Finding a Common Ground Between Marx and Religion
By Adrian Chan-Wyles (PhD)
‘Mindfulness, I declare, O Monks, is helpful everywhere.’
Buddha – Aggi (Fire) Sutta
Buddha – Aggi (Fire) Sutta
Author’s Note: I wrote this email to a friend and colleague (on the 16.6.2020), who is currently living in Romania, and who is an expert in the field of Christian (Catholic) theology. Her understanding and grasp of Christian spirituality is superb and thought provoking. I, on the other hand, am a Marxist-Leninist scholar who specialises in the study of the origination, development, history, culture and methodology of all religions, as a means to facilitate the interface of religious teaching with Scientific Socialism. Although by no means the same, there is a surprising amount of common ground which can be realised and cultivated so as to remove conflict and encourage progression without the need for conflict or angst. Rightwing religionists, of course, can resist this process, but the reality is that if religiously minded people really want heaven on earth, or enlightenment in the temple, it is only Scientific Socialism that can deliver this reality. Just as millions of people still believe in religion in the world, and given the associated death and destruction surrounding pockets of these thought communities, it is important for Marxist-Leninists to build on the secular, academic tradition of studying religion developed in the USSR, and continued within Communist China.
ACW (16.6.2020)
Dear Gillian
At one point, Marx offers advice that sounds very much like a Christian Abbot/Abbess guiding monastics. The problem is that he tends to deal with religion in passing and not in a particular place, or in a work dedicated to religion. His foundational argument is that the bourgeoisie (and religionists), are manifesting an inverted mindset. Marx got this from Feuerbach's work assessing Christianity. It is an argument against idealism within economics. The inverted mindset mistakenly puts the cart before the horse, and assumes that all of humanity's socio-economic injustices are pre-ordained by an unseen, theistic entity, and that (the middle class say) there is no need to try and change anything, because everything is just as it should be. The bourgeois have luxury because god decrees it, whilst the workers suffer because it is what God wants for them. Marx makes the point that is how modern religion supports predatory capitalism. In return for this supportive service, the bourgeoisie privilege the Church and ensure it is a pillar of the establishment. This is why Marx stated that all religion must be removed from a) the classroom, and b) the political process. He did not say that religion is to be destroyed. In fact, by removing religion into the private sphere, Marx guaranteed two things - religious freedom for the individual unencumbered by the machinations of the State, and the end of religious support for capitalism. What is interesting is that Marx is saying nothing different than explaining and supporting modern science by rejecting inverted thinking. Inverted thinking mistakes a thought in the head for an object in the environment. Once established, this 'thought' can be worshipped, extolled and exalted over all other thoughts, and mistakenly assumed to have an independent existence in the environment when it is never seen, cannot be measured and cannot be quantified, etc.
In short, from the scientific perspective, it does not exist. Religionists are alienated from material reality by their belief in a hidden realm they cannot scientifically prove exists. Many mainstream scientists, by the way, whilst thoroughly supporting capitalism, share exactly the same opinion about religions, but whereas the likes of Dawkins and Co would like to destroy religion, Marx offers its survival as a matter of private interest. Now, Marx offered his thoughts on this matter in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as the 'Paris Manuscripts' as he wrote them on his honeymoon in France). An incomplete Russian translation was not published in Russia until 1927 (Lenin died in 1924), with a full version not published in the German language (in Berlin) until 1932. What I find interesting, is whether this would have 'refined' the Soviet attitude toward religion, if it had been more widely known? It does not represent a change in attitude (far from it), but rather represents a remarkable insight by Marx far beyond what I call the 'crude' atheism of pseudo-materialists. I will include a link to the full text at the end, but here is Marx at his rhetorical best:
Quote 1 - from Manuscript Three - Private Property and Communism
'It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy.
This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.
The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.'
Quote 2 - from Manuscript Three - Private Property and Communism
'Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?
You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.
But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.''
