Berlin
MARX, RELIGION, REVOLUTION.
RECONSIDERATIONS ABOUT SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM[1]
Sommario: 1. Socialism as science? – 2. Marx and religion. – 3. Reset of the question.
1. – Socialism as
science?
Is there really
a “scientific socialism” – or, for that matter, a scientific communism’? Can we
a adopt this concept by its ‚face value’ for today? But why should socialism –
a political program, possibly also a moral ideal - be scientific?
We know, this
concept arose out of polemics: as a self-promoting identification of an
initially rather small political and philosophical current (or faction) founded
and embodied by two German left-wing intellectuals Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. Time-frame: shortly before and after the European revolutions of 1848.
The two friends wanted to distinguish themselves from the other competing
groups or factions within a vast intellectual diaspora of radical democrats
(like Arnold Ruge), republican nationalists (like Giuseppe Mazzini) and
socialist thinkers and project-makers (like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Many of them
were political refugees, exiled in Paris or London, in opposition to the
political regimes and social systems of their homelands in continental Europe.
So Marx’s and
Engels’s own project of socialism/communism was supposed to be different from
those of the other ‚sects’ - as Engels would call them in retrospective. Forty
years later, In his ‚Preface to the English Edition’ of the Communist
Manifesto he takes care to distinguish his and Marx’s ideas in 1848 from
the various ‚utopian’ groups, be they ‚Socialists’ (like Owenites in England,
Fourieristes in France) or ‚Communists’ (as the followers of Etienne Cabet in
France, and of Wilhelm Weitling in Germany). Whereas for Marx and Engels, at
that time, the name ‚Socialism’ seemed too compromising (or too bourgeois‚ too
‚respectable’), the utopian ‚Communists’ were at least working class-inspired -
and so „there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take″[2]:
Marx and Engels choose the name ’Communism’ for their manifesto, and
would speak later about their own ‚Socialism’ only with the qualification
‚scientific’. Their own socialism/communism was rooted not just in moral or
religious ideals, so they pretended, but in the driving forces of history[3].
Today’s
socialists in advanced capitalist societies have become rather sceptical
towards any unquestioned ‚scientificity’ of their own political programs
or ethical propositions. There is no simple, no direct implementation between
specific normative ideals and the ‚objective situation’[4]. Of
course, political programs of social reform (or revolution) should be realistic
with respect to the given economical possibilities, to demographical and
ecological dynamics, to historical traditions, memories, experience ... but is
their supposed ‚scientific nature’ necessarily a good thing? Couldn’t it be
also a danger? (... a way of immunization of political projects, presenting
them as pure outcome of objective necessity, without alternatives ...)
Revised
prognoses ...
Whatever we may
mean by ‚scientific’ in the context of social ideals and social movements,
think might agree in at least one, minimal condition: a scientific attitude
should include intellectual honesty. In other words, a ‚scientific socialism’
would be a socialism prepared to recognize his own errors or failures (if, when
and where they have occurred). This attitude of self-conscious fallibilism
might be the condition of being able to learn from false prognoses, failed
prophecies, irrealistic experiments. So: If there exists something like a
‚scientific socialism’ then it should recognize his errors, e.g. the
falsification of some of its central prognoses (or ‚prophecies’).
I shall discuss
here only two of many fallible prophecies of Marxian
socialism/communism, two prognoses that didn’t come true:
(a) the
Marxist prophecy about the ‚withering away of the state’ under the
conditions of realized communism (which means the ‚higher’ or developed form of
socialism, supposedly under the conditions of general welfare);
and (b)
the Marxian prognosis of the necessary ‚dissolution or evaporation of religion’
in all (or most) modern industrial societies whit a scientific culture (at
least as soon as the conditions of social misery will have been abolished under
socialism/communism)[5].
So our rather
elementary question would be: did these prognoses (a) and (b) of Karl Marx,
Friedrich Engels and other Marxists come true? Here we have to face another
difficulty first: There simply is not just one Marxism, and so we also
do not have just one marxist answer to each of these questions, but there are
(at least) two families of Marxism[6]. The
political and ideological split between of Marxist socialists and Marxist
communists after the First World War was one of the consequences of the Russian
revolution of 1917; and obviously I cannot analyse this historical process
here. But if we just stick to our question concerning the two Marxian
prophecies (a) and (b), we will have to acknowledge the sharp difference
between the communist and the social-democratic Marxists in the 20th century.
