Sparks of resistance in the labor movement?
Lee Sustar reports on signs of movement among the union movement's rank and file.
AFTER A grim year for organized labor, those committed to class-struggle unionism can find a few good reasons to be cheerful this holiday season.
At the top of the list are strike victories by Philadelphia transit employees and University of Illinois graduate employees, a "no" vote on major contract concessions at Ford, and election victories by reformers in transit and Teamster union locals in New York City.
The grimness, of course, is the catastrophic wave of union concessions epitomized by the United Auto Workers' (UAW) agreement to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, slash benefits and give up decades of work rules. Public-sector employers have been slammed with unpaid furlough days and wage cuts of more that 10 percent, from California state workers to employees in scores of cities and counties across the U.S. In most cases, unions agreed to the cuts.
Even as the economy shows signs of recovery, traditionally strong unions in the private sector are still getting hammered. For example, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) recently agreed to the elimination of half of 2,000 union jobs at the Harley Davidson plant in York, Pa.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, "The contract institutes a new category of casual worker to be used on an as-needed basis, and who will earn about 30 percent less than first-tier production workers. The company eventually expects to employ about 250 casual and 750 full-time production workers." Current workers will get paid about $24 per hour, with new hires getting $19--casuals will earn just under $17.
With high unemployment, employers in both the public and private sector feel that they can extract such concessions without much worry that workers will fight back. The statistics seem to bear them out: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers this year are down 95 percent over 2008--which is the lowest level since records were first kept in the 1940s.
Nevertheless, against the odds, some workers drew the line, fought back--and won.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN PHILADELPHIA, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 234 went on strike for six days in November. In an era when the strike weapon is rarely used, Local 234 members used their power to shut down the city's rapid transit system, and prevailed, just as they did in strikes in 2005 and 1998. The strikers will have to pay more into their pension fund, which will eat into raises, but they turned back demands for major concessions.
One might expect a union local with a fighting tradition to break the pattern of defeat. But another high-profile strike victory came from unexpected quarters--the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Although it represented only about half of the eligible graduate employees prior to its October strike, GEO members were furious at attempts to force them to accept unpaid furlough days--and were determined to prevent the university from taking away the tuition waivers that make it possible for them to attend school.
When the strike began November 16, scores of graduate employees who had never been union members joined the picket line and signed union cards on the spot. The rallies were loud and militant, the classrooms mostly silent for lack of instructors and students. After two days, the university caved and granted the strikers' key demands.
Meanwhile, hotel workers in San Francisco carried out two three-day strikes at the Grand Hyatt and Palace Hotels in November as part of a contract fight against 31 hotels in the city. Hotel workers, members of the UNITE HERE union, face similar struggles in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles.
The strike actions and victories are important enough in themselves. But there's reason to believe that these strikes are an indication of widespread anger among labor's rank and file that's also found expression in voting results in union elections and contract concessions.
That's the conclusion of union activists at Ford, where workers defied an all-out effort from UAW officials to ram through acceptance of huge contract concessions similar to those already approved at Chrysler and General Motors. The concessions would have frozen pay for new hires at $14 per hour--already just half the pay of current workers--for six years. The agreement would have banned strikes and sent wage disputes in 2011 to binding arbitration.
But UAW leaders, who had used the financial crisis to get the concessions at GM and Chrysler, found themselves facing an unprecedented rebellion that saw local union officials defy them--something unseen in the UAW in decades. When the vote totals were announced November 1, the concessions were rejected by a 3-1 margin. The workers' suspicions were vindicated a day later when Ford announced a $1 billion profit for the quarter.
"They say we only lose the right to strike over improvements in wages and benefits. But that's what people want the right to strike for," Eric Truss, a worker at Ford's Dearborn Diversified manufacturing plant, wrote to a UAW Local 600 rank-and-file newsletter. "I campaigned for 'No,' so my co-workers are telling me to run for [union] office."
Another rebellion against concessions in an important union--the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA)--didn't succeed when votes were tallied last month. But the campaign for a "no" vote on a two-year contract concession highlighted the growing success of the Longshore Workers Coalition (LWC), a union reform group.
The LWC in previous months forced the ILA leadership to back off a plan that would have suspended a pay increase October 1. But leaders of the East and Gulf Coast dockworkers' union gave shipping bosses what they wanted through other means--a contract that will cut payments to the workers' health care funds and royalty fees that boost compensation.
To sell the deal, ILA leaders finally got employers to agree to bring lower-tier workers' wages up to top levels of pay--but only after nine years. It was the promise of a higher wage in the short term that allowed the concessions to go through, said Ken Riley, president of ILA Local 1422 in Charleston, S.C. "They designed something for tough economic times, and dangled it in front of rank-and-file members," he said. "It's hard to vote against a $2 to $3 per hour raise"--even if it will take nine years for lower-tier workers to reach top pay.
But the reformers made the notoriously conservative and corrupt ILA leadership sweat in order to get the deal through. "I'm very pleased by what the LWC accomplished," said Riley, who became nationally known in the labor movement in 2000-2002 in the successful struggle to defend the Charleston Five, dockworkers who were put under house arrest for walking a legal picket line. "We've got a lot to be proud of," said Riley. "But we weren't focusing on this to send a message, but to vote it down and do a better job."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE IDEA that unions should be doing a better job was also on the minds of workers in New York City in two powerful union locals.
Members of the 38,000-member TWU Local 100, which represents subway and bus workers, voted to put the Take Back Our Union (TBOU) coalition in control of the union in election results released this month. The election of TBOU marks a revival of union reform sentiment in the local, where workers voted in 2000 to elect Roger Toussaint on the New Directions slate.
Toussaint, a onetime leftist militant, turned into a heavy-handed bureaucrat--and his poor leadership in the illegal, two-day transit strike of 2005 undermined his base of support. Toussaint was briefly jailed in the aftermath of the walkout, and the union's finances were decimated when a judge barred the practice of automatic union dues deduction from paychecks. Facing likely defeat in the current election, Toussaint moved upstairs to the TWU International, and TBOU won election on a program of rebuilding the union.
Just as the TBOU victory was announced, word came that reformers aligned with Teamster for a Democratic Union (TDU) won election in New York's Teamsters Local 804, the main local representing UPS workers in the city.
The reformers' win was all the more sweet because the 7,000-member Local 804 was the home local of the late former Teamsters president, Ron Carey, who was expelled from the union on trumped-up charges in the wake of the Teamsters' 1997 strike victory at UPS. Since then, the local has been aligned with Teamsters President Jim Hoffa. But for rank-and-file members, a concessionary deal on Local 804's most recent contract with UPS was the last straw.
Does all this stirring in the ranks make a trend? Only time--and struggle--will tell. But what's clear is that there's something going on in the union rank and file that those record-low strike statistics don't show.
