Click on the headline to link to the “International
Communist League” website.
<br />
<br />
Markin comment:
<br />
<br />
I place some material in this space which may be of interest
to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off
hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely
easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the
“remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that
struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the
fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. <br
/>
***************
<br />
Workers Vanguard No. 1007 |
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Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism
A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”
Part One
Correction Appended
In recent years, atheism has gained a certain currency among
liberal-minded members of the American petty bourgeoisie. Atheist and secular
humanist clubs have been formed not only on college campuses but also in small
towns in the South. Atheist activism is also found in rather unlikely social
milieus. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Sgt. Justin Griffith and a few
cothinkers have established the Military Atheists and Secular Humanists and
extended the organization to other military bases. Griffith and others objected
when in the fall of 2010 the Ft. Bragg commanders sponsored an on-base event by
the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. In response, Griffith proposed to
organize an atheist event featuring such speakers as Richard Dawkins, a British
evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion (2006), the
best-known exposition of what is called the “new atheism.”
Sgt. Griffith’s views and activities highlight a seemingly
contradictory situation. Adherents of the self-styled Christian right regard
proponents of atheism as an abomination, a dire and insidious threat to the
supposedly unique greatness of the American nation. On the other side, most
atheists and other freethinkers in the U.S. today view themselves as good
citizens and upholders of the American way of life and traditional political
system. A 20,000-strong “rally for reason” in Washington, D.C., earlier this
year was heavily promoted by Dawkins as a means to further the acceptability of
“freethinkers” in political life.
What we have here is a particular manifestation of the changed
political-ideological contours of the post-Soviet world. Since the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, atheism
is no longer so strongly identified in popular consciousness with communism or
other forms of left-wing social radicalism. The intellectual promoters of the
“new atheism,” which emerged in the mid 2000s, are and have always been hostile
to Marxism. Dawkins as well as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, two other leading
“new atheists,” are prominent exponents of “sociobiology,” a form of biological
determinism used to justify reactionary garbage such as male dominance and black
inferiority.
During the Cold War, a shared enmity toward the USSR and Communism
muted the hostility of religious-minded rightists to irreligious liberal
intellectuals. But especially over the last two decades, Christian
fundamentalists, believing that international Communism was vanquished with the
fall of the Soviet Union, have turned their fire against the secularist “enemy
within” and the entire tradition of Enlightenment humanism and scientific
rationality.
For evangelical preachers like Pat Robertson, it was no longer Karl
Marx but rather Charles Darwin who was the main inspirer of the enemies of the
“American Christian nation” (see “Hail Charles Darwin!” WV No. 854, 16
September 2005). In an essay explaining the origins of the “new atheism,” Victor
Stenger, one of its leading figures, complained about “Christian attempts to
force others to behave according to their beliefs; to set public policy based on
faith rather [than] reason; and to transform America into a theocracy” (“What’s
New About the New Atheism?” Philosophy Now, January/February 2011).
Then Came 9/11
The core canon, so to speak, of the “new atheism” consists of five
works: Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), Dennett’s Breaking the
Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2007), Christopher Hitchens’ God
Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and Stenger’s
The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009).
While the similarities among the five authors are more important than their
differences, there are differences in emphasis, that is, in their main concerns
and foils.
Dawkins, Dennett and Stenger were primarily responding to the
political ascendancy of the Christian right under the Republican administration
of George W. Bush. Reactionary religious forces received a major boost from the
“faith-based” Bush regime, whose often demented policies flowed from America’s
continued position, based on its overwhelming military strength, atop the world
order even as its economy stagnated. Dawkins & Co. were reacting in
particular to the campaign to make creationism (“intelligent design”) an
officially recognized alternative to Darwinian evolution. Their books mainly
polemicize against arguments that aspects of the natural world (the origin of
the cosmos, the origin and diversity of living organisms, human consciousness)
cannot be explained except by the existence of a transcendent supernatural
power.
The main concerns of Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens
were different. They were basically responding to the attack on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon in September 2001 by Islamic fundamentalists. Their books
would not have been written (at least in their main content) had that event not
occurred. Hitchens also edited the 2007 The Portable Atheist, which for
the most part consists of representative irreligious thinkers, beginning with
the materialist philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity. Four of the final six
selections are specifically directed against Islam.
Harris and Hitchens represent that current of liberal intellectuals
who supported the global “war on terror” on the grounds that Islamic jihadism
had become a mortal threat to Western civilization. Harris was positively
apocalyptic: “A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of
mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore
most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do.” The
British-born Hitchens, who died last year a U.S. citizen, was notorious for
slinging mud on behalf of the Bush administration during the Iraq war, captured
in his trashing of the antiwar country music band Dixie Chicks as “f---ing fat
slags.” Having spent some of his youth in the International Socialists (now
Socialist Workers Party), Hitchens went on to wave the Union Jack during
Britain’s squalid war with Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in 1982
on his way to becoming a full-bodied pro-imperialist pig.
As Jeff Sparrow aptly put it in “The Weaponization of Atheism”
(CounterPunch, 9 April), “the New Atheism was turbocharged by 9/11.” That
goes for Dawkins as well as Harris and Hitchens. Dawkins, who along with
numerous bourgeois liberals opposed the invasion of Iraq, has been on his home
turf a voice of the Islamophobia that has been whipped up by and helped drive
the “war on terror.”
Dawkins outraged Muslim groups in Britain two years ago by
insultingly likening the Muslim women’s burqa to a trash-bin liner. The
burqa is indeed both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. But
Dawkins’ fulminations against Islam are those of a British chauvinist and shot
through with class bias. While correctly denouncing “faith schools” for
propounding anti-scientific nonsense, Dawkins reserves his main fire for Muslim
schools, where children are “having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish,” not
those following Church of England precepts (Daily Telegraph, 8 October
2011). Nor is the Anglican state church on the receiving end of the ridicule
that Dawkins likes to dish out against Catholic dogma. As any Irishman could
tell you, such ridicule is mighty common fare in the land of the bloody
butcher’s apron (Union Jack).
Reading Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, one is reminded of the old
watchword of British colonialism: “the white man’s burden.” These intellectuals
promote the notion that the U.S. and West European states could and should use
military force to bring the benefits of “secular democracy” to the benighted
peoples of the Islamic world. Thus do the “new atheists,” from different points
on the bourgeois political spectrum, act as apostles for Western (Christian)
imperialism.
