What Marx Was Right and Wrong About

 

What Marx Was Right and Wrong About

 March 7, 2025

I suppose that Karl Marx isn’t as big a deal as he was back when the Soviet Union was a major world power and opponent of the United States in the world and was ruled by a political party that espoused a Marxist-Leninist ideology that it claimed justified all of its domestic and foreign policies. Still, the major world power China still espouses Marxism-Leninism even though its economic policies hardly comply with that philosophy, and North Korea and Cuba still claim to be Marxist states. Marxist philosophy and economics have had a large impact on the politics of western Europe today, where political parties that were once truly Marxist are now democratic parties that are part of their country’s political mainstream. Marxism, and the related words communism and socialism, are buzz words of hatred for most Americans even though very few of them know what those words actually mean. Karl  Marx, for everything he got wrong, is a major figure in the intellectual history of Europe. For us historians at least, that makes him worth paying attention to.

Karl Marx (1818-1983) was a German-born philosopher who did most of his work in England. He was a disciple of both Auguste Comte and Georg Friedrich Hegel, both of whom led him astray in significant ways. From Hegel he took the notion that history progresses through what both Hegel and Marx called a dialectic. Dialectic is the notion that history progresses in a certain way. It posits that history progresses through a succession of an original sort of structure called a thesis, the arising of a response to the thesis called the antithesis, and a resolution called a synthesis. A classic example is the way the ancient world had economic systems grounded in slavery, the medieval world had economic systems grounded in feudalism, and the modern world has economic systems grounded in capitalism. Marx accepted this view of history, as oversimplified as it may be. From Comte he took philosophical materialism. Comte (1789-1857) was a French philosopher who contended that only the material is real. Marx combined these two ideas into a system he called dialectical materialism. For him, only the material was real, but the real progressed through history through a metaphysical process of dialectic.

Marx lived and wrote at the height of the Industrial Revolution of 19^th century. In his world, economics were capitalistic, and the regulation of capitalism for the benefit of the workers and the environment that we more or less take for granted was unknown. Rather, the economy worked almost exclusively for the benefit of those who owned the means of production, that is, those who owned the factories and the land from which wealth was produced. Capitalists, some of them very wealthy, operated the means of production for their own benefit. Marx saw that the capitalists could produce no wealth without their workers, but he also saw that the life of most workers was bleak to say the least. The capitalists paid them as little as they could and still keep their factories working and producing wealth for them.

For Marx, “class” determined everything. Everything economic, political, social, and cultural was determined by the class relationships between those who owned the means of production and those who did not. Even religion was, for Marx, a tool the dominant class (in his case the capitalists) used to suppress the other classes, especially the proletariat, Marx’s term for the working class.

Poverty was endemic among the working class. Working conditions for them were, for the most part, horrific by any decent human standard. Marx saw how the unregulated capitalism of his day worked to enrich the capitalists and impoverish the proletariat. He set out to create a philosophy that asserted that eventually all of that would change. Eventually, the workers would rise up against the capitalists to create a “socialist” economic, political, social, and cultural order. He insisted that the dialectic nature of history made this socialist revolution inevitable. The means of production would belong to the state in this socialist order, and the state would represent and advance the interests of the proletariat. Eventually, this socialist order would put itself out of existence by eliminating all class distinctions within the society. Socialism would evolve into communism, an economic, social, political, and cultural system in which everyone would receive according to their need not according to how much a dominant class was willing to give them. Cf Acts 4:32-37. Though he was Jewish, Marx’s “communism” was, in theory, very much the realization of at least some of the principles of the realm God from the Christian tradition.

Marx got some things right and some things wrong. His philosophical materialism is simply wrong. Philosophical materialism is the belief that only the physical, the material, is real. It denies the reality of any spiritual plane of existence. Only that which we humans perceive with our ordinary physical senses is real. This notion led Marx to reject all faith traditions, including his own Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. Philosophical materialism is an ontology, that is, it is a philosophical system that makes certain assertions about the nature of what is real. Human civilizations across the globe and across the millennia have all sensed that there is more to reality than meets the eye. The great Joseph Campbell said that there is a reality behind perceived reality that supports perceived reality. I have said elsewhere that there is a spiritual plane of reality that both transcends and inheres in the world of our ordinary senses. Over the millennia, people of all cultures have had personal experiences of the reality of the spiritual. I have no doubt that the spiritual is real. We would all see it if we did as Campbell suggests, namely, take the materialistic shades off our eyes and see what is really there. Marx was simply wrong when he said that only the material is real.

Marx saw the world’s great spiritual traditions as nothing but shams that the dominant class (the capitalists) used to suppress the subordinate class (the proletariat). Tragically, the Christianity of his day made, and ours makes, it ridiculously easy for Marx to make this assertion and for a great many people to accept it. At its beginning, Christianity was called “the Way.” It was a way of life. It was about living this life the way God calls us to live it. It was not at all about getting souls to heaven. In fact, the earliest Christians believed in a resurrection of the dead at the end times, not that an individual immortal soul is judged and either blessed or condemned upon a person’s death. After it became the established religion of the Roman Empire in the 4^th century CE, the way Christianity diverted the attention of the faithful away from this earth and toward a supposed life somewhere else after death played right into Marx’s hand with his contention that faith is a tool of the oppressors. Marx would have had a much harder time condemning Christianity if he had understood it the way Christians understood it in the first three centuries of the faith’s existence.

Marx was right, however, more or less at least, in his analysis of the plight of working people in his context (and to a lesser extent in ours). He was right that capitalists, when left to their own devices, operate the economy for their own benefit, the wellbeing of the proletariat be damned. In Marx’s day, this aspect of capitalism was seen in the way the capitalists of industrial England did everything they could to stop the government from enacting and enforcing regulations of industry designed to protect the safety and wellbeing of society’s working class. In our day, despite our having more regulation of capitalism than England had in Marx’s day, we see the same dynamic in the way the wealthy among us manipulate our political system to limit what the government can do to protect the workers and to have the federal government enact tax cut after tax cut for the benefit of the wealthy who, frankly, just don’t need those cuts.