Mu
Monday, December 14, 2009
We, the People
[ contributed by The Cleveland Capital study group]
Today's quotes from this Wall Street Journal blog posting work, on several levels, to illustrate the attitudes of the clique of capitalists of the neoliberal stripe that rules from Washington.
Larry Summers most offensive statement, "Today, everyone agrees that the recession is over," embodies an arrogance that has characterized the exploiting class from the founding of America right through to the present day. The question has never been so much one of "Are all people equal?" as it has "Who really counts as a person?" Workers, the poor and the oppressed simply do not count as people for Summers. Therefore what they may agree to is never of any real concern to him when he speaks of "everyone."
Clearly the poor do not count either for Christina Romer who shows here that she shares the speech defect that afflicts President Obama, the inability to even articulate the word "poor." They instead talk of virtual people, "the people on Main Street."
There is enough information in these brief quotes to see also that, in the universe of these plutocrats, workers are not real people. America's ruling class sees workers, with a kind of peripheral vision, as a looming mass that wants their grubby fingers in the pie that proper people are dividing up. They, this looming grubby mass, is the troublesome 10%. By spring their numbers will dwindle to a manageable level and "people" can ignore them again. Never mind that in our world each worker without a job is 100% unemployed.
The oppressed, in the minds of the ruling class, are so far from the status of people that, when beans are counted by Banksters, ongoing domestic crimes against humanity, including the Pine Ridge Ridge genocide and the Detroit Michigan genocide, do not even merit a sideways glance.
source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/12/13/us-officials-send-mixed-messages-about-the-recession/
source reproduced here with added emphasis
Elizabeth Williamson reports on the economy.
The Obama White House is usually unified over their message, but the president's two top economic advisers sent mixed signals on Sunday about whether the recession was over.
Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, made the talk show rounds on Sunday bearing a confident message: “Today, everyone agrees that the recession is over,” he said on CNN's “State of the Union.” Now, he said, “the questions are around how fast we'll recover.”
Christina Romer, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, said the opposite. Asked by host David Gregory, “So, in your mind, the recession is not over?” Romer said: “Of course not…for the people on Main Street and throughout this country, they are still suffering. The unemployment rate is still 10%.”
Romer agreed that an “official” – or statistical — end to the recession was nigh. But that wasn't what most Americans, especially jobless ones, were experiencing.
Both economic advisers agreed that job growth would begin again by the spring. But it could still be a while after that before the jobless rate improves.
Today's quotes from this Wall Street Journal blog posting work, on several levels, to illustrate the attitudes of the clique of capitalists of the neoliberal stripe that rules from Washington.
Larry Summers most offensive statement, "Today, everyone agrees that the recession is over," embodies an arrogance that has characterized the exploiting class from the founding of America right through to the present day. The question has never been so much one of "Are all people equal?" as it has "Who really counts as a person?" Workers, the poor and the oppressed simply do not count as people for Summers. Therefore what they may agree to is never of any real concern to him when he speaks of "everyone."
Clearly the poor do not count either for Christina Romer who shows here that she shares the speech defect that afflicts President Obama, the inability to even articulate the word "poor." They instead talk of virtual people, "the people on Main Street."
There is enough information in these brief quotes to see also that, in the universe of these plutocrats, workers are not real people. America's ruling class sees workers, with a kind of peripheral vision, as a looming mass that wants their grubby fingers in the pie that proper people are dividing up. They, this looming grubby mass, is the troublesome 10%. By spring their numbers will dwindle to a manageable level and "people" can ignore them again. Never mind that in our world each worker without a job is 100% unemployed.
The oppressed, in the minds of the ruling class, are so far from the status of people that, when beans are counted by Banksters, ongoing domestic crimes against humanity, including the Pine Ridge Ridge genocide and the Detroit Michigan genocide, do not even merit a sideways glance.
source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/12/13/us-officials-send-mixed-messages-about-the-recession/
source reproduced here with added emphasis
Elizabeth Williamson reports on the economy.
The Obama White House is usually unified over their message, but the president's two top economic advisers sent mixed signals on Sunday about whether the recession was over.
Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, made the talk show rounds on Sunday bearing a confident message: “Today, everyone agrees that the recession is over,” he said on CNN's “State of the Union.” Now, he said, “the questions are around how fast we'll recover.”
Christina Romer, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, said the opposite. Asked by host David Gregory, “So, in your mind, the recession is not over?” Romer said: “Of course not…for the people on Main Street and throughout this country, they are still suffering. The unemployment rate is still 10%.”
Romer agreed that an “official” – or statistical — end to the recession was nigh. But that wasn't what most Americans, especially jobless ones, were experiencing.
Both economic advisers agreed that job growth would begin again by the spring. But it could still be a while after that before the jobless rate improves.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Товарищ Х on AmTrust Re-Branding
Today the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that, in a kind of witness protection program for Banksters, "The new owners of AmTrust Bank are considering whether to change the bank's name." Evidently they fear using their right name because folks might avoid doing business with them (well... and then there's that whole lamp-post thing) as that name "might be tainted by the bank's financial problems." Yea, that's the ticket. A name change should fix it right up.
The following choices were offered in the newspaper's poll:
AmTrust Bank
Ohio Savings Bank
New York Community Bank
Something else
The fourth one, though an improvement on the first three, lacks branding power. How about, for example:
Bendover Bank and Trust
Its Our Money Now Sucka Ltd
Banksters LLP
Fugeddaboudit Mortgage and Loan
Wide of the mark you say? Well, comrades, here is a link to the original article. The Plain Dealer, and AmTrust Bank, await your suggestions.
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/12/what_name_should_amtrust_bank.html
Товарищ Х
What name should AmTrust Bank use?
By Randy Roguski, The Plain Dealer
December 12, 2009, 3:00PM
The new owners of AmTrust Bank are considering whether to change the bank's name.
Analysts say the AmTrust name might be tainted by the bank's financial problems. The government took over AmTrust this month, and New York Community Bank bought it.
NYCB has acquired nine banks in nine years but has never changed the name to NYCB. In AmTrust's case, one possibility is restoring the bank's previous name, making it "Ohio Savings Bank, a division of NYCB."
What do you think? Please leave us your comments below
The following choices were offered in the newspaper's poll:
AmTrust Bank
Ohio Savings Bank
New York Community Bank
Something else
The fourth one, though an improvement on the first three, lacks branding power. How about, for example:
Bendover Bank and Trust
Its Our Money Now Sucka Ltd
Banksters LLP
Fugeddaboudit Mortgage and Loan
Wide of the mark you say? Well, comrades, here is a link to the original article. The Plain Dealer, and AmTrust Bank, await your suggestions.
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/12/what_name_should_amtrust_bank.html
Товарищ Х
What name should AmTrust Bank use?