Marxian socialists (or social democrats) and Marxian communists (or
bolshevists) gave different, viz. opposite answers to both questions.
Indeed only
the communists did maintain (a), the destruction of the state, as ″ultimate
goal″ of their program: the final ‚shattering’ or ‚demolition’ of the state
apparatus; and only the communists did uphold (b), the final vanishing
of religion in a rational communist society, as aim of Marxist politics: With
the end of social misery (as consequence of the end of exploitation), so they
believed, religion as such would become superfluous, senseless and
absurd, it would simply wither away.
But already at
the beginning of the 20th century the Marxian socialists or socialdemocrats
would not have signed these prophecies (a) and (b) any longer; as they already had
abandoned both Marxian views from the origins of their movement. The
majority socialists in central and western Europe did so more or less
explicitly, opting for revised (R) versions of (a) and of (b) instead: for the democratization
of the state (a/R) - but not for its destruction. And they fought
against any dominant political establishment of religion: favoring its privatization
(b/R) - but not its vanishing or extinguishing.
So while Marxist
social democrats, the majority-parties of the labour movement in Western
Europe, had already abandoned or ‚revised’ the original Marxian prognoses (a)
and (b)[7], in
the 20th century only the communist parties really tried (or pretended) to hold
on to these original Marxian prognoses or prophecies and to implement them.
Consequently only the communists may be judged by the eventual success or
failure of these Marxian prophecies (a) and (b). Socialists or social democrats
may have huge problems nowadays; but these are problems of a different nature –
the European socialist parties did (and do) not promise the end of the
state and the end of religious faith. Only communists did so.
... and failed
prophecies
And what did
happen to the state and to religion under communist rule? Did they vanish –
have they been abolished, shattered, withered away? – A rather rhetorical
question, as it seems. – If we are honest, we have to admit: what took place in
postrevolutionary Russia (and in many other socialist countries under communist
rule) was the exact opposite of the Marxian prophecies (a) and (b). How
was this possible? Was this failure the result of exceptional difficulties,
caused by unpredictable crises, or by the undermining of the construction of
socialism by counterrevolutionary enemies?
Even if we
should take into account the serious crises and harsh adversities of the new
Soviet regime in the first years of its existence, it would be absurd to put
the blame of the failure (or non-realization) of the Marxian promises (a) and
(b) only on counterrevolution: to the geopolitical and social
(‚class’)-enemies of the Soviet Union. Especially if we consider also that this
‚Soviet way’ of the construction of socialism/communism thereafter had then
been promoted as success-story: for roughly half a century it became almost the
standard export–version of Marxism and communism[8].
So, what
happened? After the revolution of 1917, after war and civil war, the
destruction of the old autocratic state-apparatus of Zarist Russia was not
at all followed by (a): neither by a rapid vanishing of the new ‚transitional’
state nor by a slow, benign kind of euthanasia of the new communist state
apparatus, giving more and more space to the free association of producers and
citizens, to self-organization within civil society or cooperative production.
No! What happened, was the exact opposite: real communism meant the strengthening
of the state, its growing institutional unification by the extension of its
control (to the country-side), by the deepening of its social
control-mechanisms (within the urban and industrial centers) and, not least, by
its increasing cultural and ideological homogenization (promoted not least by
the leading communist party).
This last point
has also to do also with (b): The process of a supposedly passive ‚withering
away’ of religion did not occur either. The soft evaporation of religion did not
happen, what happened instead was an active, organized policy of suppressing
organized religion by the state (and by the party), as the Russian Orthodox
Church was seen as a supposedly ‚counterrevolutionary force’. But in the end
this ‚revolutionary’ endeavor did not succeed - all to the contrary, it
failed almost totally: After the systemic defeat of Soviet communism in Russia
and Eastern Europe in the last decade of the 20th century the formerly
silenced, oppressed or suppressed churches in Russia and Eastern Europe were
far from dead. These churches – generally of the family of orthodox
christianity[9] -
returned quickly in the forefront of social visibility and political influence;
and they became soon ‚parties’ in the conflicts in (and between) the former
communist countries. Besides: they are now often honored and cherished by
former communists and new nationalists alike.
