I've been struggling for a while to reconcile my faith (Islam) with communism. I've run into a lot of leftists who tell me flat out that you can't be religious and a Marxist. They quote Lenin, Bukharin, and the ABC of Communism to argue that religion is 'idealist' and that any believing communist is a 'revisionist.'
But recently, someone on this platform responded to one of my posts with something that really stuck with me. They suggested that the leftists I've been arguing with might be confusing mechanical materialism with dialectical materialism. They put it this way:
'A dialectical materialist view would say that somebody receiving a message from a god is part of their material conditions... either way, it's still a real thing impacting them.'
They argued that a mechanical materialist treats humans like passive objects, reduces consciousness to brain chemistry, and sees religion as just 'false consciousness' to be eliminated. A dialectical materialist, by contrast, understands that consciousness is real, that ideas emerge from material conditions and then react back on them, and that religion is a complex phenomenon that can be a force for resistance or oppression depending on the context.
This really resonated with me, but I want to understand it more deeply.
So I want to ask you all:
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In your own words, what is the difference between mechanical and dialectical materialism?
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How does dialectical materialism approach the question of religion, compared to mechanical materialism?
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Does dialectical materialism require atheism as a philosophical commitment, or is it compatible with someone who holds religious faith as a personal and communal practice so as long as they don't use their faith as their analytical tool or basis for an argument?
Religion is a very important aspect of people's culture. Marxism must be applied to the conditions of a society, so religious faith is very important. I'm aware that there are Islamic Socialist movements and it seems, there is a great deal of conciliation between Marxism and Islamic tenets.
The impression these Marxists have is that religions are nothing but a tool of exploitation. This is a wrong analysis; in reality, it's the ruling class who dictates the direction of the superstructure, politics, culture, etc. of a society. Religion has been erroneously understood to stand outside the influence of class relations, but the reality is that when a class has power to dictate the direction of development of a society, it too has direction over religious representations. I think the illusion that religion stands outside the ruling class's sphere of influence and that it just seems to always take an oppressive character is a necessary tool to create a sort of "buffer" between the oppressor and oppressed relationship between the ruling class and the subjugated classes; in a sense, the ruling class uses religion as a tool of subjugation, but also as a way to misdirect any dissent or material struggle against their established power.
What would religion look like under a dictatorship of the proletarian? I think if a society with a rigorously educated, steadfast and theoretically-strong vanguard party guides the development of a workers' society to maximize the well-being of humankind, I have no doubt that religion would be allowed to present the very character that we read about it from their very texts, rather than distortions and corruptions aimed at serving the interests of a minority ruling class. Religion would have the opportunity to be truly "of the masses" instead of just a ruling minority. Just as we understand the concept of "everything a corporation touches turns to shit", religion has been mistreated in this fashion by feudalists, monarchists, bourgeois aristocracies, etc. Marxism isn't a dogma that is intended to scrub all character from of a society or an individual, this is a distortion of Marxism.
This is the one thing I always keep in mind and hope other marxist atheists do as well. In essence (and correct me), what you're saying is religion like a gun for example, is a tool that can be used for oppression but it can also be vice versa. Religion can also be a strong motivator that unites people and helps them fight back against oppression as we're seeing in places like Palestine & Iran.
Did I get that right?
Yes, this is how I understand religion. In El Salvador, during their revolution in the late 1970s and through the 80s, the Catholic clergy overwhelmingly took up the peasantry's struggle against the fascist capitalist class even though in other countries, religion was firmly under the the ruling class' control and, thus, was used for the oppression of the people. Many Catholic priests and nuns were massacred alongside the poor peasantry when death squads did their rounds in pueblos throughout the country.
I believe that about them & Hezbollah, Iraqi Hezbollah, & Yemen. I disagree with people trying to make it all about Islam or religion, though, I think it fails to give them enough credit for their base building. I think it's more important to look at their conversation with other national liberation & guerrilla movements