Notes on Early Marx, Religion, and Recent Scholarship on Marxism and Religion
Introduction
St. Augustine’s City of God offers a vision of harmony that serves as a lasting contrast with the conflict model of reality espoused by the Dialectical Materialism of Karl Marx. Grounded in a distinction between two loves, the love of the heavenly and the love of the earthly or fleshly existence, St. Augustine (c. 354-430 AD) analyzed two modes of civic life as he observed it in the late Roman Empire. For Augustine, the adoption of a Christian perspective on civic life, namely, a perspective that held it to be a penultimate rather than an ultimate good, was key to the possibility of social peace. He urged:
But the families which do not live by faith seek their peace in the earthly advantages of this life; while the families which live by faith look for those eternal blessings which are promised, and use as pilgrims such advantages of time and of earth as do not fascinate and divert them from God, but rather aid them to endure with greater ease, and to keep down the number of those burdens of the corruptible body which weigh upon the soul. Thus the things necessary for this mortal life are used by both kinds of men and families alike, but each has its own peculiar and widely different aim in using them. The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men’s wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away. Consequently, so long as it lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly city, though it has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as the earnest of it, it makes no scruple to obey the laws of the earthly city, whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of this mortal life are administered; and thus, as this life is common to both cities, so there is a harmony between them in regard to what belongs to it.[1]
By stark contrast stood the criticism of Karl Marx, grounded in the anthropology of theologian Ludwig Feuerbach, found in this 1844 broadside at traditional religion:
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 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.[2]
A few lines hence Marx coined his most famous description of religion as the opiate of the masses. With the rise of Karl Marx (1818-1883), material rather than spiritual life took the ascendancy in the development of a modern Western weltanschauung. No ambiguity existed for Marx as to which order the modern human must love, and love with a fervor previously reserved to the devotional praxis of human religions such as Christianity. Marx’s conferral of ultimacy upon the material order abetted a bifurcation of the bourgeoise and proletariat into an enduring, perhaps even an eternal, state of conflict. The material world simply is the ultimate world, per Marx, and the seeking any foundation of values beyond it must be resisted vigorously. The earthly journey could not be one of any Augustinian pilgrimage, but each temporal pilgrim must seek a state of permanency, communally rather than individually, within a stern secular order.
Marxian materialism became therefore an effort to live by sight, not by faith. The earthly city was the only possible home, such that living there tentatively as a captive or as a stranger courted a state of rank unreality. No City of God awaited or beckoned mankind to a brighter world. The limited material resources of earth must therefore situate a battlefield of competing and hostile interests, due to the inherent limited nature of such resources. The realm of spirit, heretofore perceived as open, free, and welcoming, came under relentless assault as the cruelest of mere illusions. The comfort of religion must be stripped away from the poor, thus casting them into the front lines of a battle against those with more material goods than they. Religion as an opiate of the masses had to be unmasked as an evil drug, and as such relegated to the dustbin of history, as the masses arose to conquer their former masters to forge a material utopia.
The problem became that in order to resist one form of the ultimate, only an alternative form of the ultimate could rise to such a challenge. Such an ultimacy manifested itself historically in those totalitarian regimes birthed under Marxist ideology. Conflict thus rendered essential called forth equal or greater levels of struggle as a matter of survival if not outright triumph. The clash in worldviews, therefore, made of Christianity and Marxism intense rivals in the 20th century. Yet it is not an original insight on my part that some areas of overlapping concern, such as dissatisfaction with the conditions of the poor, remained in view from both these perspectives. Thus, for all the early protestations of the evils of religion, I argue here that Marxism became, indeed always already was, simply another religion wrapped in the ultimately unstable cocoon of a secular garb.
