Communism and Religion
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Author : Anton Pannekoek

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Published: International Council Correspondence, vol. 2, no. 6. May 1936. Originally appeared in Dutch as "Communisme en godsdienst" in  Persdienst van de groep van Internationale Communisten in April 1936. The article was published without attribution, but Pannekoek's personal notes make the authorship clear. For more information see the Association Archives Antonie Pannekoek.Note: The original text contains inconsistent capitalization and erroneous or unusual spellings. It has been noted that "Pannekoek strongly objected to correction of his somewhat peculiar English."Transcription/Markup: Micah Muer, 2017.

I.

The fierce struggle which Bolshevism has waged and is still waging against
religion in Russia is particularly well adapted to throw light on the essence of
the russian revolution. The Bolsheviks are conducting this struggle in the name
of Marxism, just as all the rest of their policy is put through. They invoke in
this connection the marxian dictum which stands engraved as a motto on the
facade of the Moscow community center: that religion is the opium of the people.
At the time when the youthful Marx wrote that, in his "Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Law" (1843), his own struggle had points of similarity with the
later struggle of Bolshevism in Russia. He stood, that is, as the most advanced
among the Young Hegelians, foremost in the struggle for civil liberty against
feudal absolutism in Prussia. The bourgeoisie was still without political power
but was coming up; public life was harassed by arbitrary action of the police,
intellectual life by the censorship, and the best minds were living abroad.
Narrow-minded princes were using religion as justification of their right to
suppress all liberty. Therefore, according to Marx's expression at the time, the
criticism of earth had to begin with the criticism of heaven.

The rise of bourgeois society was always accompanied by a struggle against
the Church, against certain forms of religion or against religion in general.
This was quite in the nature of things, since under feudalism Church and Society
formed a strictly interrelated unity. The Church fulfilled political and social
function [sic] which in later centuries were taken
over more and more by the State and its organs: law-giving, instruction,
administration, safe-guarding of communication, promotion of technics. In
particular, everything intellectual in the guidance of society was its task, in
the smallest village as well as thruout the body politic; the Church ruled like
a super-monarchy over the whole of Christendom, and was the most formidable
exploiting power. It was natural than that during the rise of the bourgeoisie
any resistance to this exploitation should assume the form of heresy
(Albigenses, Hussites). And in the following centuries when this resistance
assumed the proportions of a seizure of power by the bourgeoisie, it came about
under the banner of a renewal of religion, as the Reformation among the
Protestants, the Calvinites and Puritans.

In the class struggles of the 16th and 17th centuries the religions were what
political parties were in the 19th, the living organizations of that struggle;
later they fossilized into churches with dead dogmas.

When the way was being paved for the revolution in France in the 18th
century, the movement was directed not merely against the nobility and monarchy,
but also against the Church. Obedience to the Church was bound up with obedience
to the Prince; religion was the most important means of holding the masses in
subjection. A powerful opposition, socially, to the ruling power determined
therefore, spiritually, a break away from the Church. The principal form of this
latter opposition was that of a hazy personal religious sentiment, apart from
all clerical doctrine, as in the case of Rousseau, tho materialistic views were
even at this time to be met with in a number of thinkers. Through the discoveries
of natural science, particularly of the law of gravitation by Newton, it had
become established that nature is subject to a fixed order of natural laws
precluding any arbitrary interference. This provided the rising bourgeoisie with
weapons of free critical thought in its struggle against the Church. There was
also the fact that the peasants and bourgeoisie looked with envy upon the great
neglected landed property of the Church, a domain which they themselves had
liked to possess in orde [sic] to cultivate and
improve it. And in the French Revolution of 1789 they did, as a matter of fact,
rob the Church of those possessions. In view of the enormous state deficit, that
was the only way in which state bankruptcy could be avoided: the seizure and
sale of the holdings of the Church, so that they could be put to further use for
agricultural and industrial purposes. Since that time, the Church has been the
sworn foe of revolution. And consequently the revolutionary bourgeoisie was
obliged to attack the Church more sharply than it would otherwise have been
inclined to do, by way of the struggle against religion. The fact that in
France, even down to the present day, rationalism and has thought are so
widespread among the middle classes is in good part owing to that historical
conflict.

