Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Novaya Zhizn, No. 28, December 3, 1905.
Source: Marxists Internet Archives.
Present-day society
is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working
class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the
landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since
the “free” workers, who all their life work for the capitalists,
are “entitled” only to such means of subsistence as are essential
for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the
safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.
The economic
oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders every
kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening
and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses. The
workers may secure a greater or lesser degree of political liberty to
fight for their economic emancipation, but no amount of liberty will
rid them of poverty, unemployment, and oppression until the power of
capital is overthrown. Religion is one of the forms of spiritual
oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of
the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want
and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle
against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in
a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle
with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the
like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by
religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to
take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by
the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while
on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their
entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price
tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people.
Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the
slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life
more or less worthy of man.
But a
slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to
struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave.
The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory
industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside
religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois
bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The
proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists
science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the
workers from their belief in life after death by welding them
together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
Religion must
be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually
express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these
words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding.
We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state
is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private
affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no
concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection
with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to
profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be
an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among
citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly
intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in
official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies
should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made
to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become
absolutely free associations of like-minded citizens, associations
independent of the state. Only the complete fulfilment of these
demands can put an end to the shameful and accursed past when the
church lived in feudal dependence on the state, and Russian citizens
lived in feudal dependence on the established church, when medieval,
inquisitorial laws (to this day remaining in our criminal codes and
on our statute-books) were in existence and were applied, persecuting
men for their belief or disbelief, violating men’s consciences, and
linking cosy government jobs and government-derived
incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established
church. Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist
proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.
The Russian
revolution must put this demand into effect as a necessary component
of political freedom. In this respect, the Russian revolution is in a
particularly favourable position, since the revolting officialism of
the police-ridden feudal autocracy has called forth discontent,
unrest and indignation even among the clergy. However abject, however
ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now
been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval
order in Russia. Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are
protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against
the spying for the police imposed on the “servants of God”. We
socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands
of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion,
making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they
should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police.
Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete
separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion
to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not
accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you
evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the
inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cosy
government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you
evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and
continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the
class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you.
So far
as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is
not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious,
advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an
association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of
class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of
religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church
so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo
logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by
word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against
every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological
struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party,
of the whole proletariat.
If that
is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists?
Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join
our Party?
The answer
to this question will serve to explain the very important difference
in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois
democrats and the Social-Democrats.
Our Programme
is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist,
world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore,
necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and
economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily
includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the
appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal
government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now
form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have
to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to
translate and widely disseminate the literature of the
eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.[1]
But under
no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the
religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an
“intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as
is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the
bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on
the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious
prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would
be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion
that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the
economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of
preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by
its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.
Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class
for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than
unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
That is
the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our
Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians
who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating
themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific
world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency
of various “Christians”. But that does not mean in the least that
the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it
does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the
forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to
be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas,
rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as
rubbish by the very course of economic development.
Everywhere the
reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to
concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife—in
order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really
important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being
solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in
revolutionary struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the
proletarian forces, which today manifests itself mainly in
Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow conceive some more subtle forms.
We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly, consistently and
patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the scientific
world-outlook—a preaching alien to any stirring up of secondary
differences.
The revolutionary
proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair,
so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system,
cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and
open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true
source of the religious humbugging of mankind.
Notes:
[1] See Frederick Engels, “Flüchtlings-Literatur”, Volksstaat, Nr, 73 vom 22.6.1874.
The attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Proletary, No. 45, May 13 (26), 1909.
Source: Marxists Internet Archives.
Social-Democracy
bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i. e.,
Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels
repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully
taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century
materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth
century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and
positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of
Engels’s Anti-Dühring,
which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist
and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist and for
leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us
recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches
Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in
order to renovate it, to invent a new, “exalted” religion, and so
forth. Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is
the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on
religion.[1] Marxism
has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and
every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction
that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.