Marx asserted what he called a “labor theory of value.” He believed that it was the work of the workers, and only their work, that generated wealth for the capitalists. He contended that the capitalists, that is, the owners of the means of production and the employers of the workers, expropriated value that the workers alone had created. In effect, they stole value from the workers that rightfully belonged to the workers because they created it. Most economists today replace the labor theory of value with a market theory of value. Value is determined not by what labor it takes to produce a good but by the law of supply and demand. When the supply of some good is low but the demand is high, the value of the good goes up. When the demand is low, whether the supply is low or not, value goes down. Not for Marx. For Marx, the capitalists were simply robbing the workers of the value the workers produced. This robbery was, for Marx, a primary example of the way capitalists exploited and oppressed workers. He was right that capitalists oppress workers, but his labor theory of value was just wrong.

Marx taught that the dialectic of history progresses through revolutions that are, usually at least, violent. Marx was no advocate of nonviolence. He had before him the model of the French Revolution of the late 18^th century and the various wars in England over succession to the throne. He may have been taken by Acts’ vision of a world in which everyone received what they needed for life, but he was not fan of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. He issued his piece The Communist Manifesto in support of a violent revolution taking place in France in 1848. He certainly believed that violence was necessary if one class was to displace and replace a different class. Lenin and the Soviet Communists certainly took this part of Marx’ teaching to heart. Was Marx right that progress requires violent revolution? It’s hard to say, but the history of Europe in the 19^th century certainly supports the notion that it does. Nonetheless, nonviolence remains a core and essential Christian teaching.

Marx was right in one crucial way. In unregulated capitalism of the type that prevailed in England and in other industrialized economies of the 19^th century, including the economy of the United States, capitalists will exploit workers to the fullest extent allowed by law. They will work within a country’s political system to broaden the scope of their control over their workers and limit the scope of governmental regulation of wages and working conditions. They will work to reduce the government’s regulation of the environmental impact of the capitalists’ businesses. They will work to limit the extent to which the government may enact policies of social welfare for people in need. That’s because governmental social welfare programs require tax money, and capitalists, by and large, care about having low tax rates more than they do about the welfare of people in need. They will, and do, oppose governmental policies and actions designed to protect the environment. They do that in part because those policies require tax money; but mostly they do it because they believe, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, that environmental regulation interferes with their ability to make money.

Marx’s fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was wrong. History does not necessarily proceed in a dialectic fashion. More importantly, there is more to reality than the material reality we perceive with our ordinary senses. The function of religion is to connect people with the spiritual reality within, behind, and beyond physical reality not to exploit workers for the benefit of the capitalists. We must reject Marx’s ontological contentions. They were, and are, just wrong.

We must not, however, therefore, completely reject Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of unregulated capitalism. With very few exceptions, capitalists, especially the capitalists behind big business, will always work for their own benefit. They will always be willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of ordinary people to their own increasing wealth. Capitalism does indeed favor the well off and oppresses the working people. About that Marx was absolutely correct. Without governmental regulation, wealthy capitalists will trample the working people under foot in every way they can. Labor unions can mitigate the capitalists’ ability to do so but only when the government’s law is behind them. Consumers can mitigate the capitalists’ ability to do so through their purchasing decisions and boycotts, but that hardly ever happens effectively in large part because consumers are as narrowly concerned with their own wellbeing as are the capitalists who make the things consumers buy do. Only the government, and only a government grounded in and committed to the rule of law, can limit the avarice of wealthy capitalists effectively.

There is much about Marxism that we must reject. It’s ontology is all wrong. There is more to reality than the material. Its embrace of violent revolution is immoral and unacceptable. These two aspects of Marxism made it appallingly easy for Russian Marxists to introduce horror on a massive scale in the USSR.[1] After all, if only the material is real, then material beings like peasants and people claimed to be opponents of the regime are perfectly expendable. Marxism has no moral constraints to temper the murderous instincts of a Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. Philosophical materialism is Marxism’s primary fault. It’s wrong. It’s dangerous. It has led to mass murder and genocide in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere. Marx was right that capitalists exploit and oppress workers to the greatest extent they can get away with. About most everything else, he was wrong.

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[1] Most Americans have heard of the Holocaust conducted by German Nazis. Far fewer have heard of the Holodomor, the forced starvation of Ukrainians (and a few others) by Soviet Communists that killed around four million people in the early 1930s.

Has the American Experiment Failed?

 

Has the American Experiment Failed?

March 6, 2025

I just saw online that the Bronze Buffoon’s niece Mary Trump has said that the American experiment has failed. The question immediately occurred to me: Has it? And then two follow up questions came to mind: What is the American experiment? And: What could it mean to say that it has failed? None of those questions is easy to answer, but I’m going to take a shot at answering them here. I think I need to address them in this order: What is the American experiment? What would it mean to say that is has failed? And then: Has it? Here goes.

What is the American experiment? To get any sort of answer to that question we need to go back to the country’s beginnings. Before the United States of America was a country, it consisted of a number of British colonies. They belonged to and were ruled by Great Britain. Great Britain was, at the time, a sort of constitutional monarchy. There was a parliament that was politically significant. There was also a monarch. At the beginning of our country it was King George III. The people of Great Britain, or at least some of them, had representatives in parliament. The American colonists did not. The American colonies may have been democracies of a sort at a local level, but they were subject to the laws of Great Britain, laws in the enactment of which they had no voice. To the extent that they were able to govern themselves as all, the colonies were ruled by land-owning white men. Slavery was legal in all of them, and the economies of some of them depended entirely on the free labor provided by enslaved human beings either from Africa or of African origin.

