The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion

Deputy Surkov’s speech in the Duma during the debate on the
Synod estimates, and the discussion that arose within our Duma group when
it considered the draft of this speech (both printed in this issue) have
raised a question which is of extreme importance and urgency at this
particular moment. An interest in everything connected with religion is
undoubtedly being shown today by wide circles of “society”, and has
penetrated into the ranks of intellectuals standing close to the
working-class movement, as well as into certain circles of the workers. It
is the absolute duty of Social-Democrats to make a public statement of
their attitude towards religion.

Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism,
i. e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels
repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over
the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and
of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a
materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all
religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels’s
Anti-Dühring , which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment
of the materialist and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent
materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious
philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels
reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but
in order to renovate it, to invent a new, “exalted” religion, and so
forth. Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the
corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. [1] Marxism
has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of
bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the
working class.

At the same time Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who
desired to be “more left” or “more revolutionary” than the
Social-Democrats, to introduce into the programme of the workers’ party an
explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on
religion. Commenting in 1874 on the famous manifesto of the Blanquist
fugitive Communards who were living in exile in London, Engels called their
vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated
that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in
religion and to prevent it from really dying out. Engels blamed the
Blanquists for being unable to understand that only the class struggle of
the working masses could, by comprehensively drawing the widest strata of
the proletariat into conscious and revolutionary social practice ,
really free the oppressed masses from the yoke of religion, whereas to
proclaim that war on religion was a political task of the workers’ party
was just anarchistic phrase-mongering. [2] And in 1877, too, in his
Anti-Dühring , while ruthlessly attacking the slightest
concessions made by Dühring the philosopher to idealism and religion,
Engels no less resolutely condemns Dühring’s pseudo-revolutionary idea
that religion should be prohibited in socialist society. To declare such a
war on religion, Engels says, is to “out-Bismarck Bismarck”, i. e., to
repeat the folly of Bismarck’s struggle against the clericals (the
notorious “Struggle for Culture”, Kulturkampf , i.e., the
struggle Bismarck waged in the 1870s against the German Catholic party, the
“Centre” party, by means of a police persecution of Catholicism). By this
struggle Bismarck only stimulated the militant clericalism of the
Catholics, and only injured the work of real culture, because he gave
prominence to religious divisions rather than political divisions, and
diverted the attention of some sections of the working class and of the
other democratic elements away from the urgent tasks of the class and
revolutionary struggle to the most superficial and false bourgeois
anti-clericalism. Accusing the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of
wanting to repeat Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have
the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the
proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw
itself into the gamble of a political war on religion. [3] This view has become part of the very essence of German
Social-Democracy, which, for example, advocated freedom for the Jesuits,
their admission into Germany, and the complete abandonment of police
methods of combating any particular religion. “Religion is a private
matter”: this celebrated point in the Erfurt Programme (1891) summed up
these political tactics of Social-Democracy.

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. [4]

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.

Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to
religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists
or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical
materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and
Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of
history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat
religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of
Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the
ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat
religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and
religion among the masses in a materialist way . The combating of
religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must
not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete
practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots
of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of
the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the
mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the
bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so:
“Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist
views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it
is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not
explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a
materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these
roots are mainly social . The deepest root of religion today is the
socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of
the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts
upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most
savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by
extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the
gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be
foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the
life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does
inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction,
pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root
of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and
foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No
educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are
crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind
destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to
fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in
all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.

Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or
unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social-Democracy’s
atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task—the
development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against
the exploiters.

This proposition may not be understood (or at least not immediately
understood) by one who has not pondered over the principles of dialectical
materialism, i. e., the philosophy of Marx and Engels. How is that?—he
will say. Is ideological propaganda, the preaching of definite ideas, the
struggle against that enemy of culture and progress which has persisted
for thousands of years (i. e., religion) to be subordinated to the class
struggle, i. e., the struggle for definite practical aims in the economic
and political field?

This is one of those current objections to Marxism which testify to a
complete misunderstanding of Marxian dialectics. The contradiction which
perplexes these objectors is a real contradiction in real life, i. e., a
dialectical contradiction, and not a verbal or invented one. To draw a
hard-and-fast line between the theoretical propaganda of atheism, i. e., the destruction
of religious beliefs among certain sections of the proletariat, and the
success, the progress and the conditions of the class struggle of these
sections, is to reason undialectically, to transform a shifting and
relative boundary into an absolute boundary; it is forcibly to disconnect
what is indissolubly connected in real life. Let us take an example. The
proletariat in a particular region and in a particular industry is divided,
let us assume, into an advanced section of fairly class-conscious
Social-Democrats, who are of course atheists, and rather backward workers
who are still connected with the countryside and with the peasantry, and
who believe in God, go to church, or are even under the direct influence of
the local priest—who, let us suppose, is organising a Christian labour
union. Let us assume furthermore that the economic struggle in this
locality has resulted in a strike. It is the duty of a Marxist to place the
success of the strike movement above everything else, vigorously to
counteract the division of the workers in this struggle into atheists and
Christians, vigorously to oppose any such division. Atheist propaganda in
such circumstances may be both unnecessary and harmful—not from the
philistine fear of scaring away the backward sections, of losing a seat in
the elections, and so on, but out of consideration for the real progress of
the class struggle, which in the conditions of modern capitalist society
will convert Christian workers to Social-Democracy and to atheism a hundred
times better than bald atheist propaganda. To preach atheism at such a
moment and in such circumstances would only be playing into the hands of the priest and the priests, who desire nothing better than
that the division of the workers according to their participation in the
strike movement should be replaced by their division according to their
belief in God. An anarchist who preached war against God at all costs would
in effect be helping the priests and the bourgeoisie (as the anarchists
always do help the bourgeoisie in practice ). A Marxist must be a
materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist,
i. e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way,
not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching,
but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and
better than anything else could. 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.

