Marxism and Religion readings

This is a selection of writings from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky on religion and the attitude of Marxists toward religion. Most of this comes from chapter six of the Reader in Marxist Philosophy, which is edited by Howard Selsam and Harry Martel. I included their introduction, which I think does an adequate job of giving an overview of the Marxist philosophy of religion.

Many of these readings can also be found in the "Marxism and Religion Study Group Readings," compiled by Dan in 2007 (which he may post at some point if people want more readings).

Hopefully you all will enjoy these readings and will post responses/questions. I may post a few questions soon to address what I consider to be the key issues that are raised.


INTRODUCTION

"Few aspects of Marxist thought have been more consistently misunderstood and distorted than its position on religion. It is as if Marx and Engels together, in all their lives, had said nothing more on the score than “Religion is the opium of the people,” and that Marxists ever since have confined themselves to repeating this phrase. The fact is that while Marx was probably not the first to say it, others since, independently, have said the same thing. Four years after Marx wrote the involved and richly textured passage in which this phrase occurs, Charles Kingsley, a Canon of the Church of England, said that the bible was used as an “opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded.”

The following passages reveal something of the complexity of the historical, social, and psychological levels on which Marx, Engels, and Lenin discussed religion. They had a certain sympathy for the atheism of the 18th century French philosophes, combined with considerable intellectual disdain for what they called the “bourgeois atheism” of the 19th century. There is nothing coarse-grained in their analyses. Religion is seen as a many-faceted reflection of the real world, including deep-seated human needs for security, consolation, and beauty. They do not want to take away from people the solace, comfort or beauty that religion brings into their lives. They do want to do away with the need for this particular form of achieving these satisfactions by abolishing the conditions that require the “illusions” religion offers.

The second leading idea found in these selections is that religious beliefs are not merely illusory; they stand in the way of man’s mastering both nature and his social relations in the interests of a better and fuller life. If religion is used by the exploiting classes as an “opium dose” to make working people accept their teachings and the authority of the clergy, then, ipso facto, it is inextricably intertwined with the class struggle. These passages should make it clear that the founders of Marxism did not believe they brought religion into the class struggle; they found it there. They were convinced, in fact, that the major conflicts in the history of religion were themselves forms of the class struggle.

This approach in no way overlooks the complex role religion has played in great social struggles. They saw, for example, in the origins of Christianity the role of the mass revolts that marked the decay of the Roman world. In the rise of Islam they called attention to the internal struggles between the Bedouins and the townspeople, the liberation of the Arabian peninsula from the Abyssinians, the desire to reestablish long dormant trade routes, and the awakening of an Arabian national consciousness. Similarly, their view of the Protestant Reformation was one of a vast complex of class struggles, taking place in different ways in various countries, but summed up in the sentence: “The ineradicability of the Protestant heresy corresponded to the invincibility of the rising bourgeoisie.” (Engels, Feuerbach)

The Lenin selections further develop the dialectics of religion and the class struggle by emphasizing that although religion may retard the struggle for socialism, the opposition to religion must always be subordinated to the long-range interests of the proletariat. On the other hand, workers and peasants and intellectuals who are religious and believe in socialism must not be estranged because of their religious beliefs. These beliefs can themselves, in certain circumstances, become powerful revolutionary forces. Not only in the class struggle but under socialism, Lenin believed, religious freedom must be maintained.

As will be easily seen in the following materials, Marxism differs from the atheism of “metaphysical” materialism by not ascribing all evil to religion and all good to atheism. It is able to avoid this pitfall, as well as that of ascribing all that is good in the world to religion, by refusing to regard religion as existing by itself, independent of the driving forces of society and history. Marxism does not blame the Crusades on religion, nor the persecution of such Copernicans as Bruno and Galileo. Neither does it credit religion with giving us morality and the “brotherhood of man.” It regards all these things, good and bad, as natural manifestations of social forces and movements expressing themselves in religious terms because religion has been the dominant form of ideology throughout almost all recorded history. Progressive and reactionary ideas, the vested interests of a ruling class or the demands of a submerged class, equally presented themselves in men’s minds, so long as men conceived the world in spiritualist terms, in religious guise. The recognition of this important truth avoids making religion a “thing-in-itself.” Marxism holds that the student of religion must seek its roots, its varied forms, and its constant changes and developments, not in the unfolding of a “divine idea,” nor in the nature of man (Feuerbach), but in the concrete conditions of life, the forces of production, and the accompanying forms of social organization, the family, the state, and so on."