In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie was obliged to continue this struggle,
not only in France but in other countries in which it was coming up, in order to
gain the complete mastery. And in this connection the struggle against the
prevailing religion had to be carried on for a double reason:

In the first place, the traditional forms of religion had their origin in an
outmoded and backward mode of production, to which they were well adapted,
— a world of handicraft and small peasantry, from which society was now
lifting itself. This religion rested upon outward forms of devotion and was a
narrow, stupid superstition of petty bourgeois and peasants, among whom the
pastor or priest was the one and only literate intellectual. In the developed
bourgeoisie itself, a different religion was growing up, one which conformed to
the needs of a commodity-producing society: the personal faith of an independent
bourgeois thrown upon his own resources. In him, the traditional doctrines were
losing their force. To this may be added the rapid development of natural
science, which, as the basis of the rapid development of technics and of the
flowering of capitalism, received at the hands of the bourgeoisie a special
care. This science taught the extension of the universe, the laws of nature, the
millions of years of the history of life on earth, the evolution of the animal
kingdom to man; in all fields of knowledge it contradicted the bible stories as
primitive ignorance. And here we have the advent of the keenest among the new
views, namely, bourgeois materialism, which is often also given the name of
natural-science materialism. It taught that the entire world, inclusive of life
and the development of humanity, is governed only through natural laws, that these
natural laws are capable of explaining all riddles of life and fate, and that a
higher mysterious power is not needed to that end, and does not exist. Because
these thinkers of the bourgeoisie believed that the capitalist development would
bring about general well-being and remove all misery, all poverty and all
stupidity, they saw all problems as solved or soluble, and no longer had need of
any higher power.

The bourgeoisie could not be content, however, with its own abandonment of
the old religion, but was obliged also to attack and combat it. For the
bourgeoisie wanted to win the power in society out of the hands of princes,
nobility and landed proprietors. The power of all these reactionary classes, who
wished to maintain what was old and outworn, rested upon the submissiveness of
the unenlightened masses, the peasants and petty bourgeois; and this
submissiveness was anchored in their religion. Because religion was the
foundation and the Church the ally of the traditional power, therefore the
bourgeoisie was obliged to conduct the spiritual struggle against religion and
church. It had to break this mass away from its spiritual leaders, and convert
it into its own following. And this was done by spreading enlightenment and
education among this mass and filling it with new ideas. Innumerable are the
literary works of a popular scientific cast which came into being around the
middle of the 19th century, for the purpose of "enlightening the people", that
is, in order to win the masses for the bourgeoisie, to inoculate them with the
political and religious views of the bourgeoisie and so to take the foundation
out from under the old ruling elements. And where the struggle became hard and
furious, the most radical views were disseminated and materialism attained an
added significance.

The reason why this struggle soon came to nothing and was discontinued when
the bourgeoisie was master of the state power, and frequently even before that
time, will be seen farther on.

II.

In Russia the struggle had to be waged against the same powers against which
the bourgeois revolutions were directed in western Europe: the princely
absolutism which by means of a horrible police regime held down all stirrings of
a libertarian development, and against big landed property which held the
peasants in thrall. The struggle had to be waged in the midst of a population
which in intellectual respects resembled most the peasant masses of medieval
Europe, long before the bourgeois revolution. The russian muzhiks were, in fact,
much more ignorant and backward than these latter. In Russia also the Church was
a foundation-pillar of the princely power, and even without reserve a
subordinate organ of Czarism. There also religion, in harmony with the
primitively barbarous economy, was a barbarous blind belief in the miraculous
power of saintly bones and of candles, and the simple souls were charmed and
intoxicated by means of sumptuous light and glittering gold vestments.