By Randy Roguski, The Plain Dealer
December 12, 2009, 3:00PM
The new owners of AmTrust Bank are considering whether to change the bank's name.
Analysts say the AmTrust name might be tainted by the bank's financial problems. The government took over AmTrust this month, and New York Community Bank bought it.
NYCB has acquired nine banks in nine years but has never changed the name to NYCB. In AmTrust's case, one possibility is restoring the bank's previous name, making it "Ohio Savings Bank, a division of NYCB."
What do you think? Please leave us your comments below
Friday, December 11, 2009
Brother, Can You Spare a Trillion?
Brother, Can You Spare a Trillion?
lyrics by Товарищ Х (2009), music by Jay Gorney (1931)
art work by Tim Hosler (2009)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, but I'm just one of the mob,
When there were workers to fleece, or evictions to do, I was right there on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with a big fat bonus ahead,
Why should I be paying my tab, is capitalism dead?
lyrics by Товарищ Х (2009), music by Jay Gorney (1931)
art work by Tim Hosler (2009)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, but I'm just one of the mob,
When there were workers to fleece, or evictions to do, I was right there on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with a big fat bonus ahead,
Why should I be paying my tab, is capitalism dead?
Once I built a bank, I made it run, but hey-- I'm just a civilian.
Once I built a bank; and now it's done. Brother, can you spare a trillion?
Once I piled it higher, up to the sun, a hundred, a thousand, a million;
Once I built a bank, and now it's done. Brother, can you spare a trillion?
Once I built a bank; and now it's done. Brother, can you spare a trillion?
Once I piled it higher, up to the sun, a hundred, a thousand, a million;
Once I built a bank, and now it's done. Brother, can you spare a trillion?
In Armani suits, gee we looked swell,
A lunch of two martinis by gum,
We piled up profits and passed on the loss,
And it was all under my thumb!
We piled up profits and passed on the loss,
And it was all under my thumb!
Say, don't you remember, when we could call Al; it was Al-- I'm just a civilian.
Why don't you remember? I'm your pal! Buddy, can you spare a trillion?
Why don't you remember? I'm your pal! Buddy, can you spare a trillion?
In Armani suits, gee we looked swell,
A lunch of ti martwonis by gum,
We piled up profits and passed on the loss,
And it was all under my thumb!
A lunch of ti martwonis by gum,
We piled up profits and passed on the loss,
And it was all under my thumb!
Say, don't you remember, when we could call Al*; it was Al-- I'm just a civilian.
Why don't you remember? I'm your pal! Buddy, can you spare a trillion?
* as in Al Greenspan
The above is sung to the tune of this Yip Harburg and Jay Gorner classic of the Lesser Depression of the 1930s (audio) to these lyrics:
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Why don't you remember? I'm your pal! Buddy, can you spare a trillion?
* as in Al Greenspan
The above is sung to the tune of this Yip Harburg and Jay Gorner classic of the Lesser Depression of the 1930s (audio) to these lyrics:
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Timely thoughts
Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin
Dear Comrades:
You complain that you have not been able to read even one-tenth of the books that interest you, and ask how to rationally allot your time. This is a very difficult question, because in the long run each person must make such a decision according to his particular needs and interests. It should be said however, that the extent to which a person is able to keep up with the current literature, whether scientific, political, or otherwise, depends not only on the judicious allotment of one's time but also on the individual's previous training.
In regard to your specific reference to "party youth," I can only advise them not to hurry, not to spread themselves thin, not to skip from one topic to another, and not to pass on to a second book until the first has been properly read, thought over, and mastered. I remember that when I myself belonged to the category of "youth," I too felt that there just wasn't enough time. Even in prison, when I did nothing but read, it seemed that one couldn't get enough done in a day. In the ideological sphere, just as in the economic arena, the phase of primitive accumulation is the most difficult and troublesome. And only after certain basic elements of knowledge and particularly elements of theoretical skill (method) have been precisely mastered and have become, so to speak, part of the flesh and blood of one's intellectual activity, does it be. come easier to keep up with the literature not only in areas one is familiar with, but in adjacent and even more remote fields of knowledge, because method, in the final analysis, is universal.
It is better to read one book and read it well; it is better to master a little bit at a time and master it thoroughly. Only in this way will your powers of mental comprehension extend themselves naturally. Thought will gradually gain confidence in itself and grow more productive. With these preliminaries in mind, it will not be difficult to rationally allot your time; and then, the transition from one pursuit to another will be to a certain extent pleasurable.
With comradely greetings,
L. Trotsky
May 29, 1923
A letter to the Kiev comrades. From Pravda, May 31, 1923. Translated for this volume from Collected Works, Vol. 2 1, by Marilyn Vogt. From: Problems of Every Day Life by Leon Trotsky
Dear Comrades:
You complain that you have not been able to read even one-tenth of the books that interest you, and ask how to rationally allot your time. This is a very difficult question, because in the long run each person must make such a decision according to his particular needs and interests. It should be said however, that the extent to which a person is able to keep up with the current literature, whether scientific, political, or otherwise, depends not only on the judicious allotment of one's time but also on the individual's previous training.
In regard to your specific reference to "party youth," I can only advise them not to hurry, not to spread themselves thin, not to skip from one topic to another, and not to pass on to a second book until the first has been properly read, thought over, and mastered. I remember that when I myself belonged to the category of "youth," I too felt that there just wasn't enough time. Even in prison, when I did nothing but read, it seemed that one couldn't get enough done in a day. In the ideological sphere, just as in the economic arena, the phase of primitive accumulation is the most difficult and troublesome. And only after certain basic elements of knowledge and particularly elements of theoretical skill (method) have been precisely mastered and have become, so to speak, part of the flesh and blood of one's intellectual activity, does it be. come easier to keep up with the literature not only in areas one is familiar with, but in adjacent and even more remote fields of knowledge, because method, in the final analysis, is universal.
It is better to read one book and read it well; it is better to master a little bit at a time and master it thoroughly. Only in this way will your powers of mental comprehension extend themselves naturally. Thought will gradually gain confidence in itself and grow more productive. With these preliminaries in mind, it will not be difficult to rationally allot your time; and then, the transition from one pursuit to another will be to a certain extent pleasurable.
With comradely greetings,
L. Trotsky
May 29, 1923
A letter to the Kiev comrades. From Pravda, May 31, 1923. Translated for this volume from Collected Works, Vol. 2 1, by Marilyn Vogt. From: Problems of Every Day Life by Leon Trotsky
The heart in a heartless world
Marxism and Religion
Michael Löwy
The Marxist view of religion has been greatly over-simplified, typically identified with the well-worn refrain that it’s the "opiate of the people." Michael Löwy challenges this misconception, and presents us with a much more nuanced view of Marxism and religion.
