Lotta people have baffleingly wrongheaded views of Marx’s critique of religion, reducing it to m*taphysics

Marx criticises religion basically from the second he enters history; but he is basically silent on metaphysical stuff like “does God exist” because *he doesn’t care the point of materialism and revolutionary philosophy is specifically to drop useless metaphysical debates for e.g. the formation and organisation of the state or the restriction of peasant rights to forest wood. But if we must discuss useless metaphysical questions, Marx comes out swinging in favour of the existence of all gods in his doctoral dissertation: “Take for instance the ontological proof [of god]: “that which I conceive for myself in a real way is a real concept for me”, something that works on me. In this sense, all gods, the Pagan as well as the Christian ones, have possessed a real existence…If somebody imagines he has a hundred thalers…he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods.”(MECWvol1p104 Marx’s emphasis)

In 1842 he points out: “And as for Rome! Read Cicero! The Epicurean, Stoic or Sceptic philosophies were the religions of cultured Romans when Rome had reached the zenith of its development. That with the downfall of the ancient states their religions also disappeared requires no further explanation, for the “true religion” of the ancients was the cult of “their nationality”, of their “state”.”(ibid p189); note the fluidity of Marx’s definition of ‘religion’ and its lack of relation to “they believe in invisible entities” and its deep connection to “they believe in reified alienated social relationships”.

Three other neat quotes (mostly early Marx because he drops metaphysical bullshit like this for important stuff like factory reports by the 50s):

Up till now the political consitution has been the religious sphere, the religion of national life, the Heaven of its generality over against the Earthly existence of its actuality.

(MECWvol3 p31)

Man, even if he proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state, that is, if he proclaims the state to be atheistic, still remains in the grip of religion, precisely because he acknowledges himself only by a roundabout route, only through an intermediary. Religion in precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way.

(MECWvol3 p152)

In order, therefore, to find an analogy [for commodity-fetishism] we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

(Capital, p165)

Marx’s critique is not “man in the sky silly”, is not “people just don’t know the truth and i must preach it”; it is that religion is the result of class society, of sanctification of oppressive social structures and the recognition of humans through an alienated structure. In more abstract terms, Marx believes religion is the result of social relations not being understood by humans except through abstract mystifications such as the gods, the state, the market.

It should be made very explicit that in capital, Marx shows that our society, the society in which the capitalist mode of production predominates, is deeply ‘religious’, believing in all manner of mystical and not-real things like value, interactions between commodities. Marx even argues that the market operates in such a way that it appears to basically everyone as an all powerful all present all knowing entity which exists as an independent subject outside of them. This is what religion is. It will not disappear when people profess their undying belief in Isaac Newton; it will disappear when they stop recognizing themselves and other humans as people through Jesus (‘christians’) or the state (‘citizens’) or the market (‘property-owners’).

Marx is also much more ambivalent on religion than most marxists seem to think (as the Capital bookclub on this website has been seeing through his Biblical references). Marx uses the Bible as both a historical source and for theoretical inspiration throughout his lifetime. There were multiple copies of the Bible in his library when he died. Why? Because “Religion is the opiate of the masses” is reduction of Marx’s ideas to absurdity. A fuller version of the quote reads:

Religion is the general theory of [the world of class society], its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point of honour, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality…Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…It is the opium of the people.

(MECWvol3 p175)

I.e. “religion is a mixed bag”

In terms of Soviet policy, I haven’t studied their policy regarding the orthodox church and I refuse to have takes on stuff I haven’t investigated unless I need too. Regarding non-christian religions: the USSR did a colonialism and pissed off a ton of the marginalised peoples of Siberia and northern Russia with their r/atheism-bro nonsense, because they enforced this atheism even on local ‘grassroots’ practices, indigenous practices. Talismans were confiscated, sacred sites destroyed to prove that "the gods aren’t real. And like it’s gotta be re-iterated–many of these people supported the soviets and even integrated socialism into their religious practices (one example; some of the Buryats started revering the Paris commune matyrs as revolutionary spirits, others created ritual around fulfilling quotas) but this wasn’t good enough for the r/atheismbros so they squashed it and pissed the well intentioned people off.

would a socialist state with a party that strictly adhered to Marxism–Leninism but allowed religious freedom among its citizenship be stable?

