← The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
WOF 532: The Suffocating "Warmth" of Marxist Collectivism
00:45:48
Loading summary
Transcript67 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to the Word On Fire Show. I'm Matthew Petrucyk, senior director of the Word On Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you for joining us. Marxism, unfortunately, seems to be making a comeback. Despite its economically disastrous, politically oppressive, and horrifically inhumane track record. The atheistic philosophy that produced the communist revolution and eventually led to the deaths of tens of millions of people has wheedled its way back into the center of our political culture. On the surface, this may sound surprising. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall over three decades ago, few public figures have openly identified as Marxist and Communist. Political parties have typically occupied the outermost fringes of political influence. However, Marxist ideas, especially in the form of contemporary identity politics, have not only continued gathering momentum beneath the surface in universities, NGOs, the media, corporate HR departments, and government bureaucracies, high profile politicians, including the mayor of New York, Zoran Mondami, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, now seem to be openly advocating for Marxist policies. So how did this morally and historically discredited ideology reemerge in mainstream politics? Equally important, how should Christians and all people concerned with basic human rights and the common good? Respondents here to discuss the dark history of Marxism, its contemporary forms, and how the Catholic Church has and always will stand against it is Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop, welcome back to the studio.
- [01:47]
B
Thanks, Matt.
- [01:48]
A
So today we're looking at the re emergence of Marxism in contemporary politics. It's kind of a zombie ideology that never really seems to disappear. But before we get into that, what have you been up to lately?
- [02:01]
B
Oh, lots of stuff this time of year. You know, in the diocese, we had a wonderful rite of election. That's the usually first Sunday of Lent when we are welcoming the catechumens and candidates who are coming into the church or into full communion. Last year we set a record for our diocese. This year we topped that record. So very happy about that. We great church in Austin, Queen of Angels. And we filled that church up with, with the candidates, catechumens, sponsors from all over the diocese. It's my chance to speak Spanish a little bit. You know, when I was in California, I spoke Spanish a lot. Now, not as much, but a lot of people from the western part of my diocese also here in Rochester, a lot of Hispanics.
- [02:37]
C
Right.
- [02:38]
B
So I did half the homily in Spanish and, you know, a number of the parts of the Mass, and I always enjoy that. But it was a great, it was a great number.
- [02:45]
A
Well, praise God, we're seeing numbers like that surge all all across, no question about it.
- [02:51]
B
A lot of bishops have been kind of tracking that and remarking it.
- [02:54]
A
Well, let's now turn to today's topic, the surprising, or perhaps if you've been following cultural trends in the last, say, five years, perhaps not so surprising, reemergence of Marxism in the political scene. Bishop, you've recently made some posts on X and then a more extended op ed criticizing some comments from the mayor of New York, Zaharan Mondame, and separately from New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, both of whom appear to be endorsing, overtly endorsing Marxist principles. But before we turn to those comments and your response to them, just say a few words about what Marxism is, what defines it, and let's start with who the founder of Marxism, Marx himself. Karl Marx.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, Karl Marx, a 19th century German figure, born 1818 in the town of Trier in the western part of Germany. He becomes a student of Hegelian philosophy as a young man, but then becomes a kind of radical Hegelian. They're more conservative and then more liberal Hegelians. He becomes a real rad, and we'll say a little bit more about that. Then he gets involved in active politics, which gets him in trouble in Germany. Then he goes to Paris, does an important writing there, they call it now the Paris Manuscripts, gets in trouble there, goes to Belgium for a time, gets in trouble there, finally ends up in London. And that's where he spends the bulk of his adult life, in London. And there he does his more serious, mature writing, Das Kapital, his sort of masterpiece. He writes at the British Museum. And if you go to the British Museum to this day they have the chair that Marx sat in when he wrote Das Kapital dies there in 1883 and he's buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. So little sketch of his life. He kind of a sad life in many ways. His family life was troubled. He was never financially secure, you know, kind of a struggling intellectual. But that's kind of a little arc of his life.
- [04:46]
A
One of my favorite biographical details from Marx's life is he had a live in maid whom he never paid. Sounds like a little exploitation to me.
- [04:55]
B
Property is theft.
- [04:57]
A
Well, let's look at some of the main ideas of Marxism which have sort of taken on their own life outside of his writing as well. And the first, this idea of historical materialism which is also connected to dialectical materialism. So what's going on there?
