...*** On the question of God, the divine, and everything related to it, you end up with a contradiction - precisely the one, I believe, that I pointed out in our conversations during
our last meeting in Capri: You have broken (or as if broken) with the "Vperyodists," without noticing the ideological foundations of "Vperyodism."

So it is now. You are "annoyed," you "cannot understand how the word 'for a while' slipped in" - so you

* See this volume, pp. 226-229. Ed.

** This letter is an addendum to an unidentified article. Ed.

*** The beginning of the letter has not been found. Ed.

write, - and at the same time, you defend the idea of God and god-building.

"God is a complex of ideas developed by the tribe, nation, and humanity, which awaken and organize social feelings, aiming to connect the individual with society, to curb zoological individualism."

This theory is clearly linked to the theories of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky.

And it is - clearly incorrect and clearly reactionary. Like Christian socialists
(the worst kind of "socialism" and its worst perversion), you use a method that (despite your best intentions) repeats the trickery of clericalism: from
the idea of God, what is historically and practically in it (filth, prejudices, sanctification of darkness and oppression, on the one hand, serfdom and monarchy, on the other) is removed, and instead of historical and practical reality, a kind-hearted petty-bourgeois phrase (God = "ideas that awaken and organize social feelings") is inserted into the idea of God.

You want to say something "good and fine," to point out "truth-justice" and
the like. But this good intention remains your personal possession, a subjective "innocent wish." Once you wrote it down, it went into the masses, and its
meaning is determined not by your good wish, but by the relationship of social forces, the objective relationship of classes. Due to this relationship, it turns out
(contrary to your will and independent of your consciousness), that you have sweetened the idea of the clergy, Purishkevich, Nicholas II, and Messrs. Struve, because in practice, the idea of God helps them keep the people in slavery.
By beautifying the idea of God, you have beautified the chains with which they bind the dark workers and peasants. Here - the priests
and Co. will say - what a good and profound idea (the idea of God), even "yours,"
Messrs. democrats, leaders, recognize - and we (priests and Co.) serve this idea.

It is incorrect that God is a complex of ideas that awaken and organize social feelings.

This is Bogdanov's idealism, obscuring the material origin of ideas. God is (historically
and practically) first and foremost a complex of ideas born of the dull oppression of man by nature and class oppression, - ideas that reinforce this oppression, lulling class struggle. There was a time in history when, despite such
origin and such actual significance of the idea of God, the struggle of democracy and the proletariat took the form of the struggle of one religious idea against another.

But that time has long passed.

Now, both in Europe and in Russia, any, even the most refined, most well-intentioned
defense or justification of the idea of God is a justification of reaction.

Your entire definition is thoroughly reactionary and bourgeois. God = a complex of ideas that "awaken and organize social feelings, aiming to connect the individual with society, to curb zoological individualism."

Why is this reactionary? Because it glosses over the priestly-serfdom idea of "curbing" zoology. In reality, "zoological individualism" was not curbed by the idea of God; it was curbed by the primitive herd and the primitive commune. The idea of God always dulled and numbed "social feelings," replacing the living with the dead, always being the idea of slavery (the worst, hopeless slavery). Never did the idea of God "connect the individual with society," but always connected the oppressed classes with faith in the divinity of the oppressors.

Your definition is bourgeois (and unscientific, unhistorical), because it operates with general, blanket, "Robinson Crusoe" concepts - rather than specific classes of a specific historical era.

One thing is the idea of God for a Zyryan savage and the like (a semi-savage too), another - for Struve and Co. In both cases, this idea is supported by class domination (and this idea supports it). The "popular" concept of God and the divine is "popular" stupidity, oppression, darkness, exactly the same as the "popular notion" of the tsar,
of the leshy, of dragging women by

To S. G. SHAUMYAN. DECEMBER 6, 1913 their hair. How can you call the "popular notion" of God "democratic," I absolutely do not understand.

That philosophical idealism "always has in mind only the interests of the individual," is incorrect. Did Descartes, compared to Gassendi, have more in mind the interests of the individual? Or Fichte and Hegel against Feuerbach?

That "god-building is a process of further development and accumulation of social principles in the individual and in society," is simply terrible!! If there were freedom in Russia, the entire bourgeoisie would raise you on a shield for such things, for this sociology and theology of a purely bourgeois type and character.

Well, enough for now - and the letter has already become too long. Once again, I firmly shake your hand and wish you good health.

Yours, V. I.