Is religion still, as Marx and Engels saw it in the nineteenth century, a bulwark of reaction, obscurantism and conservatism? To a large extent, the answer is yes. Their view still applies to many Catholic institutions, to the fundamentalist currents of the main confessions (Christian, Jewish or Muslim), to most evangelical groups (and their expression in the so-called “Electronic Church”) and to the majority of the new religious sects -some of which, such as the notorious Moon Church, are nothing but a skilful combination of financial manipulations, obscurantist brain-washing and fanatical anti-communism.
Liberation Theology
However, the emergence of revolutionary Christianity and Liberation Theology in Latin America (and elsewhere) opens a new historical chapter and raises exciting new questions which cannot be answered without a renewal of the Marxist analysis of religion, the subject of this article.
The well-known phrase that religion is the "opiate of the people" is considered as the quintessence of the Marxist conception of the religious phenomenon by most of its supporters and its opponents. How far is this an accurate viewpoint?
First of all, one should emphasize that this statement is not at all specifically Marxist. The same phrase can be found, in various contexts, in the writings of German philosophers Kant, Herder, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine. For instance, in his essay on Ludwig Börne (1840), Heine already uses it-in a rather positive (although ironical) way: "Welcome be a religion that pours into the bitter chalice of the suffering human species some sweet, soporific drops of spiritual opium, some drops of love, hope and faith."
Moses Hess, in his essays published in Switzerland in 1843, takes a more critical (but still ambiguous) stand: "Religion can make bearable...the unhappy consciousness of serfdom...in the same way as opium is of good help in painful diseases."
Hegel
The expression appeared shortly afterwards in Marx’s article on the German philosopher Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844). An attentive reading of the paragraph where this phrase appears, reveals that it is more qualified and less one-sided than usually believed. Although obviously critical of religion, Marx takes into account the dual character of the phenomenon: "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opiate of the people."
If one reads the whole essay, it appears clearly that Marx’s viewpoint owes more to left neo-Hegelianism, which saw religion as the alienation of the human essence, than to Enlightenment philosophy, which simply denounced it as a clerical conspiracy. In fact when Marx wrote the above passage he was still a disciple of Feuerbach, and a neo-Hegelian. His analysis of religion was therefore "pre-Marxist," without any class reference, and rather ahistorical. But it had a dialectical quality, grasping the contradictory character of the religious "distress": both a legitimation of existing conditions and a protest against it.
It was only later, particularly in The German Ideology (1846), that the proper Marxist study of religion as a social and historical reality began. The key element of this new method for the analysis of religion is to approach it as one of the many forms of ideology - i.e. of the spiritual production of a people, of the production of ideas, representations and consciousness, necessarily conditioned by material production and the corresponding social relations.
Although he uses from time to time the concept of "reflection" - which will lead several generations of Marxists into a sterile side-track - the key idea of the book is the need to explain the genesis and development of the various forms of consciousness (religion, ethics, philosophy, etc) by the social relations, "by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)."
After writing, with Engels, The German Ideology, Marx paid very little attention to religion as such, i.e. as a specific cultural/ideological universe of meaning. One can find, however, in the first volume of Capital, some interesting methodological remarks; for instance, the well-known footnote where he answers to the argument according to which the importance of politics in the Ancient times, and of religion in the Middle-Age reveal the inadequacy of the materialist interpretation of history: "Neither could the Middle-Age live from Catholicism, nor Antiquity from politics. The respective economic conditions explain, in fact, why Catholicism there and politics here played the dominant role."
Marx will never bother to provide the economic reasons for the importance of medieval religion, but this passage is quite important, because it acknowledges that, under certain historical circumstances, religion can indeed play a decisive role in the life of a society.
In spite of his general lack of interest in religion, Marx paid attention to the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. Several passages in Capital make reference to the contribution of Protestantism to the early emergence of capitalism-for instance by stimulating the expropriation of Church property and communal pastures.
Protestantism
In the Grundrisse he makes - half a century before German sociologist Max Weber’s famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism the following illuminating comment on the intimate association between Protestantism and capitalism: "The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice-economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism or Dutch Protestantism and money-making." The parallel (but not identity!) with Weber’s thesis is astonishing - the more so since Weber could not have read this passage (the Grundrisse was published for the first time in 1940).
On the other hand, Marx often referred to capitalism as a "religion of daily life" based on the fetishism of commodities. He described capital as "a Moloch that requires the whole world as a due sacrifice," and capitalist progress as a "monstrous pagan god, that only wanted to drink nectar in the skulls of the dead."
His critique of political economy is peppered with frequent references to idolatry: Baal, Moloch, Mammon, the Golden Calf and, of course, the concept of "fetish" itself. But this language has rather a metaphorical than a substantial meaning in terms of the sociology of religion.
Engels
Engels displayed a much greater interest than Marx in religious phenomena and their historic role. Engels’ main contribution to the Marxist study of religions is his analysis of the relationship of religious representations to class struggle. Over and beyond the philosophical polemic of "materialism against idealism" he was interested in understanding and explaining concrete social and historical forms of religion. Christianity no longer appeared (like in Feuerbach) as a timeless "essence", but as a cultural system undergoing transformations in different historical periods: first as a religion of the slaves, later as the state ideology of the Roman Empire, then tailored to feudal hierarchy and finally adapted to bourgeois society. It thus appears as a symbolic space fought over by antagonistic social forces-for instance, in the sixteenth century, feudal theology, bourgeois Protestantism and plebeian heresies.
Occasionally his analysis slips towards a narrowly utilitarian, instrumental interpretation of religious movements: "each of the different classes uses its own appropriate religion... and it makes little difference whether these gentlemen believe in their respective religions or not."
Engels seems to find nothing but the “religious disguise” of class interests in the different forms of belief. However, thanks to his class-struggle method, he realized-unlike the Enlightenment philosophers - that the clergy was not a socially homogeneous body: in certain historical conjunctures, it divided itself according to its class composition. Thus during the Reformation, we have on the one side the high clergy, the feudal summit of the hierarchy, and on the other, the lower clergy, which supplied the ideologues of the Reformation and of the revolutionary peasant movement.
While being a materialist, an atheist and an irreconcilable enemy of religion, Engels nevertheless grasped, like the young Marx, the dual character of the phenomenon: its role in legitimating established order, but also, according to social circumstances, its critical, protesting and even revolutionary role. Furthermore, most of the concrete studies he wrote concerned the rebellious forms of religion.
Primitive Christianity
First of all he was interested in primitive Christianity, which he defined as the religion of the poor, the banished, the damned, the persecuted and oppressed. The first Christians came from the lowest levels of society: slaves, free people who had been deprived of their rights and small peasants who were crippled by debts.