Beginning in 1775, the American colonies revolted against British rule. The revolution ended in 1783 when Great Britain recognized the independence of its American colonies. After a first, failed attempt to for a national government under the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen American colonies that he won their independence established the Constitution of the United States, which remains in effect, with amendments, to this day. The Constitution is in many ways an expression of the American experiment. It establishes a republic not a pure democracy. It provides for the election of a president every four years. It provides for popular representation in a House of Representatives and a Senate, though originally the people did not elect the senators, the states appointed them. The American experiment, then, is an experiment in democracy, of sorts at least. Its biggest shortcoming was that it tolerated the continuation of race-based slavery.

Shortly after the Constitution was adopted, the states amended it by adding ten amendments. They’re known as the Bill of Rights. They establish certain freedoms that the federal government was not entitled to infringe. They include freedom of religion and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, due process of law, and, tragically, freedom to own weapons. Yes, the Second Amendment says that’s for purposes of a well-regulated militia, but the Supreme Court, in one of its worst decisions ever, has read that provision out of law and made meaningful regulation of firearms essentially impossible. It is clear that from the beginning the American experiment wasn’t perfect. It was, however, an attempt to create a sort of democratic republic of a type the world had never seen be successful before. Benjamin Franklin famously answer a question about what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had created by saying, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

It predates the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence, the signing of which on July 4, 1776, is often considered the real start of the American War of Independence, succinctly states one of the values on which the United States is supposedly founded: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The men who signed the Declaration of Independence, or at least most of them, didn’t really believe even that all men are created equal much less that all people are created equal. Afterall, women in colonial America were kept down in subordinate positions in society and there were millions of enslaved human beings that white American racists didn’t believe to be equal to them at all. Still, “all men are created equal” is an American ideal if not an American reality at least, that is, if we take “men” to mean everyone.

The closest the American experiment has ever come to failing began in 1860, when the country elected Abraham Lincoln president. Southern slaveholders feared that he would somehow abolish slavery, and they seceded from the union and formed the Confederate States of America. The states that remained in the original American union fought a brutal civil war against the confederate states. At first, Lincoln and most white northerners said they weren’t fighting to abolish slavery, they were fighting to preserve the union. The South, on the other hand, clearly was fighting to preserve slavery. By 1863, however, many in the North had come to see the war as being one to abolish slavery. After the war ended in 1865, the country did adopt the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery nationwide. Somehow the American experiment had survived a yearslong civil war, something it has not had to do since.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. It did not, however end American racism, nor did it even purport to do so. The enslavement of human beings white people had kidnapped and brought to America against those people’s will was part of what became the United States since the very beginning, from 1619 when Europeans began to settle the North American continent, never mind that there were already a great many people already here who had no desire to be massacred and displaced by invading white people though that is what white people eventually did to them. Racism has always been endemic among Americans. When the Republicans sold out the South to the Democrats in 1876, the south descended into decades of hell for Black people under Jim Crow. It wasn’t much better for Black people in the north. There were no Jim Crow laws, but there was plenty of racism and racial discrimination. So the US claimed to be based on “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” but American reality has never come close to meeting that contention.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t good things in American history too. We have had more freedom under the Bill of Rights for all of our country’s existence than essentially all people the world around have had for most of human existence. We defeated Japanese imperialistic expansion essentially single-handed in World War II.[1] We have made progress toward living up to “All men are created equal.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are landmarks of that progress. After World War II, the US created a standard of living for most, though hardly all, Americans that few people in the world had ever had before and that, frankly, far too many people in the world don’t have today. We consumed a grossly disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources to do it, and consume a grossly disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources to maintain it today, but we did it, and we maintain it.

What about the republic our constitution created? It has worked well enough from its beginnings to today. Or at least it has done that since 1920 when women secured their right to vote in every state. Or maybe only since 1965 with the Voting Rights Act of that year. But it is true that we have held off-term elections every two years and presidential elections every four years since the states ratified the constitution in 1787. That is a record no other country can match. Moreover, there was no significant violent attempt to overturn one of those elections until Donald Trump unleashed a seditious mob on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Up until that date, the peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another was a hallmark of American democracy.

OK. The American experiment in republican government and a mostly capitalistic economy succeeded, more or less at least, at least until recent times. But what would it mean for the American experiment to have failed? It would mean mostly the failure of our republican (r not R) form of government. It would mean first of all a takeover of that government by some non-democratic force, be that takeover violent or nonviolent. It would be a takeover by people not committed to protect and defend the United States Constitution. People who would end our long history of peaceful elections and a peaceful transfer of power. People who would rule by decree not by the constitutional processes we’ve used for so long. People who would not respect the separation of powers our constitution establishes, most particularly people who would not obey legitimate orders by federal courts. It would be a takeover by people not committed to, and who did not believe themselves to be bound by, the rule of law. People who did not respect Americans’ civil rights. It would, in other words, be a takeover of our federal government by fascists.

It could also be something a bit less than that but still disastrous for American democracy. It could be the American electorate putting in power people to whom most of those fascist things I just listed apply. It could be the reelection of a former president who once unleashed a mob in an attempt to overturn his loss of a legitimate election. It could be the election to the presidency of a man who has been convicted of 34 felonies in a legitimate trial in a legitimate court. It could be the election to the presidency of a man who could not at first rule completely like a fascist dictator but who would position himself as close to being a fascist dictator as he could and who would not be satisfied until he was truly a fascist dictator over this country. It could be the election to the presidency of a man who most admired nondemocratic rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who may in fact be a compromised agent of Putin. Yes, a failure of the American experiment could look very much like that.