Cuba allows Christians (even Catholics afaik) into the party, has for decades. Cuba has close ties to liberation theologists throughout latin america, because Cuba is thankfully not run by r/atheismbros. Cuba is the most stable ML state I am aware of.

I haven’t read/listened to a whole lot of theory, what literature would you recommend to better understand dialectical materialism?

Frank Black-Elk’s “Observations on Marxism and Lakota Tradition” in Marxism and Native Americans is amazing and short (and pirate-able on libgen). He (and a few other native folks) argues strongly that native knowledge systems (he argues specifically regarding the Lakota) are dialectically materialist because of their spirituality. Aikenhead & Michell’s Bridging Cultures is a good in depth examination by native scientists of the empirical basis of indigenous knowledge. If you must read something filled with Marxist buzzwords, Bertell Ollman’s Dance of the Dialectic is an absolute masterpiece despite his annoying takes on the USSR (which don’t come up much or at all in this book). This is also a good article: https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/02/karl-marx-and-radical-indigenous-critiques-of-capitalism/

Religion is, first and foremost, a set of practices. In other words, you don’t believe a religion, but you practice a religion. Protestantism has twisted the definition so that some dude who never goes to church but “has a personal relationship with Jesus” is considered a practitioner of the religion Christianity when that goes completely contradictory with almost every other religious tradition throughout history. Likewise, Zeus, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, Ra, the Jade Emperor, Buddha, and Vishnu don’t give a shit whether you actually belief in them as long as you respect their holy sites and observe religious ceremonies that sanctify them. Zeus will reward you if your sacrifice is good and thunderbolt your ass if your sacrifice is shitty. Belief in Zeus himself is irrelevant within the framework of the religion.

Since belief is secondary to religion compared with practice and dialectical materialism is more concerned with practice as it relates to human belief through a dialectic than the specific set of practice itself, there are absolutely reconcilable. We already have atheist religions like Scientology, so materialist religions aren’t a contradiction either. In fact, many Indigenous religious practices are fairly materialist. They will say something like how water is sacred or water is a relative. It’s not that they think water itself is imbued with supernatural powers, which was the mistake I’ve initially made. I made that mistake because I incorrectly approached religion as a set of beliefs first. But if you approach religion as a set of practices first, then “water is sacred” translates to “what religious rites, ceremonies, and acts are conducted to sanctify water.” The details vary, but every Indigenous people who think water is sacred treat even a drop of water with a sense of reverence and gravitas. This sense of reverence and gravitas translates to not wasting water on pointless shit like golf courses or even non-native plants that guzzle more water than native ones. It means treating the lake or stream or any other source of drinking water with care so it won’t get polluted. It means not overfishing a lake or a stream because other animals are entitled to use of water as well. This isn’t new age mumbo jumbo, but a completely grounded understanding of their environment.

However, I see possible conflict between the Abrahamic religions and dialectical materialism because unlike the vast majority of religions, Abrahamic religions require the practitioner to profess sincere belief in a particular god with particular characteristics. It’s not enough that someone prays 5 times a day and fasts during Ramadan, but they have to sincerely belief in the shahada as well in order to be considered a Muslim. Within the theology itself, the God of Abraham is said to be unchanging and perfect, which conflicts with the idea of everything having their own internal contradictions that through negation of the negation leads to qualitative change which begets even more internal contradictions in a neverending cycle. In other words, the Abrahamic God is static and eternal while dialectical materialism implies a reality that is dynamic and everchanging. I do not know how one would square this circle.

At risk of being removed for sectarianism, I honestly feel that religion begets cults and is a danger to the human race. Basing your actions on things that are have been proven to be false often has horrific consequences.

Capitalism itself is a death cult.

• do you think that religion is antithetical to dialectical materialism?

Ultimately, yes. Religion is fundamentally incompatible with a materialist understanding of the world.

• was suppression of religion in the USSR enforced out of a belief by the party that it contradicted the principles of Marxism–Leninism?

I think this is a good example of overdetermination and we should be cautious about attributing one single motivation to things like government policy, especially in such a fraught situation as the USSR’s suppression of religion. In short, it’s worth approaching this situation itself dialectically.