At
the same time Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who
desired to be “more left” or “more revolutionary” than the
Social-Democrats, to introduce into the programme of the workers’
party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring
war on religion. Commenting in 1874 on the famous manifesto of the
Blanquist fugitive Communards who were living in exile in London,
Engels called their vociferous proclamation of war on religion a
piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the
best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really
dying out. Engels blamed the Blanquists for being unable to
understand that only the class struggle of the working masses could,
by comprehensively drawing the widest strata of the proletariat into
conscious and revolutionary social practice,
really free the oppressed masses from the yoke of religion, whereas
to proclaim that war on religion was a political task of the workers’
party was just anarchistic phrase-mongering.[2] And
in 1877, too, in his Anti-Dühring,
while ruthlessly attacking the slightest concessions made by Dühring
the philosopher to idealism and religion, Engels no less resolutely
condemns Dühring’s pseudo-revolutionary idea that religion should
be prohibited in socialist society. To declare such a war on
religion, Engels says, is to “out-Bismarck Bismarck”, i. e., to
repeat the folly of Bismarck’s struggle against the clericals (the
notorious “Struggle for Culture”, Kulturkampf,
i.e., the struggle Bismarck waged in the 1870s against the German
Catholic party, the “Centre” party, by means of a police
persecution of Catholicism). By this struggle Bismarck
only stimulated the
militant clericalism of the Catholics, and only injured the work of
real culture, because he gave prominence to religious divisions
rather than political divisions, and diverted the attention of some
sections of the working class and of the other democratic elements
away from the urgent tasks of the class and revolutionary struggle to
the most superficial and false bourgeois anti-clericalism. Accusing
the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of wanting to repeat
Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the
workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the
task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to
the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a
political war on religion.[3] This
view has become part of the very essence of German Social-Democracy,
which, for example, advocated freedom for the Jesuits, their
admission into Germany, and the complete abandonment of police
methods of combating any particular religion. “Religion is a
private matter”: this celebrated point in the Erfurt Programme
(1891) summed up these political tactics of Social-Democracy.
These
tactics have by now become a matter of routine; they have managed to
give rise to a new distortion of Marxism in the opposite direction,
in the direction of opportunism. This point in the Erfurt Programme
has come to be interpreted as meaning that we Social-Democrats, our
Party, consider religion
to be a private matter, that religion is a private matter for us as
Social-Democrats, for us as a party. Without entering into a direct
controversy with this opportunist view, Engels in the nineties deemed
it necessary to oppose it resolutely in a positive, and not a
polemical form. To wit: Engels did this in the form of a statement,
which he deliberately underlined, that Social-Democrats regard
religion as a private matter in
relation to the state,
but not in relation to themselves, not in relation to Marxism, and
not in relation to the workers’ party.[4]
Such
is the external history of the utterances of Marx and Engels on the
question of religion. To people with a slapdash attitude towards
Marxism, to people who cannot or will not think, this history is a
skein of meaningless Marxist contradictions and waverings, a
hodge-podge of “consistent” atheism and “sops” to religion,
“unprincipled” wavering between a r-r-revolutionary war on God
and a cowardly desire to “play up to” religious workers, a fear
of scaring them away, etc., etc. The literature of the anarchist
phrase-mongers contains plenty of attacks on Marxism in this vein.
But
anybody who is able to treat Marxism at all seriously, to ponder over
its philosophical principles and the experience of international
Social-Democracy, will readily see that the Marxist tactics in
regard to religion are thoroughly consistent, and were carefully
thought out by Marx and Engels; and that what dilettantes or
ignoramuses regard as wavering is but a direct and inevitable
deduction from dialectical materialism. It would be a profound
mistake to think that the seeming “moderation” of Marxism in
regard to religion is due to supposed “tactical” considerations,
the desire “not to scare away” anybody, and so forth. On the
contrary, in this question, too, the political line of Marxism is
inseparably bound up with its philosophical principles.
Marxism
is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as
was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the
materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical
materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists
and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the
domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must
combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism,
and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which
has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know
how to
combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of
faith and religion among the masses in
a materialist way.
The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological
preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be
linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which
aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion
retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on
broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the
peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the
bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And
so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of
atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not
true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois
uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly
enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist
way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social.
The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden
condition of the working masses and their apparently complete
helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every
day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most
horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more
severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars,
earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force
of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the
people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian
and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”,
“unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism,
prostitution, death from starvation—such is the
root of
modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and
foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist.
No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses
who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy
of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses
themselves learn to fight this root of
religion, fight the
rule of capital in
all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.
Does
this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or
unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that
Social-Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to
its basic task—the development of the class struggle of the
exploited masses against
the exploiters.
This
proposition may not be understood (or at least not immediately
understood) by one who has not pondered over the principles of
dialectical materialism, i. e., the philosophy of Marx and Engels.