The means by which the Bolshevist Party was able to win the political power
and demolish Czarism and the bourgeoisie was this: it championed the economic
interests of the peasants, their striving to get possession of the land, against
the landed proprietors, set this up as the goal of the revolution and thus won
the peasants for its program. But next it had to take care that the peasants
should not, subsequently, after they had attained their goal, turn against the
Party, take up with a bourgeois policy of their own and to that end make use of
their old spiritual power, the Church, as a rallying point. For this reason the
reactionary power by which the peasants had hitherto been dominated had to be
destroyed, so that the peasants should become supporters of Bolshevism
spiritually as well as materially. That was possible only by way of a struggle
against the Church, in the most radical form by way of an intensive propaganda
against religion in general.

This struggle, which was waged directly through the "League of the Godless" but
with the support of the State, was scarcely distinguishable in character and
content from the one which was waged earlier in western Europe by the bourgeois
materialists and free thinkers. It had nothing whatever to do with Marxism. And
the philosophical polemics of Lenin dating from the time prior to the Revolution
(in the complete edition of his works, collected under the title "Materialism
and Empiriocriticism") are quite on the level of bourgeois materialism; which,
of course, is quite natural since his struggle in Russia was directed against
the same sort of opponents. The propaganda in Russia was distinguished from that
of western Europe only in the circumstance that it was waged with still more
primitive arguments and cruder instruments, because it was directed against a
still more barbarous superstition. The procedure has, of course, been described
before: the muzhik's understanding of the arguments based on natural science is
rather limited; but he sees and hears these godless ones direct the fiercest
sort of attacks against God, give utterance to the most terrible blasphemies,
— and no flash of lightning from heaven strikes the evil-doers. That
proves to him that God doesn't exist, or at any rate doesn't care about what
people do here below. And so he draws his conclusions: he lets the priest go
hungry, converts the cross into kindling wood and the church into a stable,
hangs pictures of Marx and Lenin in his room and perhaps burns candles to them.
The younger generation, however, takes up with the youth groups which educate
themselves in national economy and natural science, and it takes over
Materialism as a recognized and matter-of-course doctrine. In Russia a new
generation is growing up, and has been growing up a sufficient number of years
to form a new stratum of adults to whom religion is only an historical
phenomenon, a superstition of elderly people belonging to the past. The russian
Church has gone under with Czarism.

This is not to say that religion generally, in Russia, has disappeared or is
surely disappearing. First because we have in fact the occurrence, in limited
measure, of what was posited above: where the peasants come into conflict with
the government, their revolt assumes the form of a churchly resistance. When
their allegiance to the old small-peasant mode of economy comes into conflict
with the semi-violent introduction of modern agriculture and large-scale
operation in the kolhozes, the peasants seek strength by coming together in the
Church, in the old religion, the symbol of what is old and which likewise is
being suppressed by the state. The economic struggle is waged in the ideal form
of a religious conflict; and the western-european press prints stories about
horrible religious persecutions in Russia without a suspicion that these
so-called persecutions signify mainly an economico-political conflict regarding
the building up of russian agriculture. As a focus of all economic reaction,
religion remains in existence.

Besides, as is well known, on the Volga the peasant villages of the Germans
maintain their evangelical faith, remaining unphased by the atheistical
propaganda. Religion is here a much more deeply rooted personal conviction,
brought along from the petty-bourgeois commodity production of western
countries, and therefore practically immune to the primitive arguments of the
"godless". These peasants become involved in conflicts with the bases of the
state-socialist economic system. And so it is quite natural that the prevailing
system comes into conflict also with these german peasants; and because the
opposed social ideas express themselves in the form of opposed religious ideas,
— Atheism on the one hand, and Protestantism on the other — here
also the struggle assumes the form of a religious persecution.