2. – Marx and religion
For Marxists,
especially for communists, all these developments should represent an
intellectually deeply troubling state of affairs. But how a Marxian response to
this challenge should look like? Is there a Marxist explanation of the
‚survival’ of religion in and after communism? If in the words of the early
Karl Marx (from 1844) religion is just ‚the expression of real misery and at
the same time the protest against it’ – should we then say that it was the real
misery of (more or less) realized communism that produced the resistance and
resurgence of the Christian churches? Their resurrection after having been
oppressed, suppressed, prosecuted? (Or because they were prosecuted?) –
Or was the Marxian prognosis already wrong from the beginning?
In the Communist
Manifesto, Marx and Engels accept and confute various criticisms of
communism; the only accusations not even meriting any serious refutation are
"charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and
generally, from an ideological standpoint". These - we are told -
"are not deserving of serious examination"[10]. The
Communist Manifesto was not only the first of the various radical
Programs, Declarations and Manifestos in the 19th century predicting the
revolutionary success of industrial capitalism and bourgeois society in almost
prophetic terms – a correct prognosis, as we have seen in the last 150 years.
But with historical hindsight another exceptional feature of Marx’ and Engels’
revolutionary project is not less striking: It is one of the first socialist or
communist programmes written in exclusively secular (even secularist)
terms. Many of the various so called ‚utopian-socialist’ programmes had been
either religiously inspired or had used at least a religious language. Even its immediate precursor, Friedrich Engels' Grundsätze
des Kommunismus, a kind of first draft of the future Manifesto, was
(at least in its form) still a catechism, the ‚Draft of a Communist Confession
of Faith’[11].
Many of the
various so called ‚utopian-socialist’ programmes had been either religiously
inspired or had used at least a religious language. Think only of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's writings - from Qu'est-ce que la propriété
(1840) to De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l`Église (1860). Or
take - even earlier - the ‚Manifesto’ of Henri de Saint-Simon Le Nouveau
Christianisme (1825), his last, unfinished work that nevertheless inspired
the important Saint-Simonist ‚church’. And the early socialist or Communist
secret societies in the Parisian milieu of exiled democrats and revolutionaries
have been compared by almost every sympathizing contemporary intellectual with
the „Galileans“ (Heine), the early Christians and their church of the
catacombs and martyrs.
Just read the
preface to the French edition of Heinrich Heine's „Letters from Paris“, i.e.
the literary feuilletons that Marx's friend Heine had sent in the 1840s
to the Augsburger Zeitung, and later, in 1854/55, republished in a
book-volume Lutétia. The communist may be atheists, consequently big
sinners - we are told, but they are the only sincere Christians; the leading principles
of their cosmopolitism, in fact, are converging with the basic dogma of
Christianity, that is: universal charity - whereas the „false patriots“, the
German nationalists within the milieu of the Anti-prussian opposition in exile
are only hypocrites, pseudo-christians: „Maulchristen“. And so it is not just
irony, when Heine in one of his correspondences from Paris (July 15th, 1842)
evokes the possible political and social future of Europe using the images and dramatis
personae of Saint John's Apocalypse, the last book of the Christian Bible:
After the final battle between the two beasts of the apocalypse Leviathan and
Behemoth (i.e. the seaborne British Empire and the Russian Bear) the
egalitarian communist shepherd will unify all mankind in a dictatorship of
equality[12].
Karl Marx, son
of a liberal Jewish lawyer converted to protestantism, was the first
revolutionary not to use the widespread formula of communism as the „religion
of equality“ – or, as the Saint-Simon had put it: the „religion of science“.
Besides: His friend Friedrich Engels, coming from the sectarian background of
evangelical fundamentalists of Elberfeld-Barmen (a protestant enclave in
catholic Rhenania) would later sometimes adopt this metaphor again[13]- as
did the major Marxist intellectual of the German socialdemocracy Karl Kautsky,
when he spoke about of the socialist party as the ecclesia militans the
„fighting church“ of the proletariat. But why did Marx adopt this
radical secularist outlook? I can see two main motives for this Marxian
‚speciality’, and both may be found in Marx’s enlightened religious and
philosophical background: in Jewish messianism – and then in Hegel’s philosophy
of freedom as secularization of christianity.