He even went so far as to draw an astonishing parallel between this primitive Christianity and modern socialism: a) the two great movements are not the creation of leaders and prophets-although prophets are never in short supply in either of them-but are mass movements; b) both are movements of the oppressed, suffering persecution, their members are proscribed and hunted down by the ruling authorities; c) both preach an imminent liberation from slavery and misery.
To embellish his comparison Engels, somewhat provocatively, quoted a saying of the French historian Renan: "If you want to get an idea of what the first Christian communities where like, take a look at a local branch of the International Workingmen’s Association" (the multi-national network of working-class organizations formed in 1864, also known as the First International).
According to Engels, the parallel between socialism and early Christianity is present in all movements that dream, throughout the centuries, to restore the primitive Christian religion-from the Taborites of John Zizka and the anabaptists of Thomas Münzer to (after 1830) the French revolutionary com-munists and the partisans of the German utopian com-munist Wilhelm Weitling. There remains, however, in the eyes of Engels, an essential difference between the two movements: the primitive Christians transposed deliverance to the hereafter whereas socialism places it in this world.
Thomas Münzer
But is this difference as clear-cut as it appears at first sight? In his study of the great peasant wars in Germany it seems to become blurred: Thomas Münzer, the theologian and leader of the revolutionary peasants and heretic (anabaptist) plebeians of the 16th century, wanted the immediate establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God, the millenarian Kingdom of the prophets. According to Engels, the Kingdom of God for Münzer was a society without class differences, private property and state authority independent of, or foreign to, the members of that society. However, Engels was still tempted to reduce religion to a stratagem: he spoke of Münzer’s Christian "phraseology" and his biblical "cloak". The specifically religious dimension of Münzerian millenarianism, its spiritual and moral force, its authentically experienced mystical depth, seem to have eluded him.
Engels does not hide his admiration for the German Chiliastic prophet, whose ideas he describes as "quasi-communist" and "religious revolutionary": they were less a synthesis of the plebeian demands from those times than "a brilliant anticipation" of future proletarian emancipatory aims. This anticipatory and utopian dimension of religion-not to be explained in terms of the "reflection theory" -is not further explored by Engels but is intensely and richly worked out (as we shall see later) by Ernst Bloch.
The last revolutionary movement that was waged under the banner of religion was, according to Engels, the English Puritan movement of the 17th century. If religion, and not materialism, furnished the ideology of this revolution, it is because of the politically reactionary nature of this philosophy in England, represented by Hobbes and other partisans of royal absolutism. In contrast to this conservative materialism and deism, the Protestant sects gave to the war against the Stuart royalty its religious banner and its fighters.
This analysis is quite interesting: breaking with the linear vision of history inherited from the Enlighten-ment, Engels acknowledges that the struggle between materialism and religion does not necessarily correspond to the war between revolution and counter-revolution, progress and regression, liberty and despotism, oppressed and ruling classes. In this precise case, the relation is exactly the opposite one: revolutionary religion against absolutist materialism.
European Labour Movement
Engels was convinced that since the French Revolution, religion could no more function as a revolutionary ideology, and he was surprised when French and German communists such as Cabet or Weitling would claim that "Christianity is Communism." He could not predict liberation theology, but, thanks to his analysis of religious phenomena from the viewpoint of class struggle, he brought out the protest potential of religion and opened the way for a new approach-distinct both from Enlightenment philosophy (religion as a clerical conspiracy) and from German neo-Hegelianism (religion as alienated human essence)-to the relationship between religion and society.
Many Marxists in the European labour movement were radically hostile to religion but believed that the atheistic battle against religious ideology must be subordinated to the concrete necessities of the class struggle, which demands unity between workers who believe in God and those who do not. Lenin himself, who very often denounced religion as a "mystical fog", insisted in his article Socialism and Religion (1905) that atheism should not be part of the party’s programme because "unity in the really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven."
Rosa Luxemburg shared this strategy, but she developed a different and original approach. Although a staunch atheist herself, she attacked in her writings less religion as such than the reactionary policy of the Church in the name of its own tradition. In an essay written in 1905 (“Church and Socialism”) she claimed that modern socialists are more faithful to the original principles of Christianity than the conservative clergy of today. Since the socialists struggle for a social order of equality, freedom and fraternity, the priests, if they honestly wanted to implement in the life of humanity the Christian principle "love thy neighbour as thyself", should welcome the socialist movement. When the clergy support the rich, and those who exploit and oppress the poor, they are in explicit contradiction with Christian teachings: they do serve not Christ but the Golden Calf.
The first apostles of Christianity were passionate communists and the Fathers of the Church (like Basil the Great and John Chrysostom) denounced social injustice. Today this cause is taken up by the socialist movement which brings to the poor the Gospel of fraternity and equality, and calls on the people to establish on earth the Kingdom of freedom and neighbour-love. Instead of waging a philosophical battle in the name of materialism, Rosa Luxemburg tried to rescue the social dimension of the Christian tradition for the labour movement.
Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch is the first Marxist author who radically changed the theoretical framework - without abandoning the Marxist and revolutionary perspective. In a similar way to Engels, he distinguished two socially opposed currents: on one side the theocratic religion of the official churches, the opiate of the people, a mystifying apparatus at the service of the powerful; on the other the underground, subversive and heretical religion of the Albigensians, the Hussites, Joachim de Flore, Thomas Münzer, Franz von Baader, Wilhelm Weitling and Leo Tolstoy. However, unlike Engels, Bloch refused to see religion uniquely as a "cloak" of class interests: he explicitly criticized this conception. In its protest and rebellious forms religion is one of the most significant forms of utopian consciousness, one of the richest expressions of the Principle of Hope.
Basing himself on these philosophical presuppositions, Bloch develops a heterodox and iconoclastic interpretation of the Bible-both the Old and the New Testaments-drawing out the Biblia pauperum (bible of the poor) which denounces the Pharaohs and calls on each and everyone to choose either Caesar or Christ.
A religious atheist-according to him only an atheist can be a good Christian and vice-versa-and a theologian of the revolution, Bloch not only produced a Marxist reading of millenarianism (following Engels) but also-and this was new-a millenarian interpretation of Marxism, through which the socialist struggle for the Kingdom of Freedom is perceived as the direct heir of the eschatological and collectivist heresies of the past.
Of course Bloch, like the young Marx of the famous 1844 quotation, recognized the dual character of the religious phenomenon, its oppressive aspect as well as its potential for revolt. The first requires the use of what he calls “the cold stream of Marxism”: the relentless materialist analysis of ideologies, idols and idolatries. The second one however requires “the warm stream of Marxism,” seeking to rescue religion’s utopian cultural surplus, its critical and anticipatory force. Beyond any “dialogue,” Bloch dreamt of an authentic union between Christianity and revolution, like the one which came into being during the Peasant Wars of the 16th century.
