lenin, socialism and religion (1905)
[ah...] The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
(...) We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies... Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.
(...) Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the “servants of God”. We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition...
(...) So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.
(...) If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog.
(...) [absolutely right] But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
Showing posts with label christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label christianity. Show all posts
Thursday, December 10, 2009
luxemburg, socialism and the churches (1905)
It is true that we do meet churchmen of another kind. There exist some who are full of goodness and pity and who do not seek gain; these are always ready to help the poor. But we must admit these are indeed uncommon and that they can be regarded in the same way as white blackbirds. The majority of priests, with beaming faces, bow and scrape to the rich and powerful, silently pardoning them for every depravity, every iniquity. With the workers the clergy behave quite otherwise: they think only of squeezing them pity; in harsh sermons they condemn the “covetess” of the workers when these latter do no more than defend themselves against the wrongs of capitalism.
(...) The Social-Democrats want to bring about the state of “communism”; that is chiefly what the clergy have against them. First of all, it is striking to notice that the priests of today who fight against “Communism” condemn in reality first Christian Apostles. For these latter were nothing else than ardent communists.
(...) Further, to make the people forget their hardships it offered them free circus shows. Unlike the proletariat of our time, which maintains the whole of society by its labours, the enormous proletariat of Rome existed on charity.
(...) In this crumbling society, where there existed no way out of their tragic situation for the people, no hope of a better life, the wretched turned to Heaven to seek salvation there. The Christian religion appeared to these unhappy beings as a life-belt, a consolation and an encouragement, and became, right from the beginning, the religion of the Roman proletarians. In conformity with the material position of the men belonging to this class, the first Christians put forward the demand for property in common - communism. What could be more natural?
(...) [institutionalization] In the beginning, when the number of Christians was small, the clergy did not exist in the proper sense of the word. The faithful, who formed an independent religious community, united together in each city. They elected a member responsible for conducting the service of God and carrying out the religious rites. Every Christian could become the bishop or prelate. These functions were elective, subject to recall, honorary and carried no power other than that which the community gave of its own free will.[9] In proportion as the number of the faithful increased and the communities became more numerous and richer, to run the business of the community and to hold office became an occupation which demanded a great deal of time and full concentration. As the office-bearers could not carry out these tasks at the same time as following their private employment, the custom grew up of electing from among the members of the community, an ecclesiastic who was exclusively entrusted with these functions. Therefore, these employees of the community had to be paid for their exclusive devotion to its affairs. Thus there formed within the Church a new order of employees of the Church, which separated itself from the main body of the faithful, the clergy. Parallel with the inequality between rich and poor, there arose another inequality, that between the clergy and the people. The ecclesiastics, at first elected among equals with a view to performing a temporary function raised themselves to form a caste which ruled over the people... . From the 4th Century, the ecclesiastics of the communities met together in Councils. The first council took place at Nicaea in 325. In this way there was formed the clergy, an order apart and separated from the people. The bishops of the stronger and richer communities took the lead at the Councils. That is why the Bishop of Rome soon placed himself at the head of the whole of Christianity and became the Pope. Thus an abyss separated the clergy, divided up in the hierarchy, from the people. At the same time, the economic relations between the people and the clergy underwent a great change. the clergy and running the Church. Before the formation of this order, all that the rich members of the Church offered to the common property belonged to the poor people. Afterwards, a great part of the funds was spent on paying
(...) From the 6th century, the clergy imposed a special tax, the tithe (tenth part of the crops), which had to be paid to the Church.
(...) Ecclesiastical positions therefore offered the best opportunities to obtain large revenue. Each ecclesiastic disposed of the property of the Church as if it were his own and largely endowed from it his relatives, sons and grandsons. By this means the goods of the Church were pillaged and disappeared into the hands of the families of the clergy. For that reason, the Popes declared themselves to be the sovereign proprietors of the fortunes of the Church and ordained the celibacy of the clergy, in order to keep it intact and to prevent their patrimony from being dispersed. Celibacy was decreed in the 11th Century, but it was not put into practice until the 13th Century, in view of the opposition of the clergy.
(...) When the country and town proletariat rose up against oppression and serfdom, it found in the clergy a ferocious opponent. It is also true even within the Church itself there existed two classes: the higher clergy who engulfed all the wealth and the great mass of the country parsons whose modest livings brought in no more than 500 francs to 2,000 francs a year. Therefore this unprivileged class revolted against the superior clergy and in 1789, during the Great Revolution, it joined up with the people to fight against the power of the lay and ecclesiastical nobility.