I am obviously
not the first one to notice that the idea of abolishing (false) religion was
originally a religious idea in itself, an imperative connected with biblic
Monotheism: it is only the true God that may order you to smash the false
idols[14].
More specifically Marx's ‚scientific’ (i.e. secularist) socialism followed also
a messianic tradition within radical enlightenment - a tradition that we can
most prominently find in Benedict Spinoza, whose Tractatus
theologico-politicus he knew very well[15]. And
also Marx’s vision of the proletariat as ‚universal class’ is not free from
messianic hopes[16]. The
future polyvalent self-realization of/in labour would coincide with a totally
secular (‚humanist’ or ‚naturalist’) culture, substituting the religious or
fictious, ‚alienated’ self-realization that Marx had criticized in his Economical-philosophical
Manuscripts, written in Paris in 1844 [17]. And
so only the totally secular world would be mature for the universalized
Messiah: with the idea of the proletariat as the universal class Marx is
turning the working class into a collective Messiah, which would overcome the
division between Heaven and Earth, Reason and historical action. - But we know:
this Messiah did not come.
Hegelian
illusions ...
Another reason
of Marx’s peculiar revolutionary secularism lies in the delusions of his own
philosophical past: He was a revolutionary radical coming from the
‚Young-Hegelians’, the philosophical current of radical liberals in an
anti-liberal State: in restaurationist Prussia. These Young-Hegelians had
accepted many of the basic philosophical presuppositions of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel’s interpretation of Europe’s historical present after the
French revolution, but then contested his consequences[18]. In
his political philosophy Hegel hat opted for constitutional monarchy as a
somewhat a ‘state-guided’ form of liberalism in Germany - but his left-wing
disciples could not accept this account as a correct description of the
Prussian state. And at the same time Hegel had also seen political (liberal and
constitutional) modernity as the rational realization of Christian religion -
understood as the very religion of freedom[19]. And
also in this point the ‚Young Hegelians’ would not follow their master any
longer.
For Hegel both
the religious organization (the ‘Church’) and the legitimate form of political
dominion (the ‚State’) have to be understood philosophically as elements of one
organizing whole[20]. In
Hegel’s philosophy of history both institutions - the modern Church (for Hegel:
Protestantism) and the modern State (constitutionalism) - are moments of the
development and the differentiation of one common ‘reason’ (or dao). For
Hegel philosophical REASON (‚reason’ with a capital R) is more than just an
epistemic method or a pragmatic way of gaining knowledge, and it is also more
than just a method or system of establishing the best moral rules – REASON
concerns the structure of mind/spirit in general[21].
Now, if human
freedom has to be understood as auto-determination in differentiation (as
Hegel’s philosophical presupposition goes)[22],
then REASON, the very structure of Spirit (dao) can also serve as the
method of understanding history, individuating historical progresses in
conscious freedom[23].
Hegel’s Philosophy of History is reconstructing history as structured and
teleological progress of the development of human institutions; and the ‚end of
history’, the constitutional institutionalization of ‚freedom’, for Hegel
coincided with the rational development of Christianity: Christianity being the
religion in which the Divine (Christ as the Son of God) himself had become
human, identifying himself with the Logos (reason)[24].
... and
communist delusions
To make a long
and complicated story very short: De facto the Prussian state, defeated
and reborn in the antinapoleonic wars, did not reflect (or respect) Hegel’s idealization
of constitutional liberty and thus could not be seen as rational
realization of human freedom; and this awareness has surely been one of the
motives of Marx’s (anti-)idealistic and democratic revolt against
state-bureaucracy and political censorship. How was it possible to see the
modern legal-bureaucratic state (as Hegel seemed to propose) as the realization
of Christian liberty? Then Christianity itself had to be identified as part of
the problem, and not of the solution; and therefore (as Marx wrote in 1844)
„the critique of religion is the precondition of all critique“[25].