- [05:13]
B
Well, that's the Hegel connection. So as a young man, he takes in Hegel's thought, and there's no way we can even gesture, summarize Hegel in 30 seconds. But Hegel's famous for that idea of the way ideas move. Thesis, and then something opposed to it. Antithesis, antithesis. The two of them battle, and then they express a synthesis of the two. And then that synthesis produces its own antithesis and the beat goes on. So as ideas unfold, what's happening in Hegel's philosophy is that is spirit, absolute spirit is coming to its own self realization through history. Again, we're not going to try and sum up Hegel, but Marx takes all that in. But then he famously says, what I did is I turned Hegel on his head. So if Hegel's talking about the movement of ideas primarily or absolute spirit, Mark says, I accept the dialectical part of it. That's the way things move. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But I'm gonna propose a dialectical materialism that's not so much about the movement of absolute spirit, but the way material conditions, economic conditions develop and unfold. They develop in this highly conflictual way. One economic system gives rise to its antithesis, which then produces the synthesis and so on. So he sees history in a kind of Hegelian way, but it's a dialectical materialism with the focus on the economic substructure.
- [06:39]
A
That's a great summary. Of course, another one of the pillars of Marxism is this reduction of all of history to a class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. What's going on there?
- [06:52]
B
Well, because that would be in Marx's mind, the most in his time, the most recent instance of this. So he goes back to analyzing slave economy in ancient times and going the feudal economy, the early capitalist economy, and then his own time as capitalism, especially in London. Keep in mind, he's writing in London, which is the capital of the world at the time when the whole industrial revolution is really underway. So it was the capital of capitalism at that moment. The great struggle was between what he calls the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. How do we define them? Something like the bourgeoisie would be the capitalist class that owns the means of production. The proletariat would be the industrialized working class. So mind you, England had largely been an agrarian society. But mid 19th century, a lot of people are coming now from the farms in the countryside into the cities. And think Dickens. Now, that's the era. You know, factories and these kind of soulless places of production. And the people coming from the farms now Becoming not farmers, but the proletariat, the industrialized working class. And so Marx noticed now the struggle between those two classes. And that's what he put his finger on.
- [08:02]
A
And we also, of course, have the general critique of capitalism itself and private property. What's the general sense of what he sees wrong there?
- [08:12]
B
Well, you look at the early writings of Marx. I mentioned those Paris manuscripts. They're also called the Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. So he's a young man when he writes these, and it's a more romantic sort of expression. Later on, he becomes more scientific. The Germans always loved the Wissenschaflich. You have to get scientific. So by the end, Das Kapital, it's much more. But the early Marx, there's something like more ethical, you might say. The big word at the time in his writing is ent, fremdung in his German, which means alienation. Now that's come into our vocabulary too, in a big way. Marx felt that capitalist man was alienated in all sorts of ways. Alienated from his own freedom and productivity. Because now he's being told by some hierarch or some capitalist what he has to do. Alienated from nature. So he again has a sort of romantic vision of people have left the farms and close to the earth and all that, and now they're in these factories, sooty, dangerous, deracinated from nature. That's their environment. So they're alienated from that also, Mark says, alienated from themselves because they see in the product of their alienated labor a reflection of their own alienation. So here's an example he often uses. And to me it illustrates the Marxist thing, a pin factory. So mid 19th century. Imagine someone on a assembly line. Entire job is to take a pin and put a head on the pin and put it back. Think of like Lucy, the old Lucy show, you know, so someone assembling pins out of touch with nature, out of touch with his fellow human beings in this sort of automaton mentality, forced to work against what he really wants to do. That's, I think, what Marx has in mind when he thinks of capitalism. And to be fair, capitalism circa 1860 is not like capitalism today. Why? Because of lots of reforms. And I'm trying here to be fair to Marx and his followers, things like child labor laws, restriction of the workday, unionization, antitrust legislation, all these ways that we've reformed the excesses of capitalism. Young Marx especially is writing a time when the capitalist political economy in the west was rather brutal. And again, I Mentioned Dickens. Read the novels of Dickens and you see the conditions of the time. So, you know, he's complaining about the alienation that obtains at many levels of human life. That would be the early Marx, I think, critique of capitalism.
- [10:55]
A
How about Marxism's general critique of religion as a fundamental obstacle to the Marxist vision?