One factor is that religion was a factory for reactionary sentiment and for agitating the masses for the purposes of reaction (not speaking about capitalism specifically here but more like Black Hundreds types and obviously white restorationist kinda reaction). One of the ways to prevent white restorationist movements is by destroying the nucleus of the movement, which was largely centred around the church. Setting aside all considerations about state atheism, the antagonisms between materialism and idealism, and the goal of achieving an irreligious society etc. the suppression of the church can be seen as a political expediency; if you have a problem with gang members, you can uproot the problem by destroying their clubhouse.

Another factor is that it was likely a realpolitik manoeuvre where the church held a lot of political and economic power that rivalled the soviet DotP and thus posed a threat to it. Whether there was ideology justifications for the suppression of religion (there were) I think it’s worth being materialist about this and acknowledging that a state seeks to establish itself as peerless because it’s ultimately a tool of domination and the church threatened to become a peer so it got clapped, essentially.

Another factor is that I would assume that when the Bolsheviks liberated the USSR from the clutches of feudalism, aristocracy, and burgeoning capitalism etc. people would have experienced a watershed moment.

I would be surprised if the masses, perhaps for the first time, becoming aware of the sheer opulence of the aristocracy and the church which was so closely intertwined with it and of the ways that they oppressed the masses, didn’t experience a very strong reaction against these forces and, perhaps, if this were the case then the Soviet government may have been riding a wave rather than issuing edicts from up on high.

There are times in the Chinese GPCR where the resentment amongst the masses that had built up over generations of oppression and deprivation were unleashed. It’s easy to say “Mao/the CPC directed the masses to attack landlords and reactionaries” but it’s more realistic to say that they were riding a wave of popular sentiment at the time and that they were attempting to direct that energy towards the end-goal of revolution.

• would a socialist state with a party that strictly adhered to Marxism–Leninism but allowed religious freedom among its citizenship be stable?

I think the state and religion has always existed with varying degrees of tension. Even in an example of a theocracy such as the Tibetan Ganden Phodrang there were currents of reform, liberalisation, and different religious sects vying for political dominance. It’s easy to say that religion exists independent of the state. It’s almost as easy to say that religion exists as an arm of the state. But that’s not really very dialectical tbh.

Due to the inherent antagonisms that exist between a DotP state and religion (I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole here but ultimately in many respects the pointy end of socialism and of religion can be boiled down to matters of jurisprudence and where you have incompatibility between overlapping systems of jurisprudence, you necessarily have antagonisms and, inevitably, conflict) the question should be considered through the lens of what religious freedoms are permitted, which means interrogating the concept of religious freedom itself because it is laden with a lot of baggage.

In short, where religious freedom impinges upon the power of a DotP, religious freedom should be a secondary concern. Where religious freedom impinges upon “rights” (excuse the shorthand), religious freedom should be a secondary concern.

The freedom to practice of religion as an individual is one thing but the socio-political nature of organised religion is something that goes far beyond just what someone believes in and how they enact their reverence.

[CW: minor discussions of religious abuse]

If you want to abstain from eating beef or pork or meat entirely due to religious beliefs, fine.

If you want promote and conduct conversion therapy under the pretext of religious freedom, nope.

If you want to get circumcised as an adult as a sacrament, fine.

If you want to impose routine infant circumcision because your God hungers insatiably for the foreskins of children, nope.

I’m sure you get the idea.

It’s a bit like “political freedom”; that concept is very nebulous and it exists in tension with state power. You have channels by which you can exercise your political freedom that is endorsed by the government but you have to be unhinged to think that any state is going to permit people to organise an insurrection.

In a similar way, religious freedom exists in that same sort of tension with the state. I think that a lot of the socio-political channels that currently exist for religious freedom that we see today would be dramatically curbed, if not closed off entirely. This imo would be fundamental to the stability of a post-revolution society.

• would a hypothetical state be able to cultivate material conditions that lead people to willingly give up religion, if said state decided that religion was a threat to its sovereignty?

I’m agnostic about this in the same way that, if you press me on it, I’m agnostic about whether we will ever achieve communism in its purest sense or if it’s even possible; maybe it is, maybe it isn’t and we will only ever understand this from a retrospective perspective. Regardless of that particular debate, it’s something that I believe is worth working towards and even if we only achieve 90% of the goal then it would still be an immense benefit for humanity in itself.

