Mamdani and The Curse Karl Marx Tried to Abolish

The oldest political argument in the world is not between left and right. It is between those who accept the tragic structure of human existence and those who believe it can be abolished.

The Bible begins with a revolution in human consciousness. Man is expelled from Eden and told that bread will come “by the sweat of his brow.” Woman is told that life itself will arrive through pain. The family is no longer a passive arrangement of innocence. It becomes a structure of labor, sacrifice, birth, love, authority, dependence, and obligation.

This is not merely theology. It is anthropology.

The biblical account does not say that human hardship is accidental. It says hardship is woven into the condition of man. Work is not a capitalist invention. Pain is not a social construct. Dependency is not a bourgeois trick. The family is not an arbitrary prison created by property owners. These things belong to the permanent grammar of human life.

That is precisely what Karl Marx tried to overthrow.

Marx was not stupid. On the contrary, he was one of the most brilliant and dangerous thinkers in modern history. His genius was not that he discovered suffering. Every farmer, worker, mother, merchant, and servant before him knew what suffering was. They knew what labor was. They knew what inequality was. They knew that some men owned land and others worked it. They knew that women bore children and men fought for bread.

Marx’s genius was timing.

He appeared at a moment when the technological foundations of society were being violently rearranged. The Industrial Revolution had shaken Europe’s old order. The factory, the machine, the city, and the wage system transformed the rhythms of work and family. Romantic relations changed. Production changed. The village gave way to the industrial town. The old forms of belonging no longer explained the new forms of alienation.

Marx seized that moment of confusion and offered a total explanation.

Where the Bible had taught that work and pain were permanent features of the human condition, Marx suggested that they were historical arrangements. Where Scripture accepted the fallenness of man, Marx blamed the structure of society. Where the biblical mind saw tragedy, Marx saw oppression. Where the ancient world taught limits, Marx promised liberation.

That is why Marxism is not merely economics. It is anti-biblical theology.

Its deepest promise is not higher wages. Its deepest promise is a return to Eden without God.

Marx imagined that the alienation of man could be overcome by abolishing the private ownership of production, dissolving class conflict, and eventually producing a reconciled “social man.” In this vision, human beings would no longer relate to one another through competition, property, debt, hierarchy, or exchange. The ancient curse would be lifted. Man would work freely, share naturally, and live socially.

But this is where the utopia collapses.

Who distributes the food? Who defines need? Who measures ability? Who decides how much of the fruit of one man’s labor belongs to another? Who prevents the distributor from becoming a ruler? Who watches the committee that claims to act in the name of the people?

Marxism never solved this problem because it could not solve it. The moment someone must administer equality, a new ruling class is born.

Lenin and Stalin did not betray Marx by turning theory into bureaucracy and terror. They exposed the political necessity hidden inside the theory. If history must be forced toward liberation, someone must do the forcing. If the people are not yet conscious of their true interests, someone must speak for them. If the old order will not surrender, someone must crush it.

The dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of those who claim to represent the proletariat.

This is why Marxism so often attracts intellectual classes. It offers them a sacred role. They become the interpreters of history, the priests of liberation, the engineers of the new man. In older religious civilizations, the priest interpreted divine law. In Marxist civilization, the intellectual interprets oppression.

The problem did not end with economics. Later radical movements took Marx’s template and moved it from the factory into culture. The struggle of worker against capitalist became the struggle of identity against identity, race against race, sex against sex, colonized against colonizer, victim against oppressor. The battlefield shifted from production to language, education, family, sexuality, and memory.

This was not an accident. It was Marxism’s method applied to new material.

Find a wound in reality. Name it oppression. Identify an enemy. Organize resentment. Promise redemption through struggle. Then place the intellectual class in charge of explaining who must be liberated and who must be condemned.

The result is a politics of permanent accusation.

Yet the older questions remain unanswered. What is work? What gives labor dignity? What does man owe his family? What does society owe the weak? What does the successful man owe the poor? What can the state justly take? What must remain private? What is charity when it is coerced by law? What is freedom when every relationship is politicized?

The moderate social democrats tried to answer these questions through compromise. Thinkers such as Eduard Bernstein understood that the revolutionary dream was too violent and too abstract. Instead of abolishing capitalism, they sought to soften it. Progressive taxation, welfare provisions, health systems, labor protections, and social insurance were attempts to answer Marx’s moral challenge without accepting Marx’s apocalyptic politics.

That answer may be imperfect, but it at least understands something Marxism forgets: human beings are not raw material for a theory.

The classical liberal tradition understood this even more deeply. John Locke, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson began not with class destiny but with individual liberty, property, consent, conscience, and limits on power. Their question was not how to remake man but how to restrain government so that man could live, work, worship, build, and associate freely.

That tradition deserves renewed attention.

Why do universities so often teach Marx, Foucault, and Heidegger more intensely than Locke, Paine, or Jefferson? Because theories of power generate power for those who teach them. A philosophy that tells students they are trapped inside invisible systems of domination requires an expert class to decode those systems. A philosophy of liberty, by contrast, tells people they are morally responsible agents.

One empowers the interpreter. The other empowers the citizen.

This is the core philosophical divide of our age.

The biblical and liberal traditions do not deny suffering. They deny that suffering can be abolished by political engineering. They understand that work is hard, families are complicated, wealth is uneven, society is imperfect, and man is morally dangerous. They therefore build limits: limits on rulers, limits on appetite, limits on utopian dreams.

Marxism rejects limits. It treats the structure of existence itself as an injustice to be overcome.

But every attempt to abolish the tragic nature of life ends by creating a political tragedy. The dream of a world without hierarchy produces a new hierarchy. The dream of a world without exploitation produces new masters. The dream of a world without alienation produces loneliness, surveillance, and fear.

The Bible was wiser. It did not promise man a painless world. It taught him how to live in a fallen one.

That may be the great lesson modern politics refuses to learn: the sweat of the brow cannot be legislated away. It can only be given meaning.