On Marxism and Religion

Morning Comrades.

It does often amuse me that our societies create these non-confrontational rules about what subjects one must not speak on, a disastrous relict of Victorian etiquette to hide people’s inherent inability of dialogue. Religion is often such a topic and for no other reason that wanting to write about it, this is what we are doing today, and probably for a few days knowing me. There are no “hard” topics to ignore, just an unwillingness to articulate ideas correctly for a plethora of silly reasons. Before that, as per usual, here are some new tunes for you, this week.

Once again, and on the off-chance of repeating myself, this is a good one not to be missed.

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On Marxism and Religion

Over the last few decades learning and subsequently teaching in this field I have too often come across the faulty perception that Marxism equates Atheism. It is true that Marx’s interpretation of history and vision of a future involves the absence of religion and the Leninist practical application of his theories in Russia after the 1917 revolution have certainly given enough reason for this understanding but all in all it is too deeply founded upon misunderstanding of it.

Marx’s description of religion as “the opium of the people” has become one of the best known lines he ever wrote, which is in some ways a shame because, first, it is only half true and, second, it diverts attention from the deeper point that Marx was making. The actual quote that is mostly shortened for the memefication of philosophy goes as such:

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 ideas of religious critics that we all know too well ( Dawkins etc ) are a throwback to views about religion that were held by many eighteenth-century philosophers in Europe, who viewed religious faith as the result of ignorance and superstition and as the source of oppression and violence. The philosophical milieu in nineteenth-century Germany from which Marx emerged held similar views and came to the conclusion that “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.” But it was precisely these ideas that Marx himself eventually came to reject. Marx came to understand religion “as a symptom and not the disease,” and “as a source of solace” that would not disappear “until the sources of people’s pain—an unfair economic system—had been eradicated.

The key to understanding Marx’s critique of Religion, not Faith, is that he viewed Religion within the material realities of history and his present tense. It is the not the Belief but the man-made real life structures such as the Roman Catholic Church, for example, that wield earthly power and serve as instruments of oppression that are being criticized.

It is vital to understand the meaning of Marx to grasp his ideas in relation to his development. In this connection, his conception of religion is one of the most important aspects of his notions.
In 1842 he wrote:

I desired there to be less trifling with the label ‘atheism’ (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people.

(Letter to Ruge, November 24, 1842.)

It was quite easy to deal with religion by just being against it, but that was not good enough. Again, ‘Everybody knows’ that Marx wrote about religion being the opium of the people, so we shall look at the entire passage from which this comes a little further:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

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.

(Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction.)

‘Everybody’ thinks that Marx was saying that religion was dope manufactured by the ruling class to keep the masses happy. The real Marx, however, was concerned with much more weighty problems. Among other things, he was thinking about how an abstract human being could exist. He concludes that one could not. ‘Man is the world of man, state, society’, and the conception of God was a necessary conception in an ‘inverted world’. Once the world was right side up, the idea would not be needed. Meanwhile we should pay attention to it.

To be fair, Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels were well aware of the progressive role that religion sometimes plays, and they ignore the memorable but misleading opium metaphor in their later writings on religion. The danger of taking it too seriously is that religion itself can come to be seen as the enemy, in the way that Dawkins, Hitchens et al. apparently believe it to be. But Marx’s deeper analysis suggests a much more pragmatic approach. It was not the job of non-believing socialists in the 1960s, for example, to win Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X to atheism, but to unite with them in the fight for racial equality. On the other hand, when religious organizations choose to organize their members for reactionary political goals—the Mormon Church pouring millions of dollars into the campaign to ban gay marriage in California, for instance—they become legitimate targets for protest.

Marx says the reason why many people hold religious ideas is due to the oppression and exploitation they are subjected to. Lacking any material explanation for this, many look to mystical ideas as a form of comfort. However, this also means religious ideas can play a useful ideological role for the ruling class. Workers can be told not to worry about their position in society today. Instead, if they just ‘turn the other cheek’, they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

While religion can play a reactionary role, Marxists do not claim it can be defeated purely through argumentation. To rid society of religion, the material conditions for religion must be removed. Therefore, only when we have a democratically and rationally planned economy, based on the needs of us all, rather than the profit of a few, will we begin to see the withering away of religious ideas as the need for them subsides. With that, Marxists are in favour of religious freedom, but argue people will decide for themselves to abandon religion in a socialist society.

The point of this in our world today is this:

Atheism and our commitment to employ the Marxist Theory are not pre-determined upon one another. When we, here in the Global North West critically learn about revolutions against Capitalist oppression we soon realize that most of these revolutions were deeply connected to the local and regional faiths and beliefs, often versions of the main global religions. A commitment to dialectical materialism mandates this understanding and action. So when you are involved in discussions and acts of this nature, do keep in mind that whilst there is truth in understanding the structural connections between institutionalized religion as material power players a persons faith has little if nothing to do with what we are trying to do here.

At some point I hope to get into the question of Faith in Marxism but for the time being, thank you for your attention, support and interest.

Yours, warmly,

V.