Proto-communists and the abolition of family

~ Dr. Paul Kengor

Prologue to a Proto-Communist Dystopia

My colleague and friend, Dr. Paul Kengor, has written a must-read book on the dystopian state of affairs in American society and culture titled, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage. I did an initial book review of this revelatory work, but as I continued rereading Kengor’s opus I am compelled to write additional essays alerting the public that truly this book is exceedingly important; it’s historical facts are imperative, especially for our young people to learn lest those legions of Cultural Marxists that work day and night to deconstruct and destroy the world’s Judeo-Christian traditions, will have triumphed in their treason.

Kengor who in chapter two, “Early Communists and Socialist Movements Against Family and Marriage,” had this historical passage on the abolition of the family from one of the founding fathers of communism, Friedrich Engels: “Engels saw this plan to liberate mothers and wives from the chains of conventional family economic bondage, that children would be raised communally. (Recall Hillary Clinton’s socialist memoir, It Takes a Village). Likewise, he understood it as an enormous advantage to unleashing all inhibitions to women’s sexuality. Engel’s hoped his perverted worldview would in time open Pandora’s Box of sexual psychopathy upon society; always pushing relentlessly his “unconstrained” and depraved sexual behavior among women. Like Aristotle, one of the greatest writers on the grotesqueries of human nature, once wrote: “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.” Thus Engels always pushed for the degeneration and deconstruction of societal morality as a proven strategy to realize his communist utopia. Engels further wrote:

With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the consequences which today is the most essential social-moral as well as economic factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor.

Marx and Engels, like many wicked men throughout history didn’t like societal restraints that dictate moral standards based on Judeo-Christian traditions, so like Aristotle theorized that men like Marx and Engels would do they “started revolutionary changes” to justify their perverted sexual worldviews “connected with their private lives.”

Proto-Communist No. 1: Robert Owens

Proto-Communism is the idea that Communist ideology existed even before Marx and Engels, the Founding Fathers’ of Communism codified this political philosophy in their books, speeches and articles. Kengor cites radicals like Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), a prominent German Marxist feminist, August Bebel (1840-1913), a German socialist, and most notably these three proto-Communists – the English utopian-socialist Robert Owen (1771-1858), (who according to Kengor possessed a venal hatred of the family as an institution), and Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a French socialist, and “Christian Communist” John Humphries Noyes (1811-86), where each man zealously projected an intellectual foundation for the rejection, perversion and ultimately the abolition of the Judeo-Christian conception of family.

Kengor eloquently chronicles how Robert Owen definitely left his proto-Communist worldview establishing many communes that would become an ideological blueprint for Progressives and the Democrat Socialist Party to pervert and deconstruct the family in modern times. Robert Owen first established his new communist colony in New Harmony, Indiana, and dedicated it with his speech titled “Declaration of Mental Independence,” which Kengor rightly called, “an anti-Declaration of Independence, and somewhat of a precursor to the Communist Manifesto.” “I now declare to you and to the world,” proclaimed Owen, “that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race.” What evils was Owen referring to? “I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property, combined with some of these irrational systems of religion.” Property, religion, marriage – Robert Owen’s unholy trinity.

A reoccurring paradox of history is when evil men like Robert Owen endeavor to create an atheistic, anti-Christian, communist commune, which though it soon failed, Kengor chronicles few lasted more than four years, yet from its ashes many followers imitated his commune concept across America. The paradox of evil continued with Owen’s establishment of proto-Communism in America which though he wasted virtually all of his personal fortune on his unsuccessful attempt at communism, many other Americans in the early 1800s (just like in modern times) held such a venal hatred and contempt of anything related to America’s Judeo-Christian traditions that they kept Owen’s communist worldview alive and thriving to such a degree that Owen’s declared before he died in 1858, that, “The social system is now firmly established.” Owen made this local observation just 10 years after the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) launched Communism worldwide.

Proto-Communist No. 2: Charles Fourier

One of the most famous communist commune builders after Owen’s scheme collapsed into disaster was Charles Fourier whose new proto-Communist worldview was quickly established here in America, although Fourier died in 1837 before he could physically come to America. Nevertheless, like with Owen, Fourier’s atheistic communist ideas were zealously embraced by his legions of supporters who would propagate his anti-family radicalism throughout America.

Fourier as well hated private property, biblical marriage, morality and religion so he skillfully used his communist communes as the vehicle to establish his new world utopia, ever pushing society into a more progressive direction, according to Kengor. In the 1830s, two centuries before Chai Feldblum and associates were developing policies to move Beyond Marriage, Fourier was openly promoting the end of one-to-one marriage thus facilitating extramarital affairs among spouses, Kengor writes. His principal supporter in America, Albert Brisbane (1809-90), a utopian Socialist, who practiced Fourier’s moral relativism personally for he had three illegitimate children as well as numerous mistresses. However, even Brisbane wasn’t crazy enough in the 1840s and 50s New England society to implement some of Fourier’s more irredeemable sexual practices – polygamy, homosexuality, and unlimited “free love.” Brisbane also set up many of Fourier’s Proto-Communist schools for the children where (like Progressives of today) these moral perverts could ‘change the world’ by isolating and indoctrinating new generations of impressionable children and thus more effectively distort their understanding of biblical morality. Soviet communist tyrant Lenin famously said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Remember college today lasts four years.