So, Marx says 'Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation.' This is what I mean about the level of insight expressed by Marx. Marx is certainly not a religionist in the conventional sense, and in Chapter Three of the Communist Manifesto Marx states 'Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.' However, nevertheless we may compare this Revolutionary thinking of Marx with the teaching of the Christian monk - Abbot Andre Louf when he says:
'It is a humility all more radical in that it reaches the contemplative even in that very desire that constitutes the heart of his vocation: the desire of seeing and knowing a God who seems to hide himself in incurable weakness, who constantly denudes himself unto such a poverty. This God appears so far off and even, at certain moments, as if "dead", inexistent, a mirage, a projection into infinity of one's own desires. Hence the contemplative finds himself at the heart of his desert, or in the dark night, even in the mystery of Jesus himself crying out: "My God, my God, why have you abadoned me?!" (Matt 27:46). The night may perhaps be brief, or it may be prolonged, apparently endless, according to the good pleasure of God's grace and to the measure of each individual vocation. More than other believers, the contemplative ought to be an "expert in atheism." Does he believe? Perhaps, yet without believing, it seems to him. He no longer understands anything except this one thing: that the God in whom he thought he believed is nothing but an idol invented by himself or fashioned by a culture still vaguely imprinted by Christianity; that the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, is a wholly Other who will surge forth elsewhere than where one expected him, and that one must above all abandon the attempt to reach him by one's own efforts. And yet it suffices to let him remain unattainable and to let oneself be seized by him at the hour of his own good pleasure.'
Andre Louf, In the School of Contemplation, Liturgical Press, (2004), Page 12
There is far more to the criticism of religion by Marx, than most religionists would admit. There is far more religious freedom in Socialist countries than in capitalist countries (by law), but Western religionists want the freedom for their religion to make money and influence the political process. As religions are about unifying the 'inner' with the 'outer' through various methods, neither making money nor controlling the political system are part of this path. By removing religion from the political process it yet again assumes its original function of securing spiritual freedom. As genuine spiritual freedom parallels the freedom expressed through the thinking of Karl Marx, Socialism is the fulfilment of religion and not its negation. This is because capitalism keeps religion in a state of arrested development and maintains the 'fetish' of idol worship and sectarianism. Generally speaking, it is only monasticism which sees through this capitalist trap and sets the individual free on the path toward Socialism. The outer structures of religion will change, of course, as a Socialist Society evolves, and may well even merge with the formations of Socialist realism.
Paris Manuscripts 1844
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
Communist Manifesto
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Aggi (Fire) Sutta
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn46/sn46.053.than.html
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2020.
ACW (16.6.2020)
Dear Gillian
At one point, Marx offers advice that sounds very much like a Christian Abbot/Abbess guiding monastics. The problem is that he tends to deal with religion in passing and not in a particular place, or in a work dedicated to religion. His foundational argument is that the bourgeoisie (and religionists), are manifesting an inverted mindset. Marx got this from Feuerbach's work assessing Christianity. It is an argument against idealism within economics. The inverted mindset mistakenly puts the cart before the horse, and assumes that all of humanity's socio-economic injustices are pre-ordained by an unseen, theistic entity, and that (the middle class say) there is no need to try and change anything, because everything is just as it should be. The bourgeois have luxury because god decrees it, whilst the workers suffer because it is what God wants for them. Marx makes the point that is how modern religion supports predatory capitalism. In return for this supportive service, the bourgeoisie privilege the Church and ensure it is a pillar of the establishment. This is why Marx stated that all religion must be removed from a) the classroom, and b) the political process. He did not say that religion is to be destroyed. In fact, by removing religion into the private sphere, Marx guaranteed two things - religious freedom for the individual unencumbered by the machinations of the State, and the end of religious support for capitalism. What is interesting is that Marx is saying nothing different than explaining and supporting modern science by rejecting inverted thinking. Inverted thinking mistakes a thought in the head for an object in the environment. Once established, this 'thought' can be worshipped, extolled and exalted over all other thoughts, and mistakenly assumed to have an independent existence in the environment when it is never seen, cannot be measured and cannot be quantified, etc.