- [11:01]
B
Right. Now there's something that I've always found of great interest, obviously, as a religious person. And this, I think is a key difference between Marx and someone like Christopher Dawson, whom I very much admire. How we read culture. Marx saw things in terms of what he called substructure and superstructure. So the substructure, the essential structure of any society, is economic. Now, you might say that's like a first principle for Marx. That's just fundamental. You don't have to argue for that. That's just the way it is, man. He says the human being is the productive animal. He said, you can call him the rational animal if you want, you can call him whatever. But he defines himself, Marx says, as the productive animal. What's economics? Well, it's all the different realities surrounding productivity. So that's always at the core of any society, economics. Now, economics will produce around itself like a penumbra or like a carapace, a protective shell. And we call that culture. So the arts and science and music and literature and politics and religion above all, what are they? The means by which the economic substructure is protecting itself. You say, okay, how's that work? Well, Marx observes, you know, most art in the west is produced by whom? Well, people who are paid by very wealthy people, whether they're cardinals or kings or archbishops or princes. Right. Are we surprised, therefore, that art tends to celebrate and make excuses for the power structure? Politics. What do politicians talk about? And here it's interesting contrast Aristotle's politics from what we mean by politics. We tend to say, well, they talk a lot about economics, don't they? A lot about taxation, budgets, money, you know, stock market. That's what politicians are concerned about. So Marx says, yeah, that's the purpose of politics, is to protect the economic substructure. How about the military? How would a Marxist read that? Well, what does the army tend to do? It gets involved in wars that are protecting markets. The capitalist market has to expand all the time and find I'm getting ahead of myself here. But new people to exploit. And so armies in service of colonial enterprises meant to expand markets. Well, yeah, the military serves the economic substructure. Now let's come to religion. Finally, maybe his favorite Example, what's religion's job? Well, it's to dull people's sensitivities to their miserable lives. So as victims of the capitalist political economy, the vast majority of people lead these miserable lives. What's religion come along to say? Don't worry, you pray and someday when you die, you will go to heaven and so everything will be okay. And you're suffering here. This is part of a spiritual program that you should accept. You know, Marx always finds really interesting. Why do so many wealthy people support religion? Why is religion propped up by lots and lots of money? Well, because it's in the interest of the ruling class, see, to propagate religion. When I was teaching this business at the seminary years ago, and you know, I was doing this all tongue in cheek, I'd say, if you're a Marxist and you're coming up here to the seminary and you're looking at someone like me, what am I doing is I'm training drug pushers. So the purpose of religion is to drug us. Hence his famous line, the opium of the masses. Mind you, opium dens were just becoming a thing in Marx's time, when people would just go to these terrible places and they would smoke opium and they would just move into this dream state and they would be completely oblivious to reality, their lives ruined. So Mark said, ah, there's religion. Opium for the masses. And people like me, priests are drug pushers. We hand out the opium. As a seminary professor, I was training the drug pushers, right? So Marx would see religion as a supreme part of the economic superstructure whose purpose is to protect the substructure. Do you know, maybe we talked about this before, man. The wizard of Oz. It's very interesting. You can read it from a Marxist standpoint. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I'm the great and mighty Oz. Well, who's the mighty Oz? Well, it's religion. It's the culture and all of its magnificence. But what's really manipulating all that? It's this little crummy fellow behind the screen. Don't take action to him. Look at me. And then remember the dog. Toto pulls back the curtain. There's the Marxist intellectual. The Marxist intellectual's job is to pull back the curtain that conceals the grimy economic substructure, which is in fact producing this illusion of the superstructure. Which is why now Marx says the first critique is always the critique of religion, mind you, too. So he's a student of Hegel, but also of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach is maybe the most famous left wing Hegelian Feuerbach, the father of modern atheism. Right. And Feuerbach says, well, religion is just this projection of our idealized self consciousness. So boy, I'd love to be all powerful, I'd love to be all knowing, I'd love to be all loving. And so I project this image out there and I call it God. Right? Well Mark says of course that's true. But then he says, well, well why do we do that? See, why would we do such a weird thing? Because we're so alienated in our economic life and we need the opium of the masses. So that's how he would take in Hegel and Feuerbach and use them as a way of critiquing religion.