How is that?—he will say. Is ideological propaganda, the preaching
of definite ideas, the struggle against that enemy of culture and
progress which has persisted for thousands of years (i. e., religion)
to be subordinated to the class struggle, i. e., the struggle for
definite practical aims in the economic and political field?
This
is one of those current objections to Marxism which testify to a
complete misunderstanding of Marxian dialectics. The contradiction
which perplexes these objectors is a real contradiction in real life,
i. e., a dialectical contradiction, and not a verbal or invented one.
To draw a hard-and-fast line between the theoretical propaganda
of atheism, i. e., the destruction of religious beliefs among certain
sections of the proletariat, and the success, the progress and the
conditions of the class struggle of these sections, is to reason
undialectically, to transform a shifting and relative boundary into
an absolute boundary; it is forcibly to disconnect what is
indissolubly connected in real life. Let us take an example. The
proletariat in a particular region and in a particular industry is
divided, let us assume, into an advanced section of fairly
class-conscious Social-Democrats, who are of course atheists, and
rather backward workers who are still connected with the countryside
and with the peasantry, and who believe in God, go to church, or are
even under the direct influence of the local priest—who, let us
suppose, is organising a Christian labour union. Let us assume
furthermore that the economic struggle in this locality has resulted
in a strike. It is the duty of a Marxist to place the success of the
strike movement above everything else, vigorously to counteract the
division of the workers in this struggle into atheists and
Christians, vigorously to oppose any such division. Atheist
propaganda in such circumstances may be both unnecessary and
harmful—not from the philistine fear of scaring away the backward
sections, of losing a seat in the elections, and so on, but out of
consideration for the real progress of the class struggle, which in
the conditions of modern capitalist society will convert Christian
workers to Social-Democracy and to atheism a hundred times better
than bald atheist propaganda. To preach atheism at such a moment and
in such circumstances would only be playing into
the hands of
the priest and the priests, who desire nothing better than that the
division of the workers according to their participation in the
strike movement should be replaced by their division according to
their belief in God. An anarchist who preached war against God at all
costs would in effect be helping the priests and the bourgeoisie (as
the anarchists always do help the bourgeoisie in
practice).
A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a
dialectical materialist, i. e., one who treats the struggle against
religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely
theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the
basis of the class struggle which is going on in
practice and
is educating the masses more and better than anything else could. A
Marxist must be able to view the concrete situation as a whole, he
must always be able to find the boundary between anarchism and
opportunism (this boundary is relative, shifting and changeable, but
it exists). And he must not succumb either to the abstract, verbal,
but in reality empty “revolutionism’˜ of the anarchist, or to
the philistinism and opportunism of the petty bourgeois or liberal
intellectual, who boggles at the struggle against religion, forgets
that this is his duty, reconciles himself to belief in God, and is
guided not by the interests of the class struggle but by the petty
and mean consideration of offending nobody, repelling nobody and
scaring nobody—by the sage rule: “live and let live”, etc.,
etc.
It
is from this angle that all side issues bearing on the attitude of
Social-Democrats to religion should be dealt with. For example, the
question is often brought up whether a priest can be a member of the
Social-Democratic Party or not, and this question is usually answered
in an unqualified affirmative, the experience of the European
Social-Democratic parties being cited as evidence. But this
experience was the result, not only of the application of the Marxist
doctrine to the workers’ movement, but also of the special
historical conditions in Western Europe which are absent in Russia
(we will say more about these conditions later), so that an
unqualified affirmative answer in this case is incorrect. It cannot
be asserted once and for all that priests cannot be members of the
Social-Democratic Party; but neither can the reverse rule be laid
down. If a priest comes to us to take part in our common political
work and conscientiously performs Party duties, without opposing the
programme of the Party, he may be allowed to join the ranks of the
Social-Democrats; for the contradiction between the spirit and
principles of our programme and the religious convictions of the
priest would in such circumstances be something that concerned him
alone, his own private contradiction; and a political organisation
cannot put its members through an examination to see if there is no
contradiction between their views and the Party programme. But, of
course, such a case might be a rare exception even in Western Europe,
while in Russia it is altogether improbable. And if, for example, a
priest joined the Social-Democratic Party and made it his chief and
almost sole work actively to propagate religious views in the Party,
it would unquestionably have to expel him from its ranks. We must not
only admit workers who preserve their belief in God into the
Social-Democratic Party, but must deliberately set out to recruit
them; we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to
their religious convictions, but we recruit them in order to educate
them in the spirit of our programme, and not in order to permit an
active struggle against it. We allow freedom of opinion within the
Party, but to certain limits, determined by freedom of grouping; we
are not obliged to go hand in hand with active preachers of views
that are repudiated by the majority of the Party.