A Historical Materialist Understanding of Religion
Despite his reputation as “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” Dawkins is
remarkably tolerant toward the Church of England, which has been described as
“the Tory party at prayer.” In a recent televised “debate,” he told the
Archbishop of Canterbury that he preferred to call himself an agnostic rather
than an atheist and that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of there being no god,
evoking gasps on Twitter. Writing in the 1920s about Henry Brailsford of the
Independent Labour Party, a self-described agnostic, Marxist revolutionary
leader Leon Trotsky observed:
“This word is sometimes used in Britain as a polite, emasculated,
drawing-room term for an atheist. Even more often, it characterizes a diffident
semi-atheism—i.e., that variety of idealism which on the question of God, to use
parliamentary language, abstains from voting. And so we see here the force of
cant, of conventionality, of the half-truth, the half-lie, of philosophical
hypocrisy.”
Combating religious obscurantism is an integral part of the
struggle by the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist
League, to forge a revolutionary workers party that can provide political
leadership of the working class, beginning with its most advanced elements. In
the words of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin:
“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 [philosopher
Ludwig] Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a
materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all
religion.”
At the same time, we oppose all forms of religious persecution and
oppression and defend the separation of church and state—a fundamental gain of
the American Revolution that is increasingly honored in the breach by the U.S.
capitalist ruling class. Our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain fight for
the abolition of the state churches as well as the monarchy and the House of
Lords as part of their struggle for a socialist federation of the British
Isles.
Karl Marx’s attitude toward religion is popularly identified with
the phrase “the opium of the people.” However, the passage in which this phrase
is used is rarely quoted in its entirety. And when it is, it is usually
interpreted in a sense contrary to Marx’s intent:
“Religious distress is at the same time the
expression of real distress and also the protest
against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is
the opium of the people.
“To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of
the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give
up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up
a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is
therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the
halo of which is religion.” [emphases in original]
— “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law:
Introduction” (1843-44)
Marx’s aim here was not to convince the faithful to abandon their
religious beliefs. He was addressing contemporary exponents of Enlightenment
rationalism, in particular his fellow left Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Ludwig
Feuerbach. The latter maintained that belief in Christianity, since it is based
on the illusion of a benevolent and omnipotent supernatural being, could be
dispelled by rational argumentation. Marx understood that religious
beliefs—especially divine intervention in one’s earthly life and heavenly bliss
in an afterlife—served as a solace for the exploited and oppressed masses. They
are responding to the privation and injustice they suffer in class-based society
while feeling powerless to change their objective condition.
Religion, therefore, will not disappear unless and until these
conditions are overcome in a future communist society—an egalitarian and
harmonious society in which economic scarcity has been eliminated through the
further progressive development of scientific knowledge and its technological
application in a world planned economy. As Marx explained in Capital,
Volume I:
“The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only
then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man
none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his
fellowmen and to Nature.
“The life-process of society, which is based on the process of
material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as
production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in
accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain
material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are
the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”
For early man, religion was a response to a feeling of helplessness
in the face of the often destructive forces of nature. Scientific studies of
pre-class, pre-literate societies have shown a causal connection between
religious beliefs and practices and the struggle to wrest a livelihood from the
natural environment. One of the founding fathers of modern anthropology,
Bronislaw Malinowski, observed that appeals to supernatural forces take place at
the point where existing techniques cease to be reliably effective:
“In a maritime community depending on the products of the sea
there is never magic connected with the collecting of shellfish or with fishing
by poison, weirs, and fish traps, so long as these are completely reliable. On
the other hand, any dangerous, hazardous, and uncertain type of fishing is
surrounded by ritual. In hunting, the simple and reliable ways of trapping and
killing are controlled by knowledge and skill alone; but let there be any danger
or uncertainty connected with an important supply of game and magic immediately
appears.”
— “Culture,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1931)
With the emergence of class-based society, religion underwent a
significant change in character and function. Religious doctrine was manipulated
and enforced by the dominant (property-owning) class and its priestly agents to
sanctify wealth and power, while offering solace to the exploited classes. Thus,
Lenin wrote with respect to the Russian Orthodox state church:
“What a profitable faith it is indeed for the governing classes!
In a society so organised that an insignificant minority enjoys wealth and
power, while the masses constantly suffer ‘privations’ and bear ‘severe
obligations,’ it is quite natural for the exploiters to sympathise with a
religion that teaches people to bear ‘uncomplainingly’ the hell on earth for the
sake of an alleged celestial paradise.”
— “Political Agitation and ‘the Class Point of View’” (February
1902)
On the History of Atheism
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, all
currents of thought in Europe, however antagonistic, were confined within the
bounds of Christian doctrine (leaving aside the small Jewish communities and
Muslim Spain). Those considered disdainful toward religious authority were
condemned for “impiety,” a term that implied lack of reverence, not outright
denial of a supreme being. It was in the 16th century that the term and concept
of atheism (derived from ancient Greek philosophy) became a factor in the
European intellectual universe. For example, in 1611 Cyril Tourneur, a
playwright in Renaissance England, published a work titled The Atheist’s
Tragedy, a subject that would have been inconceivable a century earlier.
The new intellectual challenge to traditional Christian belief
coincided with and was conditioned by the birth of modern science. A liberal
intellectual historian, Jonathan I. Israel, observed: “It was unquestionably the
rise of powerful new philosophical systems, rooted in the scientific advances of
the early seventeenth century and especially the mechanistic views of Galileo,
which chiefly generated the vast Kulturkampf between traditional,
theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God, and the universe and secular,
mechanistic conceptions which stood independently of any theological sanction”
(Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750
[2001]).
There has been a decades-long debate among intellectual historians
as to the extent of actual atheism in the Renaissance and early Enlightenment.
Underlying this debate are a number of factors. To openly profess atheism was to
invite torture and execution by the state authorities that enforced Christian
orthodoxy. As late as the 1690s in Scotland, a university student, Thomas
Aikenhead, was hanged for the capital crime of “blasphemy.” Evidence of this
“crime” was verbal discussions he reportedly had with fellow students. In some
cases, the personal writings of those accused of atheism were burned at the
stake along with their authors. Few clandestine or posthumous manuscripts
explicitly arguing against the existence of god in any sense have been
found.
The accusation of atheism was promiscuously applied to anyone who
questioned or challenged the locally dominant Christian orthodoxy. In fact,
Catholics and Calvinists engaged in mutual recriminations that the rival
doctrine logically led to atheistic conclusions. In many (possibly most) cases,
the ideas of those accused of atheism who did reject Christianity corresponded
more closely to deism, pantheism, agnosticism or an eclectic amalgam thereof.