Frankfurt School
Bloch’s views were to a certain extent shared by members of the German radical scholars known as the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer considered that "religion is the record of the wishes, nostalgias and indictments of countless generations." Erich Fromm, in his book The Dogma of Christ (1930), used Marxism and psychoanalysis to illuminate the Messianic, plebeian, egalitarian and anti-authoritarian essence of primitive Christianity. And the writer Walter Benjamin tried to combine, in a unique and original synthesis, theology and Marxism, Jewish Messianism and historical materialism, class struggle and redemption.
Lucien Goldmann’s work The Hidden God (1955) is another path-breaking attempt at renewing the Marxist study of religion. Although of a very different inspiration than Bloch, he was also interested in redeeming the moral and human value of religious tradition. The most surprising and original part of his book is the attempt to compare-without assimilating one to another-religious faith and Marxist faith: both have in common the refusal of pure individualism (rationalist or empiricist) and the belief in trans-individual values: God for religion, the human community for socialism.
In both cases the faith is based on a wager - the wager on the existence of God and the Marxist wager on the liberation of humanity-that presupposes risk, the danger of failure and the hope of success. Both imply some fundamental belief which is not demonstrable on the exclusive level of factual judgements.
What separates them is of course the suprahistorical character of religious transcendence: "The Marxist faith is a faith in the historical future that human beings themselves make, or rather that we must make by our activity, a ‘wager’ in the success of our actions; the transcendence that is the object of this faith is neither supernatural nor transhistorical, but supra-individual, nothing more but also nothing less." Without wanting in any way to "Christianize Marxism" Lucien Goldmann introduced, thanks to the concept of faith, a new way of looking at the conflictual relationship between religious belief and Marxist atheism.
Marx and Engels thought religion’s subversive role was a thing of the past, which no longer had any significance in the epoch of modern class struggle. This forecast was more or less historically confirmed for a century - with a few important exceptions (particularly in France): the Christian socialists of the 1930s, the worker priests of the 1940s, the left-wing of the Christian unions in the 1950s, etc.
But to understand what has been happening for the last thirty years in Latin America (and to a lesser extent also in other continents) around the issue of Liberation Theology we need to integrate into our analysis the insights of Bloch and Goldmann on the utopian potential of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Oppression of women and religious doctrine
What is sorely lacking in these "classical" Marxist discussions on religion is a discussion of the implications of religious doctrines and practices for women. Patriarchy, unequal treatment of women, and the denial of reproductive rights prevail among the main religious denominations - particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and take extremely oppressive forms among fundamentalist currents.
In fact, one of the key criteria for judging the progressive or regressive character of religious movements is their attitude towards women, and particularly on their right to control their own bodies: divorce, contraception, abortion. A renewal of Marxist reflection on religion in the twenty-first century requires us to put the issue of women’s rights at the center of the argument.
This article first appeared in New Socialist.
Michael Löwy, a philosopher and sociologist of Brazilian origin, is a member of the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and of the Fourth International. A Fellow of the IIRE in Amsterdam and former research director of the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), he has written many books, including The Marxism of Che Guevara, Marxism and Liberation Theology, Fatherland or Mother Earth? and The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America. He is joint author (with Joel Kovel) of the International Ecosocialist Manifesto. He was also one of the organizers of the first International Ecosocialist Meeting, in Paris, in 2007
Michael Löwy
The Marxist view of religion has been greatly over-simplified, typically identified with the well-worn refrain that it’s the "opiate of the people." Michael Löwy challenges this misconception, and presents us with a much more nuanced view of Marxism and religion.
Is religion still, as Marx and Engels saw it in the nineteenth century, a bulwark of reaction, obscurantism and conservatism? To a large extent, the answer is yes. Their view still applies to many Catholic institutions, to the fundamentalist currents of the main confessions (Christian, Jewish or Muslim), to most evangelical groups (and their expression in the so-called “Electronic Church”) and to the majority of the new religious sects -some of which, such as the notorious Moon Church, are nothing but a skilful combination of financial manipulations, obscurantist brain-washing and fanatical anti-communism.
Liberation Theology
However, the emergence of revolutionary Christianity and Liberation Theology in Latin America (and elsewhere) opens a new historical chapter and raises exciting new questions which cannot be answered without a renewal of the Marxist analysis of religion, the subject of this article.
The well-known phrase that religion is the "opiate of the people" is considered as the quintessence of the Marxist conception of the religious phenomenon by most of its supporters and its opponents. How far is this an accurate viewpoint?
First of all, one should emphasize that this statement is not at all specifically Marxist. The same phrase can be found, in various contexts, in the writings of German philosophers Kant, Herder, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine. For instance, in his essay on Ludwig Börne (1840), Heine already uses it-in a rather positive (although ironical) way: "Welcome be a religion that pours into the bitter chalice of the suffering human species some sweet, soporific drops of spiritual opium, some drops of love, hope and faith."
Moses Hess, in his essays published in Switzerland in 1843, takes a more critical (but still ambiguous) stand: "Religion can make bearable...the unhappy consciousness of serfdom...in the same way as opium is of good help in painful diseases."
Hegel
The expression appeared shortly afterwards in Marx’s article on the German philosopher Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844). An attentive reading of the paragraph where this phrase appears, reveals that it is more qualified and less one-sided than usually believed. Although obviously critical of religion, Marx takes into account the dual character of the phenomenon: "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opiate of the people."
If one reads the whole essay, it appears clearly that Marx’s viewpoint owes more to left neo-Hegelianism, which saw religion as the alienation of the human essence, than to Enlightenment philosophy, which simply denounced it as a clerical conspiracy. In fact when Marx wrote the above passage he was still a disciple of Feuerbach, and a neo-Hegelian. His analysis of religion was therefore "pre-Marxist," without any class reference, and rather ahistorical. But it had a dialectical quality, grasping the contradictory character of the religious "distress": both a legitimation of existing conditions and a protest against it.
It was only later, particularly in The German Ideology (1846), that the proper Marxist study of religion as a social and historical reality began. The key element of this new method for the analysis of religion is to approach it as one of the many forms of ideology - i.e. of the spiritual production of a people, of the production of ideas, representations and consciousness, necessarily conditioned by material production and the corresponding social relations.
Although he uses from time to time the concept of "reflection" - which will lead several generations of Marxists into a sterile side-track - the key idea of the book is the need to explain the genesis and development of the various forms of consciousness (religion, ethics, philosophy, etc) by the social relations, "by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)."
After writing, with Engels, The German Ideology, Marx paid very little attention to religion as such, i.e. as a specific cultural/ideological universe of meaning. One can find, however, in the first volume of Capital, some interesting methodological remarks; for instance, the well-known footnote where he answers to the argument according to which the importance of politics in the Ancient times, and of religion in the Middle-Age reveal the inadequacy of the materialist interpretation of history: "Neither could the Middle-Age live from Catholicism, nor Antiquity from politics. The respective economic conditions explain, in fact, why Catholicism there and politics here played the dominant role."
