My attention was arrested by the title of a book published last year: ‘Living a Marxist Life: Why Marx is a Drug You Should Probably Take’ [1]

This continues the mesmeric attraction of Karl Marx that has been renewed, especially since his 200th birthday in 2018. This summer, Yanis Varoufakis the former Greek finance minister, arrested a lot of people’s attention during the Marxism 2025 Festival in London by writing an article in the Guardian entitled ‘In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I’ll tell you what we need – Marxism’. [2]

For that Marx 200^th birthday occasion, journalist Joe Humphreys of the Irish Times asked the Australian philosopher Peter Singer What did he get right?[3] Meanwhile, at the other end of the world Xi Jinping was standing in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing telling the party faithful that Karl Marx’s theory ‘still shines with the brilliant light of truth’.[4]

Singer opined that ‘Marx’s influence can be compared to that of major religious figures like Jesus or Muhammad.’[5] Indeed, on the first page of Gregory Claeys’ book Marx and Marxism he makes the attention-grabbing statement, ‘Karl Marx was the Jesus Christ of the twentieth century’.[6]

As a local organiser for the following of Jesus of Nazareth this kind of statement ensures that I am wide awake.

It seems to me that Marx could have done us all a favour at the major turning points in his philosophy by applying the teaching of Jesus Christ.

Anthropology

Marx successfully explained industrial man to himself before anybody else did. The ‘worker’ was still befuddled by the fact that he worked to make things, as he’d always done – but now these things disappeared. These products were now the property of the person who owned the factory. The worker remembered the days when he used to make these things slowly, by hand, which he could then sell to his numerous contacts. He knew that almost nobody owned a factory. He got paid a wage – that was all.

Marx understood the implications, thinking his way into the future. Including the idea that you could eventually get a whole crowd of people to own a factory. Then they could sell the fruits of their labour and share the profits. To get everybody on board with this kind of thinking Marx sought what he called the ‘new man’. It was exactly at that point that his project was derailed.

‘Old man’ thinking was still very much around. Marx had expected that the world, not just the individual, would take this idea on board. Much as we today talk of ‘group think’ Marx was expecting ‘world think’. On both of these issues, ‘old man’ attitude and individual responsibility, Jesus had much to say. First, he described the kind of mind-set that you can expect to find in an individual:

‘That which comes out of the person, that is what defiles the person. For from within, out of the hearts of people, come the evil thoughts, acts of sexual immorality, thefts, murders, acts of adultery, deeds of greed, wickedness, deceit, indecent behaviour, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile the person.’[7]

From his early days in school Karl Marx was well aware of the definition of sin. By the time he wrote his magnum opus Das Kapital he even joked, ‘Original sin is everywhere at work’[8]. But the boring task of looking for that ‘new man’ went on and on.

By 1961, the Communist party of the USSR was still working on it. At the 22nd Party Congress in Moscow, the creation of the ‘new man’ was emphasised as a fundamental priority and categorical necessity in their statement:

‘The party regards the education of the new man as the most difficult task in the communist reshaping of society. Until we remove bourgeois moral principles, roots and all, trained men and women in the spirit of communist morality and renewed them spiritually and morally, it will not be possible to build a communist society’.[9] It appeared to them that Marx had bequeathed to them a non-functioning moral compass. The Marx analyst David Lyon summed this up: ‘if the bourgeoisie was selfish, this was bad but if the proletariats demanded the same as them, this, apparently, was good’.[10]

In Romania, Josef Ton, who worked as a Baptist minister while the country was ruled by Nicolae Ceaușescu wrote, ‘Socialism needs the new man, the moral man. Only the spirit of Christ can revolutionise a man, transform him and make him a new kind of person’.[11]

And we don’t have to look far to see if the problem still persists. In Varoufakis’s article he related: ‘A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity’.[12] This view fits right into Jesus’ original list.

It’s such a smelly word to call such a list ‘sin’, but stay with me, there’s an upside. Jesus made no appeal to world-think or group-think. He presented himself as calling at the door, offering forgiveness, not the door of a church or a political party, but an individual’s door – of any race or religion.

So, here’s the upside in Jesus’ own words: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.’[13]

There’s a world of difference between being incurably evil and being curably sinful. Who wants to be incurably evil?

The Guv’nor

Marx may have missed some of this because he was plagued by atheism. He was a member of the Berlin University Doctors’ Club, a group of philosophers who specialised in criticising religion. They were quick to latch onto a new book, published in 1835 which was right up their street. It was David Struass’s ‘The Life of Jesus’ (Leben Jesu) which postulated that the records of Jesus life were not history at all, but myths.[14]

This could also explain why Marx appears to have had a gap in his thinking where the history of Jesus should have been. History was never his strong subject in school. They also looked on Jesus as some kind of leader of a religion, seriously missing the mark. In English, Jesus gets called ‘Lord’ although the only Lords we usually think of are people in the British House of Lords or the ‘Lord of the Manor’ in a film. It doesn’t quite cover the designation Jesus made of himself: ‘All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth’.[15]

I learned a good descriptive title for Jesus from a London preacher (Richard Bewes). It’s the London word ‘Guv’nor’. It simply means ‘the person in charge’. When Jesus allowed the Roman empire to catch up with him and he and Pontius Pilate had that talk, he made it clear that he wouldn’t be waging some kind of earthly war on sin. ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If it were, those who serve me would fight’.[16] Pilate had the Guv’nor right in front of him.

