The following quotations are taken from various members of the Hegelian tradition and are used to support my (and others) argument that Marxism is a religion. The argument that Marxism is a religion has been put forward in popular culture by detractors of Marxism. My study into Marx’s philosophy from the primary sources (available in The Revolutionary Renaissance and throughout this site) comes to this conclusion from a substantive position. My conclusions complement those made by Dr. James Lindsay, who has set forth a well-reasoned argument for dialectical Leftism being a faith.
In my book The Revolutionary Renaissance I argue that the religious aspect is explicitly present within the philosophy itself. Hegel ultimately reconstitutes a god in his philosophy, a monadic subject-object in his Absolute Idea. It becomes clear that Marx takes Hegel’s historicist dialectical system and materialises it. The simultaneous effect is to materialise Hegel’s divine creation which in Marx’s system becomes the union of humanity and nature. In the later part of my book I explore the consequences of these ideas and use them to explore why so many people are murdered in Marxists societies.
Quotes from Hegelians:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
“The state is the march of God in the world” [1, p. §258].
Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944)
“Spiritual reality is a synthesis” [2, p. 22] so that through the correct praxis it would be possible to “awaken the religious consciousness” [2, p. 35].
Marxism is a religion, in the words of Marxists:
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
“[M]an with man — the unity of “I” and “You” — that is God.” [3, p. §60]
“The new philosophy takes the place of religion; it has within itself the essence of religion; in truth, it is itself religion.” [3, p. §64]
Karl Heinz Marx (1818-1883)
“A curtain was fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed. … I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.” [4, p. 18]
“[M]an is the supreme being for man” [5, pp. 137, 142].
“Nature is man’s inorganic body … physical and spiritual life is linked to nature” [6, p. 74].
Described Hegel’s dialectic as “the divine process of man … the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness — is therefore God” [6, p. 165].
Stated that he was seeking out the “real religion” [6, p. 163], by which he means the materialised form of religion which is combined with its real essence.
In the preface to The German Ideology (co-authored with Friedrich Engels) Marx declares how the type of person he seeks for the revolution is someone who would deny the idea of gravity so as to walk on water [7, p. 2].
Marx and Engels differentiated “[d]ivine criticism” [8, pp. 191-192] from “human criticism”; when Hegel’s dialectic is combined with materialism it becomes the human dialectic.
The draft precursor to The Communist Manifesto was named: The Communist Confession of Faith [9, p. 96].
In my book The Revolutionary Renaissance I argued that in Marx’s system fetishism and labour are key dialectical expressions of an underlying concept of human sacrifice. Marx’s concept of fetishism explicitly draws on religious terminology and is attributed to the capitalist epoch of production, leading him to state that the capitalist “is religious … elevated wealth into a god … this Moloch” [4, p. 266]. Labour is said by Marx to be imbued with “supernatural creative powers” [10, p. 20], which by his conceptualisation must sustain the religious creation of the erroneous form of real religion, in capitalism. Hence why Marx describes capitalism as the system of Cain [11, p. 738f].
These quotes offer some substantial evidence that Marxism is a religion. See my book (Part V, sec. 3.2.2: Marxist religion revisited: ritual purification and human sacrifice) to find out more about how the concepts of labour and fetishism ar related to the reintroduction of slavery and democide observed in Marxist societies.
Antonio F Gramsci (1891-1937)
“Philosophy is criticism and the superseding of religion” [12, p. 326]. This has a particularly Feuerbachian ring to it (Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach). ‘Supersede’ indicates a dialectical movement in which the old object is destroyed but is at the same time partially preserved in a new creation, in a higher form. The example commonly given by dialectic philosophers is of something organic growing into its superior form; the seed becomes a sapling and then a tree which bears seeds, the caterpillar a moth, and so on.
“The position of the philosophy of praxis is the antithesis of the Catholic.” [12, p. 332]
“Real will takes on the garments of an act of faith in a certain rationality of history and in a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism24 which appears in the role of a substitute for the Predestination or Providence of confessional religions” [12, p. 336].
“[I]n the masses as such, philosophy can only be experienced as a faith.” [12, p. 339].
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. [Socialism is] Religion in the sense that it too is a faith with its mystics and rituals: religion, because it has substituted for the consciousness of the transcendental God of the Catholics, the faith in man and in his great strength as a unique spiritual reality.” [13, p. 88][Quoted from “Audacia e Fede” in Avanti!]
Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)
“Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.” [14]
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Described Marxism as a mythological system [15] and later advocated a “mythical representation” [16, p. 229] as the new approach to revolutionary philosophy (seen among the post-structuralists).
Paulo Freire (1921-1997)
Freire rejects the nature of suffering in the world. If he is truly a Christian, then we might expect him to accept humanity’s lot after their expulsion from Eden. However, he asserts that God would not create a world of so many injustices [17, pp. 61-62, 163-164]. Of course, in Christianity it is God who brings forth creation and who says that creation is good. Here, Freire is like all Marxists, setting himself against God, instead proclaiming that our purpose is to complete god’s work. Humanity is set to become equal to God, the completion of the work of creation taking place through the “gnostic” [18, p. 67] process of collectivist knowledge creation which adopts the: i) historicist framework (telos of history is to complete god’s work), and ii) the dialectical methodology to create gnowledge. This gnowledge is used to inform the reformation of creation through revolutionary action.
Bruno Latour (1947-2022)
Advocates for a new iteration of The Communist Manifesto (The Communist Confession of Faith) which he describes as “animism anew” [19]. Animism is of course, a primitive form of religion observed among tribal societies in which animals and aspects of nature (such as the land) have spirits. The animist can often commune with these spirits in attempts to influence the world and to improve their lives.
Neo-Marxist feminism/post-feminism
Various feminists make calls to reintegrate primordial feminine deities (such as Gaia, Medusa, etc.) into their identity which appears to be a form of neo-paganism. A cursory look through the literature or book titles will reveal an abundance of sources.
Works Cited
| [1] | G. W. F. Hegel and S. W. Dyde, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, London: G. Bell, 1896. |
| [2] | G. Gentile and A. J. Gregor, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works, New Brunswick: Transaction, 2009. |
| [3] | L. Feuerbach, Principles of Philosophy of the Future, 1843. |
| [4] | K. Marx, Collected Works: 1835-1843, vol. 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. |
| [5] | K. Marx, J. J. O’Malley and A. Jolin, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. |
| [6] | K. Marx and M. Milligan, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Mineola: Dover Publ., 2007. |
| [7] | K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I & III, Mansfield Centre: Martino Fine Books, 2011. |
| [8] | K. Marx, F. Engels and R. Dixon, The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Critique, Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1956. |
| [9] | K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works 1845-1848, vol. 6, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. |
| [10] | K. Marx, The Gotha Program, New York: National Executive Committee Communist Labor Party, 1922. |
| [11] | K. Marx, Capital Volume I, vol. 35, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010. |
| [12] | A. F. Gramsci, Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. |
| [13] | J. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. |
| [14] | M. Tse-tung, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China. 11 June 1945. [Online]. Available: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm. |
| [15] | J.-P. Sartre and A. Michelson, “Chapter 13. Materialism and Revolution: The Revolutionary Myth,” in Literary Essays, New York, Collier Books, 1962, pp. 198-256. |
| [16] | J.-P. Sartre and A. Michelson, Literary Essays, New York: Collier Books, 1962. |
| [17] | P. Freire, Pedagody of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993. |
| [18] | P. Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. |
| [19] | B. Latour, “An attempt at a “compositionist manifesto”,” New literary history, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 471-490, 2010. |
