Saturday, November 26, 2011

Marx and Religion

There are many misconceptions about Marx's view of religion, as well as the relation of atheism to Marxism in general.

Now, it IS true that Marx himself wasn't religious, and that it is a tenant of most forms of Marxism that all social institutions derive from and support the relations of production that form the base of society. In this sense, religion, as a social institution, is contingent (or part of the "superstructure," in Marxist parlance). It follows, then, that in Marx's view of revolution, when all relationships of domination were challenged and dismantled by the oppressed, this would extend to all social institutions, including the institutional forms of religion as we know them today. Now, Marx may have believed that at this point, people would cease to believe in God if there were no authority figures telling them to do so. However, that is quite different from saying that Marxism is in principle an atheist philosophy.

In fact, Marx was more ambivalent toward religion than most people realize. He may not have articulated a definition of religion like the one I outlined in my previous post (my own thinking on the subject owes much more to Talal Asad); however, unlike other scholars of his time, he did not rely on simple functionalism and recognized that religion was too complex to exist in a linear causal relationship with any other aspect of human life. Thus, he did believe that religious institutions were used to inculcate bourgeois ideology (even though he did not even touch on the role religion played in the emerging bourgeois-colonial world order with its concomitant "colonization of consciousness"; and he probably could not have imagined the way religion would come to be commodified, the way it would create new spaces for capitalist exploitation and use the language of markets and competition in the constitution of liturgical and discursive practices). But he also noted that religion "is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions" (the words immediately preceding the famous "religion is the opium of the people"... a context which gives this statement a double meaning, as opium is also an excellent pain reliever). Furthermore, as part of his general theory that that which arises from the materiality of productive processes comes to have a life of its own in which it is dialogically related to the material "base," Marx believed that religion contained ideas and principles (justice, giving to the poor, etc.) that could potentially be used by the oppressed to resist the forces of their domination.

Now, certainly there have been plenty of atheist Marxists. And this is excluding the "communist" dictators of the 20th century, because their political strategies bore little to no resemblance to the teachings of Marx, did not need to be justified by Marx (and in that sense the special relationship the Russian Orthodox Church had with the Tsar and the important role its clergy played in the old social order helps contextualizes the Party's actions toward religious institutions). But, one should note that there have also been a significant number of religious Marxists around the world. The very prominent "liberation theology" of Latin America, which fuses Catholicism with Marxism, is a good example.

I bring this up because it will be relevant to my next post, but also, because it demonstrates the way in which a certain view of Marx and Marxism was deliberately manufactured to sustain the narrative of the Christian-Capitalist-Democratic West triumphing over the Evil-Communist-Atheist East. It was necessary to play up the "inherent atheism" of Marxism/communism in order to frame the Cold War as a battle between Good and Evil, and cover up the fact that it was really a territorial squabble between two imperial powers.

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