Re: [Marxism] Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion by V.I. Lenin

[Einde O'Callaghan <einde@xxxxxx>]

Leon Trotsky wrote:
> Thanks to all that have tried to inform me but even
> after reading this I'm still a little confused.  Seems
> to be full of contradiction but the general message
> appears to be closer to my viewpoint.
>
>
> Carl
>
> ****************************************
>
>
> The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion
> by V.I. Lenin
> Written: May 13 (28), 1909
> Source: Lenin Collected Works, Volume 15, pp. 402-413
>
> http://www.ex.ac.uk/Projects/meia/Lenin/Archive/1909-Atti.htm
>
> These tactics have by now become a matter of routine;
> they have managed to give rise to a new distortion of
> Marxism in the opposite direction, in the direction of
> opportunism. This point in the Erfurt Programme has
> come to be interpreted as meaning that we
> Social-Democrats, our Party, consider religion to be a
> private matter, that religion is a private matter for
> us as Social-Democrats, for us as a party. Without
> entering into a direct controversy with this
> opportunist view, Engels in the nineties deemed it
> necessary to oppose it resolutely in a positive, and
> not a polemical form. To wit: Engels did this in the
> form of a statement, which he deliberately underlined,
> that Social-Democrats regard religion as a private
> matter in relation to the state, but not in relation
> to themselves, not in relation to Marxism, and not in
> relation to the workers' party.
>
> Such is the external history of the utterances of Marx
> and Engels on the question of religion. To people with
> a slapdash attitude towards Marxism, to people who
> cannot or will not think, this history is a skein of
> meaningless Marxist contradictions and waverings, a
> hodge-podge of "consistent" atheism and "sops" to
> religion, "unprincipled" wavering between a
> r-r-revolutionary war on God and a cowardly desire to
> "play up to" religious workers, a fear of scaring them
> away, etc., etc. The literature of the anarchist
> phrase-mongers contains plenty of attacks on Marxism
> in this vein.
>
> But anybody who is able to treat Marxism at all
> seriously, to ponder over its philosophical principles
> and the experience of international Social-Democracy,
> will readily see that the Marxist tactics in regard to
> religion are thoroughly consistent, and were carefully
> thought out by Marx and Engels; and that what
> dilettantes or ignoramuses regard as wavering is but a
> direct and inevitable deduction from dialectical
> materialism. It would be a profound mistake to think
> that the seeming "moderation" of Marxism in regard to
> religion is due to supposed "tactical" considerations,
> the desire "not to scare away" anybody, and so forth.
> On the contrary, in this question, too, the political
> line of Marxism is inseparably bound up with its
> philosophical principles.
>
> *************************
>
> A Marxist must be able to view the concrete situation
> as a whole, he must always be able to find the
> boundary between anarchism and opportunism (this
> boundary is relative, shifting and changeable, but it
> exists). And he must not succumb either to the
> abstract, verbal, but in reality empty "revolutionism"
> of the anarchist, or to the philistinism and
> opportunism of the petty bourgeois or liberal
> intellectual, who boggles at the struggle against
> religion, forgets that this is his duty, reconciles
> himself to belief in God, and is guided not by the
> interests of the class struggle but by the petty and
> mean consideration of offending nobody, repelling
> nobody and scaring nobody by the sage rule: "live and
> let live", etc., etc.
>
> *********************
>
> Let us now pass to the conditions which in the West
> gave rise to the opportunist interpretation of the
> thesis: "religion is a private matter". Of course, a
> contributing influence are those general factors which
> give rise to opportunism as a whole, like sacrificing
> the fundamental interests of the working-class
> movement for the sake of momentary advantages. The
> party of the proletariat demands that the state should
> declare religion a private matter, but does not regard
> the fight against the opium of the people, the fight
> against religious superstitions, etc., as a "private
> matter". The opportunists distort the question to mean
> that the Social-Democratic Party regards religion as a
> private matter!
>
> ***************
It might help to read a bit further in this text and not tear a feww
paragraphs out of context. Later in the same text Lenin says:

"... the question is often brought up whether a priest can be a member
of the Social-Democratic Party or not, ... It cannot be asserted once
and for all that priests cannot be members of the Social-Democratic
Party; but neither can the reverse rule be laid down. If a priest comes
to us to take part in our common political work and conscientiously
performs Party duties, without opposing the programme of the Party, he
may be allowed to join the ranks of the Social-Democrats; for the
contradiction between the spirit and principles of our programme and the
religious convictions of the priest would in such circumstances be
something that concerned him alone, his own private contradiction; and a
political organisation cannot put its members through an examination to
see if there is no contradiction between their views and the Party
programme."

But this is simply quoting sacred texts - itself a religious exercise
(something that Lenin also takes people to task for in this document).
In this article Lenin is making a point about a particular circumstance
and not propounding a universally general principle.

A more extensive and nuanced marxist analysis of religion can be found
in Paul N. Siegel's book "The Meek and the Militant", which is
unfortunately out of print.

Einde O'Callaghan


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