Karl Marx: Opium of the People

[Josh]

I agree, that's how you are using the term. I think that's misleading. I mean, why not use the term "Nazis" or "Tsarists"? Nazis were totalitarian, Tsarists were authoritarian. I'm not particularly afraid of a Tsarist revolution or a Marxist revolution or a Nazi revolution in the United States.

I am concerned about authoritarianism. No politician should be above the law. We need a free press. We need the balance of powers among the branches o government. We need fair trials and investigations. We need to be able to hold elections and agree on the outcome. These mechanisms protect democracy. If they fall apart, democracy is in danger.

I’m just explaining to you how to communicate with people like Wade better.

Giving a defence of communism is not the way to communicate better. Instead, I would agree that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are bad, and I would affirm that Wade thinks such things are bad too. There is nothing wrong with using “communism” as a synonym for those things.

Other than the fact that it is simply wrong. Words have meanings. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are brutal authoritarian regimes. Neither of them are remotely communist in any way.

“You’re using the wrong words!”, yells the academic, unaware that language changes and people use slang to communicate with each other.

[Bootstrap]

A lot of people use the term "Communism" to mean "an authoritarian or totalitarian state", which is how people like Wade feel when basically all of their freedoms, including religious freedoms, have been taken away.

I agree, that's how you are using the term. I think that's misleading. I mean, why not use the term "Nazis" or "Tsarists"? Nazis were totalitarian, Tsarists were authoritarian. I'm not particularly afraid of a Tsarist revolution or a Marxist revolution or a Nazi revolution in the United States.

I am concerned about authoritarianism. No politician should be above the law. We need a free press. We need the balance of powers among the branches o government. We need fair trials and investigations. We need to be able to hold elections and agree on the outcome. These mechanisms protect democracy. If they fall apart, democracy is in danger.

I’m just explaining to you how to communicate with people like Wade better.

Giving a defence of communism is not the way to communicate better. Instead, I would agree that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are bad, and I would affirm that Wade thinks such things are bad too. There is nothing wrong with using “communism” as a synonym for those things.

If you think this thread is a defense of communism, you should probably go back and read it again. It is not. Start with the second post, in which I lay out the reasons that I think Christianity is incompatible with Marxism.

Suppose I told you that I use the word "hammer" to mean any tool and you need to do the same if you want to communicate with me. That would make it difficult for us to communicate for the purposes of computer repair. The same is true if you insist on using "communism" as a synonym for things that are not remotely communism.

[Bootstrap]

“You’re using the wrong words!”, yells the academic, unaware that language changes and people use slang to communicate with each other.

Could you please screw that in with a hammer?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

[Bootstrap]

... language changes and people use slang to communicate with each other.

People on the extreme left call a lot of people Nazis. People on the extreme right call a lot of people communists. That's not just slang, that's propaganda.

We rightly fear communists, Nazis, Marxists, totalitarians, authoritarians, etc. We shouldn't use those terms lightly to describe people who are none of these things.

[ken_sylvania]

We rightly fear communists, Nazis, Marxists, totalitarians, authoritarians, etc. We shouldn't use those terms lightly to describe people who are none of these things.

According to Jesus we shouldn't fear communist, Nazis, Marxists, totalitarians, or authoritarians.

[Bootstrap]

We rightly fear communists, Nazis, Marxists, totalitarians, authoritarians, etc. We shouldn't use those terms lightly to describe people who are none of these things.

According to Jesus we shouldn't fear communist, Nazis, Marxists, totalitarians, or authoritarians.

I assume you are thinking of verses like this?

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

[PetrChelcicky]

Bootstrap,
I do not call you a Communist. But I suppose that you underestimate the intellectual influence of American Communists on American political thought, including your own political thought. Communists were a leading intellectual force in the Red Decade and practically the only intellectual force behind the Civil Rights Movement. (I suppose that they were the only CRMers who foresaw and accepted that Civil Rights would undermine traditional civil liberties.)
And their ideas survived via their offspring (the "red diaper babies") in often surprising environments (for example by people turned "neocon"). Certainly unsystemical and more or less diluted.