Religion is not simply a superstition invented by priests and rulers and
which can be combated by atheistical propaganda. Nor is it a mere outcropping
of ignorance which can be destroyed through indoctrination with natural science. It
arises from the incapacity of human beings to control their own destiny. It is
an expression of the feeling that unknown and overpowerful forces, of either
natural or social origin, are masters over life and destiny. Whether and in what
form religion will continue to exist in Russia depends therefore on the
country's further economic development. The atheism of the youthful Russia is in
harmony with this first period of the rise of state capitalism: the Russians see
before them an unrestricted and boundless development toward well-being and
superfluity; they see the problems of life as solved and no higher power is
needful. But Russia is already becoming involved in world policy, which at the
present time is issuing in the derailment of capitalism toward world war,
decline, revolution; the dangers which menace the rest of the capitalist world
cannot be evaded by Russia, she is not the master of her destiny. Recent press
reports are significant in this respect; they state that the russian government,
after the treaties with the west-european governments, has now negotiated with
the Roman Catholic Church regarding permission of catholic propaganda. If by the
side of the prevailing state capitalism there should still remain or arise in
Russia, private property and commodity production in considerable measure, the
acquired Materialism, as against the spiritual effects of this material reality,
would become a mere outward form.

III.

Just as the Communist Party carried over the bolshevist methods into the
political class struggle of western Europe and America, so it has also copied
here the russian method of combating religion. And so in this question also we
are presented with an instructive example of the great opposition between
Bolshevism and Communism, as an outcome of the opposition between the primitive
russian society of czarist times and the developed capitalism of the West.

Communism, the emancipation of the working class, signifies the end of
religion. With the vanishing of earthly misery, there vanishes also the heavenly
reflex of this misery. When humanity directs the labor process with conscious
design and its own existence is thereby assured, when man is the master of his
destiny and is not mastered by any enigmatic superior forces, he then sees the
whole world before him with open clarity, and no phantasmagoria of an anguished
mind can any longer cloud his insight. But even when this goal is not yet
attained, the realization that it will be attained has a
liberating effect upon the mind. Historical Materialism, the marxian doctrine,
teaches us to understand the social forces. The workers see that there are no
mysterious supernatural powers which bring them poverty, misery, war,
destruction, but that all these things are outcomes of capitalism; things which
they, through their struggle, can conquer and set aside. Therefore these forces,
although still very powerful, are no longer mysterious; and hence religion vanishes
among the working masses who, through Socialism or Communism, have acquired a basis
of marxist insight. This does not come about through the force of atheistical
arguments against religion, by which the workers are convinced and won over.
Rather, by reason of the new social insight, the feeling of timid uncertainty is
dissipated and vanishes from their consciousness, so that their minds become
accessible to arguments which in reality they scarcely need any more, and their
religion goes by the board.

A profound difference exists between the marxist historical Materialism and
the bourgeois Materialism dating from the middle of the last century. The latter
thought to be able to explain human society by means of natural laws and was
quite unaware of the fact that society has its own laws. Marxism points out
these laws of society by which the development of humanity is conditioned.
Bourgeois materialism believed that through knowledge of the natural laws and through
their application in technics, man could master his destiny and thereby also
become spiritually free. But this application, the development of Capitalism,
gave rise to still greater misery and to unknown powers which were still more
formidable. Marxism explains these powers and enlightens the workers regarding
the manner in which the workers themselves, with the aid of this science, can
conquer them. The opposition of the two kinds of materialism comes forth most
clearly in their respective conceptions of religion, the one regarding it as a
simple effect of ignorance regarding nature, the other as an effect of social
factors. And on this basis we see that the manner in which religion is combated
by Bolshevism is quite on the plane of bourgeois materialism.

If religion were nothing more than a product of ignorance, it would have had
to vanish more and more among the educated class, the bourgeoisie, in the last
half-century of increasing scientific knowledge and constantly better
instruction. But what do we see? That during this time this class, even its
intellectual part, has grown more and more religious. Of course it is often said
that this is merely owing to the fact that the bourgeoisie has an interest in
maintaining religion among the people and therefore supports religion by its own
example. No doubt this comes into play among other things, but it is not the
main matter. With such superficial views regarding its opponents, the
proletariat can only weaken itself. The bourgeoisie is not made up,
intellectually, of hypocrites any more than it is composed, economically, of
evil-doers and politically of blockheads, — regardless of what the
propaganda of party politicians thirsting for power would have us believe. The
religious sentiments in this class are for the most part genuine, and we shall
endeavor to show that such is quite in the nature of things.

