Marxism & Religion posted by Richard Seymour

A brilliant new article in Socialist Worker today about Marxism and the critique of religion. A few excerpts:

Jews in Prussia faced systematic discrimination, with laws determining where they could live and the occupations they could take up. In the 1840s there were raging debates about Jewish emancipation which parallel some of the arguments about Islam and Muslims today.

At the time, Marx was making a name for himself as a radical journalist working on liberal publications. Much of his energy was spent debating with a circle of liberal writers and thinkers known as the Young Hegelians. Prominent among them was Bruno Bauer, who had been one of Marx’s tutors at university.

Bauer started off his academic career on the right, but had shifted left politically, becoming increasingly critical of Christianity. In 1842 he was dismissed from his university post in Berlin because of his radical views.

There were good reasons why Bauer and the Young Hegelians criticised Christianity and religion in general. Prussia at the time was still an absolute monarchy with restrictive laws dating from the feudal era, propped up by the stifling ideology of the church.

The liberals in Prussia hankered for the kind of reforms that had come in the wake of the 1789 French Revolution. They were, however, considerably less keen on the messy business of actually having a revolution. Consequently they focused on demanding reforms from the creaking Prussian government – in particular parliamentary elections and the separation of church and state.

The Jewish demand for emancipation was part of this wider struggle. Marx, whose Jewish father had converted to Christianity to escape oppression, backed the campaign to scrap the laws that discriminated against Jews.

Fairly straightforward, one might think. In circumstances in which Jews were oppressed, it made sense to support their demands for political equality.

However:

In sharp contrast to Marx, Bauer came out against Jewish emancipation, mobilising in his defence a seemingly left wing argument. Many of Bauer’s comments prefigure the arguments put by some today for downplaying, ­ignoring or colluding with Islamophobia.

Bauer argued that religion was the main enemy, and therefore to support Jews demanding emancipation as Jews would be tantamount to capitulating to religion and the special pleading of a religious minority. Jews should first renounce their religion, he insisted, and only then would they deserve the support of liberal atheists.

“As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews,” wrote Bauer in one essay on the question.

While this argument superficially seems to treat all religions as “equally bad”, it was rapidly backed up by another that clarified what was really at stake. In a second essay attacking the Jewish emancipation campaign, Bauer argued that while all religions were equally bad, some were more equal than others.

Specifically, Bauer now claimed that Christianity was in fact superior to Judaism: “The Christian has to surmount only one stage, namely, that of his religion, in order to give up religion altogether. The Jew, on the other hand, has to break not only with his Jewish nature, but also with the development towards perfecting his religion, a development which has remained alien to him.”

Here the parallels with arguments over Islam today are striking. Liberal secularists often insist that they are against all religion, and have no specific issue with Islam. But the specific religion that most exercises them, the one they hold predominantly responsible for social evils from terrorism through to homophobia, invariably turns out to be Islam.

Quick clarification on Bauer's point about "perfecting his religion" - in Bauer's view, Christianity was the perfection of Judaism, a stage through which Jews might have to move or abandon if they were to arrive at perfect secularism. Indeed, it is not hard today to find examples of Islam being treated "less equally" than other religions. One encounters people who think of Islam in terms of 'fundamentalism' (an unimaginative category imported from a Christian conceptual framework), or who think that it uniquely has a history of violence or justifies violence, or (even better) is a total social, economic and political order, a civilization, and an imperialist one at that. I swear I've encountered one or two self-described progressive liberals who retail this Daniel Pipes-cum-Bat Ye'or version of the Clash of Civilisations thesis.

Most people think of Marx as a straightforward critic of religion, without realising or caring to know that he was also a critic of the critique of religion:

Marx, who was already rethinking his relationship with the Young Hegelians, responded forcibly to his former mentor Bauer in a polemical essay called On The Jewish Question, published in 1844. Rather than join in the attacks on “Jewish backwardness”, or issue simpering pleas for “tolerance”, he turned his guns on the failings of Bauer’s liberal politics.

First, Marx noted that the restricted “political emancipation” called for by Bauer – effectively, the demand for a secular state – was nowhere near enough. In fact, it wouldn’t even get rid of religion, which was supposedly Bauer’s main target. Marx noted that the US constitution was avowedly secular, yet the US was “pre-eminently the country of religiosity”, teeming with all manner of sects and cults peddling their wares.

Not exactly unfamiliar today.

More fundamentally, Marx argued that religious faith was primarily an effect, rather than a cause, of a much more general oppression. Focusing on the religious question served to obscure this wider picture, diverting energy away from real social struggle and into sterile theological debate.

Marx also noted that liberals viewed human society as rigidly divided between a public “political life” and a private “civil society”. Political reform should be restricted to the former, they claimed, leaving untouched economic arrangements such as private property and wage labour that fell into the category of “civil society”.

Marx proceeded to tear down this artificial opposition. He explained how the supposedly atheistic demands of the Young Hegelians in fact served to conceal their own quasi-religious assumptions.

Specifically, they believed in a vision of human society composed of atomised private individuals that owned property and were motivated by self interest – a kind of Thatcherism before its time that bore no relation to how society actually worked:

“The so called rights of man are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society, the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.”

The irony here, as Marx notes, is that Bauer accuses Jews precisely of “egoism”, of deliberately isolating themselves from society, of being obsessed by money making and trading. Bauer is himself guilty of the sins he accuses Jews of and Judaism acts as a convenient scapegoat for his own political failings.

In contrast to the liberals, Marx called for the radical generalisation of “political emancipation” into a “human emancipation” that would revolutionise economic relations and the whole of society, as opposed to merely ­tinkering with the nature of the state. And this socialist political project would be based on a consistently materialist understanding of the world, not just an atheistic one.

Punchline:

Bauer, by contrast, rapidly shifted to the right and later became a cheerleader for the vile anti-Semitism that emerged in Germany in the 1870s – an ideology that would eventually lead to the Nazi gas chambers.

It is worth noting that Marx goes so far in Private Property and Communism as to counterpose atheism to socialism:

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.

The Hegelese in that passage shouldn't be allowed to obscure the crucial point: atheism is only meaningful as a passage from religion, not as a permanent vanguard against it in which the human being's sovereign reality is continually asserted through the negation of God. He writes in On the Jewish Question:

We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness ... We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions.

A consistent materialist analysis, then, does not start with people's ideas about God, and certainly doesn't move one to stroppily inform believers that the problem with them is that their religion demands or allows this or that heresy to the secular order, and therefore to be acceptable they must repent, recant and convert. Even when social conditions are revolutionised, one does not dogmatically launch a purge on the religious. The relationship between Bolsheviks and Islam is instructive here:

[A]theism was never included in the Bolsheviks' programme. Indeed, they welcomed left wing Muslims into the communist parties (CPs). The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted in 1923 that in some former colonies as many as 15 percent of CP members were believers in Islam. He called them the 'raw revolutionary recruits who come knocking on our door'. In parts of Central Asia, Muslim membership was as high as 70 percent.

Indeed:

Sacred Islamic monuments, books and objects looted by the tsars were returned to the mosques. Friday - the day of Muslim celebration - was declared to be the legal day of rest throughout Central Asia. A parallel court system was created in 1921, with Islamic courts administering justice in accordance with sharia laws. The aim was for people to have a choice between religious and revolutionary justice. A special Sharia Commission was established in the Soviet Commissariat of Justice.

Some sharia sentences that contravened Soviet law, such as stoning or the cutting off of hands, were forbidden. Decisions of the sharia courts that concerned these matters had to be confirmed by higher organs of justice.

And:

A parallel education system was also established. In 1922 rights to certain waqf (Islamic) properties were restored to Muslim administration, with the proviso that they were used for education. As a result, the system of madrassahs - religious schools - was extensive. In 1925 there were 1,500 madrassahs with 45,000 students in the Caucasus state of Dagestan, as opposed to just 183 state schools. In contrast, by November 1921 over 1,000 soviet schools had some 85,000 pupils in Central Asia - a modest number relative to the potential enrolment.

What's more:

The Bolsheviks made alliances with the Kazakh pan-Islamic group the Ush-Zhuz (which joined the CP in 1920), the Persian pan-Islamist guerrillas in the Jengelis, and the Vaisites, a Sufi brotherhood. In Dagestan, Soviet power was established largely thanks to the partisans of the Muslim leader Ali-Hadji Akushinskii.

In Chechnya the Bolsheviks won over Ali Mataev, the head of a powerful Sufi order, who led the Chechen Revolutionary Committee. In the Red Army the 'sharia squadrons' of the mullah Katkakhanov numbered tens of thousands.

At the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920, Russian Bolshevik leaders issued a call for a 'holy war' against Western imperialism. Two years later the Fourth Congress of the Communist International endorsed alliances with pan-Islamism against imperialism.

However:

From the mid-1920s the Stalinists began planning an all-out attack on Islam under the banner of women's rights. The slogan of the campaign was khudzhum - which means storming or assault.

The khudzhum entered its mass action phase on 8 March 1927 - international women's day. At mass meetings women were called upon to unveil. Small groups of native women came to the podium and threw their veils on bonfires. This grotesque plan turned Marxism on its head. It was far from the days when Bolshevik women activists veiled themselves to conduct political work in the mosques. It was a million miles from Lenin's instruction that 'we are absolutely opposed to giving offence to religious conviction'.

Indeed, there are many who still claim some intellectual heritage from or solidarity with the Bolshevik tradition who would be appalled by the foregoing. Giving Muslims their own schools and courts? Don't you know what those Barbarians will do to their women and children? Gates of Vienna! Stand by Denmark!