It is from this angle that all side issues bearing on the attitude of
Social-Democrats to religion should be dealt with. For example, the question
is often brought up whether a priest can be a member of the
Social-Democratic Party or not, and this question is usually answered in an
unqualified affirmative, the experience of the European Social-Democratic
parties being cited as evidence. But this experience was the result, not
only of the application of the Marxist doctrine to the workers’ movement,
but also of the special historical conditions in Western Europe which are
absent in Russia (we will say more about these conditions later), so that
an unqualified affirmative answer in this case is incorrect. 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, of course, such a case might be a rare exception even in
Western

Europe, while in Russia it is altogether improbable. And if, for example, a
priest joined the Social-Democratic Party and made it his chief and almost
sole work actively to propagate religious views in the Party, it would
unquestionably have to expel him from its ranks. We must not only admit
workers who preserve their belief in God into the Social-Democratic Party,
but must deliberately set out to recruit them; we are absolutely opposed to
giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions, but we recruit
them in order to educate them in the spirit of our programme, and not in
order to permit an active struggle against it. We allow freedom of opinion
within the Party, but to certain limits, determined by freedom of
grouping; we are not obliged to go hand in hand with active preachers of
views that are repudiated by the majority of the Party.

Another example. Should members of the Social-Democratic Party be
censured all alike under all circumstances for declaring “socialism is my
religion”, and for advocating views in keeping with this declaration? No!
The deviation from Marxism (and consequently from socialism) is here
indisputable; but the significance of the deviation, its relative
importance, so to speak, may vary with circumstances. It is one thing when
an agitator or a person addressing the workers speaks in this way in order
to make himself better understood, as an introduction to his subject, in
order to present his views more vividly in terms to which the backward
masses are most accustomed. It is another thing when a writer begins to
preach “god-building”, or god-building socialism (in the spirit, for
example, of our Lunacharsky and Co.). While in the first case censure would
be mere carping, or even inappropriate restriction of the freedom of the
agitator, of his freedom in choosing “pedagogical” methods, in the second
case party censure is necessary and essential. For some the statement
“socialism is a religion” is a form of transition from religion to
socialism; for others, it is a form of transition from socialism
to religion.

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!

But in addition to the usual opportunist distortion (which was not made
clear at all in the discussion within our Duma group when it was
considering the speech on religion), there are special historical
conditions which have given rise to the present-day, and, if one may so
express it, excessive, indifference on the part of the European
Social-Democrats to the question of religion. These conditions are of a
twofold nature. First, the task of combating religion is historically the
task of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and in the West this task was to a
large extent performed (or tackled) by bourgeois democracy, in the epoch of
its revolutions or its assaults upon feudalism and medievalism. Both in France and in Germany there is a tradition of
bourgeois war on religion, and it began long before socialism (the
Encyclopaedists, Feuerbach). In Russia, because of the conditions of our
bourgeois-democratic revolution, this task too falls almost entirely on the
shoulders of the working class. Petty-bourgeois (Narodnik) democracy in our
country has not done too much in this respect (as the new-fledged
Black-Hundred Cadets, or Cadet Black Hundreds, of

Vekhi [5] think), but rather too little , in comparison
with what has been done in Europe.

On the other hand, the tradition of bourgeois war on religion has given
rise in Europe to a specifically bourgeois distortion of this war
by anarchism—which, as the Marxists have long explained time and again,
takes its stand on the bourgeois world-outlook, in spite of all the
“fury” of its attacks on the bourgeoisie. The anarchists and
Blanquists in the Latin countries, Most (who, incidentally, was a pupil of
Dühring) and his ilk in Germany, the anarchists in Austria in the
eighties, all carried revolutionary phrase-mongering in the struggle
against religion to a nec plus ultra . It is not surprising that,
compared with the anarchists, the European Social-Democrats now go to the other extreme . This is
quite understandable and to a certain extent legitimate, but it would be
wrong for us Russian Social-Democrats to forget the special historical
conditions of the West.