Another
example. Should members of the Social-Democratic Party be censured
all alike under all circumstances for declaring “socialism is my
religion”, and for advocating views in keeping with this
declaration? No! The deviation from Marxism (and consequently from
socialism) is here indisputable; but the significance of the
deviation, its relative importance, so to speak, may vary with
circumstances. It is one thing when an agitator or a person
addressing the workers speaks in this way in order to make himself
better understood, as an introduction to his subject, in order to
present his views more vividly in terms to which the backward masses
are most accustomed. It is another thing when a writer begins to
preach “god-building”, or god-building socialism (in the spirit,
for example, of our Lunacharsky and Co.). While in the first case
censure would be mere carping, or even inappropriate restriction of
the freedom of the agitator, of his freedom in choosing “pedagogical”
methods, in the second case party censure is necessary and essential.
For some the statement “socialism is a religion” is a form of
transition from religion to socialism; for others, it is a form of
transition from socialism
to religion.
Let
us now pass to the conditions which in the West gave rise to the
opportunist interpretation of the thesis: “religion is a private
matter”. Of course, a contributing influence are those general
factors which give rise to opportunism as a whole, like sacrificing
the fundamental interests of the working-class movement for the
sake of momentary advantages. The party of the proletariat demands
that the
state should
declare religion a private matter, but does not regard the fight
against the opium of the people, the fight against religious
superstitions, etc., as a “private matter”. The opportunists
distort the question to mean that
the Social-Democratic Party regards religion
as a private matter!
But
in addition to the usual opportunist distortion (which was not made
clear at all in the discussion within our Duma group when it was
considering the speech on religion), there are special historical
conditions which have given rise to the present-day, and, if one may
so express it, excessive, indifference on the part of the European
Social-Democrats to the question of religion. These conditions are of
a twofold nature. First, the task of combating religion is
historically the task of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and in the
West this task was to a large extent performed (or tackled) by
bourgeois democracy, in the epoch of its revolutions
or its assaults upon feudalism and medievalism. Both in France and in
Germany there is a tradition of bourgeois war on religion, and it
began long before socialism (the Encyclopaedists, Feuerbach). In
Russia, because of the conditions of our bourgeois-democratic
revolution, this task too falls almost entirely on the shoulders of
the working class. Petty-bourgeois (Narodnik) democracy in our
country has not done too much in this respect (as the new-fledged
Black-Hundred Cadets, or Cadet Black Hundreds, of Vekhi[5]think),
but rather too
little,
in comparison with what has been done in Europe.
On
the other hand, the tradition of bourgeois war on religion has given
rise in Europe to a specifically bourgeois distortion of
this war by anarchism—which, as the Marxists have long explained
time and again, takes its stand on the bourgeois world-outlook, in
spite of all the “fury” of its attacks on the bourgeoisie. The
anarchists and Blanquists in the Latin countries, Most (who,
incidentally, was a pupil of Dühring) and his ilk in Germany, the
anarchists in Austria in the eighties, all carried revolutionary
phrase-mongering in the struggle against religion to a nec
plus ultra.
It is not surprising that, compared with the anarchists, the
European Social-Democrats now go
to the other extreme.
This is quite understandable and to a certain extent legitimate, but
it would be wrong for us Russian Social-Democrats to forget the
special historical conditions of the West.
Secondly,
in the West, after the
national bourgeois revolutions were over, after more
or less complete religious liberty had been introduced, the problem
of the democratic struggle against religion had been pushed,
historically, so far into the background by the struggle of bourgeois
democracy against socialism that the bourgeois
governments deliberately tried
to draw the attention of the masses away from socialism by organising
a quasi-liberal “offensive” against clericalism. Such was the
character of the Kulturkampf in
Germany and of the struggle of the bourgeois republicans against
clericalism in France. Bourgeois anti-clericalism, as a means of
drawing the attention of the working-class masses away from
socialism—this is what preceded the spread of the modern spirit of
“indifference” to the struggle against religion among the
Social-Democrats in the West. And this again is quite understandable
and legitimate, because Social-Democrats had to counteract bourgeois
and Bismarckian anti-clericalism by subordinating the
struggle against religion to the struggle for socialism.
