Was Jesus Really a Socialist? (Part 1: Three Kinds of Socialists)

If you are an emotional thinker with a huge ego, it is easy to respond emotionally rather than logically and rationally to bumper sticker claims like, “Jesus was a Socialist,” or even “Socialism is sharing and caring.” People with much higher IQs than you and I have fallen for these hashtags and built entire philosophical and theological systems around such warm sentiments.

There are Three Kinds of Socialists

In this sense there are three kinds of socialists.[1]

There are of course many labels that socialists use to give the appearance of diversification and sophistication as they rebrand and claim that “real socialism has never been tried,” and that “next time things will be different.”[2]

Socialism is, however, one of the oldest and consistently failed government paradigms in history, dating back to certain city-states in Ancient Mesopotamia.[3] It always has the same core of ideas driving it and the same alluring lies buttering its path to destitution and oppression. Here are a few technical terms for this label diversity: total bunk, deceit, fraud, disingenuous nonsense, disinformation, gaslighting, deflection, misdirection, obfuscation, spin, verbal sleight of hand, manipulative framing.

Deluded Wicked Fools & Malicious Wicked Fools

The first and second kind of socialists know the history of socialism—Decreasing efficiency, diminished functionality, disappearing incentives to labor, a steady move toward poverty, rapid increases in government force, mass arrests, show trials, mass murder, mass starvation, waves of purges of the “uncooperative.” They understand the long-range program of total government, Government control over all production, and centralized planning for every aspect of the economy. They always move forward with the suspension of natural rights even while heralding them and the promise of goods and service rights even while the capacity to sustain them drains away.

Each is willing to say anything, to make any promise, to work any angle to convince the masses to throw in their lot with them in bringing this promised Utopia to fruition.

Oppressors and the Oppressed

One of the age-old techniques is the vilification of one sector of society to stoke the rage and desire for vengeance in the rest of society. Oppressors are among us. They are responsible for all that ails us. You have been cooperating with them for too long as a betrayer of the oppressed. It is time to rise up, disrupt, sabotage, attack, kill. Vote us into power, give up all your personal rights and we will usher in a new age of man, eradicate all that the oppressors built to keep everyone else down, and punish those oppressors and unrepentant betrayers as they deserve.

Critical Marxists Dreaming Big

In Critical Marxism, the categories of the oppressed, and, thus, the categories of the oppressors and the tools of their trade, have multiplied. Marxists work the notion of dialectic… or points of conflict from which they can strike the spark of revolution. They manipulate these tensions to evoke pity and guilt on the one side, and to incite resentment, discontent, rage, and finally violence on the other. If you have any empathy at all, you must prove it by becoming an ally with those who are suffering.

These are the fancy terms for presenting present reality in existing systems as unfair, hurtful, and intolerable.

1. Gender Dialectic:

Oppressed: Women, Non-binary, Trans
Oppressor: Men, Cisgender
Key Terms: Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity, Male Privilege

2. Racial/Cultural Dialectic:

Oppressed: People of Color, Indigenous
Oppressor: White, Western, European
Key Terms: White Supremacy, Whiteness, Colonialism

Oppressed: LGBTQIA+, Queer
Oppressor: Those promoting sexual restraint, limitation, based on Heterosexual, Cis-normativity
Key Terms: Heteronormativity, Compulsory Heterosexuality

4. Moral / Sexual-Taboo Dialectic:

Oppressed: Boundary-Transgressive or Non-Normative Desires, minor-attracted persons, Incest-attracted persons, etc.
Oppressor: Traditional Moral Codes, Religious and Cultural Norms
Key Terms: Norm Disruption, Deconstruction of Taboos, Anti-Normativity, Radical Consent Ethics

(This category frames long-standing moral prohibitions as social constructs demanding deconstruction.)

5. Corporeal / Beauty Dialectic:

Oppressed: Fat, “Ugly,” Non-conforming Bodies
Oppressor: Thin, Conventionally Attractive
Key Terms: Body Positivity, Lookism, Aesthetic Oppression

6. Ability Dialectic:

Oppressed: Disabled, Neurodivergent
Oppressor: Able-bodied, Neurotypical
Key Terms: Ableism, Neurotypical Privilege

7. Age Dialectic:

Oppressed: Youth, Emerging Generations
Oppressor: Older, Traditional Authority
Key Terms: Adultism, Gerontocracy

8. Religious Dialectic:

Oppressed: Non-Christian, Marginalized Faiths, Atheists
Oppressor: Christian (especially Evangelical), Jewish Believers
Key Terms: Religious Hegemony, Christian Nationalism

9. Cultural / Post-Colonial Dialectic:

Oppressed: Global South, Indigenous Cultures
Oppressor: Western, Industrialized North
Key Terms: Coloniality, Cultural Imperialism

10. Economic Dialectic:

Oppressed: Poor, Working-Class, Wage Labor
Oppressor: Wealthy, Capital-Owning, Bourgeois, those defending property rights
Key Terms: Classism, Economic Injustice, Capitalism, Wealth Inequality

11. Epistemic Dialectic / i.e. Knowledge or Truth or Reality Dialectic:

Oppressed: Lived Experience, Narrative Knowledge
Oppressor: Objective Reason, Universal Truth Claims, Science, Logic, Maths
Key Terms: Standpoint Epistemology, Epistemic Injustice, Knowledge-Power Constructs

12. Eco-Dietary Dialectic:

Oppressed: Animals, Ecosystems, Non-Human Life
Oppressor: Human Consumption, Agricultural and Industrial Systems
Key Terms: Animal Rights, Vegan Ethics, Eco-Feminism, Environmental Justice, Anti-Anthropocentrism
(Reinterprets food, clothing, and consumer habits as moral battlegrounds between exploitative human systems and oppressed non-human life.)