- [17:09]
A
So connecting all of these strands to communism. Marxism's explicit goal is to usher in a global communist society that is classless, stateless and defined by common ownership of property and the means of production. So Bishop, given the perennial existence of some form of private property and different economic classes and national boundaries in world history across the globe, throughout space and time, how does Marxism believe it can achieve its utopian goals?
- [17:38]
B
That's where things get very murky in Marx. And it's often been remarked that he's Wissenschaflik, you know, he's very scientific when he's analyzing capitalism and the movement of economic systems and all this. And, and yeah, he thinks there's going to be a great cataclysmic struggle, see between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There's going to be this great revolutionary moment. The proletariat is the spearhead of the revolution. And then that's going to usher in not immediately pure communism, but a kind of propag to it. Right. A sort of transitional period. Now almost any again, I was coming of age. The Soviets often refer to this as, you know, we haven't achieved pure communism. We're in this kind of state capitalism period. Okay, again, this is where Marx gets very murky and almost like eschatological. Keep in mind, Karl Marx has descended on both sides of his family from long lines of rabbis. And there is something of the Old Testament eschatological prophet in Marx, you know, and Kim is due, you know, the passion for justice and you know, the poor who have been exploited by the rich. The themes are clearly in the Old Testament prophets. And then one day, one day the day of the Lord will come when things will be set right. And there's kind of that overtone to pure communism. It will emerge somehow at the end of this long. The end of history. Right. He kind of knows roughly what it looks like. And you've just described it there, you know, classless society with no private property, everything held in common in his early writings. What's the line about? I want to be hunter in the morning and I want to be marksman in the afternoon, and I want to be critic in the evening, without ever becoming hunter or marksman or critic. Like I wanted to be everything and not constrained, you know, in any way, so that everyone lives in that kind of society. How it happens. This is where Marx is quite rightly criticized as utopian, properly speaking. The word, of course, coined by the great St. Thomas More. Right, who utopos not a place. And so is the Marxist dream utopian? I would say certainly, yes. That's one of the ways I would strongly criticize it. It's radically unrealistic, apart from the eschaton, maybe at the eschaton, when everyone is in a state of perfect, selfless love and so on. But as a realistic political proposal, I don't think so.
- [20:07]
A
Well, let's get into that in more detail now, and we'll turn to the actual history of Marxism and communism in just a moment. How it's played out over a century. But what at the conceptual level. Let's move to the Catholic critique. What at the conceptual level does Marxism get wrong?
- [20:25]
B
Go back to the beginning of Catholic social teaching. Rerum novarum, 1891. You've got Leo XIII, who's very aware. See, mind you, that comes out 1891. Marx dies, 1883. So the Marxist movements are starting in Europe. Leo knew there are new things we got to talk about, right? There are changes happening that we have to talk about. And he nods toward the left, certainly in Reverend Navarrem, he nods toward, call them reforms of capitalism. He's aware of the exploitation of workers and all of that, at least the beginning of the call for unionization, those things in Rerum Navarrem. But it begins practically with a vigorous critique of socialism in its various forms. Private property, the Pope affirms private property as a function, I would say, of human dignity, of the dignity of the individual, that I have a right, a prerogative to private property. He's opposed to collectivist understandings. And the critique there is as old as Aristotle. You know, when Aristotle is critiquing the political vision of his mentor Plato. Plato had a kind of communist view, you know, the shared life of the guardians. And there's no all the children are shared in common, and there's no private property, et cetera. And Aristotle right away said, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're looking at something that everyone's responsible for, essentially no one's responsible for it. The least cared for part of your society will be the general part. That's like everyone's concerned. When I taught this again years ago at Mundelein, the students were arranged in what we called CAMs in those days. It's a section of the students building. Right. And every cam had a cam room, which was the general room. So all the kids had their own room. But then it was a kind of a general room. I would always say which room is the least cared for in your cam, and without hesitation, the cam room. How come? Well, because no one's in charge of it. It's everyone's room, so it's no one's room. So Leo actually appeals to that old Aristotelian argument about responsibility. But I think private property as a value is grounded in human dignity for the Pope. But he would certainly pull back from socialism in its various forms, but he would accept certain restrictions upon capitalism. He wants the market economy, and I think all the Popes follow him there. He wants the market economy but circumscribed both legally and morally, so as not to be rapacious and not to result in exploitation.
- [23:10]
A
What about this meta view of history that reduces it to economic materialistic conditions? What's the Catholic critique of that?