Now of course, I’ve just been describing Donald J. Trump, who is the American president as I write these words. Does the seemingly incomprehensible fact that the American electorate has put Trump in the White House a second time mean that the American experiment has failed? I think I must answer that question by saying that the American experiment has taken a serious blow, but it remains to be seen if that blow is fatal. It may well be. Trump has turned the Republican Party, at least in its public aspect, into essentially an American fascist party that kowtows to Trump at every turn. That will do whatever Trump wants it to do. That offers no check on Trump’s irresponsible behavior and inane policies at all. Trump hasn’t done it yet as far as I know, but he has certainly said that decisions by the federal courts should have no effect on what the president can or can’t do. Trump clearly does not respect the rule of law. He neither understands the US constitution nor does he intend to live up to the presidential oath he has now taken twice to protect and defend that constitution. He wants to withdraw the US from NATO, a multi-national defense group to which the US has belong since NATO’s creation in 1949 and to which the world owes the stopping of Soviet communist expansion in Europe. He has turned this country’s back on Ukraine, that nation what has waged such valiant and unexpectedly successful opposition to Russia’s illegal, unprovoked war of aggression against it that began in 2022. He would be perfectly happy if Russia conquered Ukraine and crushed the Ukrainian people’s hopes for an independent and democratic nation.

It is not too much to say that Trump wants to be America’s Vladimir Putin. He would love to turn American democracy into a farce the way Putin has turned Russian democracy into a farce. He would very much like to squelch the free speech of all who oppose him in the way Putin has done that fascistic job in Russia. He is perfectly willing to follow Putin’s lead on essentially every issue of importance to this country and to the world. Trump is committed to democracy in no meaningful way.

Yet it still remains to be seen if the American experiment has failed. It remains to be seen for one primary reason among others. Trump did not get a majority of the votes in the 2024 presidential election. He got more votes than Democrat Kamala Harris did, but he won without a majority vote. He therefore does not have the mandate that he claims to have. There are other reasons for hope as well. Our public media may mostly be controlled by big business; but they are not yet controlled by the government, and at least some of them speak out against Trump. State governments oversee elections; and while some of those state governments are run by Trumpists, at least some of them are not. Even in Trump controlled states, elections still take place the outcomes of which are not determined in advance by the government. Not all Republican politicians or voters back Trump enthusiastically, though most Republican politicians are afraid to say in public that they don’t. Americans committed to democracy, to the success of the American experiment, are numerous and are organizing, at least to some extent.

The Democratic Party is being nowhere near vociferous enough in its opposition to Trump. Democratic politicians tend to pull their punches when they criticize him. I’ve even seen Senator Bernie Sanders, who claims to be a socialist, do that. But the Democrats still are an opposition party. Because Trumpist Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, there isn’t a whole lot the Democrats can do to stop Trump’s antidemocratic madness, but they can and to some extend do speak out against it. We can cling to some hope that the Democrats will regain control of Congress in the 2026 off year election. If they do, they will be able to do much more to reign in Trump and his fascist agenda.

Has the American experiment failed? I’ll say: Not quite yet. It may be in the ICU, but it hasn’t died yet. That the American electorate put Donald Trump back in office should send chills down the spine of every loyal American who believes in that experiment to any extent at all. That it doesn’t is a major cause of concern over the experiment’s fate. But that experiment isn’t dead yet. We must all do all we can to keep it from dying.

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[1] It was different in Europe. There the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany with some but not much help from the west. By D-Day, the Soviets had already beaten the Germans at Stalingrad, thereby assuring Germany’s defeat in the war. D-Day was not the turning point in the war. Stalingrad was.

Listen to Him!

 This is the text of the sermon I gave at Northshore United Church of Christ on Sunday, March 2, 2025. I have two earlier and rather different drafts of that sermon. I may post them here also.

Listen to Him!

For

Northshore United Church of Christ, Woodinville, Washington

March 2, 2025

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Guest Pastor

 

Scripture: Luke 9:28-36

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

We’ve all heard it, haven’t we: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” That’s Acts 16:31 in its King James Version form. We find the same idea in the most quoted verse in the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Also the King James Version wording. Conservative Christians ask: “When were you saved?” By that they mean “When did you first believe that Jesus was your Lord and Savior?” The Christian tradition in which we stand has asserted and insisted on the necessity of believing in Jesus as the way to salvation for a very long time.

Today is Transfiguration Sunday. We just heard Luke’s version of the Transfiguration story, and it is a strange story indeed. In it Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain. Moses and Elijah come to talk with him, and he becomes dazzling white. The three disciples are quite understandably a bit freaked out. It doesn’t get better for them when a voice from a cloud says: “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him.” Peter wants them all to stay up on the mountain, but Jesus apparently doesn’t think that suggestion is even worth responding to. Jesus and the three disciples come back down the mountain.

It's easy enough to get captivated by the part of this story in which Jesus becomes dazzling white and talks to Moses, who represents the law, and Elijah, who represents the prophets. The story is called the Transfiguration, which, of course, refers to that bit about Jesus becoming dazzling white. There is, however, another part of this story that has always struck me as more important than the transfiguration itself. In the story there is a voice from a cloud. The story clearly intends that we understand it to be the voice of God. Please notice what the voice does not. The voice does not say about Jesus “believe in him.” It says “listen to him.” In the story of the Transfiguration, God tells us not to believe in Jesus but to listen to Jesus.