Marx had studied
philosophy in Berlin with Hegel, but in the Western province of Rhenania,
occupied by Prussia, he was a journalist fighting for the freedom of the Press
– today he would fight against illiberal restrictions of the Internet. This
might well explain his rejection of Hegel’s idealization of the (Prussian)
state in a period of restauration, and his aversion against the established protestant
churches as well. But it does not justify his errors in prognosis (or
prophecy): Marx’s optimistic prophecy of a stateless society in
communism and Marx’s utopian exclusion of any form of religion from human
self-realization (or ‚freedom’) have revealed themselves as fundamental errors.
Errors can be fatal. The illusionary prophecy (you may call it ‚materialist’ or
‚idealist’, it doesn’t really matter) of the substitution of the political
state by a mere „administration of things“ (as Friedrich Engels would call it
later) might have had indirect fatal consequences: It could have made
technocratic planning methods easier, adopting ways of treating human beings as
if they were things (and not – as the Christian socialists would hold: as
images of God).
Karl Marx
himself was not in favour of any organized repression of religion at all – his
own arms against religion and superstition were always philosophy, history and
literary criticism. And what is more important: obviously Karl Marx himself
cannot be held responsible for the terrible oppressions and prosecutions of
thousands of religious believers in various countries under communist rule that
occurred a century after Marx. The idealist or ‚scientist’ belief (or
‚materialist’ faith, the label doesn’t matter) that the growth of science and
industry might render any religious idea or emotion superfluous and futile does
not necessarily lead to any religious prosecution. It is simply an
under-complex vision of humanity[26]. But
perhaps it may have made it more difficult to perceive the cruelty of
anti-religious repression. Not only under communism.
3. – Reset of the
question
I may end with
some very general remarks: Whatever the „objective reasons“ for the second
Russian Revolution of 1917 might have been (after the first, the liberal
February-Revolution); and whatever its positive effects for the anticolonial
and anti-imperialist movements of the 20th century might have been – the
outcome for both questions that I have raised here was a terrible, and
sometimes even a terroristic one: (a) for the relation between the freedom of
civil society under the rule of law and the political state; and (b) for the
relation between reason, religion and human self-realization in a socialist
society.
After the
liberal February Revolution of 1917 the Russian Orthodox Church convocated its
first (somehow democratic) Concile after centuries of autocracy – but after the
October Revolution, under Lenin and later und Stalin the Church was prosecuted,
repressed and undermined by terror and infiltration (until Josef Stalin
remembered the useful role of the orthodox religion for psychological warfare
in the Great Patriotic War against the German aggression)[27].
What consequences
did this pattern of the marxist criticism of religion have for later
revolutions of the 20th century?
-
In Latin America, since about fifty years the influential Catholic ‚theology of
liberation’ has been successfully challenging the idea that Christian religion
is by its essence oppressive and anti-revolutionary.
-
And whereas many national liberations in the period of anti-colonialism had
began as essentially secularist, anti-religious, social(ist) revolutions, they
later did give birth to regimes with heavily religious imprint: Think about the
Algerian revolution, the Indian national liberation, even the development of
Pakistan, the birth of Israel as a socialist and secularist state[28].
And not least:
some of the paradigmatic revolutions at the end of the 20th century did
explicitly assume a religious identity: so did the anti-communist revolution in
Poland, based on an implicit ‚national alliance’ between the Solidarnòsc
workers’- union, the citizens’-rights-movement and the Roman Catholic Church;
and so did obviously the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Is the Marxian
identification between social emancipation and the abolition of religion still
valid? Was it ever?
Works cited
J. ASSMANN (2003),
Die mosaische Unterscheidung oder Der Preis des Monotheismus, München: Hanser
Verlag 2003.
E. W. Böckenförde, Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis
Staat und Religion bei Hegel, in: Der Staat 21 (1982), 481 – 503.
F. ENGELS,
„Grundsätze des Kommunismus“, in: Marx Engels Werke (MEW), Vol. 4, Berlin/DDR:
Dietz Verlag 1959, 361 – 380.
Id.
(1888/2002), Preface to the English Edition, in: Marx/Engels, The Communist
Manifesto (1848/2002), 295 – 302.
Id.
(1890/2002), Preface to the German Edition, in: Marx/Engels, The Communist
Manifesto (1848/2002), 303 – 311.
