When Marx deemed religion the “opium of the people”, his critical successors laid too much importance on his narcotic metaphor and not enough on the preposition holding this definition together. Marx did not call religion the opium “for” the people or “at” the people; he defined it as something “of” them, therefore not an unnatural force separate from them but something naturally arising out of “the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering” (Marx).
This distinction between religion as a natural or unnatural force in relation to humankind holds paramount importance because many Marxists treat religion as an external foe opposed to the people in all its appearances. Even Marx, Engels, and Lenin—among other prestigious figures of scientific socialism—while not advocates of religion’s unnaturalness, sometimes failed to fully bring their beliefs about religion to dialectic conclusions because they myopically portrayed the development of popular sentiment towards religion as one trending from straight from religion to irreligion.
I am not, in this exploration, attempting to profane the goal of socialist atheism. The opposite is more the case. Through a greater understanding of the historic trajectory of religion and its internal dialogue, I want to strengthen the foundations of modern atheism as a humanist ideology opposed to the cynical, anti-masses atheism birthed by fascist ideologues like Friedrich Nietzsche.
This exploration will hopefully allow Marxist-Leninists, Kimilsungist-Kimjongilists, and all other scientific socialists to attain an understanding that allows them to approach the seeming exceptions of our 21st century with greater nuance and therefore empathy and clarity. This will take us closer to acquiring a scientific socialist understanding of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the liberation theology found throughout socialist nations in Latin America.
To resolve these contradictions, we must expose what exactly they are. The issue that can be seen repeatedly in Western left discourse on religion is easiest to understand when put in comparison with the Western left’s frequent cries of “Neither Washington, Nor Moscow, Nor Beijing!” What stereotypical virtue-signaling can be seen in this attempt to reduce all “imperialisms” to the same quality! As with “centrism”, this fence-sitting—this false belief in symmetry—only favors the status quo of US hegemony.
In the religious sphere, we see the same tendency towards false symmetry. Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are wrenched down to a faulty equivalency, wherein they can be swapped out to substitute for each other in a given situation, taken as different expressions of the same formula. While this notion is parallel to a positive and courageous attempt to promote the equal validity of religious belief, we cannot take that equality of personal belief as a justification to flatten out the incredibly distinct modes and objects of worship in these religions and their respective establishments.
These different modes and objects have real meaning outside of the personal fulfillment that religion brings to its adherents. Scientific socialists cannot excuse themselves to think otherwise. Any assertion that religion either does not develop or does not develop in a way that is enmeshed in the reality of class conflict is simply absurd and undialectical on its face. Religions flow and ebb just as social classes flow and ebb, some growing until their changes burst forth as an assertion on both religious and secular society, others vegetating and receding, and still more remaining as a potent force only by adapting to their ever-changing realities.
How could it be any other way? And more importantly, in returning to the subject of the fallacy of religious symmetry, how could these religions not develop in a profoundly asymmetrical and pluripotent way? Just as capitalism develops unevenly even in its attempts to impose itself as a ubiquitous system, there is simply no dialectic argument that can sustain the belief that religions develop evenly or with no essential, selective differences.
Without accepting this, and without expanding on the assumption that religious history has trended towards disbelief, it becomes impossible to rationally explain certain obvious trends in religion’s development. Anyone familiar with basic world history can point to the fact that polytheistic pagan religions across the worlds have been confronted and absorbed or at least irrevocably altered by the spread of monotheism.
To examine why that has been the case though, as scientific socialists we cannot simply ascribe the prevalence of one tendency over the other to chance. Yes, we can point to the military expansion of Christian and Islamic kingdoms as conditions for the spread of their religious doctrines, but this does not explain why these traditions have remained in place, why their practitioners felt a need to expand, or why they annihilated rather than annexed (as the Romans did) the gods of their polytheistic adversaries.
To resolve these contradictions, we must reach into the doctrines of religion, examine their commonalities, see how they reacted to each other, and most importantly, remember that history is—as the Juche idea clarifies—both a product of class conflict and the undercurrent force of the popular masses’ conscious activity. Thankfully, Marxism-Leninism has already received an invaluable critique from Ali Shariati, one of the main theoreticians behind Revolutionary Shi’ism, the ideology of the Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Shariati’s writing, while approaching the subject from an Islamist opposition to Marxism, is nonetheless invaluable because it does not regurgitate or outright reject Marx but responds to his conclusions, as should be unsurprising from a man who translated Frantz Fanon’s work into Farsi. To Marx, Shariati posits what we have been building towards, that religious development is not a simply a history of conflict between belief and disbelief, but a conflict between modes of belief:
“Thus, throughout history, whether it be the history of the Abrahamic religions or the religions of the East or the West—in whatever form it takes—wherever a prophet or a religious revolution appeared in the name of religion, it was first manifested in spite of and in opposition to the existing religion of its own age and secondly, the first group or force which arose against this religion, stood against it, persevered and brought about a struggle, was religion.” (Shariati 22)
Shariati throws back the one-sided approach of embryonic atheism and asks us to consider what we know intuitively: that no religion arose against a backdrop of atheism. Each arose rather, as a new mode of thought amid an existing mode, an existing religion.
Buddhism and Jainism arose out of Hinduism. Judaism arose out of a polytheistic environment, Christianity arose out of Judaism, and Islam arose out of a polytheistic environment by building on Judaism and Christianity. Even Hinduism, largely regarded as the oldest religion, cannot be said to have arisen out of atheistic disbelief but rather out of the historical Vedic religion. And all these processes cannot be said to have abruptly ended; they are continuously developing through the existing religious framework and encounters with external frameworks.