Marx saw his atheism passed on to his children. When Eleanor was six years old the family visited a church to hear a rendition of beautiful music. She wondered afterwards if what she was feeling was ‘unprecedented religious qualms’. She later wrote that Marx had put her on his knee and explained that it was the music calling and not the voice of God. ‘He quietly made everything clear and straight, so that from that hour to this no doubt could ever cross my mind again’.[17]

David Lyon even records, ‘Marx’s Capital was about to become tremendously important as the intellectual foundation of an international socialism but it received precious little attention at first. Marx offered to dedicate it to Darwin who politely declined the honour, probably because he wished not to be associated with Marx’s atheistic opinions’.[18]

Practicality

Marx expounded the idea of praxis, where proper thinking inevitably forced proper action. That was all very fine and good, but to make it work the ‘new man’ still had not yet appeared.

It’s fair to ask of any philosophy whether it is internally consistent – whether it works. The Marx family’s own life is an eloquent commentary on this. In Fritz Raddatz’s biography of Marx he spends 46 pages on the last and sorriest chapter of his life, which he entitles ‘Hell in London’. With access to the correspondence with Marx’s closest collaborator, Friedrich Engels, he reveals a picture of self-inflicted family trauma and desperate financial circumstances. It transpires that from 1868 Engels used some of the profit from his father’s mill in Manchester to provide ‘a generous annual pension – some £2,000 at present-day values [1978]’.  [= €16,500 in 2025] Unfortunately, too much of this ‘pension’ got spent on pub crawls on Saturday afternoons (with Engels!).

Marx’s comment on this predicament: ‘a purely proletarian setup would be unsuitable here however fine it might have been when my wife and I were alone or the children were young’.[19]

When my wife and I lived in central London we were amazed to find that one of Marx’s favourite drinking haunts is still operating (and rather successfully too) – the Northumberland Arms, just round the corner from our flat.

Taking care

Marx had a soft spot for people in difficulties not of their own making. He attended meetings for refugees in London. There were many political refugees in exile in the city (he was one) and he cared about their plight. But this instinct didn’t get included in his on-going plan for the world.

In China, the writer George Patterson saw the issue up close and personal. He had previously been enamoured with Marx as he reflected on his experience of irrelevant churches. Going to China changed his mind. He tells of a medical acquaintance who visited the Soviet Union on several occasions and wrote of his surprise when the subject of compassion was discussed there.

‘The mere mention of stradanya, literally co-suffering, set Russian physicians on edge. Their pupils widened, bodies grew tense and voices sharpened. The most frequent immediate response was to label compassion a religious idea belonging to a dishonoured past. In tones of disdain and repugnance they explained that though there was nothing illicit or illegal about the word, it was not acceptable, simply that the concept had withered. Compassion has been replaced by something better, a national striving for the highest communist ethic’.[20]

Mao Zedong, the self-professed champion of Marx, left a legacy. In our own day Wang Yi, the great Christian leader and thinker from Chengdu, is currently imprisoned by the Chinese state for ‘inciting subversion of state power’ (= proposing Jesus as the Guv’nor) and ‘illegal business operations’ (= arranging for the man on the street to have access to a Bible). I checked. To my astonishment I found that when the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson went to see Wang Yi in the period just before his incarceration, his church was taking care of the needs of ex-prisoners and their families – more than the city authorities had done.[21] Wang Yi and friends have shown again that communities of followers of Jesus have been able to flourish amid a wide range of political regimes, Marxist and otherwise.

That religion question

Ironically, Marx’s obsession with ‘eradicating religion’ backfired. Biblical scholar Tim Keller comments ‘Marx’s analysis of religion as an instrument of oppression was anticipated by the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and even by the message of the New Testament Gospels…the Bible beat him to it!’[22]

Marx was into poetry. Those poems by the ancient Hebrew prophets from his own family tradition would have been instructive and maybe scared him into reality. And Jesus reserved his bitterest criticism for hypocritical religious leaders: ‘They do not practise what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them’.[23]

Maybe Marx had skipped Jesus’ own mother’s song celebrating the time he was born:

‘He has brought down rulers from their thrones

    but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things

    but has sent the rich away empty’.[24]

Go easy on Marx.

His name gets used, either unwittingly or unscrupulously, by aspiring leaders seeking to position themselves. And if you’re beginning to suspect that Karl Marx could have been a lot more radical if he had given credence to Jesus Christ, you’re right.

And as to the offer of that new ‘drug you should probably take’ – no thanks.

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[1] Andrew Pendakis, Living a Marxist Life: Why Marx is a Drug You Should Probably Take (Bloomsbury Academic 2014)

[2] Yanis Varoufakis, In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I’ll tell you what we need – Marxism Guardian (4 July 2025)

[3] Irish Times, 1 May 2018

[4] Irish Times, 1 May 2018

[5]  Irish Times, 1 May 2018

[6] Gregory Claeys, Marx and Marxism (Pelican books 2018)

[7] Mark 7:20-23

[8] Karl Marx, Das Kapital Volume I, Chapter 26

[9]  George Patterson, The China Paradox, Christ versus Marx (Word Publishing 1990, 20

[10] David Lyon, Karl Marx, An assessment of his life and thought (Lion Publishing,1979), 85

[11] Lyon, Karl Marx, 185

[12] Yanis Varoufakis, Guardian (4 July 2025)

[13] Revelation 3:20

[14] Fritz J. Raddatz, translated by Richard Barry, Karl Marx, A Political Biography (Little, Brown), 26

[15] Matthew 28:18

[16] John 18:36

[17] Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx, A Life (Bloomsbury 2014)

[18] Lyon, Karl Marx,120

[19] Lyon, Karl Marx, 102

[20] Patterson, The China Paradox,23

[21] Ian Johnson, The Souls of China (Allen Lane 2017)

[22] Tim Keller, The Reason for God (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 58

[23] Matthew 24:4,5

[24] Luke 1:52-53