Random Precision
26th July 2008, 00:05
This thread is meant to give people new to the revolutionary left a solid understanding of the ideas of Marxist thinkers on religion.
Therefore...
Part I: Marx and Engels on Religion
Marx and Engels believed that religion allows the alienated a mental rebellion against their oppression. As with every other part of their thought, their critique of religion is solidly entrenched in their materialist method.
Following are their most important ideas on religion, in their own words.
They made it clear that religious ideas are in opposition to the materialist school of thought, and thus in fundamental conflict with Marxism:
The great basic question of all, especially of latter-day philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being… The question of the position of thinking in relation to being…in relation to the church was sharpened into this: did God create the world or has the world existed for all time? Answers to this question split the philosophers into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of the mind over nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other…comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.
- Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
And therefore, any sort of "Christian socialism" is impossible:
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
- Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto
Religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society:
For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.
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 encyclopedic 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 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.
- Marx in Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
The example of the Christian religion in western capitalist society demonstrates this. Religion is often a form of oppression in a class society:
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 labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.
- Marx in Capital, Volume One
However, none of this is to suggest that Marx and Engels were "anti-theists" or opposed religious ideas for their own sake. They saw religion as bound up in class society, as a "particular mode of production" that "fall[s] under the general law [of private property] (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm)". Marx continues:
Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen (http://marxists.org/glossary/people/o/w.htm)) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.
- The Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844
Thus, to Marx and Engels, solely attacking religion was an effort based in idealism, that it is pointless without attacking capitalism. Furthermore, as the MIA Encyclopedia puts it:
Marx saw Atheism as associated with crude communism and sought to transcend Atheism by revolutionising the social conditions which create the need for people to believe in God, rather than atheistic polemics against belief in God.
Marxism is neither atheistic nor agnostic nor pantheist, but practical-critical. It does not counter the theist by dogmatically asserting that God does not exist, but rather, asks why it is necessary to believe in God and how it is possible to live without God.
As a product of alienation in class society, religious ideas have, throughout history, served as a rallying point for progressive forces:
In the so-called religious wars of the 16th century, very positive material class interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be explained by conditions of the time in Germany. The revolutionary opposition to feudalism was alive throughout all the Middle Ages. According to conditions of the time, it appeared either in the form of mysticism, as open heresy, or of armed insurrection.
- Engels in The Peasant War in Germany
Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him.
- Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome…
[The risings of peasants and plebeians in the Middle Ages], like all mass movements of the Middle Ages, were bound to wear the mask of religion and appeared as the restoration of early Christianity from spreading degeneration… But behind the religious exaltation there was every time a very tangible worldly interest.
Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, ie, on one hand, to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other, to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the “law”. The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. That is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the English… All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes.
- Engels in The History of Early Christianity
Furthermore, Marxism is absolutely opposed to forcible suppression of religion. Religion will only cease to exist when its basis, class society, no longer exists:
The actual basis of the religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself... It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination 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 domination 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 now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force, when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes — only then will the last alien 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 in Anti-Duhring
Such is a relatively brief overview of the ideas of Marx and Engels on religion. In my next post, I will do a similar overview of Lenin's ideas on religion, and how he used the views of Marx and Engels to form a coherent idea of the relationship of religion to the proletarian revolution.
(Edited to include KC's valuable contributions)
Therefore...
Part I: Marx and Engels on Religion
Marx and Engels believed that religion allows the alienated a mental rebellion against their oppression. As with every other part of their thought, their critique of religion is solidly entrenched in their materialist method.
Following are their most important ideas on religion, in their own words.
They made it clear that religious ideas are in opposition to the materialist school of thought, and thus in fundamental conflict with Marxism:
The great basic question of all, especially of latter-day philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being… The question of the position of thinking in relation to being…in relation to the church was sharpened into this: did God create the world or has the world existed for all time? Answers to this question split the philosophers into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of the mind over nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other…comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.
- Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
And therefore, any sort of "Christian socialism" is impossible:
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
- Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto
Religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society:
For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.
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 encyclopedic 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 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.
- Marx in Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
The example of the Christian religion in western capitalist society demonstrates this. Religion is often a form of oppression in a class society:
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 labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.
- Marx in Capital, Volume One
However, none of this is to suggest that Marx and Engels were "anti-theists" or opposed religious ideas for their own sake. They saw religion as bound up in class society, as a "particular mode of production" that "fall[s] under the general law [of private property] (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm)". Marx continues:
Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen (http://marxists.org/glossary/people/o/w.htm)) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.
- The Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844
Thus, to Marx and Engels, solely attacking religion was an effort based in idealism, that it is pointless without attacking capitalism. Furthermore, as the MIA Encyclopedia puts it:
Marx saw Atheism as associated with crude communism and sought to transcend Atheism by revolutionising the social conditions which create the need for people to believe in God, rather than atheistic polemics against belief in God.
Marxism is neither atheistic nor agnostic nor pantheist, but practical-critical. It does not counter the theist by dogmatically asserting that God does not exist, but rather, asks why it is necessary to believe in God and how it is possible to live without God.
As a product of alienation in class society, religious ideas have, throughout history, served as a rallying point for progressive forces:
In the so-called religious wars of the 16th century, very positive material class interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be explained by conditions of the time in Germany. The revolutionary opposition to feudalism was alive throughout all the Middle Ages. According to conditions of the time, it appeared either in the form of mysticism, as open heresy, or of armed insurrection.
- Engels in The Peasant War in Germany
Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him.
- Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome…
[The risings of peasants and plebeians in the Middle Ages], like all mass movements of the Middle Ages, were bound to wear the mask of religion and appeared as the restoration of early Christianity from spreading degeneration… But behind the religious exaltation there was every time a very tangible worldly interest.
Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, ie, on one hand, to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other, to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the “law”. The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. That is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the English… All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes.
- Engels in The History of Early Christianity
Furthermore, Marxism is absolutely opposed to forcible suppression of religion. Religion will only cease to exist when its basis, class society, no longer exists:
The actual basis of the religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself... It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination 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 domination 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 now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force, when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes — only then will the last alien 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 in Anti-Duhring
Such is a relatively brief overview of the ideas of Marx and Engels on religion. In my next post, I will do a similar overview of Lenin's ideas on religion, and how he used the views of Marx and Engels to form a coherent idea of the relationship of religion to the proletarian revolution.
(Edited to include KC's valuable contributions)