Marxist Perspectives on Religion

[Random Precision]

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]". 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) 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)

[Little-Lenin]

How can humanity reach the truth about religious questions?

Little-Lenin.

[mikelepore]

Religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society:

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.

I don't understand how you got "religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society" from what Marx wrote. People lived in a heartless world for about a million years before class divided society first appeared. The earliest clan and tribal societies experienced suffering and were religious.

[narcomprom]

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 struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. " as you quoted the Introduction of Kritik der Hegelianischen Rechtsphilosophie.
The enlightment, the struggle against alienation, the propagation of a social consciousness, of a class consciousness, does nescessarily incude the struggle against superstitious beliefs. In communism there is no need for a reiligion but first we've got to achieve communism.

You are still to present Lenin yet let me insert two of short quotes of his concerning the struggle against religion as a fortaste as we at this topic.

"The further enlightment is spread through the people, the stronger will religious prejudice be replaced by a socialist consciousness, liberating all oppressed classes from their enthralment in modern society"-"Искра" № 16, 1 february 1902

"The struggle against religious prejudice must be conducted carefully; much harm is done by those, who insult religious feelings in this struggle. The struggle must be conducted through propaganda, through enlightment."-Lenin's speech on 19.11.1918 on the first "Всероссийский Съезд Рабочих".

[Coggeh]

I don't understand how you got "religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society" from what Marx wrote. People lived in a heartless world for about a million years before class divided society first appeared. The earliest clan and tribal societies experienced suffering and were religious.

I think it would be better to say organised religion rather than religious belief.In the earliest human societies (hunter and gatherer economies) ‘magic-religious’ beliefs reflected an attempt to explain phenomena that had a profound influence on people’s lives, like fires, changing seasons, astronomical events, natural disasters, and the migration of herding animals.
As these early societies developed into class societies, a privileged layer of priests and magicians came into existence. Special institutions and new ideas and morals developed to justify the new social and economic order. Religion became the ideological justification for the enslavement of the majority of people, who were promised life after death as a reward for the misery on earth.

[Philzer]

Hi!

Religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society:

False. Religion as a ideology* is a product of class society!

* it means ideology in a marxism-sense, not in the sense of psychology

I don't understand how you got "religious belief is a product of alienation in a class society" from what Marx wrote. People lived in a heartless world for about a million years before class divided society first appeared. The earliest clan and tribal societies experienced suffering and were religious.

Exactly!

Religion is a step of conscious in the history of the anthropogenesis.

The example of the Christian religion in western capitalist society demonstrates this.

The religion of the capitalism is not the christian or an other poly- or monotheistic religion, it is the pantheism of bourgeouisie!

Pantheisms with the highest grade in opportunism (3 dimensional freedom) can subsuming all older religions with no problems! (because they have a lower grade of allowed opportunism)

In communism there is no need for a reiligion but first we've got to achieve communism.

It reduces the problem only to the consoling/comfort aspect! But the most importent aspect is the ethic as the self-affirmation

-> Religion is the will to be right without sanity.


let me try a conclusion:


All religions are expression of differently kinds of three-dimensional etics.

Always in depending on productive ressources. ( like marx say: productive relations (and here we must add: also the ideology) follows the productive ressources in any kind of "blind created" societies.

-> a communism, or how ever we will call them, can only be a conscious-created, scientific and also a fourdimensional directed society.

-->> every threedimensional individual can not and/or is not willing to understand this. For example you can see it in the unwilling to serve the environment.
(fourdimensional ethic always limites threedimensional freedom a little)

-->> so every religious individual will hate communism, will fight against communism, may be in quiet, and only at home in their arm chair, as long as they lives.

Kind regards

[tradeunionsupporter]

I agree with Marxism on religion.

[Thirsty Crow]

I think it would be better to say organised religion rather than religious belief.In the earliest human societies (hunter and gatherer economies) ‘magic-religious’ beliefs reflected an attempt to explain phenomena that had a profound influence on people’s lives, like fires, changing seasons, astronomical events, natural disasters, and the migration of herding animals.
As these early societies developed into class societies, a privileged layer of priests and magicians came into existence. Special institutions and new ideas and morals developed to justify the new social and economic order. Religion became the ideological justification for the enslavement of the majority of people, who were promised life after death as a reward for the misery on earth.

