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 |
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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.”
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