Religion is the fantastic form in which people give expression to their
unconscious sentiment of their connection with the universe, so long as they do
not know the real connection. Man has always been dependent on the world for his
existence and this dependence will continue to exist because man always remains
a part of the world and his life is a part of the total process of universal
history. But in the periods of history which lie behind us he failed to realize
clearly this dependence and to master it. In the early times of primitive
cultural conditions, the means of living were offered him by way of natural
phenomena independent of his will, (sunshine, rain, fertile soil); but at the
same time, powerful forces were capable of destroying him. More recently, by
means of technical devices, later supported by natural science, he learned to
direct these natural forces, to use them and draw them into his service. His
life became richer and more secure. This was followed, however, by the advent of
social forces, arising out of the forms of production in which,
with advancing technology, people worked together in ever greater units: tribes
and, later on, cities and nations, leading to states and classes. Struggle of
the tribes for land, struggle of the cities and states for trade and profit,
struggle of all against all in sharp competition, struggle of the classes for
their share of the product and for power, war and crisis in modern times —
all these things, as mighty forces, drove people forward and brought them
success or decline. The individual felt powerless, and was so in fact; happiness
and disaster were not dependent on himself. While he lived in the midst of a
world of constantly richer possibilities, brought about by way of collective
human effort, but without conscious design and plan, he was visited by
catastrophes and threatened with extinction by forces which he did not
understand and failed to master, forces which likewise were brought about by way
of collective human effort, but also without conscious design and plan. This
dependence on a world totality standing high and mighty above him and beyond his
understanding expressed itself in a feeling of fear and dejection, occasionally
of confidence and calmness, but always of subjection to the sublimated
personifications of these forces, hence in religious feelings.

In the modern capitalist class, two tendencies are working counter to each
other. On the one hand, its technical power has never revealed itself so mighty
as in the present period, the period of the rise and perfection of aerial
navigation, the enormous acceleration of international communication, spiritual
and material, of the refinement of machine technique and of the more substantial
interweaving of labor and science. That which previously had been noted as an
astonishing compendium of unconscious growth — man's mastery over nature
and the natural forces — was now proudly proclaimed as the program of a
consciously directed technico-scientific advance. Thus there arose in the
bourgeoisie the consciousness of unlimited possibilities, the feeling of beeing
[sic] capable of everything. This was especially true
of the masters of production, the world's economic leaders, who saw themselves
as the directors of human destiny. The spiritual reflex of this tendency was not
so much materialism, insight into the natural forces of the world, as cynicism,
contempt in what others revere.

In the midst of this feeling of confidence, however, another sentiment was at
work even long before the advent of the present world crisis in which the
anarchy of capitalist production has driven its masters to desperate exertions
and fearful doubt regarding the future. For the menace of the proletarian
Revolution has hung like a sword over the bourgeoisie from the very time of its
rise to power. As soon as the working class a half-century ago, began to
organize, took up the struggle and proclaimed its socialist goals, it was all up
with the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie. And thereupon the bourgeois
Materialism melted away, and only feeble remnants of it have been at work since
that time in a part of the petty bourgeoisie and of the workers. For it was now
revealed that natural science could not liberate humanity and that technics
under capitalism could bring no general happiness, no peace, no freedom. The
future grew dark and uncertain; the bourgeoisie saw its world full of
incomprehensible and menacing forces. And so there arose in the class all sorts
of mysticism and superstition.