An additional complicating factor was that the term atheism was
used in two different senses. “Practical” atheists, who were assumed to be very
numerous, were those who lived as if there were no god. They therefore
supposedly engaged in all manner of vice and crime to satisfy their worldly
desires without fear of eternal damnation. “Speculative” atheists, who were
assumed to be very rare, were those who denied the existence of a supreme being
on intellectual grounds. When heterodox thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Baruch
Spinoza emphatically repudiated the charge of atheism, they were in part denying
that they were morally depraved egoists indifferent to the needs of their fellow
man.
Whether a particular heterodox thinker was a self-considered and
consistent atheist is not a historically important question. What is significant
is that the concept of atheism became an important and integral
part of intellectual discourse in early modern Europe and in Britain’s American
colonies. Moreover, almost all thinkers who rejected Christianity maintained
that the betterment of mankind depended on the extension of scientific
knowledge, not divine revelation.
The interrelationship between philosophical materialism and the new
world of scientific discovery and experimentation was exemplified by Spinoza
who, whatever the ambiguities of his actual thought, was viewed as the
intellectual fountainhead of atheism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
After he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in the 1650s as a
heretic, Spinoza earned his living by making high-quality lenses for microscopes
and telescopes. In that capacity, he entered into a working relation with
Christian Huygens, one of the greatest physicists of the era.
Spinoza maintained that there was no supernatural being or power
separate from and transcending the material world. The material world was
eternal (it had no beginning) and was governed by immutable laws. There was no
spiritual component in human beings and therefore no immortal soul. Some
scholars, such as Jonathan Israel, have argued that Spinoza was in effect an
atheist. However, most intellectual historians and philosophers categorize him
as a pantheist, that is, one who identifies god with nature. Why so? Spinoza
believed that the natural world was imbued with a benevolent harmony that, if
understood, would lead to harmonious relations among men. He was an early and
outstanding representative of Enlightenment rationalism: the view that the
well-being of humanity should be based on knowledge of and conformity with the
laws of nature.
Significantly, the first published work (in 1770) openly expounding
atheistic materialism was titled System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral
and Physical World by its author Baron d’Holbach (Paul Henri Thiry) and his
collaborator Jacques-André Naigeon. These French philosophes believed
that underlying all phenomena, including human thought and action,
was matter in motion. They maintained that this matter in motion was governed by
immutable laws that were in principle knowable through scientific investigation
and experimentation. A present-day scholar, Alan Charles Kors, commented on the
social implications of Holbach and Naigeon’s atheistic materialism:
“They believed that whatever the purposes to which theism and
immaterialism had been put historically, these views ultimately arose from the
natural desires of mankind to allay and deflect the helplessness that was felt
in the presence of the awesome powers of the whole—nature—relative to the
part—man. The tragedy of mankind, for them, lay not in those desires, but in the
dysfunctional mode of their expression.”
— Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the
Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992)
Atheism and Bourgeois Society
For a century after Holbach and Naigeon’s seminal work, atheism
remained the province of a small minority of the intellectual elite. Those
bourgeois intellectuals who propagated atheism, such as Feuerbach in mid
19th-century Germany and Charles Bradlaugh in Victorian England, gained
political notoriety precisely because of how exceptional their beliefs were.
Atheistic materialism could and did acquire a mass following among
exploited workers only when industrial capitalism had developed to a point that
overcoming economic scarcity became a realistic historic prospect. Although
particularly in Britain religion would continue to play a significant role in
the labor movement, in Europe the de-Christianization of the proletariat was an
integral aspect of the development of progressive working-class consciousness
and organization, at the trade-union and the political level. Beginning in the
last decades of the 19th century, mass parties were formed expressing the
aspiration of the most advanced elements of the working class for a socialist
reconstruction of social and economic life based on material plenty for all.
In Germany, the Austro-Hungarian state and tsarist Russia, Marxism
was the official doctrine of the workers movement. Not only leftist students but
also politically advanced and thoughtful young workers acquired a materialist
worldview by studying such works as Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring and
Georgi Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History.
Even in countries such as France, where Marxism was not the official doctrine of
the workers movement, its principal leaders (e.g., Jean Jaurès in the pre-1914
Socialist Party) were usually rational humanists who were hostile to the
established churches. Conversely, right-wing bourgeois parties (e.g., the
English Tories) appealed to the authority of traditional and often
state-sponsored religion—and continue to do so.
The persistence and extent of religious belief and anti-materialist
ideology ultimately reflect the condition of the class struggle, in particular
the political consciousness of the working class. The late J.D. Bernal, a
Marxist and prominent British biologist, commented in Science and History
(1954):
“The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive
victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a
philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in
scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend
that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of
affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test
of reality and on the necessity of change.”
As a British intellectual, Dawkins recognizes that religiosity is
much more important in American society and Christian fundamentalists are more
politically influential than is the case in Europe. However, his attempts at
explanation are in the main fatuous, claiming, for example, that rival
denominations employ the “aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace.”
One of the “hypotheses” he provides in The God Delusion points in the
right direction, but not for the reason he gives: “America is a nation of
immigrants,” who, “uprooted from the stability and comfort of the extended
family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute
on alien soil.”
America’s capitalist rulers have long thrived by sowing ethnic,
religious and racial animosities—“Anglo-Saxon” against Irish, Protestant against
Catholic immigrant, and, above all, white against black—in order to divide
workers, weaken their struggles and retard the understanding of their common
class interest. This is a major reason why the U.S., uniquely among advanced
capitalist countries, has never seen the development of a workers party, even of
a reformist sort, such as the British Labour Party. The lack of independent
class political organization has in turn served to reinforce religion’s hold
among those exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system. Religious belief
and affiliation are especially strong not only among immigrants but also in the
black population, for whom the churches have been the only organizations with a
continuous existence dating back to the days of slavery.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Correction
In our articles “Hail Charles Darwin!” (WV No. 854, 16
September 2005) and “A Marxist Critique of the ‘New Atheists’” Part One
(WV No. 1007, 31 August) we incorrectly cited J.D. Bernal’s 1954
four-volume work as Science and History. The correct title is Science
in History.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 1008 |
14 September 2012
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Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism
A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”
Part Two
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 1007 (31
August).
With the decline of religiosity and the authority of the Christian
churches in the working class in late 19th-century Europe, a current of
bourgeois intellectuals sought to justify the capitalist system on supposedly
scientific (materialist) grounds. An influential expression of this current in
Britain as well as the United States was “social Darwinism” as expounded by T.H.
Huxley and Herbert Spencer. They held up the “survival of the fittest” as the
primary engine not only of evolutionary “progress” but also of human society.
