One third of the world’s population today lives under tyrannies that call themselves Marxist. No other worldview commands this many people. Yet a hundred and fifty years ago, there was no philosophy called Marxism. Karl Marx was then and undergraduate university student who specialized in pubs, taverns, cafes, and desperate letters to his family asking for more money.
How could such a transformation of the world take place so rapidly? Why have Communist revolutions swept the face of the earth? And why did they occur only in regions where Marx had insisted that they could not in theory take place until the rest of the world had already turned Communist?
The greatest myth of Marxism is that the Communist revolution is inevitable. The second greatest myth is that it is proletarian. The third greatest myth is that it is the product of industrial poverty. Nothing in the lives of either Karl Marx or Frederick Engles, his partner, suggested that any of these myths was true. Marx and Engels, the bourgeois sons of bourgeois religious families, never did a day’s manual labor in their lives. Engel’s only connection to industrial capitalism was as the son of a factory’s owner. Marx’s only connection was his lifelong subsidies from Engles.
Why, the, has Marxism been so successful in capturing the minds of men? Because it is a religion, the most powerful rival of Christianity since the rise of Islam in the seventh century.
The nature of Marxism as a religion has long been recognized by its critics. But what has not been generally recognized is Marxism’s unique fusion of both ancient and modern heresies. It revives the most ancient of religious themes-social regeneration through systematic chaos-yet it defends this view in the name of modern science. It appeals to the basest motives of mankind-autonomy from God, institutionalized envy, and bloody revolution-yet it defends itself as being simultaneously the most moral and the most scientific of systems.
Gary North has assembled the evidence to prove that Marxism has been a success because it is the most perverse imitation of Christianity ever invented. It was invented by two men who had been baptized as Christians, had affirmed an evangelical faith in their teens, and had turned in fury against God in their early twenties. Few people know that Marx wrote a satanic play and wrote satanic poetry in his youth. But anyone who has read his early writings knows that his avowed enemies were not the capitalist but the Christians and the Jews. He hated God more than he hated capitalism.