Shariati understood this, but more than that, he identifies these religious developments as revolutions, and his meaning should not be arbitrarily constricted to mean revolutions only within the religious sphere. Religion inherently bleeds into all other spheres of life. As Ayatollah Khomeini asked, “Were religion and politics separate in the time of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him)?” (Khomeini 38). The same question can be repeated ad nauseum. Were religion and politics separate in the time of Jesus Christ? Where religion and politics separate in the time of Siddhartha Gautama? The answer to each of these questions remains “Of course not!” regardless of the subject, because despite their distinct conditions, each represented a religious break that could not help being entrenched in the political conditions which gave rise to them.
The foundational story of Jesus Christ would not have occurred and could not have given rise to Christianity were it not for the Roman occupation of Palestine. The Gospel narratives of his life likewise could not have upfolded as they did if not for the subsequent sacking of Jerusalem’s temple by Rome after a squashed Jewish rebellion. The politics of provincial Judea are irrevocably enmeshed in the foundational text of Christianity and its origins as a movement.
Can any religion claim that this is not the case? Politics are the story of societal change, and societal change cannot be said to occur outside of religious change. Even when there is no singular figure or event that gave rise to a religion, as in Hinduism, the religion is undoubtedly the result of social developments, in Hinduism’s case the meeting and synthesis of Aryan and Dravidian traditions.
The social motivations of religion remain political, whether sparked by one fiery moment in history or driven by a long smolder of material conditions. The problem we are left with, having accepted this, is what trend can we observe over the course of history? Especially given that—as scientific socialists—we understand history to be one of successive trends progressing (in broad strokes) from slave economy to feudalism to capitalism to socialism.
Shariati understands this problem by identifying the inter-religious, political conflicts that give rise to religious development as a conflict between religious liberation and religious legitimation. In other words, the religion of radical prophets and the religion of reactionary guardians:
“Thus, prophets bring an evolutionary, unified religious movement, based upon the needs and sufferings of their society from the beginning of the history of humanity. They stood against the religion, the guardians of religion and the existing religious beliefs of society. And the forces which always stood against these prophets, interfered with the spread of the religious movement which we believe in and put all of their efforts into destroying or deviating it were the forces of kufr [opposing religions], not non-religion.” (Shariati 45)
Thus, Shariati differentiates between the religious movements of radical thinkers and the religious establishment of the entrenched superstructure.
We see Jesus Christ struggling not only against the foreign occupation of Rome, but principally against the temple authorities of his time, against the entrenched religion that legitimated Roman occupation and the enrichment of landowners and priests: “So Jesus went into the Temple and drove out all who were buying and selling in the temple area. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the stools of those who sold pigeons. And he said to them, ‘It is written; My house shall be called a house of prayer. But you have turned it into a den of thieves’” (Mat. 21:12-3) Jesus’s attack on temple authority finds an easy parallel in the Prophet Muhammad’s destruction of the idols at the Kaaba in that both were not only the establishment of a new theology, but also an attack on the existing political order.
Scientific socialism is by no means devoid of thinkers who acknowledge this. From Thomas Sankara to Hugo Chávez, many socialists have found inspiration in the revolutionary examples of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, while Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh made similar use of Confucian principles. When modern socialists smarmily remark to religious people that Jesus Christ was a socialist, they focus on his egalitarian principles rather than the fact that his religion was fundamentally opposed to the existing social structure of his time.
Focusing on this radicalism offers a superior method of understanding the law behind religion’s development: a development which shows a continual confrontation between revolutionary and reactionary religious forces. As Shariati defines revolutionary religion:
“A revolutionary religion gives an individual, that is, an individual who believes in it, who is trained in the school of thought or maktab of this religion, the ability to criticize life in all its material, spiritual and social aspects. It gives the mission and duty to destroy, to change and to eliminate that which one does not accept and believes to be invalid and replace it with that which one knows and recognizes as being the truth.” (31)
Religion in this sense is not an excuse to take the world as it is but a reason to change it to suit the ideal forged in one’s religious beliefs. There is a dialectic at work here, one born out of the contradictions between the beliefs espoused by the religion of legitimation and the actual conditions of the people. These contradictions find their expression in reform, prophets, and the revolutionary establishment of new theologies.
The religion of legitimation has infinite appearances and utility, but Shariati identifies it, pins it under his heel, by pointing to its goals: “That is, in the name of religion, people are made to believe, ‘The situation which you have or which your society has is a situation which you and your society must have because this is the manifestation of God's Will. It is destiny and fate’” (Shariati 32). How different is this definition from how Marx defines religion in general?
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.” (Marx)
What Marx sees as the struggle against religion is identical in function to what Shariati sees in the struggle against the religion of legitimation, and both identify a need to struggle against this religion with the foremost need to improve society itself.
This similarity is why Shariati, a Muslim, partly affirms Marx’s labeling of religion as the opium of the people:
“It was the religion of the rich aristocrats which was the opium of society. In what form? In the form when it said, "You have no responsibility because whatever happens is the Will of God. Do not suffer from your abasement because in another place you will be rewarded. Don't breathe a word about the contradictions which exist. You will be given ten times over in another world later on." In this way, they prevented the objection, criticism and the inner choice or selection of an individual.” (Shariati 52)
Shariati upholds Marx even to the point of saying that his conclusion was correct for the European conditions he operated under: “It [Marx’s conclusion] rests upon experience and is an accurate scholarly conclusion based upon realities existing in history, in human societies and in the life of the human being” (Shariati 22). He departs from Marx only in that he views his conclusion as an incorrect generalization: “This correct judgment of theirs which conforms to half of the realities was automatically made into a generalization to include all of the realities, i.e. even the other contradictory half, that is, the contradictory line to this religion and the mistake lies here” (Shariati 23). But what does Shariati attribute to the departure between him and Marx?