Marx will never bother to provide the economic reasons for the importance of medieval religion, but this passage is quite important, because it acknowledges that, under certain historical circumstances, religion can indeed play a decisive role in the life of a society.
In spite of his general lack of interest in religion, Marx paid attention to the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. Several passages in Capital make reference to the contribution of Protestantism to the early emergence of capitalism-for instance by stimulating the expropriation of Church property and communal pastures.
Protestantism
In the Grundrisse he makes - half a century before German sociologist Max Weber’s famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism the following illuminating comment on the intimate association between Protestantism and capitalism: "The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice-economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism or Dutch Protestantism and money-making." The parallel (but not identity!) with Weber’s thesis is astonishing - the more so since Weber could not have read this passage (the Grundrisse was published for the first time in 1940).
On the other hand, Marx often referred to capitalism as a "religion of daily life" based on the fetishism of commodities. He described capital as "a Moloch that requires the whole world as a due sacrifice," and capitalist progress as a "monstrous pagan god, that only wanted to drink nectar in the skulls of the dead."
His critique of political economy is peppered with frequent references to idolatry: Baal, Moloch, Mammon, the Golden Calf and, of course, the concept of "fetish" itself. But this language has rather a metaphorical than a substantial meaning in terms of the sociology of religion.
Engels
Engels displayed a much greater interest than Marx in religious phenomena and their historic role. Engels’ main contribution to the Marxist study of religions is his analysis of the relationship of religious representations to class struggle. Over and beyond the philosophical polemic of "materialism against idealism" he was interested in understanding and explaining concrete social and historical forms of religion. Christianity no longer appeared (like in Feuerbach) as a timeless "essence", but as a cultural system undergoing transformations in different historical periods: first as a religion of the slaves, later as the state ideology of the Roman Empire, then tailored to feudal hierarchy and finally adapted to bourgeois society. It thus appears as a symbolic space fought over by antagonistic social forces-for instance, in the sixteenth century, feudal theology, bourgeois Protestantism and plebeian heresies.
Occasionally his analysis slips towards a narrowly utilitarian, instrumental interpretation of religious movements: "each of the different classes uses its own appropriate religion... and it makes little difference whether these gentlemen believe in their respective religions or not."
Engels seems to find nothing but the “religious disguise” of class interests in the different forms of belief. However, thanks to his class-struggle method, he realized-unlike the Enlightenment philosophers - that the clergy was not a socially homogeneous body: in certain historical conjunctures, it divided itself according to its class composition. Thus during the Reformation, we have on the one side the high clergy, the feudal summit of the hierarchy, and on the other, the lower clergy, which supplied the ideologues of the Reformation and of the revolutionary peasant movement.
While being a materialist, an atheist and an irreconcilable enemy of religion, Engels nevertheless grasped, like the young Marx, the dual character of the phenomenon: its role in legitimating established order, but also, according to social circumstances, its critical, protesting and even revolutionary role. Furthermore, most of the concrete studies he wrote concerned the rebellious forms of religion.
Primitive Christianity
First of all he was interested in primitive Christianity, which he defined as the religion of the poor, the banished, the damned, the persecuted and oppressed. The first Christians came from the lowest levels of society: slaves, free people who had been deprived of their rights and small peasants who were crippled by debts.
He even went so far as to draw an astonishing parallel between this primitive Christianity and modern socialism: a) the two great movements are not the creation of leaders and prophets-although prophets are never in short supply in either of them-but are mass movements; b) both are movements of the oppressed, suffering persecution, their members are proscribed and hunted down by the ruling authorities; c) both preach an imminent liberation from slavery and misery.
To embellish his comparison Engels, somewhat provocatively, quoted a saying of the French historian Renan: "If you want to get an idea of what the first Christian communities where like, take a look at a local branch of the International Workingmen’s Association" (the multi-national network of working-class organizations formed in 1864, also known as the First International).
According to Engels, the parallel between socialism and early Christianity is present in all movements that dream, throughout the centuries, to restore the primitive Christian religion-from the Taborites of John Zizka and the anabaptists of Thomas Münzer to (after 1830) the French revolutionary com-munists and the partisans of the German utopian com-munist Wilhelm Weitling. There remains, however, in the eyes of Engels, an essential difference between the two movements: the primitive Christians transposed deliverance to the hereafter whereas socialism places it in this world.
Thomas Münzer
But is this difference as clear-cut as it appears at first sight? In his study of the great peasant wars in Germany it seems to become blurred: Thomas Münzer, the theologian and leader of the revolutionary peasants and heretic (anabaptist) plebeians of the 16th century, wanted the immediate establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God, the millenarian Kingdom of the prophets. According to Engels, the Kingdom of God for Münzer was a society without class differences, private property and state authority independent of, or foreign to, the members of that society. However, Engels was still tempted to reduce religion to a stratagem: he spoke of Münzer’s Christian "phraseology" and his biblical "cloak". The specifically religious dimension of Münzerian millenarianism, its spiritual and moral force, its authentically experienced mystical depth, seem to have eluded him.
Engels does not hide his admiration for the German Chiliastic prophet, whose ideas he describes as "quasi-communist" and "religious revolutionary": they were less a synthesis of the plebeian demands from those times than "a brilliant anticipation" of future proletarian emancipatory aims. This anticipatory and utopian dimension of religion-not to be explained in terms of the "reflection theory" -is not further explored by Engels but is intensely and richly worked out (as we shall see later) by Ernst Bloch.
The last revolutionary movement that was waged under the banner of religion was, according to Engels, the English Puritan movement of the 17th century. If religion, and not materialism, furnished the ideology of this revolution, it is because of the politically reactionary nature of this philosophy in England, represented by Hobbes and other partisans of royal absolutism. In contrast to this conservative materialism and deism, the Protestant sects gave to the war against the Stuart royalty its religious banner and its fighters.
This analysis is quite interesting: breaking with the linear vision of history inherited from the Enlighten-ment, Engels acknowledges that the struggle between materialism and religion does not necessarily correspond to the war between revolution and counter-revolution, progress and regression, liberty and despotism, oppressed and ruling classes. In this precise case, the relation is exactly the opposite one: revolutionary religion against absolutist materialism.
European Labour Movement
Engels was convinced that since the French Revolution, religion could no more function as a revolutionary ideology, and he was surprised when French and German communists such as Cabet or Weitling would claim that "Christianity is Communism." He could not predict liberation theology, but, thanks to his analysis of religious phenomena from the viewpoint of class struggle, he brought out the protest potential of religion and opened the way for a new approach-distinct both from Enlightenment philosophy (religion as a clerical conspiracy) and from German neo-Hegelianism (religion as alienated human essence)-to the relationship between religion and society.