Marx on Religion, in Brief
It began with a view of history, formed in internal debates among followers of G. F. W. Hegel. Marx, a young Hegelian, wielded his emerging economic philosophy as a sledgehammer against all forms of what he deemed to be residual feudalism. “Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural” he began. What would later emerge as the philosophical debate between essentialism and the social construction of reality theses in 20th century may be perceived in seed form in Marx. Separation was the prerequisite of his conflict theory of economic history, and thus he continued: “The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God.”[3]
Fundamental then to Marx (as well as Feuerbach) was the artificiality of religion. Religion is artificial, but its fault lay deeper, for it is also devious in its insistence upon its essential reality. A sustained attack on theologians was to only intensify in the latter half of the Victorian century, such that Marx could in the 1840s and beyond exploit a generalized dissatisfaction with religious intellectual life along with the promotion of his materialist alternative. Yet theologians were not the only opposition Marx had to contend with. Economists too gave him a ripe target. “When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature.” Economists, much like the aforementioned theologians, were asserting an essentialism. Economic laws function like the laws of nature in science on this view. This easy elision of the two disciplines tended to make them appear parallel in distortive ways, however. Rival disciplines even now still partake of quite a debate over the degree to which economics is a “science,” when prediction, for example, proves a somewhat evasive goal.[4] Marx wanted an alternative economics that would still bear the vaunted authority of science, but ground the field in social process more than enduring essence. Marxian materialism earnestly sought to set his economics apart from the authority of religion, but as an historical project this was more nettlesome than Marx imagined.
“These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society,” Marx assured his readers. Physics envy was present early in this version of scientism. Yet philosophers of science have made a strong case that natural laws are descriptive of regularities observed rather than deductive apodictic certitudes forced downward upon reality in Platonic fashion. “Eternal laws” of a materialistic sort were more defensible in Marx’s day before the rise of Big Bang Cosmology forced a finite universe upon the intellectual awareness of 20th century science.[5] Genuine science and developments in the history and philosophy of science eventually began to erode scientistic materialism’s effort to crown atheistic rationalism as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement.[6]
For Marx, the attempt by the wealthy to make the power of the upper classes permanent and even natural was ripe for criticism: “Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal.” Yet Marx’s turning of economics into an ideology was every bit as problematic and essentialist as much later efforts to turn it into a science. Marx did just that by merely perpetuating the problem but from the opposite side: “Feudalism also had its proletariat – serfdom, which continued all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal production also had two antagonistic elements which are likewise designated by the name of the good side and the bad side of feudalism, irrespective of the fact that it is always the bad side that in the end triumphs over the good side.” The binaries of “good and bad” as well as triumph and defeat set in place the parameters of Marx’s conflict model, which flowered across the West throughout the 20th century before imploding and foundering, unable to compete with capitalism, in 1989. Yet it was conflict Marx desired, because he believed his view would prevail. Hegel’s influence, namely, the inevitability of historical development and the emergence of higher order via dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, echoed in Marx’s promotion of inevitable conflict:
“After the triumph of the bourgeoisie, there was no longer any question of the good or the bad side of feudalism. The bourgeoisie took possession of the productive forces it had developed under feudalism. All the old economic forms, the corresponding civil relations, the political state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were smashed. Thus, feudal production, to be judged properly, must be considered as a mode of production founded on antagonism. It must be shown how wealth was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed at the same time as class antagonisms, how one of the classes, the bad side, the drawback of society, went on growing until the material conditions for its emancipation had attained full maturity.”[7]
Marx reached his point of central critique, the undermining of the essential character of the old economic order, and the establishment of constant and fluid revolutionary change:
“Is not this as good as saying that the mode of production, the relations in which productive forces are developed, are anything but eternal laws, but that they correspond to a definite development of men and of their productive forces, and that a change in men’s productive forces necessarily brings about a change in their relations of production? As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed. From this moment, the revolutionary class becomes conservative.”[8]
Was this expectation realistic in any meaningful sense, however? Could this point ever be reached, even in Marx’s own vision of a preferred end state? Could conflict ever cease and a new revolutionary conservatism (oxymoronic as that must surely be) take hold? It is difficult to believe a system so fundamentally grounded in conflict could lead to a lasting stability. It has proven naively utopian to think such could be achieved, especially on purely materialist ideological grounds, given the finitude of available material resources and human labor. It seems that history bears out such an assessment, if our best and purest Marxian exemplars today remain pariah states like Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba.