The bourgeoisie has been shaken in its self-confidence by two catastrophes:
first the World War, then the world crisis. And now there hangs over it like a
tormenting storm cloud the menace of a still more devastating world war. The
bourgeoisie does not have its world in hand. Powerless and without an idea as to
what is to be done, it stands confronting the irresistible power of these social
forces. And when they have again been unleashed, it sees the rise of the working
class, which is still for the time being calmed by means of unemployment relief
to exorcize hunger revolts, and still held in check through the possibility of
parliamentary protests or through hope of a better economic order promised from
above. But after all it hears the rumbling in the depths, it sees here and there
the flashing up of the new ideas which lend force to a coming revolution, it is
thinking more about the revolution than the workers themselves do, and it is
making ready to proceed against it with the sharpest means at command. For the
bourgeoisie can see in revolution and Communism nothing other than chaos,
extinction of all culture and the end of humanity. And yet it feels
instinctively that it is powerless to evade this catastrophe. Thus there arises
in this class more and more strongly the belief in a superhuman, supernatural
power by which the world is governed. And it clings still more strongly to this
belief because of the feeble hope that in this way perhaps the workers may be
held back from their goal and the strength which lies in their unity may be
broken.

IV.

The rise of the socialist labor movement in the last half-century is the
first case in the history of humanity in which irreligion has become a mass
phenomenon. These masses had brought religion with them as a tradition out of
their earlier petty-bourgeois or peasant mode of production. But, thrown
together as workers into capitalist industry, they learned to conduct the class
struggle, they learned a few things regarding the development of society to
socialism, they recognized that their deplorable situation was owing to natural
and understandable causes, and they saw the possibility of putting an end to
that situation through their own strength. In the most important practice of life,
their minds had occasion to concern themselves only with realities, with the
understanding of real things, and so the traditional fantastic thinking was
bound to he dispelled and gradually vanish. This process is still going on.

The connection between society and ideas is not to be conceived mechanically
as a formula, prescribing necessarily to each definite class a definite mode of
looking at things. Society works upon us continually through all the influences and
forces of our surroundings, hence upon each of us differently in various
particulars; and so the doctrines impressed upon us in youth and the traditions
of earlier states of existence are gradually overcome, in one case more rapidly
and in another more slowly. Differences may also occur in accordance with
occupation: wherever workers are exposed to unforseen [sic] catastrophes — as in the case of miners and
fishermen — even tho they may know that inadequate safety measures play a
part under capitalism, there remains in their minds a deeply rooted
religiosity.

Another factor to be considered is the development of the labor movement
itself. In the early days of its rise, when clear indoctrination with principles
prevailed, the enlightenment was the most thorough-going. When, later, the great
droves of fellow-travelers arrived, — those who came to socialism only by
reason of electoral successes and direct interests, not by reason of a profound
transformation of their basic views, — the traditional religion which they
had brought along out of their petty-bourgeois surroundings remained practically
unaffected. When the Social Democracy became a party like any other, in
competition with the others, and the churches learned to compete with it by way
of social slogans, social measures and labor organizations of their own, the
dissemination of materialistic thinking among previously religious workers came
to an end. There is also the fact that the theoretical indoctrination as well as
the inner assurance regarding the future are weakened as a result of the
reformistic degeneration of the movement. The bourgeoisie proves to he more
powerful, the goal farther away and duskier than was formerly thought. And the
devastating forces of society reveal themselves, in war, in general disorder, in
world crisis, mightier and more uncontrollable. All that could be opposed to
them was merely a certain vague belief that finally after all the workers would
win. But this belief expressed itself more as an ethical love of peace and
declarations of the fraternity of the peoples than in strong and militant
preparedness for the revolution. It is obvious that in such a labor movement
tendencies of a religious coloring come forth more and more strongly and a sort
of christian socialism gains in influence. And so we find, together with the
political, also an intensified spiritual rapprochement with the bourgeoisie.

In apparently complete opposition thereto, we have the anti-religious
propaganda of the Communist Party, which, following the russian example,
includes in its activities that of combating religion directly. Such a thing
may appear quite radical, especially to those workers who themselves were
obliged to overcome the religious traditions and have continually met with
religion as a great impediment among their comrades. But in reality it is very
superficial, remaining attached to the surface and the outer layers. To be
radical is to get at the roots of things. The root of religion is the social
essence, in this case the dependence and powerlessness. To attack this root
requires — so long as society is not itself transformed — the
bringing of such insight into the social development as to give rise to the
certainty that liberation can be attained through human effort. It is only that
which can set aside the power of religious thinking. It does not come about through
theoretical discussions directed to demonstrating the falsity of religious
dogmas; that is nothing more than an attack upon the outer form, upon the
effect, while the cause, the inner essence, is left unclarified. Only a clear
understanding of the forces by which society is driven and of how the thinking
and acting of human beings are determined by vital needs of an economic nature,
— it is only this that makes the belief in supernatural explanations
superfluous and senseless. Without this understanding, however, unbelief or
atheism is just as much a dogmatic belief and just as lacking in solid
foundations as is religion.