We see clearly in his writing that their difference—and the one I wish to bring in line with scientific socialism—relates to an understanding of history: “But they have not understood religion because they do not know religion or history. Whoever studies history will see that, throughout history, the work of religion has been just this - to preserve the religion of multitheism, either through assuming the name of monotheism or directly in the name of multitheism” (Shariati 38). While we must interrogate Shariati’s accusation that Marx did not understand history, it is true that Marx and Lenin most often explored religion through its external opposition to atheism rather than through its internal dialectic. Shariati goes beyond an imprecise criticism of religion’s opposing tendencies by drawing a developmental distinction between monotheism and “multitheism”.
Throughout Shariati’s work, he shows an unsurprising preference for monotheism, but he gives explanation and substance to his understanding of monotheism as a theology which lends itself better to revolutionary religion:
“That is, when monotheism announces that all of creation is one empire, in the hands of one Power and that all human beings are one Source, are guided through one Will, arc oriented towards one way, are made of one type, have One God, and that all powers, symbols, manifestations, values and signs must be destroyed before Him, when a person like myself, who believes in monotheism, looks at the world, I automatically see this world as having a total, living form.” (Shariati 26)
Shariati posits monotheism as a force for unity above all else and sees the promotion of inequality as untenable under this assumption. As Shariati notes in his second to last quote, the religion of legitimation can survive under the guise of monotheism, but this coexistence creates growing contradictions between the unity necessitated by a god who encapsulates every aspect of existence and the class or racial divides they exist under.
Proof of this contradiction can be found in the logic of atheists like Nietzsche who oppose religion precisely for its egalitarian principles:
“‘I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption. … — “Equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this pretext for the rancune of all the base-minded, this explosive concept which finally became revolution, modern idea and the principle of the decline of the entire social order — is Christian dynamite.’” (Landa)
Nietzsche’s atheism of legitimation finds its issue in Christianity’s egalitarian ideal and the threat it offers through inspiration. He sees value only in the religion of legitimation, and in doing so, inadvertently exposes the nature of the religion of revolution.
But the value of monotheism as a revolutionary tendency in religion can only be considered through the inverse, by examining the countertendency of multitheism. Shariati employs examples from the Greek pantheon, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but the common thread he identifies comes from theologies which separate their elements, assigning to separate entities the natural position of separate classes, nations, races etc: “We see that even for the gods, even for the most sacred of religious feelings and thoughts, the qualities are racial qualities, class qualities and those of family and this continuous separation by means of religion is legitimated because the people of that situation were not based in philosophy” (52). The impact of these separations can be best observed by remembering that in the case of Greek paganism and throughout early polytheistic religions, people did not regularly worship the full pantheon, but chose its aspects as necessary for their community and social classes.
The slaver “democracy” of Athens paid tribute to the civilizer Athena instead of the barbaric Poseidon, while rebellion against the gods found its answer in a Prometheus chained into internal torment. Within these multitheistic religions, underclasses found their own representation in thieves like Hermes and the mystery cults of Demeter, but the constraints of a pantheon that legitimated separation and class rigidity still existed. The dialectic of religious development sees contradictions form between theology and society, meaning that eventually qualitative changes must burst forth through revolution in both.
One of the principal contradictions that religious development must address comes from how multitheistic and monotheistic religions tend to situate the abstract hierarchy of people, the divine, and nature. Multitheism situates its gods above and mediating a hostile natural world opposed to humanity. Zeus is the god of thunder, Poseidon the god of earthquakes. Demeter mediated the harvest and Hapi mediated the flooding of the Nile. The pantheons of polytheism tame or embody the natural elements that humans are subjected to, so offerings to them bring forth a larger harvest, a safer journey, a military victory.
We can explain this association between nature and the gods through the conditions of early humankind, as Engels does: “Now, religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of the external forces which dominate their everyday existence, a reflection in which earthly forces take the form of the super-natural. In the beginning of history, it is the forces of nature which first produce this reflection and in the course of development of different peoples give rise to manifold and various personification” (Engels 210). Here we see Engels alluding to the fact that the hierarchy of humans, nature, and the divine proceeds from the relationship of humans to their material conditions, or in his words “external forces”. As the means of production develop and reduce humankind’s subservience to nature, so too does the godlike authority of nature lessen.
Compare this to the dynamic in monotheism. While the function of prayer retains many parallels, the practicality of bargaining loses out over an impulse to give thanks for what has already been given to humankind. In Genesis, the Earth and nature are created as subjects under humankind, and only forces like Leviathan remain as monsters able to be tamed only by God. In the Qur’an, even the angels are told to kneel before Adam, resulting in the prideful fall of Iblis. In the monotheistic paradigm, nature falls lower than humans while they remain below—but ever closer to—God, simultaneously closing the gap between humans and the ideal of equality found in the notion of an all-encompassing God.