Which, I suppose, raises an important question for us: What does “listen to Jesus” mean? I suppose it can mean a great many things, but there are two answers to that question that I want to mention this morning. One is on the level of our personal, inner relationship with God and with Jesus. I understand that you had some discussion last week about listening to God, and that is a very good thing. From the little bit I’ve heard about that discussion, I think that mostly you responded to the question of listening to Jesus at this level, which is just fine. Many of us have from time to time understood that God has spoken to us in some particular way or that we have perceived the presence of God with us in some particular way. When that happens, we really should listen to what we understand God to be saying to us. That means we must do discernment around the questions of whether what we’re hearing is really from God, and if so, what does what we’re hearing mean for our lives. That’s not necessarily easy work. It is best not to do it alone. That’s one of great gifts of a church community. In that community, you know people of faith with whom you can do that discerning. And those people, including but not limited to the church’s pastor, may be able to direct you to other resources that will help you in your discernment. May God bless you as you go about that sacred work.

Then there is a broader level of listening to Jesus and to God. It is the level of the society in which we live. It is the level of what’s going on here in our nation and what’s going on everywhere else around the world. I believe that we get our answer to what listening to Jesus means at this level initially, and primarily, from the Bible. What do we learn when we listen to God through the Bible, especially through the New Testament, and more especially from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the three gospels in which Jesus says very similar things?

Martin Luther perhaps to the contrary notwithstanding, I am sure that faith calls us to work to build the realm of God on earth. And to listen to Jesus when he calls us to inner transformation, for personal inner transformation is how Jesus wants to change the world. Also: Listen to Jesus when he condemns empire. Listen to Jesus when he says that God wants mercy not sacrifice. Listen to Jesus when he says resist wrong but do it nonviolently.

When we listen to Jesus we learn that he calls us to turn the world’s values upside down. To bless the peacemakers not the warmakers. To live nonviolently not violently. To bless the poor not the rich. To free our faith from the constraints of laws and doctrines that are supposedly required for our salvation, which they just simply are not. To structure our society so that it serves the people, all of the people, not just the wealthy and their corporations the way it does now. To stop blaming poor people for being poor but to help them get what they need for life. To end the homelessness that our society so blithely tolerates. Put simply, to make sure everyone has what they need for fullness of life to the greatest extent we can—and we can sure do a lot better at those tasks than our society does today.

Is creating the society that Jesus wants us to create an impossible dream? Maybe, but God must not think it impossible. If God did, why would God tell us to listen to Jesus? When we listen to Jesus we don’t hear an echo of the world’s ways and values. We hear a sacred conception of how life could and should be. We hear a sacred call to radical personal, inner transformation and to radical transformation of the world. Some Christians have understood that truth over the centuries, but far too many haven’t. They haven’t said listen to Jesus. They have said believe in Jesus which, frankly, is a lot easier than listening to him.

I’m not saying don’t believe in Jesus. Of course not. I believe in Jesus. I imagine that you do too. I’m saying that being truly Christian involves a lot more than believing in Jesus. It involves listening to Jesus and responding in love to what we hear for ourselves and for God’s world. Can we do it? I don’t know, but I do know this. God calls us to do it; and I know that we can do a whole lot better job of it than most Christians have done in the past and do today. So let’s listen to Jesus, shall we? Amen.

Who Is Vladimir Putin?

 

Who Is Vladimir Putin?

March 1, 2025

I wonder how many Americans really understand who Vladimir Putin is and what he has done to Russia, never mind what he's doing to Ukraine. Putin became president of the Russian Federation on Jan. 1, 2000. He has been the head of the Russian government, either directly or somewhat indirectly, ever since. When he became president, he was nobody. He had been a quite low-level KGB officer in Dresden, Germany. He worked for a progressive (by Russian standards at least) mayor of what was then still Leningrad, then went to Moscow, where he quickly became the head of the KGB's successor, the FSB. Russian president Boris Yeltsin made him the country's prime minister in 1999. He became president when Yeltsin resigned on Jan. 1, 2000. He was elected to his own first term as president shortly thereafter.

When Putin first became head of the Russian government, it was not obvious that he would turn out to be what he turned out to be. He was essentially nobody. There is an assumption that Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor because Putin promised to pardon Yeltsin and his family for the crimes they committed while Yeltsin was in office, something Putin promptly did after becoming president. In 2000, Russia had been free of the Soviet Communists for less than ten years. There was some hope that the country might develop in a more western, democratic direction than it ever had before. It became obvious after not too long that that was not going to happen. Both Yeltsin and Putin threw their lot in with the new Russian oligarchs who had become immensely rich taking advantage of the privatization of what had been government-owned entitles like huge oil and mining companies. In fairly short order, Putin forced out or took over any media outlets that didn’t support him and established control over all of Russia’s broadcast outlets. The Russian people have no domestic news source that Putin does not control. He got himself reelected several times in elections that were obviously rigged. He has now proceeded to squelch all opposition in Russia. He has murdered prominent opponents, including most notably Alexei Navalny, an opponent who may have been Russia’s best hope for the development of a democracy.

Vladimir Putin is a Russian fascist. He has maneuvered himself into a position of complete control of the country. One of the major ways in which he has done to is by aligning himself closely with the Russian Orthodox Church, whose Patriarch obediently echoes whatever the Kremlin’s line may be on any issue including the invasion of Ukraine. Putin is not a Communist, but he has called the collapse of the USSR the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.[1] He has also developed a national ideology that has been a key part of his staying in power. He works to set Russia up as the world’s alternative to what he calls decadent western culture and democracy. As part of that effort, he has enacted measures that oppress Russia’s gay and lesbian people. He claims to represent traditional family values (sound familiar?), values which are, by western standards, extremely conservative.

As part of his effort to set Russia up as a world power in opposition to the US, which of course is what the USSR was, he has worked to turn the Russian people against the west and its cultural values. As part of that effort, he has claimed over and over again that NATO is an anti-Russian organization that would conquer Russia if it thought it could. He has cried foul again and again over NATO’s expansion eastward, especially over the inclusion of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in that US led alliance.[2] He has declared Ukraine joining NATO to be a red line that the west must not cross. His fear that Ukraine might join NATO and the European Union are among the reasons he invaded Ukraine in 2002.