The historical conundrum of Marxism was noted by the mid-twentieth century by public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his introductory notes to an anthology of essays by Marx and Engels on the theme of religion, he wrote: “Evidently even a scrupulous empirical method fails to achieve common conclusions in the complex field of historical causation, in which causal sequences on many different levels intertwine. Marx, as an empiricist would have been just another learned man. As an apocalyptic dogmatist, he became the founder of a new religion, whose writings would be quoted as parts of a new canon.”[9]
In the next section I move from these quite cursory preliminary notes on the early contours of Marx’s anti-religious religion and into an investigation of some recent secondary sources. These articles in various ways seek to flesh out how Marxist ideology took on many of the very trappings of religion that had called forth Marx’s ire against religion in the first place.
Recent Analyses of Marxism as an Alternate Religion
Early in this century, other scholars have reinforced such an interpretation. Charles Taylor could remark that such a realization had become pervasive: “As has often been pointed out, militant Marxism has very often taken on some of the trappings of a religion, but it has done so while vigorously denying that this is what it is about.”[10] Thus even the criticism of traditional religion’s hypocrisy could be turned back onto its accuser. Yale historian Frank M. Turner added further nuance, namely that Marx “. . . used the categories of earlier religious thought (which he rejected) to create a secular messianic vision. According to this view, the proletariat functions in his thought very much as a suffering messiah. It must go through history, take upon itself the burden of all humanity and then emerge in an apocalyptic revolution and redeem humankind in time and in history. Certainly, there is much in Marx to suggest that he has imposed a secular framework on Judeo-Christian messianic hope and expectation.”[11]
As Allan Megill has noted, “Although Marx’s orientation was relentlessly secular, there are residues in his thinking of some religious conceptions. He continued, in a secular and universalized form, Christian conceptions of perfection.”[12] Under the pen of Friedrich Engels, always the better popularizer of the two men, Marx’s earlier emphasis on pragmatic dimensions of the life of the worker in his local milieu faded. The very essentialism that Marx had decried as a means of suppressing the human aspirations of the underclass now emerged in the notion of a much larger eternal struggle and unending conflict. This essentializing of conflict over material goods became the ideological linchpin of what would be labeled Marxism, an unyielding worldview, sweeping and universal in scope, and every bit as essentialist in character as the theological traditions it sought to displace. This is evident again in Marx’s early critique of Hegel, cited above. Note the rhetoric of a totalizing discourse of valorized conflict:
For the revolution of a nation, and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the estate of the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression[13]
Marx’s and Feuerbach’s views of religion differed. For Feuerbach traditional religion was simply an intellectual error. But for Marx, human material conditions had to be remediated before religion would actually fade from view, else its anodyne effects would still meet a felt need in the worker.[14] Wolff and Leopold aver that: “Marx’s explanation is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and therefore cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away.” Of course, a mere withering away is a dynamic far afield from the brutal repressions of the Leninist-Stalinist apparatus, to put it mildly. Human alienation from the rewards of proletariat labor was one human deficit ostensibly assuaged by religion, but the other, qua Marx, “is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence.” Notions of community are essential to all religions, both those that admit they are religions, as well as those that do not so admit. The question remained what communal arrangement actually best resolves the alienation problem.[15]
On the dissatisfaction with the breakdown of community and the rise of an individual isolation via impersonal industrial European factory work, some point of actual convergence between Marx’s dissatisfaction and that of sensitive Christians may been seen. In the Church of England in the 1850s, for instance, certain figures such as Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley were trying to come up with a resolution to the problems of British textile workers in the short-lived movement of Christian Socialism in the aftermath of the failure of Chartism. The Marxian and Christian critiques of the problems commonly experienced by workers could appear surprisingly quite congruent.[16] The worldview assumptions upon which each ideology had been built nevertheless made their rival proffered solutions incommensurable.