Engels again demonstrates that this change is deeply rooted in the dialectic process as fulfilled by religion: “By a still further development the natural and social attributes of a number of gods were transformed to one all-powerful god, who is, on his part, only the reflection of man in the abstract” (Engels 210). He clearly identifies the combination of gods into one supreme author with the emergence of class conflict as a more relevant external force to the average human than the force of nature:
“We have seen over and over again in modern bourgeois society that man is dominated by the conditions which he has himself created and that he is controlled by the same means of production which he himself has made. The fundamental facts which give rise to the reflection by religion therefore still persist and with them the reflection persists also.” (Engels 211)
Engels points to not only the fact that religion cannot fade so long as suffering’s material prerequisites persist but also shows that the hierarchy between humanity, nature, and the divine shifts in close proximity to the actual inversion of the hierarchy between humankind and its material fetters.
As the means of production developed in modern times, the religion of legitimation finds its role increasingly usurped by a legitimating faction of atheism which performs the same function. Both find their most fertile soil in a rhetorical hierarchy that places nature above humankind. The Social Darwinism of Nietzschean atheists finds its prototypes in the caste system of Hinduism, the predestination of Calvinism, the ideal of a chosen nation in Judaism, and all forms of reactionary social reflex that can be found in religious schools.
Formal monotheism and atheism both do not eliminate the potential to place nature above humanity, but they do reduce the existing formal gaps between humanity and its position as “sovereign” or “subject” in the universe (“subject” being, not by coincidence, the translation of the Juche idea). Therefore, leaps towards monotheism and atheism increase the contradictions between an ideology of legitimation that espouses the theoretical equality of humankind but takes their tangible existence as an eternal state of being. Out of these contradictions arise not just new religions but new sects and religious organizations that further narrow the theoretical ground that a religion of legitimation can stand on.
Marx is lightyears away from ignorance in this. His knowledge of history was not so much incorrect as in-progress and—principally—focused on the conditions of his time and area. As such, he draws a conclusion about the Reformation which falls into the process seen by Shariati, where an ostensibly monotheistic religion finds its egalitarianism expanded and actualized by the dual force of popular discontent and a prophetic figure who operates as a vanguard:
“Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.” (Marx)
Luther, in Marx’s words, reduced the separation between the people and a monotheistic god, thus bolstering the historic validity of monotheism by reducing the intermediate authorities between God and humankind. From this example it follows that the dialectic of monotheism operates within religions that have already declared themselves monotheistic.
To give an immensely abstracted version focused on the Abrahamic tradition, early Judaism claimed Yahweh as the name of the God of Israel, a national god. Early Christianity claimed God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit as the united Holy Trinity, the Godhead with dominion over all humankind, regardless of nation. Islam retained this internationalism while rejecting the notion of any intermediate divinity between God and humanity.
While it would be a mistake to ignore this progression, to ignore how Islam sets itself as a conscious improvement of monotheism with respect to Christianity, it would also be a mistake to view this process as entirely linear and uniform. As liberalism showed by proclaiming the equality of humankind in the same breath as it invigorated itself by forcing European peasants off their common lands and Africans into chains, the transition from feudalism into capitalism, while progressive in its furthering of the productive forces, nonetheless resulted in profound destruction in other areas. Similarly, in the realm of religion, we cannot declare that Protestantism is more revolutionary at any given moment than Catholicism simply because the former came into being out of a break with the latter—especially in the context of such inter-religious conflicts as the national liberation struggle of Ireland.
Catholicism has survived the Protestant reformation. Hinduism has survived confrontation with Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, and Christianity. Neither of these institutions would have survived with such enduring strength—according to a mechanical interpretation of the previously elaborated theory—due to their nature as multitheistic religions (although that multitheism is veiled in the case of Catholicism). What Hinduism and Catholicism show is a continual adaption to their confrontation with monotheism as a tendency. Even Hinduism, popularly regarded as a polytheist religion, finds a monotheistic theological notion in the Brahman, a universal truth presiding over diversity and change which contains conceptual similarities with the Tawhid of Islam despite the clear differences in their theologies.
Such adaptation pertains to both theory and institutional practice in a given religion. Antonio Gramsci chronicles this adaptation in the case of the Catholic Church:
“The fact that the Church has to face the problem of the “simple people” means precisely that a breach has occurred within the community of the “faithful”, a breach which cannot be healed by bringing the “simple people” up to the level of the intellectuals (the Church does not even set itself this task, which is ideally and economically too great for its actual forces), but by an iron discipline over the intellectuals so that they do not pass beyond certain limits of differentiation and do not render it catastrophic and irreparable.” (Gramsci 65)
Here we see, as Gramsci puts it, a breach between faithful masses and the intellectual core that forms the church’s institution. Unlike the Protestant promotion of laymen to priests that Marx spoke of earlier, the Catholic Church could only maintain itself through a substantial degree of that ecclesiastic separation.
Due to the breach between faithful and clergy, Gramsci recognizes the necessity for change in the Church regardless of this limit and observes the cause of its survival in past breaches: “In the past these ‘breaches’ in the community of the faithful were healed by strong mass movements which brought about, or were absorbed by, the formation of new religious orders around forceful personalities (Francis, Dominic)” (Gramsci 65-6). Gramsci identifies in different terms the undertow force of the religion of liberation, seeing multiple movements arise and drag the Church out of its crises and into reforms that perpetuate its survival by salving the contradictions between itself and its followers.