(...) In fact the cloisters profited considerably from this benevolence; having the reputation of opening their doors to the poor, they received large gifts and legacies from the rich and powerful. With the appearance of capitalism and production for exchange, every object acquired a price and became exchangeable. At this moment the convents, the houses of the lords, and the ecclesiastics ceased their benefactions. The people found no refuge anywhere. Here is one reason, among others, why at the beginning of capitalism, in the 18th Century, when the workers were not yet organised to defend their interests, there appeared poverty so appalling that humanity seemed to have gone back to the days of the decades of the Roman Empire. But while the Catholic Church in former times undertook to bring help to the Roman proletariat by the preaching of communism, equality and fraternity, in the capitalist period it acted in a wholly different fashion. It sought above all to profit from the poverty of the people; to put cheap labour to work. The convents became literally hells of capitalist exploitation, all the worse because they took in the labour of women and children. The law case against the Convent of the Good Shepherd in France in 1903 gave a resounding example of these abuses. Little girls, 12, 10 and 9 years old were compelled to work in abominable conditions, without rest, ruining their eyes and their health, and were badly nourished and subjected to prison discipline.
(...) To sum up, it is the labour of millions of exploited people, which assures the existence of the Church, the government, and the capitalist class. The statistics concerning the revenue of the Church in Austria give an idea of the considerable wealth of the Church, which was formerly the refuge of the poor. Five years ago (that is, in 1900) its annual revenues amounted to 60 million crowns, and its expenditure did not exceed 35 million. Thus, in the course of a single year, it “put aside” 25 million – at the cost of the sweat and blood shed by the workers.
(...) Your cruelties and your calumnies in former times could not prevent the victory of the Christian idea, the idea which you have sacrificed to the Golden Calf; today your efforts will raise no obstacle to the coming of Socialism. Today it is you, in your lies and your teachings, who are pagans, and it is we who bring to the poor, to the exploited the tidings of fraternity and equality. It is we who are marching to the conquest of the world as he did formerly who proclaimed that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
(...)[the key in understanding this entire text, though, is that the 'priest' represents a very specific representative of institutionalized christianity, and not religion writ large] And here is the answer to all the attacks of the clergy: the Social-Democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.
It is true that we do meet churchmen of another kind. There exist some who are full of goodness and pity and who do not seek gain; these are always ready to help the poor. But we must admit these are indeed uncommon and that they can be regarded in the same way as white blackbirds. The majority of priests, with beaming faces, bow and scrape to the rich and powerful, silently pardoning them for every depravity, every iniquity. With the workers the clergy behave quite otherwise: they think only of squeezing them pity; in harsh sermons they condemn the “covetess” of the workers when these latter do no more than defend themselves against the wrongs of capitalism.
(...) The Social-Democrats want to bring about the state of “communism”; that is chiefly what the clergy have against them. First of all, it is striking to notice that the priests of today who fight against “Communism” condemn in reality first Christian Apostles. For these latter were nothing else than ardent communists.
(...) Further, to make the people forget their hardships it offered them free circus shows. Unlike the proletariat of our time, which maintains the whole of society by its labours, the enormous proletariat of Rome existed on charity.
(...) In this crumbling society, where there existed no way out of their tragic situation for the people, no hope of a better life, the wretched turned to Heaven to seek salvation there. The Christian religion appeared to these unhappy beings as a life-belt, a consolation and an encouragement, and became, right from the beginning, the religion of the Roman proletarians. In conformity with the material position of the men belonging to this class, the first Christians put forward the demand for property in common - communism. What could be more natural?
(...) [institutionalization] In the beginning, when the number of Christians was small, the clergy did not exist in the proper sense of the word. The faithful, who formed an independent religious community, united together in each city. They elected a member responsible for conducting the service of God and carrying out the religious rites. Every Christian could become the bishop or prelate. These functions were elective, subject to recall, honorary and carried no power other than that which the community gave of its own free will.[9] In proportion as the number of the faithful increased and the communities became more numerous and richer, to run the business of the community and to hold office became an occupation which demanded a great deal of time and full concentration. As the office-bearers could not carry out these tasks at the same time as following their private employment, the custom grew up of electing from among the members of the community, an ecclesiastic who was exclusively entrusted with these functions. Therefore, these employees of the community had to be paid for their exclusive devotion to its affairs. Thus there formed within the Church a new order of employees of the Church, which separated itself from the main body of the faithful, the clergy. Parallel with the inequality between rich and poor, there arose another inequality, that between the clergy and the people. The ecclesiastics, at first elected among equals with a view to performing a temporary function raised themselves to form a caste which ruled over the people... . From the 4th Century, the ecclesiastics of the communities met together in Councils. The first council took place at Nicaea in 325. In this way there was formed the clergy, an order apart and separated from the people. The bishops of the stronger and richer communities took the lead at the Councils. That is why the Bishop of Rome soon placed himself at the head of the whole of Christianity and became the Pope. Thus an abyss separated the clergy, divided up in the hierarchy, from the people. At the same time, the economic relations between the people and the clergy underwent a great change. the clergy and running the Church. Before the formation of this order, all that the rich members of the Church offered to the common property belonged to the poor people. Afterwards, a great part of the funds was spent on paying
(...) From the 6th century, the clergy imposed a special tax, the tithe (tenth part of the crops), which had to be paid to the Church.
