Marxism and Religion, Yesterday and Today

Militant Atheism has recently gone on the offensive (again) in the recent works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And all our soi-disant radicals are rallying to the cause. But contemporary Marxists have seemed to hold back; indeed, some seem to even admire bits and pieces of l'Infâme. I looked to this volume as a corrective to the current fashionable atheism and also for a deeper understanding of the original Marxist position and I was not disappointed on either count. Now, in a volume like this in which there are many extracts one cannot hope for a comprehensive view of the thought of Marx (and also Engels) regarding their understanding of Christianity and Religion. However, I will say that I think this volume is a wonderful place to start!

What you would expect to find in a compilation like this is here: the seminal Introduction to the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', the important 'Theses on Feuerbach', relevant extracts from 'The Holy Family', and The 'German Ideology'. What one doesn't expect is all the wonderful journalistic essays and also the letters. Engels letters to Bloch and Schmidt (for instance) deploring the excesses of Marxist 'economism' are always especially welcome.

Now, to the currently fashionable cocksure atheism, the understanding of Marx and Engels must sound quite half-hearted, if not almost treacherous. What is the difference between Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens on the one hand, and Marx and Engels on he other? Dialectics. Not only isn't Religion deplored as merely a mistake, as sheer nonsense, both Marx and Engels understand and explain the historical necessity and utility of Religion. - Even its 'socialist' character!

What!?! Indeed, Engels will go so far as to claim 'that this 'socialism' did in fact, as far as it was possible at the time, exist and even become dominant - in Christianity.' (In the final essay of this book, 'On the History of Early Christianity'. 1895) Obviously, due to the social, political and economic conditions of the time this ancient 'socialism' could only be other-worldly. And, for the most part, it is for Christianity alone that our two authors reserve their highest praise. - But why?

Well, part of the answer is that in the Middle Ages movements arose within Christianity, according to Engels, that clearly sought a change in economic relations instead of merely a change in leaders. There doesn't seem to be any analogous movements in other religions. Engel's points out, in a note in this same essay, that in Islam there are periodic 'revolutions' by the poor led by some Mahdi - but they never have any intention of changing economic conditions. ...So the Nomads overthrow the City, become the City, and then need to be overthrown by other Nomads. -This, for Engels, is the History of Islam in a very small nutshell. But Christianity, through its sublated avatar, secular modernity, eventually rises to the socialistic struggle to change the actual material economic relations and social forces of _this_ world.

But for our contemporary atheists there is no distinction between superstitions. They are all nonsense. What Engels said of the satirist Lucian could be said of them too: 'from [their] shallow rationalistic point of view one sort of superstition was as stupid as the other'. They have no theory of (or hope for) changing the society that makes religion necessary. But for Marx and Engels, the problem is not Religion; the problem is society!

Again, this volume consists of many extracts, Introductions, Forewords, journalistic pieces and letters. Amazon does not give the space necessary to consider them all. The only complete work seems to be Engels' 'Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. (1883)' In it, Engels gives a brief but (I believe) sound description of the consequences of the dialectical method. Rather than the common notion that dialectics presents one with some dogmatic Truth or final Goal Engels argues that 'for it [dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, sacred.'

He understands that the communist revolution results in no utopia. 'Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect 'state', are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin.' - So much for the famous End of History!

But this review is not about Kojeve and Fukuyama. For our purposes here it is important to note that the justification for some social formation does not come from some table of 'philosophical truths', rather it comes from the necessities and contingencies of the specific circumstances of that time.

But in concentrating on the end of this anthology (Engels outlived Marx by a dozen years) I have neglected Marx! Let us turn to an early work by Marx, his 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right' (1844). First, some quotes that I believe are pertinent to our theme from the famous Introduction (which is all that is reprinted here) to that work:

'This state, this society, produce religion, a reversed world-conscioussness, because they are a reversed world.'

'Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.'

'The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.'

'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.'

(I am here following the translation provided in this book. There are better translations. The publisher, Dover, informs us that the 'contents of the present collection conform to the Russian edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. [Gospolitizdat, 1955.] Translations have been made from the originals.' For what it's worth, I cannot find any mention of who the actual translators are.)

First, a clarification about the 'opium' remark might be in order. Today, we tend to see opium mentioned and think of addicts leading perfectly wretched lives thanks to their opiate of choice. This was not how that sentence was read by Marx's contemporaries. Opium was a wonder drug used to relieve unspeakable pain. The unspeakable pain, in this case, is the capitalist system. Marx asserts that once the people have the pain-relieving drug removed they will be able to rise up and end their suffering. Indeed, Marx denies that he attacks Religion in order that people will only feel their very real pain; remove the sedative (Religion) and people will cast off the chains. ...So - what has actually happened?

The Socialist World rose and then fell, leaving Capitalism alone and unbowed. Nothing that has ever risen and endured in History goes away by magic; if a political or religious institution endures it 'deserves' to endure, if it dies it was 'necessary' for it to die. (In dialectics, as indicated above, the terms 'deserve' and 'necessary' refer to contemporary circumstances only.) The real fight, according to Marx and Engels, is against conditions that make religion necessary. To abolish religion while leaving those conditions intact, with no effective way to change those conditions, is both monstrous and impossible. Monstrous? Yes, if it should prove that the chains on Man cannot be thrown off then one fears that flowers must be reinserted into each of the links of the wretched chains themselves. (Otherwise civilization itself might be destroyed by the pain.) Impossible? Indeed. If the conditions that require the consolation of Religion are not abolished then Religion itself cannot ever disappear. That has perhaps been the most telling revelation of our awful post-modernity...

Now, what of today? Why have so many Marxist (and, post-Marxist) thinkers written so many books since the fall of the USSR admiring aspects of Christianity? Because with Marxism occulted all that is left, besides Religion, is Postmodernism, and its absurd obsession with culture and the particular. People like Habermas, Badiou and Zizek have been seen blowing kisses at aspects of Christianity.

A most recent example would be Terry Eagleton, who, towards the end of his latest book ('Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate') says that if, 'politics has so far failed to unite the wretched of the earth in the name of transforming their condition, we can be sure that culture will not accomplish the task in its stead. Culture, for one thing, is too much a matter of affirming what you are or have been, rather than what you might become. (p. 165.)' Yes, of course he is right, our world is being destroyed by the self-satisfaction of the various particularities that refuse to change. A bit later Eagleton argues that, 'Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is - of all things - theology. (p.167)' Like Marxism, the subject of Religion and Theology is 'nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself...'

'What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most absolute and universal of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? (Eagleton, p. 165.)' By comparison, one wonders if even Marxism (to say nothing of the absurdity of postmodernism!) was only a fad that is now dying out...

To underline that this current rapprochement between Religion, most especially Christianity, and Marxism isn't some private fantasy I want to close our consideration of contemporary (post-)Marxists with a passage from Habermas:

'Egalitarian Universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk (p. 150f).' From Jürgen Habermas, 'A Conversation About God and the World' in his book 'Time of Transitions' (Polity Press, 2006).

Yes, the current 'Marxists' go further in their admiration of religion than Marx and Engels ever did. But why? What separates Eagleton and Habermas from Marx and Engels? The fall of 'really-existing' socialism; the rise of postmodernism. These contemporary 'Marxists' do not want to live in a postmodern world of global capitalism... - And nothing besides!

Thus Religion, in these precise circumstances, became tolerable; and, in these precise circumstances one marvels that it might become even more than tolerable... ( )

I read this book after completing my religious studies major and was quite frustrated it contained insights and answers to questions I had been raising for years in class with no answers but instead resistance. ( )