Marxism & Religion: Part 2 - From Hatred to Brotherhood

Marxism is a child of the Enlightenment. It was born of the revolutions in politics, philosophy and economy that shook Europe and America from the 17th Century through to the 19th Century. As such it was tempered in part in the polemics and struggles against religious authority. After all, religion was the ideology of the European ruling classes, used to justify the right of kings and popes to do as they pleased at the expense of the people. To be against religious authority was to be against the feudal order. It was to be in favour of equal rights and natural law, as opposed to the rights and privileges of estates.

But Marxism was also a break with the Enlightenment. It developed after the retreat of the great French Revolution, long after the ossification of the English Revolution and the disappointment and slavery that issued from the American Revolution. The experience of revolt and disappointment deepened the critique of Marx and Engels. This was particularly true after their very direct experience of the German revolution in 1848, which was defeated by the treachery of the bourgeoisie, the class that had led the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the previous century. But even before Marx raised the call for permanent revolution to sweep away the bourgeoisie as well as the old feudal order, he and Engels had reached an understanding that the phenomenon of religious ideas and religious practices has to be understood as an expression of the experience of contemporary humans:

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

It was no longer the case that religion was a trick pulled on the masses by the ruling classes. Certainly the ruling class used religion for its own purposes but even if it hadn’t, the conditions of oppression would have generated it so long as the oppressed masses didn’t have the confidence themselves to resist their conditions. It was, in that sense, a painkiller – an opiate – that made oppression easier to bear. Though at this point Marx still holds that criticism of religion frees the mind of man so that he is free to resist real oppression, by the time of the Theses on Feuerbach in 1845, two years later, he argues that to get rid of religious ideas one must annihilate the social practices from which they emanate (“Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated theoretically and practically”). Thus, I think that if we’re going to analyze religion we ought to at least start from the level that Marx began at way back in 1843 and not revert to the position of the Young Hegelians.

This marks a big step forward, I would argue, and begins to bring materialism back into the critique of religion. But, of course, Marx isn’t the final word on Marxism in general nor on the question of religion in particular. It’s interesting that in Engels and later, Kautsky, we seem some important evolution of the idea. Kautsky, for instance, quotes Engels as saying:

“The history of primitive Christianity presents remarkable coincidences with the modern workers’ movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of the oppressed; it first appeared as a religion of slaves and freedmen, of the poor, the outcasts, of the peoples subjected or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and Socialism preach an approaching redemption from servitude and misery; Christianity assigns this redemption to a future life in Heaven after death; Socialism would attain it in this world by a transformation of society…”

Kautsky agrees overall with Engels parallel but notes that there are a few limitations to Engels views: “Christianity can hardly be called a religion of the slaves; it did nothing for them. On the other hand, the liberation from misery proclaimed by Christianity was at first quite material, to be realized on this earth, not in Heaven.” What is interesting is that Kautsky traces the “collapse” of primitive Christianity into an idealistic religion of servitude and bureaucracy to many of the same kind of material pressures that transform the workers’ movement. He does not, first and foremost, fetishize the details of early Christian ideology. It is the pressure of material conditions that corrupts the Christians.

“Like Christianity, this movement is obliged to create permanent organs in the course of its growth, a sort of professional bureaucracy in the party, as well as in the unions, without which it cannot function, which are a necessity for it, which must continue to grow, and obtain more and more important duties. “This bureaucracy – which must be taken in the broad sense… - will not this bureaucracy in the course of things become a new aristocracy, like the clergy headed by the bishop? Will it not become an aristocracy dominating and exploiting the working masses and finally attaining the power to deal with the state authorities on equal terms, thus being tempted not to overthrow them but join them?”

The conclusion we ought to draw from this is that rather than dismissing religion as a phenomenon incompatible with an ideology of revolution, in general, and of Marxism, in particular, we must examine it in its concrete specificity. We also ought to have a certain amount of humility as Marxists as religiously inspired people have been resisting oppression through revolutionary struggle a lot longer than have we, though I suppose that it is in the nature of all youth to disrespect their elders.

PART 3: Would there be religion under socialism?

