America's Republican-fascists Are The Biggest And Most Blatant Collaborators With "Marxists" In Our History

IT SHOULD STRIKE anyone who has observed the Republican-fascists since the 1990s as oddly hypocritical that they should be trying to revive the 1940s through 50s red-scare accusations that there are Marxists everywhere. It was their guy, Donald Trump who conducted a public homo-erotic wooing of the most extreme Communist regime still standing in the Kim dynasty's North Korea and was an obvious and obsequious asset of the KGB gangster running Russia and its virtually occupied nations, Putin.  I still smirk when I remember it was the Archive not finding the mosh-note from Kim to Trump that clued them in on his thuggish theft of public documents.   If there is one thing that we should have learned since Nixon and Kissinger opened up relations with still Communist controlled China it is that Republicans are all in on doing business with "Marxists" when it's those kinds of Marxists who rule as dictator-gangsters in other countries.  I fully expect that we will find out that he sold them important and dangerous secrets he stole before the end of the Trump disaster is written.  As someone pointed out, when the Rosenbergs did it, they got the death penalty.

But there is a different understanding of "Marxism" which Republican-fascists most certainly don't ever intend to do business with because it is focused on the welfare of the underclass and the least among us.

This passage from a 2003 paper by the American Baptist liberation theologian Jorge Pixley has an interesting take on this different kind of "Marxism."  I'll preface this by noting, yet again, that Karl Marx, himself, disclaimed membership in the club of Marxists so it is a word that can have various and antithetical meanings.

But perhaps a word on Christian marxism (his use of the lower case for "marxism) is in order.  The official Marxism promoted by the Communist parties of Latin America has no intellectual importance.  It followed a party line dictated from Moscow, Stalin's view of the necessary five stages of historical development.  These parties were not revolutionary, with the one exception of the Salvadoran Communist party that gained its credibility when it led the peasant uprising in 1932 where the leaders, including Farbundo Marti, were murdered.  It is estimated that there were 30,000 killed by the army, 30,000 machete-baring peasants killed by the machine guns of the army.  The Communists were among them.  The likely candidate of the FMLN in the next election is Jorge Shafik Handal of the Communist Party, showing the confidence in which the other parties in this alliance hold the communists.  This is most unusual in Latin America.

The Christian reading of Marx's writings is based on Marx's critique of economics, politics and culture depends on a reading of their social effects.  In other words, there is a bourgeois economics, an economics at the service of the capitalist class.  But there can be and must be a revolutionary economics placed at the service of the proletarian class.  The same critique was applied or suggested by Marx in relation to law, literature, and philosophy.  All of these critiques, but especially the economic one to which he devoted most of his life, are indispensable today for those who believe in the need for a different society.  Marx himself did not apply the same logic to his critique of religion, which seemed to him irredeemably bourgeois.  This we take to be a failure on his part, a failure, a costly failure.  What is more consistent with Marxist thought, though Marx himself did not develop it, is the sort of critique which the prophets and Jesus applied to religion.  The Lord of Israel that Solomon used to get forced labor for building his temple is a false god as the tenth century prophet Ahijah believed.  The early Christians were denounced as atheists, and they were atheists in the sense that they did not bow down to the civic Gods of the Roman empire.  This is the Marxism which we liberation philosophers and theologians believe in.

So, according to Jorge Pixley, it is a Marxism which includes what Marx definitively rejected. "Marxism" is that divorced from Karl Marx that you can do that.  I would point out that what he defines as Marxist is certainly present, in a number of ways, in the Jewish Prophetic literature.  Marilynne Robinson has quoted a large number of the commandments of Moses and, with good reason, points out that if followed they would produce conditions that leave what she understands as liberation theology behind in terms of its tender regard and treatment of the underclass, working poor as well as destitute.  Certainly both the Law of Moses and the Gospel treat the debtor class with far more justice than secular republican government does.  It was the debtor class who the framers of the American Constitution so often disparaged in stating their intentions by drafting the Constitution, who they openly intended to harm (again, read Charles Beard, he documents it) and the hard pressed who tended to be in debt were among the foremost opponents of the adoption of the Constitution in the months it was being put forward for adoption.

Being someone who has the deepest respect for many of the varied liberation theologies around today, I think its biggest problem is that in those who have a deep and impressive history with academic philosophy and theology (the paper is called Creativity and Struggle: Process Philosophy and Liberation Theology) is that the ideas threaten to become more important than actual life does.  It is disheartening to see the extent to which academic writing about what should be a vital and real force to deliver justice seems to be devolving into academic abstraction and, inevitably, impotence.  Academic process and procedures seems to me to inevitably tame the prophetic pursuit for justice and render it everything from misguided to totally counterproductive.   I would note that unlike the Stalinist Communist Parties of most of Latin America and most of those Communists in the United States, liberation theology has always had its primary stake in the actual welfare of the least among us. That is one of the greatest differences between secular "Marxists" and Christians who believe in the Gospel, The Law and the Prophets who also make some use of Marx's critique.   A lot of other allegedly religious philosophers and theologians, you certainly couldn't honestly say that about, they have no time for the least among us.   

I think it would be more politically savvy to leave behind the talk of "Marxism" as well as that second most abused word in political-economic babble and scribbleage, "socialism."  Both words and the various political ideologies that used them have distorted the terms out of any practical usefulness, they are as discredited and that abuse of both have earned the words many negative connotations. The idiot Republican-fascists flinging them around today only know those connotations and, removed from any denotative meaning, they can mean whatever they want them to.  For anything positive, the words are now useless.  I think their continued use is counter-productive even in liberation theology, among the most positive uses of them I'm familiar with.  

Certainly the Republican and now Republican-fascist alliance with Marxists, Communists, and Stalinists like Putin who practice Stalin's kind of Marxism more profitably by not using the scary words for it, foregoing pretenses of "socialism" as the inherent gangsterism his politics shares with all anti-egalitarian-democratic regimes do, should show that the Republican-fascists, more than even the Democratic Socialist handful among elected Democrats, are all-in with "Marxism" when they can make money and gain power and advantage through it.  American capitalists sold us out to the Chinese Communists who use their own population as slave labor.  If Republican-fascists do manage to gain permanent power, I can foresee them opening up trade with North Korea as Putin has, I've read that Putin's Russian mafia using North Korean slave labor are some of the Kim gang's most lucrative sources of capital.  Trump would certainly do whatever Putin told him to, if he had won the last election and didn't face a Democratically controlled Congress, he'd probably have done that by now.  And the Republican-fascists at all levels would go along with it, just as they did Nixon's sucking up to the "Marxists" of China, all they had to do was give up pretenses of "socialism" which is one of the first things most Communist regimes have done, Lenin and Trotsky did it almost immediately as they suppressed all workers organizing to pursue their own good.