Unicorn
24th April 2008, 21:46
An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were.
The article is largely rationalisation, reading back into history the SWP’s current politics of courting some Muslims organisations. It fails to represent the complexity of Marx and Engels’ views on religion: their fundamental atheist outlook; their opposition to organised religion; the place of religion in class society; and their opposition to discrimination and police measures against religious believers.
It is a crude attempt to smear those like the AWL who oppose the SWP’s political line as crude secularists, and dress the SWP’s line in Marxist attire. A look at what Marx and Engels actually wrote presents a very different picture.
...
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote: “Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the workers’ party ought, at any rate in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois "freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion.”
Marx and Engels’ atheism was an inseparable part of their theories and well anchored in their outlook. They believed that the natural and social world could be understood by human science and changed by human activity, not by supernatural forces. They favoured making propaganda against religious ideas and institutions – though this was subordinate to the task of mobilising workers, including those with religious views, to fight the class struggle. And they opposed the oppression of religious groups.
Marx and Engels’ authority does not tell us about the character of religion today, nor does it mechanically determine our attitude to Muslims in general or political Islam in particular. To read off our attitude simply from quotations would merely represent a religious mode of thinking.
However their writings do help us to orientate today — both as sharp critics of religion and as working-class consistent democrats on religious questions, as on all matters.
Read Paul Hampton's good article here:
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/5953
He criticises the British Trotskyist party SWP which panders to Muslims.
The article is largely rationalisation, reading back into history the SWP’s current politics of courting some Muslims organisations. It fails to represent the complexity of Marx and Engels’ views on religion: their fundamental atheist outlook; their opposition to organised religion; the place of religion in class society; and their opposition to discrimination and police measures against religious believers.
It is a crude attempt to smear those like the AWL who oppose the SWP’s political line as crude secularists, and dress the SWP’s line in Marxist attire. A look at what Marx and Engels actually wrote presents a very different picture.
...
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote: “Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the workers’ party ought, at any rate in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois "freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion.”
Marx and Engels’ atheism was an inseparable part of their theories and well anchored in their outlook. They believed that the natural and social world could be understood by human science and changed by human activity, not by supernatural forces. They favoured making propaganda against religious ideas and institutions – though this was subordinate to the task of mobilising workers, including those with religious views, to fight the class struggle. And they opposed the oppression of religious groups.
Marx and Engels’ authority does not tell us about the character of religion today, nor does it mechanically determine our attitude to Muslims in general or political Islam in particular. To read off our attitude simply from quotations would merely represent a religious mode of thinking.
However their writings do help us to orientate today — both as sharp critics of religion and as working-class consistent democrats on religious questions, as on all matters.
Read Paul Hampton's good article here:
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/5953
He criticises the British Trotskyist party SWP which panders to Muslims.