In short, from the scientific perspective, it does not exist. Religionists are alienated from material reality by their belief in a hidden realm they cannot scientifically prove exists. Many mainstream scientists, by the way, whilst thoroughly supporting capitalism, share exactly the same opinion about religions, but whereas the likes of Dawkins and Co would like to destroy religion, Marx offers its survival as a matter of private interest. Now, Marx offered his thoughts on this matter in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as the 'Paris Manuscripts' as he wrote them on his honeymoon in France). An incomplete Russian translation was not published in Russia until 1927 (Lenin died in 1924), with a full version not published in the German language (in Berlin) until 1932. What I find interesting, is whether this would have 'refined' the Soviet attitude toward religion, if it had been more widely known? It does not represent a change in attitude (far from it), but rather represents a remarkable insight by Marx far beyond what I call the 'crude' atheism of pseudo-materialists. I will include a link to the full text at the end, but here is Marx at his rhetorical best:
Quote 1 - from Manuscript Three - Private Property and Communism
'It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy.
This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.
The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.'
Quote 2 - from Manuscript Three - Private Property and Communism
'Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?
You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.
But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.''
So, Marx says 'Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation.' This is what I mean about the level of insight expressed by Marx. Marx is certainly not a religionist in the conventional sense, and in Chapter Three of the Communist Manifesto Marx states 'Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.' However, nevertheless we may compare this Revolutionary thinking of Marx with the teaching of the Christian monk - Abbot Andre Louf when he says:
'It is a humility all more radical in that it reaches the contemplative even in that very desire that constitutes the heart of his vocation: the desire of seeing and knowing a God who seems to hide himself in incurable weakness, who constantly denudes himself unto such a poverty. This God appears so far off and even, at certain moments, as if "dead", inexistent, a mirage, a projection into infinity of one's own desires. Hence the contemplative finds himself at the heart of his desert, or in the dark night, even in the mystery of Jesus himself crying out: "My God, my God, why have you abadoned me?!" (Matt 27:46). The night may perhaps be brief, or it may be prolonged, apparently endless, according to the good pleasure of God's grace and to the measure of each individual vocation. More than other believers, the contemplative ought to be an "expert in atheism." Does he believe? Perhaps, yet without believing, it seems to him. He no longer understands anything except this one thing: that the God in whom he thought he believed is nothing but an idol invented by himself or fashioned by a culture still vaguely imprinted by Christianity; that the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, is a wholly Other who will surge forth elsewhere than where one expected him, and that one must above all abandon the attempt to reach him by one's own efforts. And yet it suffices to let him remain unattainable and to let oneself be seized by him at the hour of his own good pleasure.'
Andre Louf, In the School of Contemplation, Liturgical Press, (2004), Page 12
There is far more to the criticism of religion by Marx, than most religionists would admit. There is far more religious freedom in Socialist countries than in capitalist countries (by law), but Western religionists want the freedom for their religion to make money and influence the political process. As religions are about unifying the 'inner' with the 'outer' through various methods, neither making money nor controlling the political system are part of this path. By removing religion from the political process it yet again assumes its original function of securing spiritual freedom. As genuine spiritual freedom parallels the freedom expressed through the thinking of Karl Marx, Socialism is the fulfilment of religion and not its negation. This is because capitalism keeps religion in a state of arrested development and maintains the 'fetish' of idol worship and sectarianism. Generally speaking, it is only monasticism which sees through this capitalist trap and sets the individual free on the path toward Socialism. The outer structures of religion will change, of course, as a Socialist Society evolves, and may well even merge with the formations of Socialist realism.
Paris Manuscripts 1844
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
Communist Manifesto
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Aggi (Fire) Sutta
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn46/sn46.053.than.html
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2020.