In fact, I think that Chris Harman's claim (A People's History of the World) that the first priests were in fact the guardians of the agricultural surplus (as well as the first temples which were in fact granaries). I think you're completely right to conclude that religion first became institutionalized and thzus acquired an ideological function (legitimation of the existing order or affairs).

[ComradeMan]

In fact, I think that Chris Harman's claim (A People's History of the World) that the first priests were in fact the guardians of the agricultural surplus (as well as the first temples which were in fact granaries). I think you're completely right to conclude that religion first became institutionalized and thzus acquired an ideological function (legitimation of the existing order or affairs).

Except for the difficult fact that religion/spirituality with some form of shaman or "priest" pre-date agricultural societies.

[Hit The North]

Except for the difficult fact that religion/spirituality with some form of shaman or "priest" pre-date agricultural societies.

Proving that religion is not only a result of suffering but also a product of fear and ignorance about natural forces.

[ComradeMan]

Proving that religion is not only a result of suffering but also a product of fear and ignorance about natural forces.

Why? Because all of those ancient peoples and perhaps some of the contemporary tribal peoples who preserve that way of life were/are all living unfulfilled lives of fear and ignorance. If that were also true how come "we" managed to develop technologically and scientifically at all?

[Hit The North]

Why? Because all of those ancient peoples and perhaps some of the contemporary tribal peoples who preserve that way of life were/are all living unfulfilled lives of fear and ignorance. If that were also true how come "we" managed to develop technologically and scientifically at all?

No, I'm sure something like the thousands of human sacrifices that emptied gallons of blood over the temples of the Mayans as they struggled to appease the gods and reverse the years of famine, were a rational response to their difficulties. Perhaps we should do the same in order to fix the banking crisis?

Or maybe we should take a leaf out of the book of the puritans who detected the origin of their misfortunes within the dark practices of witches. Perhaps a few witch burnings will get the economy moving again?

Or perhaps we should take seriously the claims by Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann that Hurricane Irene is God's judgement against the U.S. Congress? Perhaps sacrificing a few Democrat congressmen could have deflected God's mighty storm.

Or maybe we should concede that AIDS is God's wrath against filthy homosexual practices. Or perhaps we should go the whole hog and declare, alongside the religious fanatics of both Christianity and Islam, that all natural disasters are somehow the result of human sinful behaviour.

Certainly, according to you, these responses would not be a product of our ignorance of natural processes or superstitious fears, but a logical and rational response to disaster.

[ComradeMan]

.....

Or we could talk about the Jains for example, some of the most peaceful people who have probably ever existed, or we could talk about the Pythagorans and their contribution to mathematics, or we could talk about the many harmless tribal peoples around the world who practise nature based religions and so on and so forth.

If you pick out fanatics and extremes from anything you could make it look bad. Imagine if someone were to focus on science and only mention eugenics, Dr Mengele (whose research.... well, we'll never know will we?), Werner von Braun who developed indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilians in WWII, DDT, thalidomide, or perhaps the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be really enthused if Einstein hadn't given up being a pacifist etc etc etc

Does this mean that science is bad?

[Hit The North]

You miss the point. Of course religion is contradictory, containing positive humane elements alongside often negative and inhumane ideas and practices. This in no sense contradicts the Marxist analysis of religion. Religion is contradictory because the human condition is contradictory, containing events of joy and woe, security and fear. In fact, what we see in epochal history is religion responding to material conditions. A religious community that exists in relatively harmonious and bountiful conditions can afford to cultivate a benign and peaceful cosmology. A religious community facing unstable conditions of drought and famine or social disintegration turn to savage cosmologies, introducing inhumane practices such as human sacrifice. Why? Because as Marx writes:

Originally written by Karl Marx
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.

Also it's not about picking out fanatics, it is about picking out examples of where entire religious communities have turned bad due to an ignorance about what was befalling them and how it could be overcome.

It is also about having the historical analysis to see how the general level of the forces of production determine human beings understanding of the world they live in - the actual conditions that all religions express within their dramaturgical representations.