- [23:17]
B
Right. And we would certainly see that as deeply problematic. And I mentioned Christopher Dawson, Dawson earlier, someone that I like very much, the British Catholic historian, because Dawson argued that culture is what really forms us, and to reduce that simply to our economic culture is hopeless culture in its variegated forms. But then Dawson observed that culture is always downstream of religion. So first you got to figure out what does society worship once you know its supreme value, you know its cultural norms and values, and then you see how those shape the individuals within it. It's the opposite there of culture as a superstructural epiphenomenon that's just there to protect the economic substructure. No, culture is kind of the moral and spiritual atmosphere, which in turn is conditioned by religion, by what we worship. That I think is much closer to a Catholic view of things. And it's almost the reverse of Marx.
- [24:22]
A
So look briefly then at sort of the history of Marxism put in practice, especially in the form of communism. What has its legacy been?
- [24:30]
B
Well, it's been murderous. And again, that's not to say Karl Marx, you are Personally responsible for all this. I mean, because I think Marx, to give him his due, he at his best, I think was animated by a concern for the exploited and for the poor and all that stuff. So I don't want to be too heavy handed that, you know, from Marx to Lenin and Stalin and death camps and all that. But there is a kind of logic that comes up out of the Marxist view that does conduce toward what we saw. And I think a big part of that is the suspension of the rights, freedom and dignity of the individual. When you see things in a collectivist way. Individuals, well, what did Lenin say? You got to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right? Hey, that means we're going to allow 16 million people to die in a famine. Well, you know, there's a certain price you got to pay when you see things in this very sweeping Hegelian way. And like the forces of history and so on, the individual tends to get forgotten about pretty rapidly. And when you see religion as simply a problem that's gotta be gotten rid of, watch out. Because to me that's the story of the 20th century. The great murderous, rapacious ideologies of the 20th century, both left and right are conditioned by the bracketing of God. And so whenever I see, even read that in Marx, they saw that as a liberating move. I see all that followed from that as something really horrific in our Western culture. So those two things I think the marginalizing of the individual in favor of the collective and then also the rejection of God and religion, they did lead by some steady steps toward the horrors of the 20th century.
- [26:18]
A
You've been a strong critic of wokeism and Wokist ideologies for several years now. What connection, if any, do you see between Marxism and contemporary identity politics, groupthink
- [26:30]
B
and just that very phrase you used there, identity politics, that we're talking about what our group identity is. I hate that I think you look at people individually and if I'm obsessed with what ethnic or what religious or what cultural group I belong to, then I'm going to start thinking collectively and I'm going to start ignoring the prerogatives of the individual. The other thing I see is the antagonistic view of society that's deeply Hegelian and therefore Marxist, that I'm going to read society as a constant struggle. Now Catholic social teaching, see, insists upon the opposite. Don't read society antagonistically. There are certain inequities, if you want, that are born not of immorality, they're born of just the nature of things. And there can be a cooperative view of economic life, social life, cultural life. We need not portray it always as an antagonistic struggle between those who have power and those who don't. When you read together Marx and someone like Nietzsche, you get a poisonous brew that comes up into the 20th century. I think you see that in a lot of the Frankfurt school people who in turn had a big impact on wokeism. Nietzsche meets Marx. The power. Power is the main category. And there's a desperate struggle between classes or groups, the group identity, group think. Those are all the things I see coming from Marx into Wokeism.
- [28:04]
A
You're kind of metaphysically, ontologically, either in one group or the other. Right. So either guiltless or guilty.
- [28:10]
B
Yeah, yeah. And you know this whole thing about equality of opportunity versus equity of outcome. Yes. Equality of opportunity, that's an expression of justice. And justice is always right.
- [28:22]
A
Right.
- [28:23]
B
It's never right to be unjust. Okay, but inequities, some inequities are the result of sin. Okay, I'll get that. Oppression or exploitation. Not all of them. See, I'm an Aristotelian that way. Aristotle, he would notice differences that obtain among us that are born of just differences in intelligence and courage and education and background and so on and so forth. Character. So to encourage a cooperative view of society, not an antagonistic one. I think that's Catholic social teaching zooming
- [28:55]
A
out just a little bit. You can even say it at a theological level. Why do you think that profoundly destructive ideas oftentimes become packaged in appealing sounding words and concepts like justice and equality and empathy and human rights.