It also depends on how you define religion. Something like ancestor “worship” (shorthand again, sorry - don’t come at me) carries over in extremely irreligious societies.

Is this ultimately a religious practice? In origin, yes.

In its modern examples? …maybe - in certain instances. But it’s largely something which has shifted to being a cultural practice in irreligious contexts imo so it’s more custom and ritual than it is strictly religious from that perspective.

To extend this metaphor a bit more, since we’re talking East Asia and the blurry lines between custom and religion, sticking your chopsticks upright in your bowl is considered taboo due to funerary practices that are largely in the past. Is this prohibition itself religious? Ehhh… not so much. It’s a lot like saying “bless you” when someone sneezes - you’re probably not actually blessing them, you’re probably entirely detached from the religious and superstitious underpinnings of the origin of saying “bless you” and you’re just engaging in custom when you say it.

Religion is a collection of beliefs, superstitions, practices, and jurisprudence that has been codified.

While we very well might see the end of the beliefs themselves, humans are by nature superstitious and we will always carry the cultural practices of our ancestors and of our social context with us to some extent

As for religious jurisprudence, I don’t want it belabour the point (any more than I already have) but I see it as being something that will be largely sidelined post-revolution; those religious prohibitions on something like gambling will still exist (it’s not like there is going to be state-mandated participation in gambling) but the ability for a person to deny their family medical care on the basis of religious jurisprudence, for example, would be overriden.

I would expect to see a withering away of religion under socialism over generations, whether this is directed by the state as intentional policy or whether it occurs as a reflection of the material basis of society in the same way that saying “bless you” was wrapped up in either superstitious beliefs or religious beliefs (depending on which story you believe) but now it has been effaced of its spiritual meaning and has simply entered into the domain of custom.

• have you personally experienced any cognitive dissonance from simultaneously holding religious and Marxist-Leninist beliefs?

No because I was raised largely irreligious and I haven’t held religious beliefs since becoming an ML.

• I haven’t read/listened to a whole lot of theory, what literature would you recommend to better understand dialectical materialism?

The Principal Contradiction by Torkil Lauesen

They did go rather hard against religion, at the same time it has nothing to do with collapse of ussr.

At a fundamental level religion deals with unknown, so with march of science religions gets pigeonholed into dealing with fundamental reality of human death. I don’t think going around dying people beds and saying “this is it, embrace non-existence” is a good idea.

Even if material problems are solved, people will want to find meaning/solace in death. So I don’t think it’s something that can be solved.

At the same time religions tend to carry brainworms from the ages before, so what stalin should have done is reform orthodoxy/islam into something liberation theology adjacent. Alas, that particular issue got completely fucked, so russia especially has history of twisting orthodox church’s arms, so it’s very annoying missed opportunity.

Re authors there is lunacharsky, but I haven’t read his stuff

There’s no reason one can’t be religious and be a materialist monist or some kind of property dualist (such as Spinoza was)

I think Matt Chrisman’s framework has something useful to it here. People need religion but church is a terrible place to get it. That religion describes our psychic relationship to the world. Science or Politics or the like describes our physical relationship to the world. Religion is how we feel about it and how we interact with others. In the west churches tend to use religion to constrain people so they are more content being utilized by capital. Lots of places in the east as well but in ways I am not equipped to speak on. What christman proposed was that “the revolution” loosely fills the same emotional needs for many of us as religion would. Kinship, belief in a project larger than ourselves, a willingness to work towards a goal we will not personally see, and opiate for when we need some spiritual medicine.

There was a thread on this a few weeks ago

My take is: who cares about what you worship as long as you’re present in the material world. God(s) made the earth and you. If you want to “not be attached to worldly things,” go isolate yourself in a sanctuary. Otherwise, we’re all in this world until we reach the next, so contribute to its betterment while you’re here.

There are a lot of catholic and Muslim leftists, socialists, communists, etc. (I’m not too knowledgeable on other libertory theologies) They chose leftism because they determined it’s the best framework in which to practice their religion (which they often emphasis the altruistic parts)