The bankruptcy of small, family-owned businesses and farms was likened to the
extinction of species of birds or mammals that had failed to adapt to a changing
natural environment. For Huxley and Spencer, a worker who became a foreman was
analogous to a strong male tiger besting a weaker rival in fighting to mate with
a tigress.
In the present-day English-speaking world, a somewhat similar
intellectual niche is occupied by sociobiology. It is, as they say, no accident
that leading “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris—are
strong proponents of this doctrine and its offspring, evolutionary psychology.
Adherents of sociobiology have made outrageous claims regarding supposedly
innate racial and sexual differences. Steven Pinker, a member of the advisory
board of Harris’ Project Reason Foundation, praised the “clear historical
discussion” of IQ in Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s grotesque,
pseudoscientific tract asserting black inferiority, The Bell Curve
(1994). (For a debunking of this racist tract, see “The ‘Bell Curve’ and
Genocide U.S.A.,” WV No. 611, 25 November 1994; reprinted in Black
History and the Class Struggle No. 12, February 1995.) Similarly, when Larry
Summers, then president of Harvard, infamously declared in January 2005 that
women have less innate aptitude for the hard sciences, Pinker declared that
there was “enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously.”
While Dawkins, Dennett and Harris steer clear of Pinker’s more
outrageous claims, they all indulge in some variant of biological determinism,
the view that genes dictate behavior. In The Selfish Gene (1976), the
book that first brought him to prominence, Dawkins wrote that a society based
simply on a genetic “law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty
society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore
something, it does not stop it being true.” Such statements earned Dawkins sharp
criticism in Not In Our Genes, a work of prominent scientists attacking
the racist, pseudoscientific field of sociobiology, particularly its defense of
bogus studies upholding the inheritability of IQ.
Even as he distanced himself from the racist arguments about IQ,
Dawkins’ foam-flecked review of Not In Our Genes accused its authors of
presenting a “bizarre conspiracy theory of science” simply for having argued
that scientific research (like everything in class society) may be influenced
and at times distorted by ideological biases. In The Mismeasure of Man
(1981) and other works, the late, renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould
exposed in great depth how “scientific” racism based on consciously or
unconsciously twisted data is used to justify the lording of one class, sex or
race over another (see “Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism,”
WV No. 797, 14 February 2003). Gould was also among those evolutionary
biologists who refuted the fallacy that Darwinian evolution by natural selection
can be applied to human social development.
Where Dawkins and Dennett really indulge their pseudo-materialist
itch is in discussing the basis of religious belief. Asking in his book
Breaking the Spell why religion “means so much to so many people, and
why—and how—does it command allegiance and shape so many lives so strongly,”
Dennett answers with a confused and confusing hodgepodge, jumping back and forth
between the animism of primitive hunter-gatherer bands and the Christian
churches in present-day America. He relates later religious doctrine to
universal psychological behavior that supposedly originates with our early
hominoid precursors, such as the need for young children to accept the authority
of their parents. One could just as well argue that a child’s awareness of the
relation between cause and effect (e.g., kicking a ball with the front of one’s
foot makes it move forward) predisposes him to scientific rationality in later
life.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that religious
behavior can be called “a human universal” demanding “a Darwinian explanation.”
His “explanation” is the absurd notion of a religion “meme,” an obscurantist
term defined as a unit of cultural inheritance. This concoction is presented as
an analogue of the gene, supposedly replicating, mutating and responding to
selective pressure. Dawkins asserts that “memetic natural selection” offers “a
plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular religions” without
indicating why one religious “meme” might be selected over another, or even the
rules whereby such “memes” are transmitted. Here Dawkins has crossed over into
the realm of vulgar pseudoscience. Unlike memes, genes actually exist—they can
be sequenced, spliced, transplanted and traced. Memes are pure idealist
sophistry.
Sociobiology purports to provide a materialist explanation for the
inequalities, injustices, ideological currents and brutalities of modern society
while rejecting the historical (dialectical) materialist understanding that
these are fundamentally rooted in class divisions and class struggle. V.I. Lenin
observed in “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (March
1913) that “man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and
doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the
economic system of society” (emphasis in original). Protestantism,
for example, arose as an adaptation of Catholicism in 16th- and 17th-century
Europe along with the growing economic weight of the capitalist merchant class.
This fact, which is accepted by far more than just Marxists, has no value in
Dawkins’ realm of “memetic” fantasy.
Nationalism Trumps Religion in the Modern World
By focusing on the crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, the
“new atheists” disregard and therefore implicitly deny that national chauvinism
is the main source of popular ideological support for wars, oppression and
social injustice. Racism, too, is given short shrift. In The End of
Faith, Sam Harris argues:
“Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was
at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v. Muslims),
the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v. Catholic Croats; Orthodox Serbians v. Bosnian
and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir
(Muslims v. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v. Christians and animists), Nigeria
(Muslims v. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims v. Christians), Sri Lanka
(Sinhalese Buddhists v. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese
Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims; Muslim
Azerbaijanis v. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in
point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of
literally millions of deaths in the last ten years.” (emphasis in original)
In fact, in the modern world religion is a subordinate aspect of
nationalism, the predominant bourgeois ideology. A basic common bond linking all
bourgeois politicians—from social democrats to fascists—and all bourgeois
intellectuals—from secular humanists to religious fundamentalists—is elevating
the interests of their nation-state above all other interests.
Since the 18th century, almost all major wars (excluding some civil
wars) have been fought on the basis of national, not religious, divisions.
Indeed, coreligionists have often been pitted against one another. In both the
First and Second World Wars, young American men who were Protestants, Catholics
and nonbelievers fought and sought to kill young German men who were
Protestants, Catholics and nonbelievers. And vice versa. The primacy of national
identity over religious affiliation is also evident in wars in the Islamic
world. In the almost decade-long war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, Arab
Shi’ite Muslims fought against Persian Shi’ite Muslims.
The “new atheists” ascribe a religious character to what are
actually national conflicts. Like Harris, Dawkins contends that religious
fanaticism is the main factor underlying the “Israeli/Palestinian wars” and the
Northern Ireland “troubles.” The state of Israel was founded in 1948 by Jewish
settlers from Europe who were perforce culturally European and in most cases
physically distinguishable from the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. The
Zionist rulers cohered a new nation in the Near East with its own distinct and
unique language, modern Hebrew. A large fraction of the Israeli population does
not believe in or practice Judaism as a religion. Such non-believing Israelis
are for the most part just as virulently hostile to the dispossessed and
oppressed Palestinian Arabs as are their religious-minded fellow nationals.