Megill identifies a dramatic shift when Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) popularized Marx’s work: “In Engels’s version, Marxism claimed to be an all-embracing science. Whereas other socialisms are utopian, Marxism has the measure of the world as it is.” The use of strategic and symbolic moments aided in Engels’s rhetorical success. “In his 1883 ‘Speech at Marx’s Graveside,’ Engels declared that Marx had discovered the law of development of organic nature.” This coalesced with an already rising tide of naturalistic scientism in the modern world. But it also represented a shift in the Marxian ethos, and, per Megill, “the result was to downplay Marx’s early concern with human activity or praxis and his critique of estrangement.” In Engels’s popularizations, the nuance of Marx abated, and the doctrinaire contours of a rigid and eventually violent ideology began to coalesce.[17]
Long-noted in the secondary literature are the religious or quasi-religious features of Marxist ideology. The chief interlocutors with whom Marx interacted and debated in his early formative years in Prussia, figures such as Hegel and Feuerbach, utilized religious tropes as interpreted through the lens of the philosophy of idealism. Marx’s materialism stood in continuous contrast and tension with such a philosophy, but never fully escaped the latter’s search for a totalizing discourse with a firm center of gravity or a stable organizing center. His investigations began with studied critiques of local conditions in European societies such as Germany, England, and France, and only later became reified and universalized into a sweeping global ideology that could come to be described as a secular religion.
Mid-twentieth century figures such as Nikolai Berdyaiev surveyed socialism as manifesting a religious ethos even as it stood within a tradition of official atheism. In fact, this was a Militant Atheism designed to erase doubt by a firm faith in the tenets of a materialistic worldview. Many times in the history of the spread of communism, the salvation it offered was not merely proffered as a free-will choice, but as a forced conversion. The alternative religion of Marxism was propounded in ways that mirrored the very religious promotional methods Marxists once decried as manipulative. Propaganda in education, the arts, “the press, radio, theater, educational courses, film, literature, museums,” were employed to undermine traditional religion in Central Europe during the Cold War.[18]
Nowhere was this trend toward Communism as a secular religion clearer than in the person and cult of Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924). Such features distanced Leninism from original Marxian concerns. Far from placing the common person of the proletariat in a place of honor, Lenin sought to create a “revolutionary minority, organized as a conspiracy of disciplined and obedient men and women ready to destroy primordial commitments and reconstruct new loyalties and beliefs.” Such a project, ironically mirroring many of the same features of earlier generations of Christian clergy oft decried by Marxists, brought such features back in new forms. For Klaus-Georg Riegel, Leninist confessional practices in the 1930s gave evidence of “the transfer of sacral, transcendental powers to an inner-worldly and secular vocation” as an alternative to seeking the certainty of salvation in another world. He documents strong academic criticisms of this tendency in Leninism as early as the interwar literature challenging the Leninist ascendancy. Especially impressive in his analysis is identification of the redeployment of religious tropes in the entrenchment of communist ideology via psychological pressure and terror. Riegel shows that by the 1930s, “Inquisition by Confession,” even more intrusive than the earlier Spanish Inquisition of the Catholic church, and routinely decried by anti-religionists, was deployed by Leninists. Note too that it was in the field of internecine conflict between various factions within communism that these events took place, echoing the latter years of the French revolution. A series of show trials in Moscow from 1936 to 1938 created the milieu for the development of the methodologies of public shame and humiliation that would recur throughout the history of Leninism and later Stalinism. “The routine rituals of criticism and self-criticism were arranged as degradation ceremonies to expose, humiliate and, in many cases, to exclude the sinner accused of sins which were publicized by a censuring purge commission, or a monitoring and questioning public.” Such “were organized as an institutionalized ritual of exclusion for those cadres who dared to confess criminal thoughts and acts.” Psychological tools such as isolation, stigmatization, unconditional submission and surrender, reaffirmations of systematic obedience, and finally torture, were essential to the Leninist toolbox of conformity.[19] Marx’s distaste for religion, especially his anger at its ceremonial artificiality, hypocrisy, and subterfuge, thus stands in notable contrast with such later excesses of would-be followers like Lenin.