The atheism which is being propagated by the C.P. and the vague religiosity
of many socialist circles are, one as much as the other, bourgeois mades [sic] of thought. Atheism and religion have this in common,
that they are unconscious expressions of a sentiment produced in human beings by
society. They are accordingly both dogmatic; that is, they regard themselves as
absolute truth and combat and persecute each other because they hold the opposed
ideas to be determining as regards the practical struggle. In making use of the
name Materialism as the doctrine of reality — the doctrine which
investigates, with a view to understanding, only reality, the real forces of the
world — we at the same time deney [sic] that
atheism has any right whatever to bear this name. As a descendant of bourgeois
materialism, atheism sees, to be sure, the reality of nature, but not the
reality of society, hence only that of the less significant half of the
universe. Its value is that of an empty hull, of a negative solution, because it
merely asserts that the religious explanation of the world, the one by means of
supernatural beings, is out of order. The thing that might give it a positive
content, — the real explanation of the world's development, a clear
knowledge of the forces and their effects by which our life is governed, —
that is lacking. This content can be given only by Marx's historical
materialism.

It was said above that the C.P. has propagated atheism and combated
religion, but the statement is in reality too favorable. It is the free thinkers
who combat religion with fairly considered arguments. What has been done by the
organs of the C.P. was not much more than jeering and offensive outbursts
against religion. It is perhaps the clearest indication of the intellectual
poverty of the communist parties that, in their intellectual dependence on
Bolshevism, they came out in western Europe against religion with the same
simple means with which the muzhiks were impressed in Russia. And of course it
was not intended as serious combat, — in such matters, that is beyond the
capacities of the Russian Bolshewiks [sic], —
but was designed merely to harass the bourgeoisie and to impress the workers
with a bit of theatrical boldness. It is the old method of external appearance
in the place of inner strength, — a method which is at work also in their
policy of employing high-sounding words, behind which there is only a
reformistic striving for outward successes with a view to power. And as proof by
example to show how faintly communist and how completely bourgeois this alleged
materialism is, there comes as the last somersault the slogan of tolerance: now
that Russia is making its peace with the western powers, the Communist
International seeks to get on the good side of the bourgeoisie and, to that end,
proclaims religious tolerance, the old bourgeois principle.

To the bourgeoisie, it is a principle. The bourgeoisie has
received — as a troublesome legacy from the earlier centuries when class
struggles were reflected in religious differences — the various religions
and churches, now contracted to rigid articles of faith. In spite of the fact
that each must assume, according to his own doctrine, that the other fellow is
forever lost, one must respect the other's belief, as otherwise no business
could be conducted among the different sects. Business does not admit of any
dispute about religious beliefs, and business is the main matter. And so in the
capitalist world one must tolerate. Also in the case of political affairs.

The real communism is not tolerant. A communist worker whose deepest desire
is to bring his class to a strong unity of action does not tolerate having his
comrades remain without understanding of the social development. He knows that
so long as clarity is lacking regarding society, the mind is filled with some
belief or unbelief. The conversion of a belief to an empty unbelief does not
bring his class any strength. He will set about with all his power to provide
insight, clarity, understanding of society, insight into the goal and the
struggle of the working class, in order that the workers may see with clear eyes
the reality or the world by which their destiny is determined. It is then that
the supernatural traditions lose their force. In this way the unity of action of
all workers as a strictly coherent and conscious class is prepared and
secured.


     From : Marxists.org

Events :
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     Communism and Religion -- Added : March 01, 2021

     Communism and Religion -- Updated : January 08, 2022

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