Superficially, the communalist conflict in Northern Ireland does
appear to be based on religious divisions, since the antagonistic parties are
conventionally called “Protestants” and “Catholics.” In this case, religious
affiliation has been an important factor in defining divergent national
identities. Nonetheless, there are atheist and other non-believing “Protestants”
and “Catholics” in Northern Ireland. What then is the source of the
conflict?
In the 17th century, successive English governments promoted
settlement in northern Ireland by Protestants (Calvinists), mainly from
Scotland, to strengthen their colonial rule over the native Irish inhabitants.
The latter retained adherence to the Roman Catholic church. In that era, the
language of the Irish people was still Gaelic, not English, a national (not
religious) factor differentiating them from the Scottish-derived community in
the northern part of the island. In the 18th century, many members of that
community emigrated to Britain’s North American colonies, where they were
conventionally called “Scots-Irish,” indicating their primary as well as
secondary country of origin.
The British bourgeoisie’s rule over its Irish colony was based on
its profit-accumulating, imperialistic interests, as the Spartacist
League/Britain noted in writing about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the Republic of
Ireland last year (“Down With the Monarchy and the ‘United Kingdom’!” Workers
Hammer No. 215, Summer 2011). The article stressed “intransigent opposition
to all forms of nationalism—first and foremost the dominant English chauvinism”
and concluded: “Our programme is for workers revolutions to overthrow all the
capitalist regimes in Britain and in Ireland, North and South. The myriad forms
of national oppression will be resolved when workers revolution has swept away
capitalist rule on both sides of the Irish border and both sides of the Irish
Sea.”
Oppenheimer, Heisenberg and the Bomb
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger all cite with
approval an aphorism by prominent American physicist Steven Weinberg: “Religion
is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing
good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil
things, it takes religion.” As Marxists, we do not share in this moralistic
framework. But even on its own terms the statement is wrong, implying that “good
people” have never committed atrocities when motivated by nationalism but only
when motivated by religious fanaticism.
An instructive counterexample was provided by two world-class
physicists during the Second World War: J. Robert Oppenheimer in the U.S. and
Werner Heisenberg in Germany. Oppenheimer, a left-leaning intellectual whose
relatives, friends and colleagues included supporters and sympathizers of the
Communist Party, was the chief scientific administrator for the development of
the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project). In leading the work, he was motivated
by conventional national loyalty. Also, like many other scientists involved in
the Manhattan Project, he was driven by hatred of fascism (falsely conflated
with support to the Allied imperialists) and fear that Nazi Germany would first
develop and use nuclear weapons to win the war.
Germany surrendered two months before the A-bomb was first
successfully tested at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. The decision was
then made to drop the two bombs the U.S. had available on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one thought that Japan had the capability of building
such a bomb, and a few top U.S. government officials and military men (e.g.,
General Dwight Eisenhower) expressed reservations about using atomic bombs
against the Japanese civilian population. But Oppenheimer did not. He justified
the mass murder of defenseless men, women and children in the name of liberal
idealism. The very destructiveness of these weapons, he contended, would lead to
a new, benign world order of peace and international cooperation. In a speech
given when he resigned as head of the Manhattan Project in October 1945,
Oppenheimer pontificated:
“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of
a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time
will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
“The peoples of the world must unite, or they will perish. This
war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic
bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand.... By our works we are
committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law and in
humanity.”
— quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(1986)
This is the language of bourgeois secular humanism in the
imperialist epoch. It should be noted that the U.S. dropped the bombs as a
message of U.S. military superiority, intended not for Japan and its imperialist
rulers, who by that time were all but defeated militarily, but for the Soviet
Union, a degenerated workers state.
Werner Heisenberg was one of a small number of top-level German
physicists who loyally served the Nazi regime through the war. He was not an
adherent of fascist ideology and did not join the Nazi party. He was not an
anti-Semite and had closely collaborated with Jewish physicists before Hitler
came to power in 1933. During the Nazi regime, he defended the scientific
validity of the theoretical work of Albert Einstein and other Jewish physicists
against the demented advocates of “German physics.” Heisenberg served under the
Third Reich out of conventional German patriotism. In her memoirs, his widow
offered the following explanation of her husband’s mindset: “Heisenberg loved
the country of his childhood and youth; he did not believe that the picture that
was now looming so appallingly was the true countenance of Germany. Within
himself he carried the picture of another Germany for which he thought he had to
persevere” (Elisabeth Heisenberg, Inner Exile: Recollections of a Life with
Werner Heisenberg [1984]).
In 1942, at a high-level conference on armaments attended by Albert
Speer and other directors of the German war economy, Heisenberg explained the
technical possibility of constructing an atomic bomb (“as large as a pineapple”)
that could destroy a city. When Speer questioned him about the feasibility of
producing such weapons, Heisenberg expressed uncertainty that it could be done
in time to affect the outcome of the war. Speer decided not to pursue such a
project. After the war, Heisenberg wrote that German physicists “were spared the
decision as to whether or not they should aim at producing atomic bombs.” But he
did not indicate that he and the others would have refused to do so out of moral
scruples.
The bourgeois-rationalist “new atheists” do not acknowledge the
pernicious role of national chauvinism in the world today because they are
themselves loyal to protecting the power and position of their “own” capitalist
nation-states. While religion has served as an ideological pillar for ruling
classes since the advent of class society, bourgeois society cannot exist
without basing itself on nation-states. Each of these states serves a nationally
delineated capitalist class, which requires state power—i.e., armed bodies of
men—to protect its rule and property against challenges from both the working
class and capitalist rivals in other countries. Each bourgeoisie portrays itself
as representing the entire people, holding that the workers and oppressed social
groups share a common interest in preserving and bolstering the national economy
and armed forces.
The aims of socialism are counterposed to all variants of
nationalism. As Lenin stated:
“Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the
‘most just,’ ‘purest,’ most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms
of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all
nations in the higher unity....
“The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism;
on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national
distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the
ties between nationalities closer and closer, or tends to merge nations.”
— Critical Remarks on the National Question
(October-December 1913)
Patriotic jingoism in the imperialist (advanced capitalist) states
expresses the predatory appetites of the ruling bourgeoisies. Nationalism in the
impoverished and oppressed semicolonial countries expresses both
the aspirations of the weaker, dependent bourgeoisies to exploit their own
working people and their manipulation of the masses’ legitimate hatred of
imperialist subjugation. Marxists support the just struggles of oppressed
countries against imperialist domination. But in doing so we oppose
nationalist ideology, calling instead for the internationalist class
unity of the workers in oppressed and oppressor countries against the ruling
classes of both.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
*********
Workers Vanguard No. 1009 |
|
28 September 2012 |
Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism
A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists”
Part Three
This part concludes the article. Parts One and Two appeared
in WV Nos. 1007 and 1008 (31 August and 14 September 2012).
