The discussion heats up for Why Marx Was Right at Bensonian.org: Andrew Walker, contributor to Mere Orthodoxy, gets into the claim that “Marxism believes in an all-powerful state.”

Andrew Walker

Terry Eagleton insists that Marx’s understanding of the state has been misunderstood. Objecting to the claim that the state leads to irrepressible tyranny and the loss of liberty, Eagleton claims that Marx was in fact an opponent of the state and that his philosophy had no intent to wrest power into the hands of the State. Objecting to Eagleton’s claim, Walker discusses the anthropological deficiencies surrounding Marx’s view of man and how this inadequacy detrimentally impacts political authority. He contends that Marx failed to properly delineate the function of the state from being minimally administrative to maximally coercive. While the historical record reveals no long-term success for Marxism, Walker shows that failing to limit the reach of the state has led to disastrous and deadly consequences in the history of statecraft and secondly, that Marxist models have debunked Marx’s own claims. Read more on Bensonian…