However, just as leftists today must accept that capitalism’s progression from post-WW2 welfarism to post-1970s neoliberalism does not symbolize simply a progression from ‘kinder’ to ‘crueler’ capitalism but more importantly the death knell of its capacity for productive innovation—superseded by predatory financial speculation, so too do we in this conversation need to remember that the capacity for reform does not allow any religion to infinitely persist despite the contradictions inherent between its institutional and theological identity and its followers’ material reality.
Gramsci already saw the Catholic Church’s dynamism calcifying in his own time, seeing its religious legitimation meld with political legitimation:
“The new orders which arose afterwards had very small “religious” significance but great “disciplinary” significance over the masses of the faithful. They are ramifications and tentacles of the Society of Jesus or they have become such—weapons of “resistance” for preserving the already acquire political position, not forces of renewed development. Catholicism has become “Jesuitism”. The modern age has not seen the creation of “religious orders” but of a political party, the Christian Democrats”. (66)
These conclusions and their modern parallels show clearly that the tendency of religious development contains not only currents of liberation theology that force their institutions to adapt, but also the equivalent of counter-revolutionary currents—veritable religious fascists—who attempt to wrench the crises of the religious establishment back from its instability by prioritizing its disciplinary and political unity rather than sating its theological contradictions through reform.
At this point, it’s apparent that many parallels can be drawn between the development of religious tendencies and the political development of society in general. On one hand, the primacy of community to religious life makes this unsurprising; Religion cannot escape the weight of its own nature as a social force. It has been developed by and conditioned the subsequent development of material society, so it proceeds in parallel with material society. But it cannot proceed in neat tandem with material society because humankind’s development of material society is tethered to improvement of the means of production, while the development of religious world-beliefs is tethered to the consequences of material society’s limitations and contradictions. Therefore, the religion of liberation cannot improve material society without producing or supporting a political revolution that facilitates an improvement in the means of production.
As a result, religious trends have recently developed in the asymmetrical fashion typical of capitalism, frequently spreading through military expansion, and often lag behind the productive system established in a given nation. While we have theorized that religious development trends towards monotheism, viewing that as the end of religious development is not only undialectical but also ignores the evident prominence of atheism in the vanguard nations of socialism. The appearance of atheism in their programs and the continued presence—and even growth—of monotheism in many other socialist nations cannot be ignored but rather reconciled.
Atheism must be explored through its dialectic with monotheism. Ali Shariati’s proclamation that monotheism serves as a better ground for revolutionary religion is logically sound in that monotheism in true form preaches the absolute unity of the universe and its elements through an absolute presence of God. This belief does necessitate an acceptance of equality if all things are thought of as coming from God. Class and racial differences are therefore illegitimated through this belief.
However, this belief still presupposes the will of a god over humankind; it presupposes predestination through a divine plan. While atheist legitimators may presuppose class and racial boundaries through a plan of ‘natural selection’, even the religion of liberation is limited by its belief in a divine law superseding human effort, which necessitates a belief that all the horrors and injustices of history were part of a plan tolerated if not sanctioned by God. Even some Marxists fall into a similar limit by viewing socialism as inevitability which is prophetically unfolding in a passive manner, rather than predicated on our collective human effort.
To lay out our progress once again, early multitheism found itself as gods over nature over humanity by imbuing the varied forces of nature with varied divinities. Monotheism found itself uniting those divine elements into a god positioned over humanity but subordinating nature to them. Over the course of monotheism’s development, the distance between God and humanity grew slimmer and slimmer, robbing individual human communities of special treatment by making God more ubiquitous. Therein lies the dialectic between pure monotheism and atheism. As the theoretical distance between humankind and God shrinks, the ability of legitimating religion to salve the inequality of material society shrinks and liberating religion steps forward, it seeks instead to change the material conditions to bring them further in line with the perfection of monotheism it seeks.
However, as the state, upon the disappearance of external threats and internal divides, withers away, so does God dissolve into the primacy of humankind when the material and social conditions for their separate existence above humankind disappear. Religion is, as Marx and Engels wrote, a reflection of real suffering, so if the religion of liberation succeeds in eliminating suffering, it simultaneously eliminates the condition for its own religious content to exist. Marxist atheism places humankind at the head of the hierarchy, above God as a creation of humankind and above nature as a force subordinated by the conscious activity of humanity.
In essence, we are brought to the Juche idea, where not only do we accept Marxist atheism but improve it by discarding historical materialism’s fatalistic notion of history in favor of the Juche idea’s view that organized human activity ultimately charts the uncertain course of history: “Since the beginning of human history, the masses of the people have been conquering nature and making what is necessary for their existence and development by their creative activity to change the old. Their continuous creative activity has advanced society” (Kim 26). Humanity, as the “subject” in this progression, stands increasingly above the dialectic laws of nature through its consciousness of its own conditions, its desire for independence from the fetters of those conditions, and its creativity in acting to abolish these fetters. The transition from religion to atheism—affected by the religion of liberation and its atheist successor—is part of the development of humanity’s consciousness towards the Juche idea. It is the development of understanding by the masses of their own position as masters over nature and their own society.
What does this mean for our modern political reality? Ultimately, any conclusion from our discussion of revolutionary religion, religious legitimation, and their development must be made in light of the enormous asymmetry in the world’s religions. This asymmetry has produced clear trends in the development of socialist countries. Marx’s analysis of the bankrupt, legitimating religion widespread in Europe, along with the later marriage of power between the Tsar and the Orthodox Church, molded the USSR into a state atheist power, which in its tumultuous first experiment at socialism furnished a strong example of the uncertain development of religion into irreligion when contrasted with the relative success found by the PRC.