Secondly, in the West, after the national bourgeois revolutions were over, after more or less complete religious
liberty had been introduced, the problem of the democratic struggle against
religion had been pushed, historically, so far into the background by the
struggle of bourgeois democracy against socialism that the bourgeois
governments deliberately tried to draw the attention of the masses
away from socialism by organising a quasi-liberal “offensive” against
clericalism. Such was the character of the Kulturkampf in Germany
and of the struggle of the bourgeois republicans against clericalism in
France. Bourgeois anti-clericalism, as a means of drawing the attention of
the working-class masses away from socialism—this is what preceded the
spread of the modern spirit of “indifference” to the struggle against
religion among the Social-Democrats in the West. And this again is quite
understandable and legitimate, because Social-Democrats had to counteract
bourgeois and Bismarckian anti-clericalism by subordinating the
struggle against religion to the struggle for socialism.

In Russia conditions are quite different. The proletariat is the leader
of our bourgeois-democratic revolution. Its party must be the ideological
leader in the struggle against all attributes of medievalism, including the
old official religion and every attempt to refurbish it or make out a new
or different case for it, etc. Therefore, while Engels was comparatively
mild in correcting the opportunism of the German Social-Democrats who were
substituting, for the demand of the workers’ party that the state
should declare religion a private matter, the declaration that
religion is a private matter for the Social-Democrats themselves, and for
the Social-Democratic Party, it is clear that the importation of this
German distortion by the Russian opportunists would have merited a rebuke a
hundred times more severe by Engels.

By declaring from the Duma rostrum that religion is the opium of the
people, our Duma group acted quite correctly, and thus created a precedent which should serve as a basis for all
utterances by Russian Social-Democrats on the question of religion. Should
they have gone further and developed the atheist argument in greater
detail? We think not. This might have brought the risk of the political
party of the proletariat exaggerating the struggle against religion; it
might have resulted in obliterating the distinction between the bourgeois
and the socialist struggle against religion. The first duty of the
Social-Democratic group in the Black-Hundred Duma has been discharged with
honour.

The second duty—and perhaps the most important for
Social-Democrats—namely, to explain the class role of the church and the
clergy in supporting the Black-Hundred government and the bourgeoisie in
its fight against the working class, has also been discharged with
honour. Of course, very much more might be said on this subject, and the
Social-Democrats in their future utterances will know how to amplify
Comrade Surkov’s speech; but still his speech was excellent, and its
circulation by all Party organisations is the direct duty of our Party.

The third duty was to explain in full detail the correct
meaning of the proposition, so often distorted by the German opportunists,
that “religion is a private matter”. This, unfortunately, Comrade Surkov
did not do. It is all the more regrettable because in the earlier activity
of the Duma group a mistake had been committed on this question by Comrade
Belousov, and was pointed out at the time by Proletary . The
discussion in the Duma group shows that the dispute about atheism has
screened from it the question of the proper interpretation of the
celebrated demand that religion should be proclaimed a private matter. We
shall not blame Comrade Surkov alone for this error of the entire Duma
group. More, we shall frankly admit that the whole Party is at fault here,
for not having sufficiently elucidated this question and not having
sufficiently prepared the minds of Social-Democrats to understand Engels’s
remark levelled against the German opportunists. The discussion in the Duma
group proves that there was in fact a confused understanding of the
question, and not at all any desire to ignore the teachings of Marx; and we
are sure that the error will be corrected in future utterances of the
group.

We repeat that on the whole Comrade Surkov’s speech was excellent, and
should be circulated by all the organisations. In its discussion of this
speech the Duma group demonstrated that it is fulfilling its
Social-Democratic duty conscientiously. It remains to express the wish that
reports on discussions within the Duma group should appear more often in
the Party press so as to bring the group and the Party closer together, to
acquaint the Party with the difficult work being done within the group, and
to establish ideological unity in the work of the Party and the Duma group.

---
Notes:
[1]

See K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right . Introduction. (K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion , Moscow, 1957, p. 42.)

[2]

See F. Engels, “Flüchtlings-Literatur. II. Das Programme der
Blanquisten”.

[3]

See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring , Moscow, 1959, pp. 434-37.

[4]

This refers to F. Engels’s preface to K. Marx’s pamphlet
The Civil War in France (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works , Vol. 1, Moscow, 1958, p. 479).

[5]
Vekhi ( Landmarks) —a Cadet collection of articles by
N. Berdayev, S. Bulgakov, P. Struve, M. Herschensohn and other
representatives of the counter-revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie, published
in Moscow in 1909. In their articles on the Russian intelligentsia these
writers tried to discredit the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the
best representatives of the Russian people, including Belinsky and
Chernyshevsky; they vilified the revolutionary movement of 1905 and thanked
the tsarist government for having, "with its bayonets and jails”, saved
the bourgeoisie from “the popular wrath”. The writers called upon the
intelligentsia to serve the autocracy. Lenin compared the programme of the
Vekhi symposium in point of both philosophy and journalism with
that of the Black-Hundred newspaper Moskovskiye Vedomosti , calling
the symposium “ an encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy” , “nothing
but a flood of reactionary mud poured on democracy”.