Id.
(1895/1960), Preface to Karl Marx, ‚Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848-1850’, in:
Marx Engels Werke (MEW), Vol. 7, Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag 1960, 509 – 527.
A. GORZ (1980),
Adieux au prolétariat. Au delà du socialisme, Paris: Galilée 1980.
H. HEINE, Lutétia,
in: H. Heine, Sämtliche Schriften (ed. Klaus Briegleb), Vol. 5, München: Hanser
Verlag 1984.
A. HONNETH (2015),
Die Idee des Sozialismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2015.
C. JAMME / Helmut
SCHNEIDER (eds.), Mythologie der Vernunft. Hegels „ältestes Systemprogramm des
deutschen Idealismus“, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag 1984.
O. KALLSCHEUER
(1986), Marxismus und Sozialismus bis zum 1.Weltkrieg,
in: Iring Fetscher/
Herfried Münkler (eds.), Pipers Handbuch der politischen Ideen,
Vol.4, Neuzeit: Von
der Französischen Revolution bis zum europäischen Nationalismus, München
(Piper) 1986.
Id.
(1999), The West, the Rest, and the Prophet, in: Constellations. Vol.6 / No.
2 (June 1999), 222- 232.
Id. (2009), Hegels
Theorie der Säkularisierung, in: Andreas Arndt / Christian Iber / Günter Kruck
(eds.), Staat und Religion in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag
2009, 109 – 120.
K. LÖWITH,
Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History,
Chicago: Chicago U.P. 1949.
K. MARX
(1841/1976), „Spinoza’s theologisch-politischer Tractat“ (Excerpt-notebook),
in: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Vol. IV., Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag 1976,
232-241.
Id.
(1844/2005), Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (ed. by Barbara
Zehnpfennig), Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 2005.
ID. (1844),
Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie,
in:
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris 1844 / Reprint 1967, 71 – 85.
K. MARX - F.
ENGELS (1848/2002), The Communist Manifesto. With an Introduction and notes by
Gareth Stedman Jones, Penguin Classics, UK 2002.
M. WALZER
(2015), The Paradox of Liberation. Secular Revolutions and Religious
Counterrevolutions, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
[Un evento culturale, in quanto ampiamente pubblicizzato in precedenza, rende impossibile qualsiasi valutazione veramente anonima dei contributi ivi presentati. Per questa ragione, gli scritti di questa parte della sezione “Memorie” sono stati valutati “in chiaro” dai promotori, dal curatore della pubblicazione e dalla direzione di Diritto @ Storia]
[1] Paper presented at the
International Symposium on History, Reality and Future of Socialism, Peking
University, School of Marxism, 21-22 October 2017.
[2] See ENGELS’S
later Prefaces to the English Edition of the Communist Manifesto (1888,
298f.) and to the German Edition (1890, 309 f.).
[3] I will not
discuss the later distinction of Marx and Engels between socialism as ‚lower’
stage or phase of communism, which then is supposed to be the ‚higher’ or more
perfect version of the socialist goal. (It might also be seen as a way of
saving ‚utopia’ within scientific socialism).
[4] Axel
HONNETH (2015) recently proposed an ‚updated’ idea of socialism that he wants
to be more than just an ‚ideal’. But in fact he is proposing just a another
normative ideal (or a reformulated set of norms: a normative model of socially
embodied freedom) which he then presents as the result of a ‚normative
interpretation’, (implementation or reconstruction) of modern societies by
means of a moral sociology of institutions (‚updating’ the conceptual tools of
Hegel). Missing in his interesting proposal – however - is the crucial role of social
movements for any form oder ideal of socialism.
[5] Religion
or ‚religious misery’ is being understood/explained by Marx as expression
of real (i.e. social) misery and at the same time protest against it:
“Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elends und in
einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend”. (MARX, 1844, S.71) Here the
young Marx also makes the famous analogy between religion and ‚opium of
the people’.
[6] I am not sure
whether Chinese Marxism is just another variant of communist thought or a
third, culturally autonomous version of Marxism, but cannot discuss this
problem here.