- [29:10]
B
Yeah, well, that's what they'll do. You know, you've got to present in a way that's. That's. It's like sweet poison. So it's sweet, but then when you actually take this in, it's poisonous. And people learn how to make their way in a given culture. If you want to undermine your given culture, you find the words that. Oh, people like that. So I'm going to. I'm going to package it that way, but I think you've got to be able to. Our own version of toto. Pulling back the curtain. What's really going on here? I mean, what's really being proposed here? And you know, see, Matt, I think some of it is I'm old enough to have lived through kind of these late communist, like the Soviet communism, and to have witnessed John Paul II's great prophetic struggle against it. I was my, what, early 20s in those days. I'm afraid there are a lot of younger people today. They don't remember any of that. They don't remember Soviet communism now, Chinese communism, Cuban communism, Venezuelan communism, North Korean communism. Any of those sound appealing? You know, I think it's been tried and found very wanting indeed, you know, as an ideology. So I think there's all kinds of theoretical problems with it, and then we see what it looks like on the ground. Anyway. I do think I'll say that as a Catholic, but I think it's also kind of a conservative principle. Conservatives are anti utopian. We're wary of utopian programs, you know, oh, we just change this and that. Everything will be great, you know, not this side of the eschaton, it won't. And we can make things better. We're never going to make them perfect. And it's that kind of angelism. What's the Pascal line? Solis qui fait l' ange fait la bette. Right. The one who'd make himself an angel makes himself a beast. Dead right. Seems to me dead right. So if, you know, an angelism, we can make this happen if we just change these economic structures or. No, no. If you try to make yourself an angel, you'll make yourself a beast.
- [31:20]
A
And the problem is always out there in other people in the system and never in here.
- [31:24]
B
Yeah.
- [31:25]
A
Well, the impetus for the show is that these ideas seem to be in circulation again in mainstream politics. So I'd just like to read two key quotes, one from the mayor of New York, another from a very prominent congressman from New York, and get your reaction to them. So in his inaugural address, the new mayor of New York, Zoran Mondame, said these words. He says, quote, we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. And he goes on to say, quote, let us prove that when a city belongs to the people, there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy, no one too alone to feel like New York is their home. What do you find troubling about these
- [32:08]
B
words or revelatory talk to people and there's some still alive, they're old people now, but who lived under collectivist regimes, fled for their lives, escaped with their lives from them. Ask them about how warm they found collectivism. See, I hear collectivism. I don't hear, hey, we're all one big happy family. I hear the individual is kind of expendable here. What's much more important is our group identity is the collective and so on. And you take away from individuals their freedom and their prerogative to determine their life, their freedom to enter into the economy the way they want to. I think disaster follows from that and we've got tons of evidence of it. So no, no, I reacted very negatively because I think that's a very dangerous rhetoric. I don't think collectivism is warm at all. I would say show me one example of collectivism that is warm. Warm to human flourishing. They're not.
- [33:11]
A
The high profile congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez also recently made headlines saying this in response to an otherwise very well received speech given by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference. So she's speaking at the same conference here after he's spoken and just after calling Western culture and her words thin and fluid, she says, quote, the response that we should have to Western culture is material, it's class based, it's common interest. And then she describes her perspective as a class based international perspective.
- [33:47]
B
It's right out of the Marxist playbook.
- [33:49]
A
We can see that now.
- [33:50]
B
Right Again, I don't know her formation well enough. Has she read Marx carefully and I don't know, but that's what struck me in that rhetoric. It's right out of the Marxist playbook. First of all, that marginalizing of culture. See if culture on the Marxist reading, it's just a superstructural support for the substructure. Well then don't pay attention to that. Don't pay attention to the wizard of Oz. Try to find out what's going on behind that curtain. That's what's interesting. And so Rubio invoking the culture and a la Christopher Dawson religion. Cause Rubio went further than just, you know, from Shakespeare to the Beatles, we have this kind of common culture. He also talked about God and about Christianity. Well, see, for a Marxist, that's all missing the point. So what you do is you say, oh, it's all thin and ephemeral and changing because it just depends on, you know, how it's trying to protect the substructure. What we should look at are these material conditions which are formed by the class struggle. That's Marx, you know, pure and simple. And, and that's what I found alarming when an American politician, look, I mean, all my life I've known Democrats, Republicans, I'm from a Democratic background and my whole family's Democratic. But you know, fdr, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, even Bill Clinton. You don't have people advocating for Communism, you have a more left wing approach to democratic capitalism, let's call it, but it's not communism. There have been communists in our system, you know, go back to the early 20th century. They were kind of strong around the First World War and then even kind of a fringe element. What I find troubling, and it's both in Mamdani and aoc, is fairly prominent politicians on the American left who are unapologetic about it. Seems to me they're not trying to hide it. They're not giving you a disguised, indirect. They're coming right out of the Marxist playbook as a religious leader, not just someone who observes politics, but as a Catholic bishop. First critique is a critique of religion. You let Marxists dominate the society, the first victim is going to be religion. So, yes, that makes me very nervous.