-Howard Selsam & Harry Martel (editors), “Part Six: Religion,” Reader in Marxist Philosophy, pp 224-226 (1963).



RELIGION “THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE”

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.

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 from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the saintly form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms.”

-Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844), from Marx and Engels, On Religion.



RELIGIOUS WORLD: THE REFLEX OF THE REAL WORLD

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labor to the standard of homogenous human labor-for such a society , Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion...

[Religions] can arise and exists only when the development of the productive power of labor has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in other elements of popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to nature.”

-Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867).


[Dan’s note: Engels is mercilessly criticizing Duhring … Here he takes up Duhring’s argument that in his future society religion would be prohibited. Engels argues instead that the only way to abolish religion is not to prohibit it but to create a world in which humans would have control over society and nature, rather than being subject to seemingly alien natural and social forces.]

But it does not matter what we want. What matters is what Herr Dühring wants. And he differs from Frederick II in this, that in the Dühringian future state certainly not everyone will be able to be happy in his own way. The constitution of this future state provides:

"In the free society there can be no religious worship; for every member of it has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that there are beings, behind nature or above it, who can be influenced by sacrifices or prayers" {D. Ph. 286}. A "socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has therefore ... to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic, and therewith all the essential elements of religious worship" {D. C. 345}.” Religion is being prohibited.

All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces. In the beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were at first so reflected, and in the course of further evolution they underwent the most manifold and varied personifications among the various peoples […] But it is not long before, side by side with the forces of nature, social forces begin to be active; forces which present themselves to man as equally extraneous and at first as equally inexplicable, dominating them with the same apparent necessity, as the forces of nature themselves. The fantastic personifications […] at this point acquire social attributes, become representatives of the forces of history. At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of the innumerable gods are transferred to one almighty God, who himself once more is only the reflex of the abstract man. Such was the origin of monotheism […] In this convenient, handy and readily adaptable form, religion can continue to exist as the immediate, that is, the sentimental form of men’s relation to the extraneous natural and social forces which dominate them, so long as men remain under the control of these forces. However, we have seen repeatedly that in existing bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois political economy has given a certain insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, this makes no essential difference.

Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in general, nor protect the individual capitalists from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual workers against unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the extraneous force of the capitalist mode of production) disposes. Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the control of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are at present held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which now confront them as an irresistible extraneous force; when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes-only then will the last extraneous force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.”

-Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878).

RELIGION AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

“Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences.

We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion.

Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressivist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!”

The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist.

No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organized, planned and conscious way.”

-Lenin, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party Towards Religion” (1909), Selected Works, vol xi, pp 666.



“Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.

But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.

Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become absolutely free associations of like-minded citizens, associations independent of the state. Only the complete fulfillment of these demands can put an end to the shameful and accursed past when the church lived in feudal dependence on the state, and Russian citizens lived in feudal dependence on the established church, when medieval, inquisitorial laws (to this day remaining in our criminal codes and on our statute-books) were in existence and were applied, persecuting men for their belief or disbelief, violating men’s consciences, and linking cozy government jobs and government-derived incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established church. Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church…

So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.

If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party?

The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats.

Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.

But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.

That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various “Christians”. But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development.”

-Lenin, “Socialism and Religion” (1905), Selected Works, vol xi, pp 658-62.



“Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist program upon the dynamic of the productive forces. If you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else. Except for this as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion.”

-Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, chap 3, pg 35.


