How so! I plunge, plunge without fail
My blood-black saber into your soul.
That art God neither wants nor wits,
It leaps to the brain from Hell’s black mists.
Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Yes—he was also a poet.
Was Marx actually a Satanist? Some might say he was just a romantic youth, and it is hard to say one way or another with absolute certainty, but whether or not Marx literally worshiped Satan, his imagination was satanic in the older Christian sense: rebellion against God, hatred of the created order, and the promise that man can become his own creator. He certainly saw man the way Satan would, offering something Satan would have known could never actually work while knowing that the attempt to implement it would kill on a scale even smallpox could not match.
“Real communism has never been tried” is the familiar refrain, but that is because real communism is not possible. Every attempt at it has stalled out in the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” stage, and that will always be true as self-interest cannot be abolished. It can only be punished, starved, terrorized, and driven underground.
Here is another verse Marx wrote:
Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it well.
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.
Communism promises freedom from want in a utopian paradise of plenty, but people are not wired to work like bees or ants, and, as a result, all communism delivers is starvation and depravity.
Marx called religion “an opiate for the masses,” but this quote is seldom understood. Marx wanted the masses given their opiate, and communist countries tend to have the masses worship the communist leaders whenever the Dictatorship of the Proletariat emerges.
Lenin was worshiped like a god after his death, and Stalin understood something Trotsky never fully grasped. Trotsky wanted the communist revolution worshiped as an ideal. Stalin understood that the Soviet people, having been severed from God and told to worship their former emperors as His chief earthly intermediaries for centuries before, needed a god in the image of man. Lenin became the icon, and Stalin the successor.
Communists called themselves “atheists,” even if they were never in practice, and Lenin was not satisfied just burning down churches. He jailed priests with prostitutes and forced nuns to take husbands to break their vows.
Here is another verse from Marx:
Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle.
Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think.
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.
Here is another:
The world which bulks between me and the Abyss,
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality:
Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
And then sink down to utter nothingness,
Perished, with no existence—that would be really living!
Marx gives the same basic argument to all of mankind that the serpent gave to Adam and Eve, telling us that if we renounce religion and rebuild society in Marx’s image we will be akin to God ourselves, at least collectively speaking. Is it really a surprise that everyone who has ever led a Marxist revolution, then, has turned out to be a sadistic monster?
Here is the thing: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is not how one treats free people. It is how one treats livestock. Marx’s vision was to reduce people to farm animals, feeding and housing them while expecting them to work “for the collective” until they drop from exhaustion. If we are to take Marx at his word, it may well be that he wrote Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto specifically to see the world destroyed, knowing that evil hands hell-bent on man’s destruction would flock to his siren call and smash their countries upon Marxism’s rocks.
It is the conceit of man that we think we know more, and that others know less. Give someone a title and this problem grows exponentially. Give someone a system nobody has ever managed to implement before, and those with lofty titles will think they and they alone can make it work.
“Real communism has never been tried” is the familiar refrain, but that is because real communism is not possible.
It is not hard to play on the ego of youth either. They are told that the world has changed and that they, and not their forebears, can make socialism work. Wisdom, after all, is the appreciation of what limited knowledge we have, and wisdom comes with age. The youth have little wisdom by virtue of being young, and it is easy to convince those who are unwise that they are smarter than those who came before.
A wise person would not think they can improve a complicated system like our electricity grid or our food distribution system without first taking the time to become an expert in those systems. A wise person would understand what they do not know, but those with an overabundance of ego have no limits to what they imagine they can do.
It is not just Marx. New York City just put Zohran Mamdani in as mayor, and democratic socialists are winning Democratic primary after Democratic primary across the country. “We are not communists,” such people say, “we are democratic socialists,” but David Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, says that the goal of democratic socialism is “liberation and communism.”
Think of the ego Karl Marx must have had to think he could redesign the political and economic landscape of the entire world. Perhaps those who tried and who continue to try to implement Marx’s vision had good intentions, but I do not believe Marx did. I think Marx wanted to see the world burn, as much of it did in the twentieth century. Marx even told us he wanted the world to burn. Just read his poetry.
Did the world learn its lesson from all the carnage in the last century? No. Sadly, each generation seems to want to learn this lesson the hard way, which will likely make this century even bloodier, and the quest for Marxism will turn the world into the devil’s playhouse, if given the opportunity.
Marxists never refer to Marxism as a movement, but as a revolution. There is a reason for that. Movements have a start and an end in which something moves a certain distance and then stops. A revolution is perpetual, moving so far and then revolving over again as something else. Marxist revolutions are continuous.
The people living in communism are in a perpetual state of fear and hunger. Every time the people start to get used to it, it revolves again as something else. Marx and Engels supplied the phrase “permanent revolution” and Trotsky later turned it into doctrine. The result is not liberation, but a living hell on Earth made permanent, devouring each subsequent generation.
It was not enough for Marx to damn those alive during his lifetime. In the logic of satanic rebellion, Marx wanted to damn everyone who ever would live, for all time to come. Marxism is not a faith for the humble, though. It is a faith for those who believe man can be redesigned, society can be remade, history can be commanded, and God can be replaced.
If we look at what Satan would need to destroy God’s creation, he would actually need two systems: one for those with the humility for faith, and one for those with the vanity to deny a higher power. Both would, of course, pervert God’s moral law. I’ve written before how Muhammad supplied the system for the faithful. Marx supplied one for the arrogant.