To understand Communists we must see that they did not only rely on Marx, but also and sometimes more on the French tradition, stemming from the Jacobins (who in turn sometimes relied on the "enlightened absolutism" of the 18th century). For instance your concept of "civil order" seems to come from the Code Napoléon (ordre public), but may be even older.

This French tradition is definitely different from the English tradition established after 1688; contractualism connected with the acceptance of an opposition as equals. In France, the Catholic/Conservative opposition was nearly always looked at as a danger and illegitimate, something which must be prevented at all costs. Society must at any case "progress" which only allows for a turning farther to the Left. In England, an alternation between a rightwing and a leftwing party has always been seen as normal - whatever their differences were. (This implies fallibilism - the idea that the "progresses" of yesterday may have been erroneous and then should be changed back.)

These are relevant distinctions in political theory which survive till our time.

[PetrChelcicky]

Coming back to your own words. I see that you use two kinds of models - the oppression-revolution model on one hand and the "civil order and rule of law" model on the other.
Did you ever think about the question how those two models can match? Don't they lead to double standards? If it is "our" in-group, it is oppression, and revolution is quite legitimate. If it is "the other" in-group, it is a break of civil order and may quite legitimately be suppressed.

[Bootstrap]

I do not call you a Communist. But I suppose that you underestimate the intellectual influence of American Communists on American political thought, including your own political thought. Communists were a leading intellectual force in the Red Decade and practically the only intellectual force behind the Civil Rights Movement.

Well no, it's simply false to claim that people like Martin Luther King were Communists or Marxists. That was a tactic that people used to try to undermine the civil rights movement, and the emotion behind these claims is not proof that they are true.

I think this description is accurate.

Despite King’s consistent rejection of communism, in 1962 his associations with a few alleged Communists prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to launch an investigation into his alleged links with the Communist Party. In 1976 the U.S. Senate committee reviewing the FBI’s investigation of King noted: “We have seen no evidence establishing that either of those Advisers attempted to exploit the civil rights movement to carry out the plans of the Communist Party” (Senate Select Committee, Book III, 85). From wiretaps initiated in 1963, the FBI fed controversial information to the White House and offered it to “friendly” reporters in an effort to discredit King. In 1964 King told an audience in Jackson, Mississippi, he was “sick and tired of people saying this movement has been infiltrated by Communists … There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida” (Herbers, “Rights Workers”).

I think this is a fair summary of King's belief that Christianity and Communism are incompatible. But you would be right to say that King was not a free market capitalist, either. Marx learned from Adam Smith's writings, but Marx was no capitalist. King learned from Marx's writings, but King was no Marxist.

In the Cold War climate of the 1950s and 1960s, the threat of communism galvanized public attention. In 1953 Martin Luther King called communism “one of the most important issues of our day” (Papers 6:146). As King rose to prominence he frequently had to defend himself against allegations of being a Communist, though his view that “Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible” did not change (King, Strength, 93). Although sympathetic to communism’s core concern with social justice, King complained that with its “cold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism, communism provides no place for God or Christ” (Strength, 94).

King first studied communism on his own while a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in 1949. In his 1958 memoir, he reported that although he rejected communism’s central tenets, he was sympathetic to Marx’s critique of capitalism, finding the “gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty” that existed in the United States morally wrong (Stride, 94). Writing his future wife, Coretta Scott, during the first summer of their relationship, he told her that he was “more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits” (Papers 6:123; 125).

King began preaching on “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity” in 1952, repeating sermons on the same theme throughout his career and including one as a chapter in his 1963 volume of sermons, Strength to Love. Communism’s presence demanded “sober discussion,” he preached, because “Communism is the only serious rival to Christianity” (Strength, 93). King critiqued communism’s ethical relativism, which allowed evil and destructive means to justify an idealistic end. Communism, wrote King, “robs man of that quality which makes him man,” that is, being a “child of God” (Strength, 95).

[Josh]

I don't throw a dictionary at people for "misusing" the words "Nazi" or "Communist". Instead I try to understand what they're saying.