- [36:05]
A
So let's, before we turn to our listener question, look at some possible counter arguments that are induced against the Catholic position. And one of them is that this idea of Marxism can actually find its roots within Christianity itself because the first Christians shared everything in common. So how in the world could Christians in good faith say that it's somehow immoral to pursue that kind of end?
- [36:32]
B
Yeah, no, I would say, as I mentioned, certain elements within Marxism I think are grounded ultimately in a biblical concern for justice and a concern for the exploited poor and a passion against rich and powerful people that exploit the poor. Yeah, I agree with all that. And that's essential to Catholic social teaching too. Now the question becomes, what's the best way to avoid all that? What is the best way to answer exploitation, to lift up the poor and so on. Look, I would join many people, and it's indeed Catholic social teaching that nothing has lifted up more poor people than the market economy, properly managed and morally constrained. So I'm not advocating, let's go back to the 19th century or to sweat shops, and I'm not advocating for that at all. A properly constrained and morally limited market economy. But I think that's the best way to lift up the poor and actually to limit exploitation. John Paul II often said the idea is to get more and more people into the market. Not to badmouth the market, rather to make it more accessible to more people so more entrepreneurs can emerge, more businesses can be created, more jobs can be created. And then people that have work and are benefiting from it, they might become entrepreneurs themselves. And whatever makes the market bigger, stronger and more inclusive, that's what we want. I think that's the best way to deal with these issues. And I think that's the mainstream of Catholic social teaching. Right.
- [38:12]
A
How about the position of those who say, well, look, I recognize that things got a little out of control historically with the death camps and the wanton
- [38:20]
B
executions, a few little minor problems, the
- [38:23]
A
death of millions, those were aberrations. And the problem is we haven't really tried real Marxism yet. What's our response?
- [38:30]
B
Right, the truce, cosmic thing. Yeah, no, and that's always the argument. And you do indeed find a warrant in Marx himself who said, we're not gonna get right there, we're gonna go through the various stages and Okay, I don't know, to me that's a little too high a price to pay while we're waiting for Utopia arrive like, you know, the death of a few million. Well, we can have to deal with that. No, no, no, I think that's a, it's a utopian materialist Hegelianism. And, you know, why are we bothering with that? I think we stay with the mainstream of Catholic social teaching, which is grounded, yes, indeed, in the Hebrew prophets, yes indeed, in Jesus, yes indeed, in the Fathers of the Church, but also in Aristotle and therefore in Thomas Aquinas and then these contemporary Popes. I think that's a much richer and better tradition to be embracing. See, and that's. It bugs me when Catholics, it's happened all my life, they don't reverence that tradition, they run after these extremisms. And we've got a much, much better way to do it.
- [39:29]
A
How about the well known Marxist first? From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Now that sounds fair on the surface, yeah. But there's something mischievous about that as well.
- [39:40]
B
Well, if you go on YouTube, look up Thomas Merton's last speech. So Merton, the great Trappist spiritual writer, was on this trip to Asia and he was in Bangkok speaking at a conference. And his paper was, it was something like Marxism and Monastic perspectives or something like that. And it's literally the last thing Merton ever said. He delivered that speech and you can watch it on YouTube. And then he said, well, I guess there'll be questions in the afternoon. And so now I'm going to disappear. And with that he leaves and he died about an hour later.
- [40:14]
A
Wow.