The “new atheists” vehemently oppose the position of some
left-liberal intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, that there was a causal
connection between Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on the U.S. in 2001 and
Washington’s policies in the Arab/Islamic world. In “What’s New About The New
Atheism?”, Victor Stenger asserts: “Some commentators have tried to explain this
tragic event in terms of social causes, such as the perceived American
oppression of Muslim nations.” The term “perceived” implies that U.S.
imperialism is guiltless in the oppression of the peoples of the Arab/Islamic
world. More generally, none of the main “new atheist” works make reference to,
much less condemn, the atrocities committed by the American state, e.g., the
A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the razing of Korean cities
and villages in the 1950s, the carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and early
’70s, the lethal economic warfare against Iraq in the 1990s.
A major theme of both Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and
Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is the antagonistic relationship
between Islamic fundamentalism and the West. Yet in neither book is there a
discussion of European colonial rule over Islamic societies between the 17th and
mid 20th centuries. Nor do they take up U.S. dominance and policies in the Near
East during the Cold War era between the late 1940s and the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991-92. Harris and Hitchens go from excoriating the Koran, written
(supposedly) by Muhammad in the 7th century, to fulminating against present-day
anti-Western jihadism as if the intervening 14 centuries have no relevance
whatsoever. Basically, the “new atheists” view Osama bin Laden and his
cothinkers just as the fundamentalists present themselves, that is, as faithful
followers of Muhammad carrying out the authentic message of the Koran in today’s
world.
Almost all countries where Islam is the dominant religion, from
North Africa to Southeast Asia, were subjected to colonial rule by West European
states. In some cases (such as what are now Indonesia and Bangladesh), colonial
rule lasted for centuries; in other cases (Iraq, Syria), for a few decades. In
all cases, the European imperialists utilized Islamic clerics and the native
ruling elite to reinforce their domination and exploitation of the mass of
toilers. At the same time, they exploited and aggravated all manner of ethnic
(tribal), national and religious divisions, for example between Hindus, Muslims
and Sikhs in British India. The state of Pakistan was deliberately created as an
Islamic political entity in 1947 when the British partitioned the Indian
subcontinent, over which they were no longer able to maintain colonial rule. The
Partition resulted in horrific intercommunal slaughter, with an estimated one
million dead.
The official ideology of French imperialism demonstrates that a
lack of religious motivation is entirely compatible with imperialist subjugation
and murderous repression on a mass scale. Because England had a state church,
British colonialism had an official Christian sanction. By contrast, French
colonial rule was carried out in the name of a secular, democratic republic
claiming adherence to the liberal principles of the 1789 “Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen.”
Many of the military officers and civilian administrators who
governed France’s colonies in Africa, the Levant and Southeast Asia were
nonbelievers, and some were strongly anticlerical. The French ruling class,
represented by both Catholics and anticlerical secularists, tortured and killed
millions of Arabs, black Africans and Vietnamese in seeking to maintain its
wealth and power. The fact that the French colonial army was that of a secular
republic did not make it in the least a force for progress and
enlightenment.
Contrary to both the “new atheists” and Chomsky as well as some
leftist groups like the British Socialist Workers Party, there is no basic
conflict between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.
Notwithstanding both its recent bloody wars and occupations against the Muslim
peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists, as well as their British
junior partners, will support fundamentalist regimes and movements when they
perceive it in their interest to do so. And, notwithstanding repeated outbursts
of angry protest against Western governments (most recently over an Islamophobic
film made in the U.S.), the Islamists are, in turn, just as opportunist in their
relations with the Western imperialist powers.
For decades, Washington has supported and protected the Saudi
monarchy, the mainstay of fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab world. Bin Laden’s
outfit—the forerunner of Al Qaeda—was originally funded and armed by the CIA to
combat Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Last year the U.S. and its
West European allies conducted an air war against the Libyan regime of Muammar
Qaddafi in support of tribally based insurgents, including a substantial
jihadist component. In Egypt, political power following the ouster of Hosni
Mubarak has for the most part been exercised by the military, which has long
been heavily financed by the U.S. The military has at times collaborated with
the Muslim Brotherhood—the main Islamist organization, which now holds the
presidency—against Westernizing liberals. The generals would not have pursued
such a policy without at least the tacit approval of the White House. In
Afghanistan, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban to effect a “political
settlement” that would allow a drawdown of military forces in a war that
increasing sections of the U.S. ruling class recognize is unwinnable.
At a more fundamental level, the domination of capitalist
imperialism has arrested the socio-economic and cultural development of North
Africa, the Near East and South Asia. Pervasive poverty and social degradation
form the material conditions that perpetuate Islamic traditionalism, including
the barbaric treatment of women, among the downtrodden masses. The American
state is the main external political and military enforcer of a social system
from which the jihadist groups derive and on which they depend for their very
existence.
Imperialism, Fundamentalism and Anti-Communism
By the late 1940s, the United States had become the dominant
imperialist power in the Near East. But that dominance was challenged by the
Soviet Union, supported by Communist parties that in some countries (e.g., Iraq
and Iran) had attained a mass base of support, centrally in the working class.
Despite their Stalinist leaderships and opportunist (class-collaborationist)
policies, these parties embraced hundreds of thousands of politically advanced
workers as well as leftist intellectuals who aspired to an egalitarian socialist
society in which women would be liberated from the hideously oppressive
conditions sanctioned by Islamic traditionalism. Almost all of the indigenous
forces representing atheistic materialism and rational humanism were
concentrated in and around the Communist movement.
In its Cold War against the Soviet Union and international
Communism, U.S. imperialism utilized the forces of religious reaction in the
Near East and elsewhere in the semicolonial world. This strategy was spelled out
in 1950 by John Foster Dulles, soon to become Secretary of State: “The religions
of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual
beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That
creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it”
(quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth [1957]). The
policy outlined by Dulles would be put into effect with important historical
consequences to this day.
In Iran in 1953, the CIA organized a coup that overthrew the
bourgeois-nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadeq and replaced it with the
autocracy of the Shah. The imperialists’ main target was not Mossadeq but the
Communist Tudeh (Masses) party, which they saw as posing an imminent threat of
“red revolution.” A major social force actively involved in the CIA-orchestrated
coup was the Shi’ite Muslim hierarchy led by Ayatollah Kashani, a predecessor of
the Ayatollah Khomeini. In Indonesia in 1965, Washington encouraged a military
coup in which the Communist Party—then the largest in the world not holding
state power—was physically exterminated. Over a million workers, peasants,
leftists and ethnic Chinese were killed, many of them by mobs led by Islamic
clerics.