Marxism and Religion: Part 1

This is really a thumbnail sketch of trying to wrap my head around a Marxist approach to religion. This really comes out of the experience, evolving from the approach pioneered in contemporary times by Chris Harman, of relating to imperialism in the Middle East and the role of Islamism in the resistance to that imperialism. In many ways that relationship is a clear signpost as to how Marxists ought to treat the contradictory phenomenon of religion. For instance, going back to the late 1970s we saw two important developments. On the one hand there was the Iranian revolution of 1979 that quickly (though not without internal struggle) saw it move in the direction of Shi’ia-based Islamism, as formulated and led by Ayatollah Khomeineh. The defeat of the US client dictator, the Shah of Iran, under the impetus of an anti-imperialist movement led to the demonization of Islam in western popular culture and political policy. On the other hand, the 1980s saw a civil war in Afghanistan in which the US-backed, Islamic-based mujahideen fought against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Here, while the struggle of the mujahideen was increasingly a struggle against Soviet imperialism, it was distorted by the involvement of the USA and lauded by the latter precisely for the distortions that they had infused into the character of the struggle. Similarly, the theocratic dictatorship in Saudi Arabia (which funneled significant resources to the mujahideen) was and is closely aligned to the United States government. Clearly Islam could be an ideology of both resistance and accommodation to repressive and regressive power.

Harman encapsulated well our attitude to religion as a political phenomenon with his slogan “with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.” That slogan allowed, for instance, the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt to understand that the Muslim Brotherhood represented a conservative but nonetheless reformist response to the pro-US dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and to resist their repression without dropping their criticisms of MB policies that were regressive and even counter-revolutionary. Only by doing this could they relate to the much larger body of MB supporters, particularly the youth wing, who were to the left of the leadership in militantly opposing both imperialism and the Mubarak dictatorship. But in many ways this still left open the question of how to theorize the phenomenon of religion. This gap made it possible to both relate to religiously-inspired political movements and individuals in an open, non-sectarian way while sustaining a sectarian stance to religion itself. This gap has been under-theorized in my opinion and could allow, for instance, Alex Callinicos to argue that a person couldn’t be both religious and Marxist. Of course Callinicos, and probably most other Marxists besides, could argue that the historical materialism of Marxism simply wasn’t compatible with a religious outlook. I would argue that this, rather, was a shibboleth that placed a barrier between Marxism as an ideology of revolution and a broad population of religious adherents who had moved towards a position of revolution through their experience of resisting imperialism and (increasingly) austerity.

A good place to start in exploring this question is to define Marxism itself. In some ways Marxism has many elements in common with religion. The most obvious one is that the definition of what constitutes “Marxism” is itself contested. Maoists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, council communists, and many minor strands and hybrid formations all define themselves as Marxists in ways that are often radically contradictory. These sometimes seem to take on the character of scholastic debates about doctrine – particularly the more isolated they are from reality. Even theorists within particular traditions disagree on particular aspects of the canon. Some Trotskyists, for instance define self-identified Communist or socialist regimes, such as Cuba, as deformed workers states, while others (including my tradition) argue that they are state capitalist regimes, which nonetheless still leaves open important tactical and strategic questions. Even within traditions there is disagreement on more abstract philosophical questions such as whether the dialectic – which I will define, following Rees, as a series of principles by which to explain change as a dynamic process arising from internal contradictions – extends to the natural world or is restricted to society.

This makes defining Marxism itself rather problematic. However, I would say that at its core, the original Marxist canon contains a few key principles and these are philosophical materialism, the idea that class society has inherent contradictions that leads to conflict, particularly between the main classes and the principle that the overthrow of capitalism must be the act of the working class (self-emancipation). Self-emancipation itself is rooted in two precepts, the first being the strategic position that the working class holds within capitalist society – it produces the vast majority of wealth in society and by its actions it can stop the machine and restart it to meet its own needs. Secondly, and relatedly, the working class is, as Marx put it, a radical class in that its own liberation doesn’t require the subordination of another class. When the bourgeoisie smashed the old feudal state apparatus, with its codified system of privileges and duties, assigned to particular classes, raising the banner of universal rights, more than anything it liberated itself from aristocratic privilege so that it could better exploit the working class. The working class has no subordinate class beneath it whom it rests upon (though there are social strata beneath the working class in terms of wealth and social power) and whose exploitation it requires. Therefore the working class, to liberate itself, must also liberate all of humanity. (This is complicated by imperialism and colonialism but I don’t think that it fundamentally alters this strategic outlook so I don’t want to get into it here.) Of these three principles, really the only principle that seems to necessarily come into conflict with religion is that of philosophical materialism.