13. Apocalyptic-Crisis Dialectic:

Oppressed: Planet, Future Generations, Vulnerable Populations
Oppressor: Industrial Civilization, Capitalist and Colonial Systems
Key Terms: Eco-Crisis Narratives, Climate Justice, Environmental Catastrophism, Sustainability Politics
(Frames human history as an escalating chain of world-ending threats—population, pollution, climate—caused by oppressive systems that must be dismantled to ensure planetary survival.)

Non-political Caring? Not So Fast!

WOW!!! Perhaps you thought this was a simple matter of non-political empathy and caring vs. those meanies who make other people feel bad about themselves and are too greedy to vote for those who want to help the poor.

How the First Two Kinds of Socialists Differ

Of these two kinds of socialists, the first imagines that once total control is gained, and once all connection to the past amid the people is severed, a new age of selfless mankind will spring from the survivors of the purges… purges that are necessary in order to sever all connections to the past. The long road of suffering and ruin is, for them, a necessary step toward the utopian dreams waiting at the end of that rainbow road.

The second kind could not care less about that suffering, death, and ruin. They would rather reign supreme over a burning garbage dump than be common in a paradise. For them, whatever they personally believe about the individuals involved in the categories of Critical Marxism, they use these categories and feign alliance with its mission in order to secure their own rise to power. What they do with that power will likely have nothing to do with what they claimed to get that power. It was just a convenient vehicle for them to ride.

The Third Kind of Socialist: Useful Idiots Among Us

And now the third kind of socialist.

Vladimir Lenin is commonly attributed as exploiting the term “Useful Idiot.”[4] The history of this attribution is complicated but just, even if the phrase itself preceded Lenin and merely encapsulates his longstanding attitude toward those who, while not fully grasping the real end of socialism, proved naïve fellow travelers who would either serve the revolution or be swept aside by it.[5] They are dupes, Bourgeois sentimentalists,[6] and innocents who serve the revolution’s interests until they no longer do[7] …useful to the revolution until liquidation. He championed “The Social-Democrat’s ideal… the tribune of the people… who can react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression.”[8] This “tribune of the people” operates through manipulation of political sympathy, turning moral outrage and social conscience into revolutionary tools. Later interpreters easily saw this as treating reformists and sympathizers as useful instruments.

These Useful Idiots are regarded as fools who have little real sense of what the endgame is, but are   manipulated into sentimental fervor to assist in their own destruction by putting the weight of whatever influence they have into helping the first two kinds of socialists complete their work.

So, let me ask you. Was Jesus a Socialist? (Tune in next time for a more expansive answer to this question.)

~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD

[1] The labels multiply around supposed variation but stay tuned for why I list these three.

[2] Kristian Niemietz, “Nothing to do with me, mate: That wasn’t real socialism. Real socialism has never been tried.” —Has ‘real’ socialism never been tried? (Institute of Economic Affairs) https://iea.org.uk/has-real-socialism-never-been-tried; Ben Bayer, “For instance, Bhaskar Sunkara … claims that real socialism means ‘democratic’ control of the workplace and argues that the Soviet Union was not socialist because it lacked that democratic control.” The Dishonesty of ‘Real Socialism Has Never Been Tried’ New Ideal (August 19^th, 2020) https://newideal.aynrand.org/the-dishonesty-of-real-socialism-has-never-been-tried;  Sunkara aware of the disingenuous nature of the claim tries to distance himself from it while actually reasserting the claim in practical terms in an interview. “The Social Democratic Road to Socialism: An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara” EuropeNow (June 3^rd, 2019) https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/06/10/the-social-democratic-road-to-socialism-an-interview-with-bhaskar-sunkara%EF%BB%BF/; Noam Chomsky, “One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky … has some relation to socialism… In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.” “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism” Our Generation, Spring/Summer 1986, https://chomsky.info/1986____/.

[3] Paul Skousen, The Naked Socialist, (Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 2012);  W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, (Salt Lake City: Izzard Inc, 1958).

[4] Earliest known usage: 1864 — London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science referred to “useful idiots” as naïve supporters of political movements; In 1959, Congressman Ed Derwinski of Illinois entered an editorial referring to Americans who travelled to the Soviet Union as “what Lenin calls useful idiots in the Communist game.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot.

[5] Max Eastman, an early American communist who later broke with the movement, described Lenin’s manipulative pragmatism toward “fellow travelers” and intellectuals in his 1955 memoir Reflections on the Failure of Socialism.

[6] Arthur Ransome, British journalist and sympathizer, noted Lenin’s view of “bourgeois sentimentalists” as naïve but temporarily advantageous. (Six Weeks in Russia, 1919).

[7] Emma Goldman, after her disillusionment, wrote in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) that Lenin viewed Western liberals as “innocents who serve the Revolution’s interests until they no longer do.”

[8] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. (First published in Stuttgart, Germany, 1902).