It is not, however, the only reason and probably aren’t the major reason he did so. Putin has taken up a line about the Russian people that directly echoes Hitler’s line about the German people in significant ways. There are lots and lots of Russian people who do not live in Russia. They live all over what used to be the USSR. The Russians were the dominant people in the USSR by far, and they spread all over that huge country to work and to live. Putin wants to reunite them all in Russia the same way Hitler wanted to unite all Germans in Germany. As part of that effort, Putin has claimed again and again that Ukrainians are really Russians and that he has the right to incorporate Ukraine into Russia so that the Russian people aren’t so divided. He’s flat wrong about that. The Ukrainians have their own language. It is related to Russian, but it is not Russian. Linguists recognize both Russian and Ukrainian as related but different East Slavic languages. The Ukrainians have their own history, a history which includes very long periods of time when much of what is today Ukraine was ruled by European powers, especially Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that are considerably more western than Russia is.[3]

It is true, in a sense at least, that Russian civilization began in Kyiv, the city which is and long has been the capital of Ukraine. But that was a very long time ago, in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. By the mid-thirteenth century CE, after the Mongols sacked Kyiv, the center of Russian culture and of Russian political power had moved hundreds of miles to the northeast of Kyiv, to the cities of Vladimir, Suzdal, and, eventually, Moscow.[4] The Russians didn’t control any of what is now Ukraine for centuries thereafter. Russia’s occupation of Ukraine became complete only in the late eighteenth century CE under Catherine the Great, who was German not Russian, but never mind. Putin here is echoing the contention and practice of the imperial Russian government toward Ukraine before 1917. The imperial government never recognized Ukrainian as a language separate from Russian. At times it banned the publication of anything in Ukrainian and the use of Ukrainian in governmental administration and education. Putin’s claims about Ukraine have a long history in Russia. They have none in Ukraine. Ukrainians today insist that they are not Russians, which they aren’t, and that they never want to come under Russia’s thumb again.

Vladimir Putin is clearly a Russian fascist. By that I mean that he has established essentially one person rule across that vast nation and has eliminated essentially all opposition to that rule, which is, of course, his. His claims about Ukraine are clearly fascist. They are direct parallels to what Hitler claimed about Germans living outside Germany except that the Austrians and the Sudeten Germans really were of German language and culture while the Ukrainians really are not Russians at all. Hitler took the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia with the consent of the western European powers. He invaded and conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia not long thereafter. He occupied Austria without violent resistance and quickly incorporated it into the German Reich. Putin has invaded Ukraine under the same pretext that Hitler used in those aggressive acts of expansion, or at least most of them. He has initiated an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine the same way Hitler initiated an unprovoked war of aggression against Poland.[5]

Vladimir Putin is who Donald Trump wants to be. Trump is an American fascist, and he wants to be an American fascist dictator. He has Putin’s complete support in that effort. We’ll never know for sure, but Putin may well be responsible for Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election. Trump plays into Putin’s had at nearly every turn. He wants to pull the US out of NATO, NATO being a bête noir for Putin. Trump is flipping the US from Ukraine’s side in its war against Russia to the Russian side, something that must have Putin dancing for joy in the halls of the Kremlin’s various palaces. So far, as far as we know, Trump hasn’t murdered any opponents the way Putin has. Trump is, after all, working in an American context while Putin works in the very, very different Russian context.[6] Nonetheless, Trump has set out to destroy any institution of our federal government that could in any way stand in opposition to him. Though he hasn’t committed any atrocities like the one the Nazis committed at Babi Yar or built any death camps the way the Germans did, Trump uses America’s immigrant population much the same way Hitler used the Jews and Putin uses the west. In both of those cases, a dictator has blamed people for their country’s problems that those people simply did not and do not create. Trump isn’t yet a dictator (though it’s not clear that he knows it), but he blames immigrants in our country for things they simply are not responsible for, and he accuses them of dastardly acts that few if any of them commit.

I seriously doubt that Donald Trump knows the first thing about the differences between the Russian context and the American context. Rather, he sees Putin unequivocally as his role model, as the man he wants to become. Putin is a Russian fascist who has created a fascist Russia. Trump is an American fascist who wants to create a fascist America and will create one if we don’t stop him. Folks, the way Trump fawns over Putin should set off alarm bells in every American. It is a tragedy that it doesn’t.

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[1] This is a blatantly absurd claim in any event, but it being made in a country that suffered between twenty and thirty million casualties in World War II is simply stunning.

[2] At least, it was US led until Donald Trump became US president. Trump wants to scuttle NATO precisely because Putin hates it. And, by the way, I too think bringing former Soviet republics into NATO is foolhardy, for if Putin attacked one of them, we would be a war with Russia.

[3] This is more true of western Ukraine than it is of eastern Ukraine, where the population is more Russian than it is in the west. The most western parts of Ukraine came under Russian control only as a result of World War II when Stalin took them from Czechoslovakia and other nations.

[4] I don’t think anyone should go to Russia these days, but the cities of Vladimir and Suzdal, both north or northeast of Moscow, are otherwise well worth the trip. They have the greatest old Russian architecture still in existence.

[5] Hitler didn’t invade Poland because there were lots of Germans there who he wanted to incorporate into his Reich. He did it because he intended to murder or enslave the Slavic people of eastern Europe, including the Poles and the Ukrainians, to create “Lebensraum,” living space, for the Germans.

[6] The United States has a democratic tradition, Russia doesn’t. That is one of the main differences between the two countries.