In the end like all communist utopias, they quickly descend into the hell of reality, into the ghetto of communist dystopias, thus the Fourier-Brisbane Proto-Communist communes weren’t any more successful than Owen’s ideological colonies. Yet, the historical paradox continued to be followed by the Left – the more the Proto-Communist communes failed into utter disaster, the more American atheists built more of them so that Kengor would write “there were probably forty-some such communes that sprang up around the country in this period.”

Proto-Communist No. 3: John Humphrey Noyes

One of the most enduring and more idiosyncratic ideological communes was started by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86), one of the few Communists who was also a Christian – a “free love” – wheeling “Bible Communist” educated by the Ivy League, Kengor writes. The communist affinity to reinvent and improvise one’s own moral worldview was an essential aspect of Noyes’s ‘Christian’ radicalism. Noyes’s extremism against America’s Judeo-Christian traditions extended to creating the family anew, and moving beyond marriage, where he fabricated communal partnerships or collective marriages that he called “Complex Marriage,” where he essentially married hundreds of people at one time.

Noyes ruled over a group of some three hundred men and women who thought that monogamy was unnatural. Noyes’s Proto-Communists of the 1860s were perhaps the original followers of what the 1960s’ New Left would call “group love” and “smashing monogamy,” according to Kengor. Their worldview considered monogamy a sin, while the 1960s Socialist radicals had moved beyond the very idea that sin existed since to them morality was relative. The Noyes Proto-Communists understood their counter-moral revolution as following a metaphysical strategy connecting all of the commune’s men and women on a divine path. This self-righteous view of Noyes’s acolytes would be a frequent refrain of the Left over the next 150 years which seems irresistible to them to avoid on any intellectual level. Thus Noyes’s new ideological colony involved forced engagements of ill-fated young teens paired with older and less-desirable adults (many decades their seniors). Babies were not raised by their parents but communally in chosen children’s areas of the commune. Kengor writes, “There was collective parenting as well as collective sex, collective property, collective exchange of bodily fluids, and the collective pooling of children and their education. Marriage was a truly open affair.”

R.I.P.: Eulogy to the Family

The 2015 Supreme Court Obergefell decision legalizing homosexual marriage did not happen in a vacuum, but was a strategic part of undermining America’s Judeo-Christian traditions and institutions I call the “Progression Revolution”; It happened while Jews, Christians, conservatives, church people and prominent leadership at all levels have essentially been fast asleep for the past 200 years. All the while Cultural Marxism and Fabian Socialism (Gradualism) grew in real power and strength, hijacking institution after institution, yet admittedly not even the Communists could dream of such a fast societal leap into the abyss as same-sex marriage has allowed them to achieve.

Like the French Revolution (1789-99) – the Enlightenment Holocaust against Christianity, the clergy, the monarchy and hundreds of thousands of French people who were not part of the genocidal tribe called the Jacobins, its subsequent revolutionary movement Communism (synonymous with Socialism) pushed ideas that were diametrical to the family and marriage, Christianity and Reality. In Kengor’s epigraph to chapter 1, he cited Marx’s infamous quote in the Communist Manifesto that the “abolition of the family” as to only “radical” but as “infamous proposal of the Communists.” This means that almost 200 years ago, their ideas were just as diabolical and radical as today, but now they are universally accepted as legitimate with the help of the Academy, the Supreme Court and an apathetic society.

Kengor frequently cites to the writings of Professor Richard Weikart, who in his revelatory journal article Marx, Engels, and the Abolition of the Family, wrote the following:

Some recent commentators on Marx’s and Engel’s view of the family cast doubt on their radicalism. Some construe their attacks on the family as a call for reform, as an expression of a desire to sweep away abuses, while retaining the basic family structure intact. Others discover in Engels’ writings on the family naturalistic elements that allegedly vitiate his radical pronouncements on the abolition of the family…. These interpretations of Marx’s and Engels’ position on the family, while often raising important points, tend to obscure somewhat the radicalism of their views…. While Marx once alluded to a higher form of the family in Communists society, he and Engels usually wrote about the destruction, dissolution, and abolition of the family. The relationships they envisaged for communist society would have little or no resemblance to the family as it existed in nineteenth-century Europe or indeed anywhere else. Thus it is certainly appropriate to define their position as the abolition of the family. Only by making the term

family

almost infinitely elastic can they said to have embraced merely a reformulation of the family.

As Kengor repeatedly wrote in his book of Marx and Engels evolving conception of family – deconstruction, abolition, destruction – one indisputable fact was that none of the communist views of family were based on an absolute structure deriving from an absolute interpretation of Scripture, God, or any Christian church, or denomination. Change for Marx and Engels, was synonymous with destruction since the Christian worldview of family was religious, it did not fit their evolutionary atheism worldview based on dialectical materialism and moral relativism. “Even during the time they assumed that the family was a natural institution of society,” wrote Weikart “Marx and Engels were clear that it was not a fixed entity.”

Kengor cites the 1845 work, The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels argued that “it is not possible to speak of ‘the’ family.” Using a favorite tactic of the Communists, rewriting and perverting history, (Marx wrote: “The first battlefield is to rewrite history”). Marx and Engels contended that the family played an essential but malicious role in human history. ‘Change’ is the Communists favorite watchword due to its ambiguity to be whatever you want it to be. According to Marx and Engels all institutions (especially those associated with religion) must be deconstructed, abolished and ultimately burned and destroyed. Everything must Change.

Frederick Engels, in his Eulogy to Karl Marx, wrote about the Communist conception of Change: “Our dialectical philosophy abolishes all the notions of absolute and definitive truth.” Once the State abolishes God and Family, reality no longer exists. Reality is what the State says is Reality.