[efficiency]

Furthermore, Marxism is absolutely opposed to forcible suppression of religion. Religion will only cease to exist when its basis, class society, no longer exists:

Quote:
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

I have been trying to find from this quote what would indicate an 'absolute' opposition to the suppression of religion in Marxism. What I see instead is Engels acknowledging that religion cannot vanish until the means of production are given to all so that they may be disposers, not merely proposers. I can certainly see some common sense in not attempting to suppress religion but don't find any absolute opposition to such attempts in this statement. Can you find another?

As a Christian I find this apparent absence of warnings against suppression of religion rather frightening. I'm all for attempting to grant power to workers, but since those most interested in such a revolution make Engels, Marx and Lenin their idols, I fear the new religious doctrine (Marxism) will turn their quotations into the new Scripture texts from which a new domination takes place, that of "the enlightened" over "the religious." If then, Engels was correct here, religion would most certainly not vanish. The result will be an endlessly unsuccessful attempt to suppress it.

[ZeroNowhere]

I have been trying to find from this quote what would indicate an 'absolute' opposition to the suppression of religion in Marxism.

Perhaps this is more 'absolute'?:

We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear.

Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.

I'm all for attempting to grant power to workers, but since those most interested in such a revolution make Engels, Marx and Lenin their idols, I fear the new religious doctrine (Marxism) will turn their quotations into the new Scripture texts from which a new domination takes place, that of "the enlightened" over "the religious."

You know, perhaps I shouldn't have bothered.

[Azraella]

Most(if not all) radical leftists are not for the suppression of religion. I do think a majority of them are misguided on why religion pops up, and I do think some of them can be really offensive on the subject but they simply do not want to suppress religion. I view anti-theism and religious fundamentalism as reactionary attitudes, however religious fundamentalism is much worse and has a bigger impact on society. I'm incredibly religious and the idea of suppressing someone's religion because it didn't fit my revolutionary agenda to be rather authoritarian and counter productive.

Organized religion should be opposed by all means, and oppressive attitudes from any religion should be considered outdated and wrong by revolutionary groups.

Religion will only cease to exist when its basis, class society, no longer exists

I just think this attitude is naive to assume. The character of religion will probably change in a communist society, but I simply see no reason to assume this attitude is correct. I think religion would become a more healthy thing in a classless society. People ask existential questions and want answers, religion provides those answers and I fail to see why communism will suddenly make those questions disappear.

Edited: And I don't mean they are correct answers neccesarily.

[efficiency]

Most(if not all) radical leftists are not for the suppression of religion. I do think a majority of them are misguided on why religion pops up, and I do think some of them can be really offensive on the subject but they simply do not want to suppress religion. I view anti-theism and religious fundamentalism as reactionary attitudes, however religious fundamentalism is much worse and has a bigger impact on society. I'm incredibly religious and the idea of suppressing someone's religion because it didn't fit my revolutionary agenda to be rather authoritarian and counter productive.

Organized religion should be opposed by all means, and oppressive attitudes from any religion should be considered outdated and wrong by revolutionary groups.



I just think this attitude is naive to assume. The character of religion will probably change in a communist society, but I simply see no reason to assume this attitude is correct. I think religion would become a more healthy thing in a classless society. People ask existential questions and want answers, religion provides those answers and I fail to see why communism will suddenly make those questions disappear.

Edited: And I don't mean they are correct answers neccesarily.

Question: what do you mean by opposition? Does opposition mean suppression or does it simply mean disagreement?

I am in agreement with you about the naivety I have encountered among communists with respect to religion. I'll keep reading but from what I've picked up on so far it seems the idea is that a materialist worldview is supposed to bring about a certain sense of liberating satisfaction and happiness that allows us to be fully human. Religion just falls off as unnecessary as an opium for the masses once society becomes just through classlessness and material peace.

Well, first off, material peace can't conquer sickness and death. The best it can do is delay it. Death itself is an authority that is in a class beyond humanity. The materialist has no hope beyond the grave. As such he may be proud in his honesty but he is saddened by his hopelessness. It stands to reason that if man is unhappy and creates religion in order to cope with and justify injustice, that the perceived injustice must be magnified by materialism. Therefore it is nothing like the panacea it claims to be. The very opposite of what is supposed to happen in theory actually results.

Please understand, I am not saying this to disqualify or oppose anyone. I am saying it because I am an honest inquirer who would like to know what Marxists think. Is this a point that has been addressed? What is the failure in this question?

[Marcist]

What is meant by religion? Spiritual belief or just a supreme being?