THE DECAY OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

“From the period of the Protestant Reformation, the upper classes in every European nation, whether it remained Catholic or adopted Protestantism, and especially the statesmen, lawyers, and [diplomats], began to unfasten themselves individually from all religious belief, and become free-thinkers so-called. This intellectual movement in the higher circles manifested itself without reserve in France from the time of Louis XIV, resulting in the universal predilection for what was denominated philosophy during the 18th century. But when Voltaire found residence in France no longer safe, not because of his opinions, nor because he had given oral expression to them, but because he had communicated them by his writings to the whole reading public, he betook himself to England and testified that he found the salons of high life in London still “freer” than those of Paris. Indeed, the men and women of the court of Charles II, Bolingbroke, the Walpoles, Hume, Gibbon, and Charles Fox, are names which all suggest a prevalent unbelief in religious dogmas, and a general adhesion to the philosophy of that age on the part of the upper classes, statesmen, and politicians of England. This may be called, by way of distinction, the era of aristocratic revolt against ecclesiastical authority. Comte, in one short sentence, has characterized this situation:


'From the opening of the revolutionary period in the 16th century this system of hypocrisy has been more and more elaborated in practice, permitting the emancipation of all minds of a certain bearing, on the tacit condition that they should aid in protracting the submission of the masses. This was eminently the policy of the Jesuits.'


This brings us down to the period of the French Revolution, when the masses, firstly of France, and afterwards of all Western Europe, along with a desire for political and social freedom, began to entertain an ever-growing aversion from religious dogma. The total abolition of Christianity, as a recognized institution of the State, by the French Republican Convention of 1793, and since then the gradual repeal in Western Europe, wherever the popular voice has had power, of religious tests and political and civil disabilities of the same character, together with the Italian movement of 1848, sufficiently announce the well-known direction of the popular mind in Europe. We are still witnesses of this epoch, which may be characterized as the era of democratic revolt against ecclesiastical authority.

But this very movement among the masses since the French Revolution, bound up as it was with the movement for social equality, brought about a violent reaction in favor of church authority in high quarters. Nobility and clergy, lords temporal and lords spiritual, found themselves equally threatened by the popular movement, and it naturally came to pass that the upper classes of Europe threw aside their skepticism in public life and made an outward alliance with the State churches and their systems. This reaction was most apparent in France, first under Bonaparte, and during the Restoration under the elder branch of the Bourbons, but it was not less the case with the rest of Western Europe. In our own day we have seen renewed on a smaller scale this patching up of an alliance, offensive and defensive, between the upper classes and the ecclesiastical interest. Since the epoch of 1830 the statesmen had begun to manifest anew a spirit of independence towards ecclesiastical control, but the events of 1848 threw them back into the arms of Mother Church. Again France gave the clearest exemplification of this phenomenon. In 1849, when the terror of the Democratic deluge was at its height, Messrs. Thiers, De Hauranne, and the Universitarians (who had passed for Atheists with the clergy), were unanimous in supporting that admirably qualified “savior of religion,” M. Bonaparte, in his project for the violent restoration of the Pope of Rome, while the Whig Ministry of Protestant England, at whose head was a member of the ultra-Protestant family of Russell, were warm in their approval of the same expedition. This religious restoration by such processes was indeed only redeemed from universal ridicule by the extremely critical posture of affairs which, for the moment, in the interest of “order” did not allow the public men of Europe to indulge in the sense of the ludicrous.

But the submission of the classes of leading social influence to ecclesiastical control, which was hollow and hypocritical at the beginning of this century after the Revolution of 1792, has been far more precarious and superficial since 1848, and is only acknowledged by those classes so far as it suits their immediate political interest. The humiliating position of utter dependence which the ecclesiastical power sustains toward the temporal arm of government has been made fully manifest since 1848. The Pope indebted to the French Government for his present tenure of the chair of St. Peter; the French clergy, for the sake of their salaries, blessing trees of liberty and proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, and afterwards canonizing the present Emperor of France as the chosen instrument of God and the savior of religion, their old proper doctrines of legitimacy, and the divine right of kings being in each case laid aside with the downfall of the corresponding political regime; the Anglican clergy, whose ex officio head is a temporal Queen, dependent for promotion on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, now generally a Liberal, and looking for favors and support against popular encroachment to Parliament, in which the Liberal element is ever on the increase, constitute an ensemble from which it would be absurd to expect acts of pure ecclesiastical independence, except in the normally impossible case of an overwhelming popular support to fall back upon.”

-Marx, Editorial, New York Daily Tribune, Oct. 24, 1854.