This success can be attributed partly to the simple fact that the PRC, which enjoys a population of whom more than half identify as irreligious, survived the political wreckage of the USSR, which enjoyed similar demographics when it ended that have since relapsed into an Orthodox Christian majority. This relapse again showcases Marx and Engel’s identification of religion as a reflection of real suffering; the massive strife caused by neoliberal shock therapy in the USSR’s nations led to a resurgent reflection of the nations’ suffering. However, the continuous weaponization of religious fearmongering and extremism against the USSR (and socialist nations in general) makes the USSR’s fall insufficient as an explanation because it assumes that this political death was not contributed to by errors regarding religion which the PRC may have avoided, strengthening its resilience to these attacks.
Studying this difference would take another text, so for now it must suffice to point out that Confucian principles built an intellectual bridge between religious tendencies and secular societal construction. Furthermore, the recent rhetoric of Chinese communists, as shown by Xi Jinping, positions their acceptance of Marxism-Leninism as a long part of cultural development which includes religion rather than alienating it:
“Chinese civilization, as an inclusive and integrated whole, has become what it is today through constant interactions with other civilizations. It has been enriched by the introduction of Buddhism and the confluence of Islam and Confucianism in the old days, and by the introduction of Western learning, the launch of the New Culture Movement, and the introduction of Marxism and socialism in modern times.” (Xi 546-7)
This kind of attitude should be adopted by all scientific socialists, accepting religious thought as part of humanity’s development rather than a purely opposing force of superstition.
In both the case of the USSR and the PRC, we see that state atheism did not arise where the revolutionary element of religion was strongest, but where religious legitimation had already deprived religious institutions of a separate identity from the exploiting classes. This is only contradictory with our previous finding that absolute monotheism sublimates into Marxist atheism if we discount the asymmetrical nature of social development, thus also discounting the fact that socialism itself arose not where capitalism was at its strongest but where it was weakest and feudal class relations still lingered.
This trend is further established when we turn our attention to the secular socialist nations of Latin America. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua retain high Catholic populations despite their socialist identities and Marxist influences because the role of revolutionary religion is much stronger there. As in all the socialist nations, some degree of suffering persists from exterior pressure and the interior incompleteness of socialist construction, and for reasons which we will attempt an explanation at, the Catholic faith in these nations remained a frequent conduit for the religion of liberation, positioning religion as a historically viable and progressive ideology opposed to the persistent oppressive structures of imperialism alongside scientific socialism.
In its efforts to survive, the Catholic Church in Latin America both syncretized with certain aspects of indigenous religion and positioned itself as a mediator between the forces of colonialist barbarism and indigenous survival. Additionally, the Church’s relative proclivity for feudal relations met contradiction with a wave of liberal bourgeois class dominance in the 19th century. These factors led to the increasingly consolidated presence of a popular Catholicism within the broader Catholic Church that increasingly asserted itself against colonial domination not through hollow mediation but by forceful action.
These conditions also created a religion whose primary practice of monotheism comes not from an overwritten theology but from a direct focus on the equality of those dispossessed classes in Latin America:
“As early as 1537 there were black slave uprisings in Mexico, and in 1539 the Huaynomota and Guazamota rebelled in the North. Ruling Christendom was confronted with another model of the Church: a “popular Church” reaching beyond the Spanish republic to the country, to the poor quarters of the cities, identifying itself with the suffering, patient, bleeding Christ portrayed in the “tremendismo” art (violently bloody paintings of the popular churches of the Latin American people waiting for liberation).” (Dussel 34)
This tradition continues throughout the development of Latin America, promoting figures of popular resistance to colonial dominance out of the emerging popular religion, such as Jacinto Canek in the 18th century and Oscar Romero in the 20th.
The confluence of popular Catholicism’s characteristics and the worldwide popularity of Marxist ideas formally birthed the liberation theology of Latin America in the crucible formed by the US’s reign of coups and dictatorships: “The theology of liberation is born at the same time as a great awareness of political involvement on behalf of the oppressed. Oppressed by development, by dependent capitalism, but now by brutal and bloody dictatorships” (Dussel 44). Therefore, liberation theology in Latin America gained momentum in close step with the broad force of irreligious anti-imperialism in the region.
As a result, we should not be surprised by the relatively close relationship between the revolutionary governments of Latin America and their revolutionary religious elements; they developed in shared struggle, as the FSLN’s particularly friendly platform states clearly:
“We Sandinistas state that our experience shows that when Christians, basing themselves on their faith, are capable of responding to the needs of the people and of history, those very beliefs lead them to revolutionary activism. Our experience shows us that one can be a believer and a consistent revolutionary at the same time, and that there is no insoluble contradiction between the two.” (National Directorate of the FSLN 147)
This conclusion suggests that when the religion of liberation finds common cause with Marxist atheism against the exploiting classes and their religion of legitimation, a secular but no less socialist nation is born.
So in summary, we see that when religion has been stunted in the eyes of the people by its role in legitimating misery, state atheism may rise to the challenge, Then, when a tenable split has occurred between the rising tide of the religion of liberation and the established religion of legitimation, a secular union can occur between revolutionary religion and revolutionary ideas of an atheist origin. But what happens when the religion of liberation is at its peak? For this situation, we must turn to Iran.
