Re: [Marxism] RE religion and opium

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905):

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. Our propaganda necessarily includes the 
propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific 
literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly 
forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party 
work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave 
to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the 
literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.{1}

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.

That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in 
our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit 
proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from 
associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the 
scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the 
inconsistency of various “Christians”. But that does not mean in the 
least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, 
where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow 
the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle 
to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, 
rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as 
rubbish by the very course of economic development.

full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm

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