On Making the United States a Country Worth Having

 

On Making the United States a Country Worth Having

February 22, 2015

There is no doubt about it. The United States of America today is not a country worth having. That truth may be tragic, but it is still true. Here’s why. Our country is still rotten to the core with racism. It’s more institutional racism than personal racism, but that makes it more difficult to deal with not less. We claim to be a democracy, but money controls our politics, people don’t. Our tax structure strongly favors the wealthy and burdens the rest of us. We are the only supposedly developed country that does not have universal, tax supported health care. We spend an obscene amount of money on our military, a military we would not need if it were really there “to defend our democracy,” as nationalist ideologues claim, and not to project American power around the world. There is still prejudice against women in essentially every area of life. We are one of the few supposedly developed nations that has never had a woman as head of state or head of government. Our system of public education is a colossal failure. One of its most important failures is its failure to teach American civics. The result is that people don’t understand our constitution or the system of government it creates. We have done nowhere near enough to deal with the climate crisis. The country has once again elected the American fascist Donald Trump president and given him a compliant congress that bends the knee to him at every turn, all of which is an embarrassment at best and a total disaster at worst. Under Trump, our friends don’t respect us, nor do our adversaries; and they certainly don’t fear us. Donald Trump has put our republican form of government at risk by attempting to create an authoritarian presidency that he thinks somehow he can occupy for life. Trump and his acolytes in the executive branch of the federal government and in congress don’t understand the US Constitution. More importantly, they don’t give a damn about it. They do not believe in democracy. The believe in authoritarian if not totalitarian rule by themselves, and they even think that Trump can somehow avoid the Constitution’s limitation of a president to two four year terms. The list of American failings could, I suppose, could go on and on; but the point is made. The United States of America is not a country worth having.

Do we care? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do. I like to think that millions of other Americans do too. So we have to ask: What are we going to do about it? On one level, I don’t know. I hear people talking about protecting the self and preserving personal integrity. Those are of course worthwhile and valuable things. I fear, however, that they do little or nothing actually to stop the Trump movement and protect American democracy. We must do more, a lot more.

But to do more, we have to have an overarching vision. We have to know what sort of America we are trying to create that will make our country one worth having. So we must begin the necessary process by asking: What is a country worth having? I’ll start that analysis by quoting a famous phrase attributed, perhaps not entirely correctly, to Calvin Cooledge: “The business of America is business.” We need to modify this obviously true statement only by saying: The business of American is business and the wealthy. It seems to me that a country the business of which is business and the wealthy is not worth having. Why? Because the foundational value in human life is the individual person. All individual people. Any human institution that is worth having has as its foundational purpose benefitting people. All people. A nation that is worth having is one that functions for the benefit of its people. Not its businesses. Not its wealthy and powerful people. The people. All of the people. Though we claim to be a democracy; though we claim to be the land of the free, that is not what we are. Money controls our economy. People don’t. Money controls our politics. People don’t. Our work in the world isn’t to benefit people. It is to protect our oligarchs’ ability to make even more money, money they certainly don’t need and that they take from the rest of us.

And to make America a country worth having, we need to overcome a lie the Republican Party has been telling Americans at least since the presidency of Reagan, who promoted what was called “trickle down economics.” His vice president George H. W. Bush once correctly called trickle down economics “voodoo economics,” then sold out to Reagan when Reagan made him vice president, but never mind. The advocates of trickle down economics were fond of saying that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The theory was that if you structured the country’s taxes and other policies to benefit the wealthy, every one would benefit. Trickle down economics is a lie. It is a lie that has functioned at least since Reagan to make very wealthy Americans even more wealthy. It has functioned to create the largest wealth gap between the wealthy and ordinary Americans in American history. America will never be a country worth having as long as trickle down economics, also called supply side economics, control our economic and taxation policies. No. To make America a nation worth having, we must create an America whose institutions, all of them, work for the benefit of the people. All of the people, including especially poor and otherwise marginalized people.

The only kind of societal and political structure humans have ever created that does that is democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is a system of national organization in which taxation and other policies work for the benefit of all of the people not only for the wealthy. It is democratic. That is, it exists because the people create it through democratic practices and policies. It may in a sense be revolutionary. It certainly would be in the United States. It is not, however, imposed on a nation or a people by force. We see it most perfectly practiced in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It is practiced if perhaps a bit less perfectly in much of western Europe.

It is characterized by various things. Taxes are high. They are particularly high on wealth. They are high because the government provides numerous services that the American government does not supply or supplies only in meager form. The government provides free health care. The government provides free public education. The government provides various safety nets for people who cannot provide for themselves. The government creates and provides an adequate system of public transportation. The government funds a military, but it is a military nowhere nearly as large as a percentage of the GNP as America’s is. The economies of the social democratic countries are basically capitalist. Property is privately owned. The country’s industries are privately owned, or at least most of them are; but democratic socialism is about people not about property.

Social Democracy is not particularly socialist in the old Marxist sense. It may have roots in Marxist socialism, but it is no longer Marxist in any meaningful sense. Social democratic political parties have evolved into parties committed to democracy. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD) is a good example. The SPD began as a Marxist party. Just after World War I, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg wanted to bring about a violent socialist revolution more or less like the one Lenin had pulled off in Russia. The SPD, however, soon evolved into a peaceful, only marginally Marxist party committed to democracy and the rule of law. It has been one of the two major political parties in Germany since the end of World War II.

I suppose we must say more about the extent to which the social democratic parties of Europe are Marxist. Few Americans actually understand Marxism, and the terms Marxist, communist, and socialist have become words among us that conservative political and economic forces use to scare people into supporting policies that are actually harmful not beneficial for them. As I have said, the roots of social democracy are Marxist. That does not mean today that the social democratic parties of western Europe are in any meaningful sense Marxist. They take from Marxism only the notion that a nation’s institutions should function for the benefit of the people, perhaps especially the working people, rather than for the benefit of the capitalists, especially the wealthy capitalists. “Social democracy” should not be a scary phrase. Today it is not, and perhaps especially in America would not be, particularly Marxist. It certainly has, and in America would have, nothing in common with Soviet Communism. It is not totalitarian. It is not authoritarian. It is democratic and has no desire to be anything else.