[7] Nota bene: this
holds not only for the so called ‚revisionists’, the followers of Eduard
Bernstein, but for ‚orthodox’ Marxists like Karl Kautsky as well. With regard
to both questions (a) and (b), the abolition of the (democratic) state and
the end of (any) religion, almost all Marxists in the socialist parties of
Central and Western Europe at the beginning of the 20th century had already
abandoned the original prophecies of Karl Marx – with rather reasonable
motives, which in part had already been proposed by Friedrich Engels (1895), in
his late preface to Marx’s analysis of the ‚class-struggles in France’. - I
have analyzed these varieties of socialdemocratic Marxism to a greater extend
in Kallscheuer (1986).
[8] Another question
I cannot discuss here: Was Mao Zedong’s ‚Chinese Way to Socialism’ only a
‚creative adaption’ of the Soviet model – or was it a political alternative to
it? The answer is not evident.
[9] In Poland it
was the Catholic Church, which had not been suppressed after the war,
but was officially recognized as autonomous organization (and collective memory
of the Polish nation) by the communist state. So the forms of cooperation and
conflict between the church and the communist leadership in Poland varied in
the different periods after the Second World War. In the end the majority of
the church actively sustained the Polish transition from Soviet
socialism to a national capitalist democracy.
[10] MARX / ENGELS
(1848 / 2002, 351).
[11] F.
ENGELS (1847/1959). It may be noticed that Engels himself came from an
evangelical background.
[12] H. HEINE (1842 / 1984), 233; 406; 496 and
passim.
[13] ENGELS (1895).
[14] Jan ASSMANN
(2003).
[15] See Marx’s
excerpt-notebook (1841).
[16] See GORZ (1980,
ch. I.1.) and KALLSCHEUER (1999).
[17] Marx here
compares religious ‚alienation’ with the ‘alienation’ of the product from its
producer (MARX 1844/2005, 56 - 66).
[18] I am referring here
exclusively to the old Hegel as philosopher of the Prussian state. The younger
Hegel, sympathizing with the French revolution, had a much more direct or
‚communitarian’ idea of religious community (die Gemeinde) and political
freedom – he wrote (and discussed with his friends, the poet Friedrich
Hölderlin and his later philosophical rival Schelling) a proto-romantic Manifesto
for a new synergy/synthesis of religion, philosophy and poetry or art, the
„oldest program/system of German idealism“, under the guiding line: Wie muß
eine Welt für ein moralisches Wesen beschaffen seyn? (How the world has to
be organized for Man as a moral/i.e. free Being?) See JAMME / SCHNEIDER (eds.,
1984, 11).
[19] For a more
detailed account see KALLSCHEUER (2009).
[20] See BÖCKENFÖRDE
1982.
[21] I am not sure
whether or not one might individuate here a common element between the Greek
concept of nous (from Plato to Hegel’s ‚spirit’) and the Chinese tao
(in Confuzius and especially in Tchouang-Tseu /Zuang-zhi). Both seem to
have been concepts combining the understanding of both immanence and transcendence
– both want to understand contingency (changing empirical reality) from the
point of view of a structured organization of the whole cosmos, under
the heaven (tian). And this ‚point of view’ contains also a hint (an‚
inner spark’) of transcendence: For Zuang-zhi the point of view of ‚heaven’ is
also a kind of ‚inner’ freedom.
[22] For Hegel human
‚mind’ (in conscience and action) is ‚spirit’ as an oriented structure (tending
towards a telos) of conscious self-organization and self-understanding.
Thus understood human spirit is ‚free’.
[23] The idea of
history as a progressive development is, obviously, not new in Hegel: he took
it from the European Enlightenment, with a cultural and moral imprint of the
Christian vision of world-history. See Karl LÖWITH (1949).
[24] In the Prologue
of the Gospel of St. John.
[25] „die Kritik der
Religion ist die Voraussetzung aller Kritik“ (Marx 1844, 71); see also Marx’s criticism
of Hegel in his ‚Paris Manuscripts’ of the same year (MARX 1844 / 2005, 1 – 4;
125 ff.
[26] Besides: this
idea was perhaps even more Saint-Simonist than Marxist.
[27] I am
not particularly well informed about the history of the Cultural Revolution in
China, but it seems that anti-religious prosecutions had also played a certain
role.
[28] See Walzer (2015).