# North: Regeneration through Revolution



## RamistThomist (Sep 21, 2017)

North, Gary. Regeneration through Revolution: Marx's View of Religion.

While dated in many ways, and once the Soviet Union fell this book wasn't quite as urgent, it bears a careful reading given the subtle infiltration of Marxism today. Whether it is Bernie voters or the Cultural Marxists infiltrating Reformed denominations, this book provides key ammunition that both a) hits Marxism at the root and b) picks apart his bad economic theories.

North explores a different angle of Marx’s thought: Marx was more heavily influenced by the earlier pagan, chaos religions than previously recognized. This is a legitimate approach. We all have axioms that we take for granted and that filter the rest of our thought. This is the foundation for his later thought. North writes: 



> ““Marx held to the orderly Newtonian worldview of physical-natural cause and effect, but he resurrected and baptized an ancient tradition of social chaos. His worldview was a strange mixture of Western linear history (Augustine), Western utopian-ism (communism), scientific rationalism (Newton), eighteenth- century classical economics (the labor theory of value and the cost of production theory of value), atheism (dialectical materialism), and pagan cyclical history (the chaos festivals)” (North xviii).



Chaos religion–and its festivals–allowed man to tap into the primal unformed chaos. Thus, the violence, the overturning of social norms, the sexual orgies that one always found in pagan festivals–and in Communist Revolutions (and Occupy Wall Street). North suggests that this ritual morphs into a secularized form: secret societies (76).

Rather than giving an analytical review of Marx’s thought, I will simply list five or six problems embedded in Marxist thought.

*Problem 1: *Lenin’s problem: “the Social-Democratic consciousness of proletarians does not develop by itself.” (xxxix).

*Problem 2: *Problem with the labor theory of value: activity is a meaningful economic substitute for value. Contrast with subjective theory of value.

*Problem 3: *Problem in Marxian doctrine: progress only comes from the clash of classes. How then will progress be possible “after the Revolution” (North 51)?

*Problem 4*: how does a lawlike determinism arise from flux and chance (60)?

*Problem 5: *North: If all profits stem from the employment of human labor, then it follows that greater profits can be made in businesses that are labor intensive. The more machinery one employs in the production process, the less profit should be available, since there are fewer laborers present to exploit….Yet what we do see is precisely the reverse: the most profitable industries tend to be those in which large quantities of constant capital are employed (123).

*Problem 6*: North: Here is the central flaw of all socialist systems: how can the allocation of scarce resources take place in a society devoid of money (142)? How much is _x _worth? How do you know?

*Problem 7*: how can the total wealth of nature be released under socialism without the use of mass production methods that require the division of labor? Perhaps even more fundamental, how can the socialist planning board allocate scarce resources efficiently without some kind of pricing mechanism involving the use of money (182-183)?

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