Many Marxists in the European labour movement were radically hostile to religion but believed that the atheistic battle against religious ideology must be subordinated to the concrete necessities of the class struggle, which demands unity between workers who believe in God and those who do not. Lenin himself, who very often denounced religion as a "mystical fog", insisted in his article Socialism and Religion (1905) that atheism should not be part of the party’s programme because "unity in the really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven."
Rosa Luxemburg shared this strategy, but she developed a different and original approach. Although a staunch atheist herself, she attacked in her writings less religion as such than the reactionary policy of the Church in the name of its own tradition. In an essay written in 1905 (“Church and Socialism”) she claimed that modern socialists are more faithful to the original principles of Christianity than the conservative clergy of today. Since the socialists struggle for a social order of equality, freedom and fraternity, the priests, if they honestly wanted to implement in the life of humanity the Christian principle "love thy neighbour as thyself", should welcome the socialist movement. When the clergy support the rich, and those who exploit and oppress the poor, they are in explicit contradiction with Christian teachings: they do serve not Christ but the Golden Calf.
The first apostles of Christianity were passionate communists and the Fathers of the Church (like Basil the Great and John Chrysostom) denounced social injustice. Today this cause is taken up by the socialist movement which brings to the poor the Gospel of fraternity and equality, and calls on the people to establish on earth the Kingdom of freedom and neighbour-love. Instead of waging a philosophical battle in the name of materialism, Rosa Luxemburg tried to rescue the social dimension of the Christian tradition for the labour movement.
Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch is the first Marxist author who radically changed the theoretical framework - without abandoning the Marxist and revolutionary perspective. In a similar way to Engels, he distinguished two socially opposed currents: on one side the theocratic religion of the official churches, the opiate of the people, a mystifying apparatus at the service of the powerful; on the other the underground, subversive and heretical religion of the Albigensians, the Hussites, Joachim de Flore, Thomas Münzer, Franz von Baader, Wilhelm Weitling and Leo Tolstoy. However, unlike Engels, Bloch refused to see religion uniquely as a "cloak" of class interests: he explicitly criticized this conception. In its protest and rebellious forms religion is one of the most significant forms of utopian consciousness, one of the richest expressions of the Principle of Hope.
Basing himself on these philosophical presuppositions, Bloch develops a heterodox and iconoclastic interpretation of the Bible-both the Old and the New Testaments-drawing out the Biblia pauperum (bible of the poor) which denounces the Pharaohs and calls on each and everyone to choose either Caesar or Christ.
A religious atheist-according to him only an atheist can be a good Christian and vice-versa-and a theologian of the revolution, Bloch not only produced a Marxist reading of millenarianism (following Engels) but also-and this was new-a millenarian interpretation of Marxism, through which the socialist struggle for the Kingdom of Freedom is perceived as the direct heir of the eschatological and collectivist heresies of the past.
Of course Bloch, like the young Marx of the famous 1844 quotation, recognized the dual character of the religious phenomenon, its oppressive aspect as well as its potential for revolt. The first requires the use of what he calls “the cold stream of Marxism”: the relentless materialist analysis of ideologies, idols and idolatries. The second one however requires “the warm stream of Marxism,” seeking to rescue religion’s utopian cultural surplus, its critical and anticipatory force. Beyond any “dialogue,” Bloch dreamt of an authentic union between Christianity and revolution, like the one which came into being during the Peasant Wars of the 16th century.
Frankfurt School
Bloch’s views were to a certain extent shared by members of the German radical scholars known as the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer considered that "religion is the record of the wishes, nostalgias and indictments of countless generations." Erich Fromm, in his book The Dogma of Christ (1930), used Marxism and psychoanalysis to illuminate the Messianic, plebeian, egalitarian and anti-authoritarian essence of primitive Christianity. And the writer Walter Benjamin tried to combine, in a unique and original synthesis, theology and Marxism, Jewish Messianism and historical materialism, class struggle and redemption.
Lucien Goldmann’s work The Hidden God (1955) is another path-breaking attempt at renewing the Marxist study of religion. Although of a very different inspiration than Bloch, he was also interested in redeeming the moral and human value of religious tradition. The most surprising and original part of his book is the attempt to compare-without assimilating one to another-religious faith and Marxist faith: both have in common the refusal of pure individualism (rationalist or empiricist) and the belief in trans-individual values: God for religion, the human community for socialism.
In both cases the faith is based on a wager - the wager on the existence of God and the Marxist wager on the liberation of humanity-that presupposes risk, the danger of failure and the hope of success. Both imply some fundamental belief which is not demonstrable on the exclusive level of factual judgements.
What separates them is of course the suprahistorical character of religious transcendence: "The Marxist faith is a faith in the historical future that human beings themselves make, or rather that we must make by our activity, a ‘wager’ in the success of our actions; the transcendence that is the object of this faith is neither supernatural nor transhistorical, but supra-individual, nothing more but also nothing less." Without wanting in any way to "Christianize Marxism" Lucien Goldmann introduced, thanks to the concept of faith, a new way of looking at the conflictual relationship between religious belief and Marxist atheism.
Marx and Engels thought religion’s subversive role was a thing of the past, which no longer had any significance in the epoch of modern class struggle. This forecast was more or less historically confirmed for a century - with a few important exceptions (particularly in France): the Christian socialists of the 1930s, the worker priests of the 1940s, the left-wing of the Christian unions in the 1950s, etc.
But to understand what has been happening for the last thirty years in Latin America (and to a lesser extent also in other continents) around the issue of Liberation Theology we need to integrate into our analysis the insights of Bloch and Goldmann on the utopian potential of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Oppression of women and religious doctrine
What is sorely lacking in these "classical" Marxist discussions on religion is a discussion of the implications of religious doctrines and practices for women. Patriarchy, unequal treatment of women, and the denial of reproductive rights prevail among the main religious denominations - particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and take extremely oppressive forms among fundamentalist currents.
In fact, one of the key criteria for judging the progressive or regressive character of religious movements is their attitude towards women, and particularly on their right to control their own bodies: divorce, contraception, abortion. A renewal of Marxist reflection on religion in the twenty-first century requires us to put the issue of women’s rights at the center of the argument.
This article first appeared in New Socialist.
Michael Löwy, a philosopher and sociologist of Brazilian origin, is a member of the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and of the Fourth International. A Fellow of the IIRE in Amsterdam and former research director of the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), he has written many books, including The Marxism of Che Guevara, Marxism and Liberation Theology, Fatherland or Mother Earth? and The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America. He is joint author (with Joel Kovel) of the International Ecosocialist Manifesto. He was also one of the organizers of the first International Ecosocialist Meeting, in Paris, in 2007
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