[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/25/07, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 12:03:49 -0500 "Yoshie Furuhashi"
> <critical.montages at gmail.com> writes:
> > 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.
>
> I think that depends. In the US if you look at the biographies of
> many of the old Wobblies and other radicals of the late 19th
> and early 20th centuries, their paths to becoming socialists,
> communists, anarchists or whatever, often involved their first rejecting
> the religious faiths in which they had been brought up
> (often after their having read Darwin or about Darwin and Darwinism) .
> Most
> of these people did not come from elite backgrounds.  And
> I think that many here have had somewhat similar experiences
> as well.  And despite rumors to the contrary, we are not
> all from elite backgrounds either. However, I would agree
> with you that there are lots of people who manage to come
> to socialism without abandoning their religious faith and
> that for many people, it is the ethical teachings of their faith
> that help motivate them to become radicals and revolutionaries
> in the first place. That is fact that we have to respect.
>
> > 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.
>
> I think that people's pathways to becoming socialists or communists
> are quite varied.  Many African-Americans, many Latin Americans
> have often followed pathways where they become revolutionaries
> while remaining religious.  In western Europe, the rejection of
> religion was often an important step in workers becoming socialists.
> In fact the German SPD used to distribute a pamphlet called "Moses
> or Darwin" to German workers.  Socialism was closely tied to
> anticlericalism in many countries.  In Spain, the Spanish anarchist
> made a point in distributing freethought literature to workers
> and peasants.  The situation, it seems to me, is quite varied
> depending on the country, ethnicity, time period etc.

Historically, confrontation with colonialism and neo-colonialism has
been the biggest motivator of people, moving the largest number of
people to take a revolutionary path.

Religion has largely withered to a residual state in much of Western
Europe, excepting the faiths of immigrant communities, and so it has
been in Japan, where none of the religions of the book ever really
caught on anyhow, but irreligious workers in Japan and Western Europe
have not taken a socialist path, and the parties that are still called
socialist and communist are basically social democratic parties that
are socialist and communist in the name only.  Make workers
(relatively) really rich by the world standard, and they will be
probably less religious, but that works only for native-born workers
of the North, and that doesn't seem to motivate them to socialism or
communism.

-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>