(...) Ecclesiastical positions therefore offered the best opportunities to obtain large revenue. Each ecclesiastic disposed of the property of the Church as if it were his own and largely endowed from it his relatives, sons and grandsons. By this means the goods of the Church were pillaged and disappeared into the hands of the families of the clergy. For that reason, the Popes declared themselves to be the sovereign proprietors of the fortunes of the Church and ordained the celibacy of the clergy, in order to keep it intact and to prevent their patrimony from being dispersed. Celibacy was decreed in the 11th Century, but it was not put into practice until the 13th Century, in view of the opposition of the clergy.
(...) When the country and town proletariat rose up against oppression and serfdom, it found in the clergy a ferocious opponent. It is also true even within the Church itself there existed two classes: the higher clergy who engulfed all the wealth and the great mass of the country parsons whose modest livings brought in no more than 500 francs to 2,000 francs a year. Therefore this unprivileged class revolted against the superior clergy and in 1789, during the Great Revolution, it joined up with the people to fight against the power of the lay and ecclesiastical nobility.
(...) In fact the cloisters profited considerably from this benevolence; having the reputation of opening their doors to the poor, they received large gifts and legacies from the rich and powerful. With the appearance of capitalism and production for exchange, every object acquired a price and became exchangeable. At this moment the convents, the houses of the lords, and the ecclesiastics ceased their benefactions. The people found no refuge anywhere. Here is one reason, among others, why at the beginning of capitalism, in the 18th Century, when the workers were not yet organised to defend their interests, there appeared poverty so appalling that humanity seemed to have gone back to the days of the decades of the Roman Empire. But while the Catholic Church in former times undertook to bring help to the Roman proletariat by the preaching of communism, equality and fraternity, in the capitalist period it acted in a wholly different fashion. It sought above all to profit from the poverty of the people; to put cheap labour to work. The convents became literally hells of capitalist exploitation, all the worse because they took in the labour of women and children. The law case against the Convent of the Good Shepherd in France in 1903 gave a resounding example of these abuses. Little girls, 12, 10 and 9 years old were compelled to work in abominable conditions, without rest, ruining their eyes and their health, and were badly nourished and subjected to prison discipline.
(...) To sum up, it is the labour of millions of exploited people, which assures the existence of the Church, the government, and the capitalist class. The statistics concerning the revenue of the Church in Austria give an idea of the considerable wealth of the Church, which was formerly the refuge of the poor. Five years ago (that is, in 1900) its annual revenues amounted to 60 million crowns, and its expenditure did not exceed 35 million. Thus, in the course of a single year, it “put aside” 25 million – at the cost of the sweat and blood shed by the workers.
(...) Your cruelties and your calumnies in former times could not prevent the victory of the Christian idea, the idea which you have sacrificed to the Golden Calf; today your efforts will raise no obstacle to the coming of Socialism. Today it is you, in your lies and your teachings, who are pagans, and it is we who bring to the poor, to the exploited the tidings of fraternity and equality. It is we who are marching to the conquest of the world as he did formerly who proclaimed that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
(...)[the key in understanding this entire text, though, is that the 'priest' represents a very specific representative of institutionalized christianity, and not religion writ large] And here is the answer to all the attacks of the clergy: the Social-Democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.
gilbert achcar, religion and politics today from a marxian perspective (socialist register 2006)
(60): "it is this 'elective affinity' between Christianity in its charismatic phase and a communistic social programme that explains the ability of a Thomas Muntzer in the early 16th century to formulate in Christian terms a programme that Friedrich Engels described, in 1850, as an 'anticipation of communism by fantasty.'" [this makes no analytical sense, whatsoever. The implication here, then, is that other traditions would not have made this 'programme' available to Muntzer (who, remember, was a radical cleric that justified Peasant rebellions that were already underway; not a leader of the rebellions themselves). Is that really a Marxist claim? The notion that more than a thousand years later, the ideology he mobilized still bore the imprint of its origins? It seems to me that this fundamentally misunderstands ideology. millenarian peasant revolts abound through history--the fact of their millenarianism is hardly enabled or explained by Christianity (throughout chinese history, most notably)]
(64): "it is this same 'elective affinity' between original Christianity and communistic utopianism that explains why the worldwide wave of leftwing political radicalization that started in the 1960s... could partly take on a Christian dimension..." [very odd. (1) surely you will admit the fact that leftwing demands can be expressed through alternative religious registers, a la shi'ism? (2) if the claim is that this gets co-opted, then this claim obviously applies to christianity as an ideology of left-wing latin american movements, a la nicaragua? i just cant' make sense of the argument]
(64-65): pointing out facts that seem to explain the necessarily co-opted character of islam (its integration into juridical/political networks; the fact it wasn't touched by colonial powers; the fact it wasn't challenged by rebellions against western domination (really? nasser?); etc., etc.); the whole discussion is thoroughly ungrounded and unconvincing. and in fact it suggests an extraordinarily stagnant conception of the middle east that makes the non-islamic into an aberration, which is quite confusing, since he would not want to say that otherwise.