Conclusion
The degree to which such developments carried out in his name accorded with Marx’s original vision invokes a bit of historical conjecture. Marx’s project centered upon aims more practical than puritanically ideological, but this distinction proved impossible to maintain in the hands of his zealous progeny, especially Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. For all his early distaste for traditional religion, Marx himself tended to start out, at least, as a philosophical detractor rather than the literal destroyer of traditional religious adherents as persons of flesh and blood.[20] Even a recent account critical of the view of religion held by official communism of the 20th century perceives in early Marx and kind of ethos that contains useful critiques of modern life that cannot fully be ignored. Princeton ethicist Charles C. West has observed that: “Marxism is humanism to the highest degree. As we have seen, it is a collective humanism of the human species in solidarity, not of individuals pursuing their various goals, as most secular humanism is. It projected a vision of human society without exploitation, inequality, or the selfish spirit of private property and ambition. It galvanized the protest of the masses of the dispossessed and the poor to fight for their liberation and for a new humanity.” The political framework as well as the worldview in which such notions took cultural form undermined Marx’s original vision becoming effectual. Most notably, the materialistic weltanschauung via which Marxian religion unfolded held inadequate awareness of human flaws identified in Augustine’s assessment of the City of Man, itself a community of fallen creatures. West adds a vital caveat: “In its Communist form the vision failed. It became inhuman in its humanity because it did not understand how human sin persists, even when the masses have won control. It did not learn the Christian graces of compromise, reconciliation, forgiveness, and the limitation of power by a God who is justice and love.”[21] Escape from the influence of the City of God has not proven to be one of the feasible achievements of the City of Man, and least of all of the Marxian project.[22]
Notes
[1] Augustine, City of God, Book XIX.17.
[2] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher 7 & 10 (1844), pars. 2-3, online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm, accessed May 11, 2021.
[3] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (n. p.: Progress Publishers, 1955 [1847]), 54, online at https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Poverty-Philosophy.pdf, accessed May 11, 2021.
[4] See Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), passim.
[5] See Man Ho Chan, “Is the History of our Universe Finite?” Theology and Science 17 (2019): 248-256, DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2019.1596314, accessed May 12, 2021.
[6] A helpful window into the debates is Edward B. Collins and Robin Collins, “Scientific Naturalism,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 325-34; cf. Fraser Watts, ed., Creation: Law and Probability (London: Routledge, 2008), passim; and Robert C. Koons and George Bealer, eds., The Waning of Materialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), passim.
[7] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 54.
[8] Ibid, 54-5.
[9] Reinhold Niebuhr, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion (New York: Schocken, 1964), xii.
[10] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/HUP, 2007), 390.
[11] Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 135.
[12] Allan Megill, “Marxism,” in The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Thomson Gale, 2005), 4: 1357.
[13] Marx, “Contribution,” pars. 45-6.
[14] In Capital, Book 1, he held: “The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and nature;” cf. Niebuhr, 136.
[15] Wolff, Jonathan and David Leopold, “Karl Marx”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/marx/>.
[16] Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind of the 19th Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 102-3.
[17] Megill, 1359.
[18] Radmila Radić, “The Proselytizing Nature of Marxism-Leninism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 36 (1999), 81, 83-4.
[19] Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6 (2005), 101, cf. notes 46-9, cf. 117.
[20] On the latter elements especially in Stalinism, see Anne Appelbaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor, 2004), 344-89.
[21] Charles C. West, “Should Christians Take Marxism Seriously Anymore?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24 (2000), 7 [2-7]; cf. Taylor, Secular Age, 641.
[22] One recent academic multi-author publication dedicated to the practical eradication of global poverty consulted in research for this paper contains no indexical listings for Marx, Marxism, socialism or communism. See David Lawson, et. al., eds., What Works for the Poorest? Poverty Reduction Programmes for the World’s Extreme Poor. A slightly older but influential popular treatment of poverty has an Index mentioning Communist China on a single page and socialism on a single page, but not Marx or Marxism; cf. Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin 2006).
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