In
Russia conditions are quite different. The proletariat is the leader
of our bourgeois-democratic revolution. Its party must be the
ideological leader in the struggle against all attributes of
medievalism, including the old official religion and every attempt to
refurbish it or make out a new or different case for it, etc.
Therefore, while Engels was comparatively mild in correcting the
opportunism of the German Social-Democrats who were substituting, for
the demand of the workers’ party that the state should
declare religion a private matter, the declaration that
religion is a private matter for the Social-Democrats themselves, and
for the Social-Democratic Party, it is clear that the importation of
this German distortion by the Russian opportunists would have merited
a rebuke a hundred
times more
severe by Engels.
By
declaring from the Duma rostrum that religion is the opium of the
people, our Duma group acted quite correctly, and thus created a
precedent which should serve as a basis for all utterances by Russian
Social-Democrats on the question of religion. Should they have gone
further and developed the atheist argument in greater detail? We
think not. This might have brought the risk of the political party of
the proletariat exaggerating the struggle against religion; it might
have resulted in obliterating the distinction between the bourgeois
and the socialist struggle against religion. The first duty of the
Social-Democratic group in the Black-Hundred Duma has been discharged
with honour.
The
second duty—and perhaps the most important for
Social-Democrats—namely, to explain the class role of the church
and the clergy in supporting the Black-Hundred government and the
bourgeoisie in its fight against the working class, has also been
discharged with honour. Of course, very much more might be said on
this subject, and the Social-Democrats in their future utterances
will know how to amplify Comrade Surkov’s speech; but still his
speech was excellent, and its circulation by all Party organisations
is the direct duty of our Party.
The
third duty was to explain in full detail the correct meaning
of the proposition, so often distorted by the German opportunists,
that “religion is a private matter”. This, unfortunately, Comrade
Surkov did not do. It is all the more regrettable because in the
earlier activity of the Duma group a mistake had been committed on
this question by Comrade Belousov, and was pointed out at the time
by Proletary.
The discussion in the Duma group shows that the dispute about atheism
has screened from it the question of the proper interpretation of the
celebrated demand that religion should be proclaimed a private
matter. We shall not blame Comrade Surkov alone for this error of the
entire Duma group. More, we shall frankly admit that the whole Party
is at fault here, for not having sufficiently elucidated this
question and not having sufficiently prepared the minds of
Social-Democrats to understand Engels’s remark levelled against the
German opportunists. The discussion in the Duma group proves that
there was in fact a confused understanding of the question, and not
at all any desire to ignore the teachings of Marx; and we are sure
that the error will be corrected in future utterances of the group.
We
repeat that on the whole Comrade Surkov’s speech was excellent, and
should be circulated by all the organisations. In its discussion of
this speech the Duma group demonstrated that it is fulfilling its
Social-Democratic duty conscientiously. It remains to express the
wish that reports on discussions within the Duma group should appear
more often in the Party press so as to bring the group and the Party
closer together, to acquaint the Party with the difficult work being
done within the group, and to establish ideological unity in the work
of the Party and the Duma group.
Notes:
[1] See
K. Marx, Contribution
to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right.
Introduction. (K. Marx and F. Engels, On
Religion,
Moscow, 1957, p. 42.)
[2] See
F. Engels, “Flüchtlings-Literatur. II. Das Programme der
Blanquisten”.
[3] See
F. Engels, Anti-Dühring,
Moscow, 1959, pp. 434-37.
[4] This
refers to F. Engels’s preface to K. Marx’s pamphlet The
Civil War in France (see
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected
Works,Vol.
1, Moscow, 1958, p. 479).[5] Vekhi (Landmarks)—a
Cadet collection of articles by N. Berdayev, S. Bulgakov, P. Struve,
M. Herschensohn and other representatives of the
counter-revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie, published in Moscow in
1909. In their articles on the Russian intelligentsia these writers
tried to discredit the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the
best representatives of the Russian people, including Belinsky and
Chernyshevsky; they vilified the revolutionary movement of 1905 and
thanked the tsarist government for having, "with its bayonets
and jails”, saved the bourgeoisie from “the popular wrath”. The
writers called upon the intelligentsia to serve the autocracy. Lenin
compared the programme of the Vekhi symposium
in point of both philosophy and journalism with that of the
Black-Hundred newspaper Moskovskiye
Vedomosti,
calling the symposium “an
encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy”,
“nothing but a flood of reactionary mud poured on democracy”.