For many leftists, Iran is treated either as a historic abnormality or thrown into the tent of national bourgeois states. This approach is, simply put, unscientific and therefore anti-Marxist. Something does not defy classification or warrant oversimplification simply because we do not yet have the tools to explain it properly. Such attempts by leftists, principally anarchists, Maoists, and Trotskyists, smack of the imperialists attempts to argue against communism by attributing the characteristics of capitalism to its ‘plutocratic’ and ‘authoritarian’ state structure. Iran cannot be understood by ignorantly blazing past its own assertions of an Islamic Revolution to a conclusion that is more easily understood by Western political thought.
As mentioned before, Ali Shariati and other theorists such as Morteza Motahhari forged the Revolutionary Shi’ism which shaped Iran’s overthrow of the Western-puppet shah. Shariati and his associated theorists were influenced by and reacting to the popularity of Marxist ideas, from Marx to Guevara and Fanon. Even though the Islamic Revolution took a decidedly anticommunist political stance directed primarily against the USSR’s presence in the region and its ally, Ba’athist Iraq, Iran’s development cannot be therefore slotted into the capitalist camp, who has met it with greater, sustained hostility even when Iran has made diplomatic overtures and deals to placate the West.
Simply put, if Iran can be slotted into the realm of bourgeois nationalism, how are we to explain the US’s consistent animosity to it? The US is unabashed in its support for Saudi Arabia as a regional leader and similarly has had little qualms about fomenting unrest and material support for Sunni extremist groups such as al-Nusra and ISIS. Diplomatic coordination between the US and Iran has historically occurred only when both are focused on combating a threat that has been put in place by previous or even ongoing Western support, such as the sale of weapons to Iran to ensure mutual devastation with Ba’athist Iraq, or the US and Iran’s coordination in the initial phases of the invasion of Afghanistan.
This cooperation has not led to a warming of relations between the countries but an increasing disillusionment of the Iranian government with the US’s cynicism. Furthermore, Iran’s inclusion in the ‘axis of terror’ along with the US’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA have thoroughly shattered the illusion of compatibility between the US and the IRI as much as the incompatibility of the US and the PRC has been proven over the last decade.
This breakdown cannot be rationally explained simply by highlighting the IRI’s Islamic governance and chalking things up to a US who has drunk the kool-aid of its ‘Clash of Civilizations’ rhetoric. The IRI is incompatible with the US because its economic system, if not communist in ultimate goal, is ultimately more compatible with socialism and anti-imperialism than with capitalism thanks to the coexistence of revolutionary religious thought with a strong degree of state ownership and focus on public welfare.
With methods similar to the PRC’s market socialism, the IRI retains a strong state hand even in ostensibly private industries, using a combination of Bonyads (state charities) and controlling shares to ensure that profit is redirected towards public welfare and state volunteer groups such as the Basij, which are primarily recruited from the poorest sectors of Iranian society: “[Saeid] Golkar provides no shortage of statistics which prove: the main source of Basij recruits are people who need government welfare programs which promote socio-economic equality. So it should be unsurprising that the full Farsi title of the Basij uses the term ‘oppressed’, which in Iran refers to the exploited and underprivileged classes who suffered under the aristocrats and monarchy” (Mazaheri 155-6). The Basij, as a public organization drawn from nearly if not more than a quarter of the Iranian populace, deeply define the political life of Iran as their original purpose of a paramilitary resistance group formed in opposition to the Iraqi invasion has transformed into a widespread and varied force united only in their commitment to furthering the Islamic Revolution.
Due to the Basij’s importance to Iranian political life, their defining ties with Iran’s poorest classes not only shed light on the socialist aspects of the IRI but also contribute an important context to the formation of Iran’s revolution. Where the religion of legitimation degraded its own political reputation in the USSR by supporting the Tsar, and the Latin American religions of liberation gained in reputation over the legitimating portion of the Catholic Church by opposing their local dictatorships, under the shah, Shia Islam reached the opposite pole, placing it alongside the underclasses which would later comprise the Basij:
“In the 1940s, when the shah came to power, the stereotypical cleric had been a self-serving, entrenched member of the political establishment, But by the 1960s, he was a scrawny, lice-ridden wretch—treated with contempt by city slickers in Tehran but pitied by almost everyone else. Like a mendicant friar, he relied increasingly on donations from private citizens, receiving food and handouts from pious grandmothers, Increasingly, a feeling of humility pervaded clerical work, an aura of poverty and piety that made it easy for the ulama to elicit sympathy among other Iranians.” (Ghazvinian 269).
The shah, put in power by a flagrant US organized coup, contributed to his own downfall by removing the foundations for religion to serve as a legitimating force, and by disenfranchising the clerical class, gave them political viability.
However, the success of Shia Islam in Iran’s political trajectory cannot be chalked up to circumstance but must also be explained through its inner content. In the evolving tradition of Shia Islam, the figures of Ali and his son Hussein show a valiant resistance to the perceived corruption of Islamic principles by the Umayyad caliphate, a process which Ali Shariati transposed onto modern times:
“They key to Shariati’s immense popularity among Tehran’s young intellectuals was his ability to recast Shia Islam as a progressive, dynamic revolutionary force perfectly suited to the twentieth-century struggle against social injustice and the oppression of the poor. Rather than indulge in defeatist, fatalistic displays of weeping and mourning over the martyrdom of Hussein and Ali every year, he suggested, Shia Muslims should remember that their beloved martyrs died rebelling against tyranny and follow suit.” (Ghazvinian 274).
