it reads poorly, the statement itself, but that was never really the point.

But, and seeing the tear it all down, burn all of American history to the ground and start over.

It's like, were we perfect or not we? I mean, were the founding fathers perfect? Of course they're not.

No one is or ever has been other than Jesus Christ. Um, have we failed to live up to our ideals?

Of course we have. But at the same time, the constitution, the declaration of independence lays the foundation for, um, still in my opinion, the greatest nation that's ever existed on earth in terms of providing freedom, liberty, the ability to pursue happiness, economic opportunity and so forth.

And, um, it's distressing to see and hear from people who think, who hate the country or want to tear everything down.

It's like, you're not going to find a better solution anywhere else. And well, years ago, there was a black conservative radio host here in Denver.

I think he's retired, retired now. And he wrote a book called find a better country, which

I thought was very clever is yes, we have lots of problems. We have a flawed past, but find a better country, find a country that reforms itself the way the

United States has reformed itself. Find a country that allows for a more principled participation of the citizens.

We have a Republic. We have a Republic with a structure of representation. And it's really ingenious.

The founding fathers were brilliant men who studied the history of civil government,

Greek and Roman government. They knew their Bibles and they were very intentional about the kind of Republic they wanted to form.

And there's that famous story about Ben Franklin coming out of the Constitutional Convention. And a woman of some standing and influence at the time said,

Mr. Franklin, what have you given us? And he said, a Republic, if you can keep it. So we can't just assume that the

American Republican form of civil government is permanent. It's not.

It could go down. So let me read this thing I have in my book from a Black Lives Matter leader named

Hawk Newsom. He says, if this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it.

All right. And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It's a matter of interpretation.

Well, we know, given the summer of 2020, that fiery summer, we know what was meant.

It was burn down police station, police stations destroy businesses, intimidate police officers.

It was really horrible and ugly. And I hope to God we never see anything like that again.

So you've done a great job at explaining Marxism, its connection to critical race theory.

And hopefully our listeners will be able to better detect what's going on in our culture and to recognize its roots.

But let me close the interview with the question of how should we as Christians respond when we see what's going on?

How can we point people towards Jesus Christ as the ultimate solution for sin, including the sin of racism and prejudice?

But then also for, I don't know if there's even a good way to say this, and we do a whole nother episode on it, but why should we, based on the

Bible, view the United States government and its institutions as something that we should trust and defend rather than something we want to tear down?

Yeah. Yeah, that's a big question, isn't it? But I do have a final chapter on what we can do constructively.

And I have quite a bit to say there, but several things I say are we need fire in our bones for the gospel and to preserve, or to use biblical language, strengthen the things that remain that are good.

In the United States, Jeremiah brings a message from God to the exiles in Jeremiah 29 and verse 7.

And the Lord says, seek the welfare of the cities to which you are exiled, because when it prospers, you prosper.

So we should want to prosper. We should want our nation to prosper. And Jesus said to be salt and light wherever we are.

So I think we need fire in our bones and we need love in our heart. We don't want to use propaganda or manipulation or violence of any kind.

We should use persuasion and prayer and suffering for the right cause as needed.

And I do think we need to understand the roots of the problem. And that's the main reason why

I wrote my book. It doesn't pop into existence out of nowhere. There's a long history of revolutionary philosophies, even going back before Marx, but Marx is a pretty good place to start.

And I try to explain how that plays out and why people say the sort of things that they say.

What's behind this whole idea of white privilege and group think in terms of if you're part of this racial ethnic group, this is the way you are, and this is what you do, and this is how you have to somehow atone for your sins culturally and so on.

So I think as Christians, we want to see individuals changed, born again through faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ, given what he's done through his atoning work. And we also want to see righteousness to some extent in our society as a whole.

That is, we should seek the welfare of the city to where God has put us. And Paul says in Acts 17 that God has placed you wherever you are, and you should be a light for Christ wherever you are, and speak against injustice, work for what is good.

But don't just jump on a political bandwagon because it looks exciting or it seems to be the trend.

We really need to think biblically about all this and think logically and not be manipulated by slogans or images, not be intimidated either.

All right. So Doug, thank you for your time today. I appreciate your explanation. You helped me to even understand the connections better, and I hope our listeners have gained some insight into what's going on and what are the roots of it from our conversation today.

If you want to learn more about his book, Fire in the Streets, which is an excellent book, very sound biblically, theologically, philosophically, but also historically gives you a really good picture of what's going on.

We'll include links in the show notes at podcast .gotquestions .org,

and also on the description field on YouTube where you can learn more about Dr. Grothuis and his work and other books he's written as well.

So again, Doug, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. You are welcome. Thanks for having me.

This has been the Got Questions Podcast. Got questions? Biblize answers, and we'll be fine.