This leads to two questions, to my mind. What are the limits of philosophical materialism in terms of it being necessary to achieve the key strategic aims of Marxism (self-liberation of the working class to overcome all class division)? Does religion, or at least some religion, exist within those limits sufficiently to permit a person to be both religious and a Marxist? It is self-evident that one can go to church, believe in God, believe in (for instance) Christian salvation and still believe in working class self-emancipation. There are plenty examples of individuals who did so. AJ Muste, who led the American Workers Party in the 1930s, for instance, was a Christian socialist and nonetheless was comfortable fusing his organization with the Trotskyists led by James Cannon to form the Socialist Workers Party (US). More challenging for those who adhere to a particular religious sect: is it possible to believe that real, practical unity is possible and desirable between workers of one faith and another? However, this is a common problem, not restricted to religion. We see a similar phenomenon in terms of different strands of socialism as much as between different faiths (if on a smaller scale given the global predominance of a religious outlook versus one connected to various strands of Marxism). Religion hasn’t cornered the market on sectarianism, unfortunately. And, generally, as suggested above, the possibility and desirability of unity exists in direct proportion to the level of struggle and therefore the confidence of the masses to make gains in their own interest. During the early stages of the Egyptian Revolution, for instance, there were many instances of Muslims and Christians uniting to defend each other from attack during prayers.

Returning to the question of the limits of philosophical materialism as a standpoint necessary for scientific examination, if one looks outside of politics we see that many scientists, whose professional activity is a materialist examination of, for instance, biological evolution or genetics, are nonetheless religious. On the other hand, more than one atheist cosmologist nonetheless accepts that the universe had a beginning moment that looks an awful lot like theological creation – and we often forget that the Big Bang theorem is only the “standard” model that is contested by other models like Steady State, etc. And physicists accept phenomenon, like entanglement, that looks an awful lot like spirituality and which has yet to be really explained by what we would normally call materialism. In other words, defining that limit, beyond which lies the wasteland of submission to otherworldly authority and conservatism is not as straightforward as some, perhaps most, Marxists have generally assumed. This suggests that religion, like any ideological and material (in the sense of social practice) phenomenon, including various expressions of Marxism, must be examined concretely and specifically.

This fundamental starting point to any critical, materialist analysis is generally lost on Marxists who seek to polemicize against religion. We become obsessed with theological dogma and debates. For instance, the much-lauded book by Paul Siegel, the Meek & The Militant, argues that the reason for the defeat of great movements in history has been their adherence to religion and its failure to have a properly radical critique and strategy. “But the other-worldly aspect of religion makes these movements turn away from class struggle. Instead of learning the lessons of defeat to renew the struggle, they find solace in dreaming of heavenly bliss or in passively waiting for the messiah.” (p.55) Certainly this is sometimes true – religion can lead to a moderating of the struggle when more radicalism is needed. But is this always the case and can the defeat of religiously inspired movements be reduced to religion in this way? Not only is it sometimes the case that movements are defeated because they are simply not strong enough – for instance the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66-72AD, which is probably the source of Christianity and its spread. But this also applies to other ideologies, including Marxism. Sometimes you lose because you can’t win, not because you are wrong. The Bolsheviks in Russia were victorious against imperialism and counter-revolution and were, nonetheless, defeated by the weight of material circumstances – famine, economic ruin, failure of the revolution to spread. This was independent of the ideology of the leading party of the revolution. In fact, ideology is itself transformed by the level and confidence of the struggle of subordinate classes. As we witness with the defeats of both the Jewish zealots and the Bolsheviks, in most instances defeat of a movement leads not to a considered rethinking, followed by the “renewal of struggle” but, rather, to the retreat of the guiding ideology into conservatism, routinism and forms of subservient idealism. Certainly factions may see the error in this, break away and form new attempts to resist oppression but that applies as much to religion as it does to Marxism. We must not be arrogant about this. After all, religion has inspired more revolutions against oppression than Marxism, a fact of which we must be cognizant, even if we believe – as I do – that the social analysis of Marxism is correct and its strategic orientation is fundamental to a winning strategy for the liberation of humanity.