(66): the central problem of the article is that he compares christianity's best-foot forward, to islam's worst-foot forward, in essence. why not reverse the situation, compare shariati (or somebody else, for goodness' sake) to ratzinger, or something? would we still be screeching about 'elective affinities', then? the notion that the 'fundamentalist' affinity of the two traditions in his model (muntzer and islamic 'fundamentalism' writ large) can tell us anything, at all, and that the notion of stripping away accumulated superfluity is unique to these two, is nonsense of the highest order.
(66): "by no stretch of the imagination..." he wants to argue, could islamic fundamentalists want to return us to a society where class differences no longer exist. fine, but islamic fundamentalists do not, at all, monopolize the islamist tradition; you could very easily imagine many islamic thinkers that would mobilize islam to make that case. what's more, if you asked ratzinger to go to the basics, you think that would give us communism? this is just so nonsensical.
in sum, really: the idea that his notion of 'elective affinity' has any analytical purchase seems a classic example of assuming that ideologies can do work outside of material context and practice. it is categorically not marxist.
(60): "it is this 'elective affinity' between Christianity in its charismatic phase and a communistic social programme that explains the ability of a Thomas Muntzer in the early 16th century to formulate in Christian terms a programme that Friedrich Engels described, in 1850, as an 'anticipation of communism by fantasty.'" [this makes no analytical sense, whatsoever. The implication here, then, is that other traditions would not have made this 'programme' available to Muntzer (who, remember, was a radical cleric that justified Peasant rebellions that were already underway; not a leader of the rebellions themselves). Is that really a Marxist claim? The notion that more than a thousand years later, the ideology he mobilized still bore the imprint of its origins? It seems to me that this fundamentally misunderstands ideology. millenarian peasant revolts abound through history--the fact of their millenarianism is hardly enabled or explained by Christianity (throughout chinese history, most notably)]
(64): "it is this same 'elective affinity' between original Christianity and communistic utopianism that explains why the worldwide wave of leftwing political radicalization that started in the 1960s... could partly take on a Christian dimension..." [very odd. (1) surely you will admit the fact that leftwing demands can be expressed through alternative religious registers, a la shi'ism? (2) if the claim is that this gets co-opted, then this claim obviously applies to christianity as an ideology of left-wing latin american movements, a la nicaragua? i just cant' make sense of the argument]
(64-65): pointing out facts that seem to explain the necessarily co-opted character of islam (its integration into juridical/political networks; the fact it wasn't touched by colonial powers; the fact it wasn't challenged by rebellions against western domination (really? nasser?); etc., etc.); the whole discussion is thoroughly ungrounded and unconvincing. and in fact it suggests an extraordinarily stagnant conception of the middle east that makes the non-islamic into an aberration, which is quite confusing, since he would not want to say that otherwise.
(66): the central problem of the article is that he compares christianity's best-foot forward, to islam's worst-foot forward, in essence. why not reverse the situation, compare shariati (or somebody else, for goodness' sake) to ratzinger, or something? would we still be screeching about 'elective affinities', then? the notion that the 'fundamentalist' affinity of the two traditions in his model (muntzer and islamic 'fundamentalism' writ large) can tell us anything, at all, and that the notion of stripping away accumulated superfluity is unique to these two, is nonsense of the highest order.
(66): "by no stretch of the imagination..." he wants to argue, could islamic fundamentalists want to return us to a society where class differences no longer exist. fine, but islamic fundamentalists do not, at all, monopolize the islamist tradition; you could very easily imagine many islamic thinkers that would mobilize islam to make that case. what's more, if you asked ratzinger to go to the basics, you think that would give us communism? this is just so nonsensical.
in sum, really: the idea that his notion of 'elective affinity' has any analytical purchase seems a classic example of assuming that ideologies can do work outside of material context and practice. it is categorically not marxist.
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