- [40:15]
B
Anyway, watch that speech because Merton invokes that line from Marx and then he says with a little smile, it seems to me that's a really good monastic principle and that maybe that could become a reality in a monastery. I don't think it will become a reality in society. And I think that's largely right, you know, so within a very small, hyper disciplined, spiritually alert community, maybe that principle can obtain, you know, so when a monk says, okay, I'm going to surrender my private property, I have poverty, I'm going to obey my superiors, you know, maybe that principle could obtain. The trouble again is utopian, because this side of the eschaton, no human society is going to be a monastery. And we have to acknowledge the way people really are if we're going to manage the society creatively.
- [41:04]
A
And of course, monastic communities are voluntary.
- [41:06]
B
Yeah, right, right. So be imposing that and so on. So it's the utopianism again is the problem.
- [41:11]
A
And finally, Bishop, how should we respond to the critique that calling out the contemporary dangers of Marxism is somehow partisan or right wing?
- [41:20]
B
I don't care, call it what you want. I would just say it's a murderous regime that has caused nothing but trouble for zillions of people. So I don't care what you call it. Call it conservative or right wing, I don't care. It's a terrible thing and we can search out its roots and we can see where this came from, you know, and I don't care, call me what you want. Catholic social teaching again, it's not left, it's not right. I can sound like the furthest left wing person in the world if I take certain elements of Catholic social teaching, like, you know, I'll give you an example. The universal destination of goods. When the Church says, well, there is a real sense in which, like, I don't own things as though they're all mine. No God who creates all of being. God is the owner of the world, I am a steward of it. And that's, we'd say private property. That way I have a stewardship over it. And as the popes keep reminding us, I don't have some absolute right to my private property. Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest of what I own belongs to the poor. That's Leo xiii. And so there is that strong, if you want to call it left wing approach, I just call it correct. It's a correct approach. I don't own anything.
- [42:34]
A
It's metaphysics.
- [42:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, right. It's grounded in a creation metaphysics. And then therefore my social responsibility, you know, so we can caricature the free market position as just, you know, I'm going to try to hoard all the things from my own private property. Well, no, that's not Catholic social teaching either, you know, so it's both and it's Both and.
- [42:58]
A
Well, it is time for our listener question. Today we have Wade from Louisville, Kentucky, asking about how to respond to people who defend their point of view by simply saying, well, that's my truth.
- [43:09]
B
Okay.
- [43:10]
C
Hi, Bishop Barron. My name is Wade from Louisville, Kentucky. Today, people use the phrase my truth to describe their personal experiences or beliefs. As a culture, we seem to be moving away from the idea of the truth as something objective and universal. Could you comment on the dangers of this shift and how we can better point people toward the objective truth found in Christ? Thank you.
- [43:38]
B
First of all, Wade, never lose your accent. You got a great accent. I love that. No, go back to ancient times. St. Augustine wrote a book called Contra Akademikos against the Academics. And he was. He was critiquing exactly what you're talking about, this sort of relativism. And the basic argument is very simple, but it's confounding, I think, to those who are holding relativist positions, which is, okay, what you just said to me, that there's no the truth, only my truth. And your truth? Is that the truth, or is that just your truth? I mean, it just undermines itself. Because if you say, oh, no, that's just my truth, I say, well, then I'm not going to listen to you. Then I have no interest in what you're saying, see? So the claim we always have to be claiming, ultimately, it's the truth. Otherwise I wouldn't be saying it, see? If I didn't think what I'm holding is true, why am I talking to you about it? If it's just your truth, my truth, I'm not going to talk to you. Right. So the very act of speaking to someone rests upon the assumption that truth is objective and is universal. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a conversation. So it's a stupid argument, ultimately, and it is wielded by a lot of people today, but stupidly so. And I would just turn it right back on them and say, you have to assume that truth is universal. Otherwise you wouldn't even be making this argument.
- [44:58]
A
Well, thanks so much, Wade, for reaching out to us. If you would like to ask Bishop Barron a question on a future Word on Fire show, please visit askbishopbarron.com Again, that's askbishopbarron.com we always love to hear from you. Well covered a lot of ground here, Bishop. Thanks so much.
- [45:14]
B
All right, thanks, man.
- [45:15]
A
See you next time. That does it for us today. Thanks for joining us on the Word on Fire show. If you're interested in learning more about how Word on Fire can help you grow closer to Christ, become a better evangelist with and for others, and work for the common good. Consider joining the Word on Fire Institute. Check us out at institute.WordPress.org that's institute.WordPress.org and we'll see you next time.