Here we can see that Shia Islam’s strength in Iran came in large part from its ability to be refined into a modern liberation theology which did not promote a blind fundamentalism but synthesized the progressive aspects of Islam’s historic revolution in Arabic society with the advances of modern times. As Shariati suggested: “Rather than fear or reject modernization, as some clerics did, Iranians should learn to respect themselves so they could adopt Western science and technology without shame and inferiority complexes” (Ghazvinian 274). As we see Shariati’s ideology take these steps to accommodate both the Islamic political tradition and modern techniques, we must also address why a “traditional” scientific socialist solution did not arise in Iran.
In this equation, we meet two characters, the more traditional Marxist-Leninist party of the Tudeh and the terrorist group, the MKO, who eclectically combined both Shia and Marxist ideas, finding a home in neither. The reason for the MKO’s failure to achieve power can be best understood by their flagrant opportunism in supporting Saddam Hussein’s war effort against Iraq when combined with their current close cooperation with US forces in promoting regime change against the IRI. The Tudeh party has its own more complicated relationship with the IRI, but their support for Khomeini at the Revolution’s outbreak speaks volumes and has a simple explanation: “To compare the Tudeh to the communists in 1917 Russia or 1949 China is absurd—even at the height of the revolution, Tudeh had perhaps only 5,000 members. Tudeh’s main influence was informal—by influencing discussion for decades—and not in a real, grassroots, tangible, organization-driven—and thus truly revolutionary—way” (Mazaheri 15). A tiny party of intellectuals divorced from the masses, as any scientific socialist knows, cannot lead a revolution.
The clerical class won moral leadership over the Islamic Revolution because the material reality of Iran was such that they were closer with the people, and a revolutionary interpretation of Shi’ism was integral to this journey. The ubiquity of religious feeling in Iran formed a clear foundation for the religion of liberation to gain strength, but this itself begs the question of why Islam frequently maintains a greater degree of worship in West Asia than its Christian counterparts in Europe. In part, that can likely be attributed to Islam’s lasting prestige as a religion that promoted revolutionary transformations throughout the region, even as it had its own systemic cooption by various empires, just as Christianity did—despite Christianity’s first thinkers drawing from an ultimately unsuccessful Jewish national movement opposing the Romans. The strong religious belief of Muslim nations has further meant that Revolutionary Shi’ism has been far from limited to Iran, seeing varying degrees of success in Hezbollah and the Houthi movement.
When we see the results of religion’s varying popularity and its orientation towards popular demands, it is most important to draw from this investigation that we as socialists and atheists are presented with a path that is far from straightforward. Religion and nationalism may appear to some Western leftists as hypnotic obstacles to the ‘real’ issues, methods for obscuring class consciousness, but this patronizing attitude will only leave us blind to forces which take on very real importance in the social life of great swathes of the world’s population. We can neither afford to blindly accept religious beliefs as eternal traits of the people nor sneer at their appeal. Religion is not merely a source of private superstition; it is a powerful social force that has developed alongside its ability to mediate the interactions of its believers and creators, the masses, with their material conditions.
Revolutionary religion has limits, just as the fatalism of historical materialism creates limits by reducing the importance of conscious human creativity to the class struggle and overestimating the animating role of material conditions. As adherents to the Juche idea or simply as socialist atheists, we must do everything practically necessary to promote the notion that humankind—and not a divine plan or a natural order—determines the course of history, but we must simultaneously understand religion as something which makes the progression towards a humanistic atheism neither direct nor immediately desirable in many parts of the world.
As the development of productive forces is necessary to progress economically towards communism, at times an alliance with or even under revolutionary religious tendencies may be necessary for the sake of addressing the primary contradictions necessary for constructing communism, namely all struggles for national liberation. We must resolutely oppose all attempts to cynically and chauvinistically export atheism; it must be developed internally in each nation by people who prove by their actions that socialist atheists are fully committed to the betterment of the people. The revolutionary Catholicism of socialist nations in Latin America and the Revolutionary Shi’ism of Iran are our allies as scientific socialists fighting against the imperialist US.
We in the West have, in the first place, no right to tell any nation how to reach their liberation, and in the second place, we have much to learn from nations which have successfully mobilized the people based on their existing religious tendencies. We can and must promote the successes of socialist atheism in nations such as China, north Korea, and Vietnam while increasingly studying the history of cooperation between socialism and religion in our previous examples as well as in Algeria, Laos, Libya, and others. Most importantly for the pursuit of communism, we must never be tempted to position our politics as unrelated to the political history of religion.
Thomas Sankara did us a great service by situating socialism as a modern continuation of the moral tradition sparked by Jesus Christ and furthered by the Prophet Muhammad:
“In the modern times, it goes without saying that Lenin is the most revolutionary. But it’s undeniable that Muhammad was a revolutionary who turned a society upside down. Jesus was too, but his revolution remained unfinished. He ends up being abstract, while Muhammad was able to be more materialist. We received the word of Christ as a message capable of saving us from the real misery we lived in, as a philosophy of qualitative transformation of the world. But we were disappointed by the use to which it was put. When we had to look for something else, we found the class struggle.” (Sankara 280-1).
Without limiting ourselves to the Abrahamic religions, we as scientific socialists can only broaden our understanding of the class struggle by accepting the role that religion has played in past revolutions as part of our history. In doing so, the popular image of class struggle will flourish in our minds from a history that is often limited from the Paris Commune to the modern day into a theory that can confidently place our entire history in context as one shaped by the evolving beliefs and acts of the people. While acting on what Kim Il Sung declared in his motto, “The people are my god”, we must also remember that God is ours, a reflection of our collective making.
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