The purging of Communism in the Near East in the early Cold War
period was not just the work of U.S. imperialism and indigenous reactionary
forces backed by Washington. Just as important, if not more so, were Arab
bourgeois-nationalist regimes that were supported by the Stalinist misleaders in
the name of “anti-imperialism.” In the late 1950s, the Egyptian regime of Gamal
Abdel Nasser—then viewed as the personification of Arab nationalism—crushed the
Communist Party, imprisoning, torturing and killing its leaders. In the same
period, the once powerful Iraqi Communist Party was broken by the murderous
repression of successive bourgeois-nationalist regimes, the predecessors of
Saddam Hussein (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois
Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000). The
betrayals and ultimate destruction of the once-powerful Communist movement was
an important historical factor underlying the present conditions in the Near
East: the pervasiveness of Islamic traditionalism in society and the political
strength of Islamist parties and movements.
In The New Atheism, Stenger argues that a large fraction of
the population in the world today no longer believes in religion. He points in
particular to China: “I have seen estimates that there are as many as a billion
nonbelieving Chinese alone.” Stenger may well overstate the extent of
irreligiosity among the Chinese populace. Given the closed political conditions
in China, it’s not possible to gauge the extent to which traditional beliefs and
practices, such as ancestor worship, remain current, especially among the
peasantry. Additionally, in recent years there has been a proliferation of
“underground” Christian churches, which act as a conduit to and from
anti-Communist movements in the U.S. and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is
incontestable that not only organized religion but personal religious attitudes
and practices are much less important in China than in the Near East or South
Asia.
Stenger makes no effort at a historical-materialist explanation of
this difference and, indeed, is incapable of doing so. The difference lies in
the fact that in 1949 China experienced a social revolution that
liberated the country from capitalist-imperialist domination. That revolution
and the workers state it created were bureaucratically deformed from the
beginning by the Stalinist leadership of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party.
Nonetheless, over the past six decades China has undergone a level of
progressive socio-economic development and cultural advancement that has
eroded the material grounds for religious belief among the
populace. This is despite reactionary values fostered by the Stalinist regime,
from its inculcation of Chinese nationalism to its sanctioning of “official”
Protestant and Catholic churches—a policy that the early Soviet workers state
would have considered an abomination (see “The Bolshevik Revolution vs. the
State Church” on page 2).
Understanding Jihadism
Why after having received U.S. aid in the war against “godless
Communism” did a significant current of fundamentalists, self-described as
jihadists, turn violently against the West and especially the United States in
the post-Soviet period? With the demise of the Soviet Union, fear of Communism
among Islamic traditionalists was replaced by fear of “Westernization.”
Islamists took the “democratic” ideological posturing of U.S. imperialism—now
the self-proclaimed “world’s only superpower”—at face value. In the early 1990s,
the Egyptian Islamist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become a central leader of Al
Qaeda, denounced “democracy” (Western-type parliamentary government) as a
sacrilege:
“In Islam, legislation comes from God; in a democracy, this
capacity is given to the people. Therefore, this is a new religion, based on
making the people into gods and giving them God’s rights and attributes. This is
tantamount to associating idols with God and falling into unbelief....
“In democracy, the people legislate through the majority of
deputies in parliament.
“These deputies are men and women, Christians, communists and
secularists.”
— Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds., Al Qaeda in Its
Own Words (2008)
The jihadists’ belief that the U.S. rulers aim to transform the
Near East and other traditionally Islamic countries along the socio-cultural and
political lines of present-day North America and West Europe is a
delusion. There is, to be sure, a broad and influential section of
bourgeois intellectuals, ranging from pro-Democratic Party liberals to
right-wing Republicans, who think the U.S. government should do just that.
Liberals like New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas
Kristof have agitated for the U.S. government to actively promote “democracy”
and “human rights” throughout the world, especially in the Near East. Feminists
in academia and the media have also weighed in, pointing to the barbaric
treatment of women, especially in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the
Taliban. On the right, so-called neo-cons like William Kristol and Robert Kagan
contended that Islamic fundamentalism had become a serious threat to America’s
global interests.
The anti-Western jihadism of Osama bin Laden is the converse of the
U.S. “human rights” imperialism expounded by the likes of Friedman, who
supported the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 in the name of
creating a “secular democratic society” in the Arab/Islamic world. Contrary to
both the bin Ladens and Friedmans, the aim of the imperialists is
not to create secular democracies in the Near East or elsewhere in
the Third World. The shell of “democracy” by which the capitalists disguise
their class dictatorship over the workers they exploit is reserved for the
wealthier capitalist states. In plundering the neocolonial countries,
imperialism perpetuates the backward social, economic and cultural conditions
that sustain religion. At the same time, the penetration of these countries by
imperialist capital creates elements of a modern infrastructure and a
proletariat—the potential gravedigger of bourgeois rule.
In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels devoted a brief section to “feudal socialism,” a current of Christian
intellectuals tied to the old aristocracies. These Christians denounced modern
bourgeois society—its materialistic values and glorification of individual
competitiveness—from a reactionary ideological outlook expressed in an idealized
version of medieval European society. By analogy, one can describe Al Qaeda and
the other jihadist groups as “feudal anti-imperialists,” opposing Western
domination of the Arab/Islamic world in the name of an idealized version of
medieval Islamic society and polity.
Resurrecting “Feudal Socialism”
“Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist
tinge.”
—Communist Manifesto
A present-day version of “feudal socialism” has been propagated by
Terry Eagleton, who, moreover, claims to be a Marxist. A professor of English
literature in Britain, Eagleton published a polemical book against the “new
atheists,” Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
(2009), in which he derisively refers to Richard Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens as “Ditchkins.” This work is a defense of religion, in particular a
leftist current in the Roman Catholic church (mainly in Latin America) called
“liberation theology.”
Eagleton condemns modern capitalist society as a spiritual
wasteland given over to hedonistic individualism and the satisfaction of
creature comforts on the cheap:
“The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is
godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit
in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver.... A society of
packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and
consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the kind of depth where theological
questions can even be properly raised.”