The United States of America is, obviously, a very long way from being a social democratic country. We have a small socialist movement. Senator Bernie Sanders (D. Vermont) is it most prominent representative. The United States is a more or less advanced capitalist nation. Its public institutions have a veneer of democracy on them. It has elections that most Americans think, largely wrongly, are fair. (They aren’t fair because they are controlled by money not by the people and not because they are otherwise “rigged.”) The US Constitution creates and, supposedly, guarantees a broad range of civil rights and freedoms. Yet big money controls most of our public media and thus controls a lot of what Americans take to be true. Fox News, a propaganda channel the expounds lie after lie and is in no meaningful sense a news channel, is, after all, the largest cable news network we have; so the point is made. America’s social safety nets for the poor and the weak are simply pathetic. They do some good but not nearly enough. The amount of money we spend on the military keeps us from creating a national, tax supported, health care system. Our military is bloated beyond any semblance of reason. Racism and other indefensible prejudices continue to make the American claim of personal equality and equal rights a sham.

So what are we to do? To make this country one worth having we must make it more social democratic. Social democracy must be our goal. The social democratic systems of the Scandinavian countries must be our model. Yes, the United States is much larger and demographically more diverse than those countries are, and we must take our size and demographic diversity into consideration. That does not mean that we cannot create an American version of European social democracy. If our country is ever to be worth having, we simply must do it.

OK. But how? The United States of America is at its core a conservative nation. Even those who pass among us as liberals are conservative by the standards of most countries. Our Democratic Party, our supposedly liberal one, would be a conservative party in most of the world. Creating any version of social democracy here will be a daunting task to say the least. The conservative and reactionary powers that control our public discourse have gotten Americans so used to unjust systems and so afraid of just ones that creating any version of social democracy may appear to be impossible. So be it. We must try anyway.

The place where we must start is the Democratic Party. That party isn’t liberal in any very meaningful sense, and it certainly isn’t social democratic. Democrats are, however, who pass among us as liberals. They are the only place we can start. We must start by creating a massive public backlash against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Doing that may be possible. Donald Trump is already under water in his popularity and approval ratings, and he’s only been in office for a month. He is taking dynamite to the federal government, slashing federal programs with no consideration of the good they do. He is an egomaniacal monomaniac who cares nothing about anyone but himself and people like his unelected co-president Elon Musk who give him large amounts of money. He is trying to turn our more or less democratic national government into his own personal authoritarian regime. Perhaps he will alienate enough Americans that they will turn against him. If enough Americans don’t turn against him, our democracy is dead. So we can only hope and pray that enough will. We probably won’t know the extent to which the Americans who elected Trump have turned against him until the 2026 off year elections or the 2028 presidential election, assuming that those elections even take place, certainly something Trump will prevent if he can.

It is no doubt unfortunate, but the Democrats are our only hope. Yet to be a true hope for rescuing America from its current sorry state, they must become something they today are not. They must become social democratic. Bernie Sanders has tried to make them more social democratic but without much success so far. The one thing that might wake the Democrats up to becoming who they need to be is a massive public reaction against Trump. Trump represents everything that is bad about this country. As I’ve heard said, people voted for him because he gives them permission to be their worst selves. If the over the top radicalism of Trump’s presidency (much of which traces back at least as far as Reagan’s “the government isn’t the solution, the government is the problem”) appalls enough Americans, we may have hope of a national rebirth that will make this country worth having.

What would an America worth having look like? It would, first of all, not be controlled by big money interests the way it is today. It would have a radically reformed tax structure, one, actually, that we’ve had before. We could go a long way toward revitalizing this country by reenacting tax rates like those we had in the 1950s under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. We would tax excessive wealth at a very high rate. We would get money out of politics. We would overturn the Citizens United case that says money has a constitutional right to talk. By doing those things, and by slashing our defense budget, we could afford to do the things we need to do to become a worthwhile nation, and big money couldn’t stop us. We could provide universal, free health care. We could provide free public education at least through four years of college. We could solve our horrific homelessness problem. We could protect the environment. We could improve both wages and working conditions for working people, the ones who really make our economy function. We could institute programs to eradicate systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and other unjust and destructive prejudices. We could, in other words, make this a country worth having and worth living in.

Will it happen? Frankly, I doubt it. American conservatism is so deeply engrained in our culture that the steps necessary to transform this country into something better than it is would meet with massive resistance. The entrenched money interests that control our country today would throw massive amounts of resources into efforts to stop that transformation. I know for certain that I will not live to see it happen, if it ever does. All I can do is hope, pray, and write pieces like this one that few people if anyone will read. That’s just how it is. So be it. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.

Letter re Medicaid

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Everett Herald, my local newspaper. The Herald published this letter.

Trump and Medicaid

Summary by Copilot

RS

Rev. Tom SORENSON

To:​letters

Thu 2/20/2025 6:55 PM

I have written many letters to the Herald, which has published some of them; but I have never written one this personal. I have a severely disabled twin brother. He lives in a care facility, as indeed he must if he is to survive. He is on Medicaid, and he has been for many years. He would be homeless without Medicaid. Neither I nor anyone else in his family could pay the enormous cost of his care. If homeless he would die in short order. Donald Trump wants to gut Medicaid. Donald Trump is doing a great many destructive things, but this one hits way too close to home. With this one, Trump has me scared. He has me nearly panicked. I know that millions of other Americans are in the same place I am with regard to Medicaid. Please. Everyone. Do whatever you can to stop Trump from gutting Medicaid. His doing so will bring immense suffering on an enormous scale. 

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson