[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

A lot of people who come to socialism or communism from elite
backgrounds, like Marx himself, come to it first through their
personal confrontation with dominant culture -- in many cases
religion, as was partly the case with Marx himself, which Richard
Price, in his introduction to an American Trotskyist Felix Morrow's
diatribe against religion, emphasizes: "The 'Marxism' of the young
Karl Marx evolved in large part out of the criticism of religion"
(<http://www.workersaction.org.uk/23Articles/23Morrow&Religion.htm>)
-- and only later develop their criticism of the material social
structures that they think give birth to it.  Based on their personal
experience, they often mistakenly believe that, for workers, peasants,
and others below their own stations in life to "convert" to socialism
or communism, they, too, must first develop criticism of religion,
just as they did.  But that is not so.  Their personal conversion
experiences cannot be generalized.  Poor people come to socialism or
communism in their own ways, usually not through criticism of
religion, and they may choose to be active in both their church and
party which is also like a church to them.  After all, the essence of
both, at their best, is fellowship, so there is no reason why it is
impossible to combine them, while maintaining capacity to criticize
both, though in practice it is often difficult to do so.  _The
Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South_
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1979) is worth
reading, to study how a man born into a sharecropper family, for
instance, might approach Marxism and religion.
-- 
Yoshie
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