This book came out at the very moment that the capitalist world
plunged into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the
1930s. In Britain, working people and the poor have been subjected to savage
government-imposed austerity carried out in the interests of the financial
moguls of the City of London. One would like to see Eagleton go into a
working-class pub in London or the Midlands and spout off about the evils of
“packaged fulfillment” and “consumer economics.” Barring divine intervention on
his behalf, he would encounter a pretty ugly response.
While having a special fondness for Catholic “liberation theology,”
Eagleton also has a good word for the moral rectitude and old-fashioned values
of Christian fundamentalists: “In the teeth of what it decries as a hedonistic,
relativistic culture, Christian fundamentalism seeks to reinstate order,
chastity, thrift, hard work, self-discipline, and responsibility, all values
that a godless consumerism threatens to rout.” Identifying “true” Christianity
with sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, Eagleton willfully disregards “the
wealthy are god’s chosen people” ethos of today’s Christian fundamentalism in
the one country where its adherents wield real political influence: the United
States. American evangelical Protestants have added two commandments to the ten
handed down to Moses by Jehovah on Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt not tax the rich”
and “Thou shalt not feed and give succor to the poor.”
For Eagleton, the socialist movement, like Christianity, is
animated by altruism (love of one’s fellow man), not the material interests of
the working class:
“For the liberal humanist legacy to which Ditchkins is indebted,
love can really be understood only in personal terms. It is not an item in his
political lexicon, and would sound merely embarrassing were it to turn up
there.... The concept of political love, one imagines, would make little sense
to Ditchkins. Yet something like this is the ethical basis for socialism.”
Yes, organizations claiming to be socialist have attracted
idealistic intellectuals, some from very privileged social backgrounds,
motivated by sympathy for the exploited and oppressed masses. However, the
socialist movement has always been based on politically advanced workers, whose
purpose is to qualitatively raise the material conditions (living standards) of
their class and all those on the bottom, fighting for an egalitarian society.
For Marxists, the ultimate goal is a society based on material
superabundance, a necessary condition to fully realize the creative
capacities of all its members. Consequently, underlying communism is a level of
labor productivity far greater than in today’s advanced capitalist
economies.
As Marx explained in Outlines of the Critique of Political
Economy (1857-58), the development of a collectivized economy would see the
“free development of individualities” and hence “in general the reduction of the
necessary labour of society to a minimum, to which then corresponds the
artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the
time thus set free and the means produced for all of them.”
In Defense of Marxism
The “new atheists” are hostile to Marxism. At the same time, they
feel compelled to answer their theistic antagonists who raise the mass murder
carried out by the regime of J.V. Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. That
regime claimed atheistic materialism as an important component of its formal
ideology. Dawkins and his cothinkers contend that the crimes of Stalin were not
motivated by atheism as such but rather by a religious-like belief in Marxist
doctrine. Dawkins links Stalin and Hitler, a lying amalgam often made by
bourgeois ideologues (see “Black Book: Anti-Communist Big Lie,” WV
No. 692, 5 June 1998). He wrote in The God Delusion:
“Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t; but even if he
was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple.
Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name
of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of,
respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific
eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings.”
In The End of Faith, Harris similarly argues, “Consider the
millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants
paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political
religion. At the heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid
ideology, to which generations of men and women were sacrificed.” Like almost
all bourgeois intellectuals, the “new atheists” identify Stalinism with Marxism
and Stalin’s Russia with the historical embodiment of Marxist doctrine.
V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the other leaders of the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution understood that socialism could be achieved only on an
international scale. They viewed the October Revolution in Russia as sparking a
wave of proletarian socialist revolutions in Central and West Europe, ultimately
extending to North America. However, under the conditions of imperialist
encirclement and economic backwardness, in the 1920s the Soviet workers state
underwent a bureaucratic degeneration, as analyzed by Trotsky in The
Revolution Betrayed (1936). The rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste was
consolidated by Stalin’s murderous regime and expressed ideologically in the
anti-Marxist doctrine of building “socialism in one country.”
As Trotsky explained in the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding
document of the Fourth International:
“The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a
workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary
prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth
of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a
complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the
working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class
and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The
bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the
transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste
constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time
practically—of the theory of socialism in one country.
“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still
remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social
diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the
bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the
workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country
back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the
way to socialism.”
In 1991-92, the negative of the two basic historical alternatives
projected by Trotsky—capitalist counterrevolution—came to pass.
The “new atheists” not only falsely identify Marxism with Stalinism
but also falsify Marxism as such. Daniel Dennett is particularly vulgar and
contemptuous in his caricature of Marxism in Breaking the Spell:
“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease
Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of
the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they
so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was
going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that
Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all
its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the
revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was
guaranteed in the long run.”
As a matter of fact, the beginning of the first section of Marx’s
most famous and widely read work, the Communist Manifesto, clearly states
that while the class struggle is inevitable, the outcome is not:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in
constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.”
Half a century later, the revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg
posed the historical alternatives facing mankind as “socialism or barbarism.”
With the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, the profit-driven
capitalist-imperialist system threatens to destroy civilization and even
exterminate the human race.
It is common for bourgeois-liberal intellectuals, especially those
who describe themselves as secular humanists, to argue that Marxism is a form of
teleological idealism derived from the philosophy of Hegel. Attributed to Marx
is the idea that the historical development of society will necessarily
culminate in communism. Marxism is presented and condemned as a kind of
secularized religion in which the promise of a future otherworldly heaven is
replaced by the promise of a future earthly heaven.
In one of Marx’s first writings, he explicitly argued against a
Hegelian-type teleological concept of history. The Holy Family, written
in 1844 as Marx’s first collaborative work with Engels, states:
“Hegel’s conception of history presupposes an
Abstract or Absolute Spirit which develops in such a
way that mankind is a mere mass that bears the Spirit with a
varying degree of consciousness or unconsciousness. Within
empirical, exoteric history, therefore, Hegel makes a speculative,
esoteric history, develop. The history of mankind becomes the history of the
Abstract Spirit of mankind, hence a spirit far
removed from the real man....
“History does nothing, it ‘possesses
no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is
man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights;
‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve
its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of
man pursuing his aims.” (emphasis in original)
In the political realm, the bourgeois-rationalist “new atheists”
offer at best a species of liberal reformism, proferring advice to the rulers of
a capitalist order that, at home and abroad, inculcates the reactionary,
anti-scientific religious beliefs against which Dawkins et al. rail. Marxists,
in contrast, strive to change the political consciousness of the working class
in order to effect a revolutionary change in social conditions—i.e., the
overthrow of that capitalist order—leading to the erosion and final elimination
of all backwardness and superstition. In Marx’s own words: “Philosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is
to change it.”