December 31, 2017

STATEMENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE TUDEH PARTY OF IRAN: THE STRUGGLE OF THE PEOPLE OF IRAN



Dear compatriots,
The politico-economic crisis of the bankrupt theocratic regime of Iran is growing and deepening daily. The impact of this crisis can be observed in the internal regime conflicts and the unprecedented revelations of infighting between powerful factions - revealing the depth of corruption and oppression that prevails in the so-called “exemplary system of the world”.
The spiralling poverty, deprivation, high prices and chronic unemployment - which have ruined the lives of a large portion of the population and in particular the youth, - the extensive and disastrous destruction of the environment, due to the catastrophic policies of the ruling power, and the complete economic bankruptcy of the regime as well as escalation of external pressures on the regime, have altogether created a very critical and explosive situation in our society. The heads of the regime who are living a luxury life with an unprecedented fortune that they have amassed over the last forty years by plundering the national resources and wealth of the nation, ask the people to be patient and tolerate the hardship in order to “guard the Islamic regime” - a regime that has brought nothing to our nation except destruction and cultural, political and economic regress. The current rulers have shown in practice that their only goal and desire is to save the current despotic regime and the absolute rule of the dark-minded clergy over our nation at the cost of any crime and any tragedy.
Recent weeks have witnessed the escalation of discontent and unprecedented protest gatherings of the people in numerous cities, as well as broad and extensive labour protests against high prices, oppression and the injustices perpetrated by governing bodies, from the government and parliament (Majlis) to the Judiciary and the Islamic Guards Corps and the Supreme Religious Leadership all of which protect the interests of the grand capitalists. The escalation in the discontent of the people regarding the existing situation and, more importantly, the readiness and willingness of the enraged and frustrated masses to take on the suppressive apparatus of the regime is an indication of the significant developments in the level of preparedness of the masses in opposing - and waging an open fight against - the rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Contrary to the claims of some leaders of the pro-regime reformists that such protests are “conspiracies”, we deeply believe that the majority of the people of our nation are disappointed and frustrated with the slogans of those whose only objectives are to make some cosmetic and minor adjustments to the current regime, and are now demanding fundamental changes in the governance of the country. Today only those who would like to somehow preserve the current disastrous situation fear the escalation and growth of the people’s struggle. The experience of the last two decades and several presidential, parliamentary, and city council elections that were held, and manipulated under the control and direction of the Supreme Leader, has proved that the people are rapidly moving away from the strategy of making a choice between bad and worse, and are no longer willing to submit to the manipulation of their demands by the regime and the pro-regime reformists who by and large play the role of that nation’s power brokers these days. The majority of the people of the homreland today want to put an end to the despotic theocratic regime; to end the oppression and injustice; and bring about the establishment of freedom and social justice. These demands can only be achieved through a joint struggle of all the national and freedom-loving forces without foreign intervention.
Dear compatriots,
At the same time, it should be noted that under the critical conditions of the current dangerous regional tensions, the regional reaction - supported by the Trump administration in the US and the right-wing government of Netanyahu in Israel - is seeking to distinctly impact the developments in our country and to replace the current reactionary regime with another reactionary regime. The support of these forcesi.e. the regional reaction, Trump administration, and the right-wing government of Netanyahu, for the Iranian monarchists and those political groups whose agenda is to cooperate with the most reactionary regimes of the region and to persuade the European states to impose sanctions on Iran’s economy - thereby exacerbating the misery for the destitute and disadvantaged people of our country - and to encourage foreign states to interfere militarily in Iran, leaves no room whatsoever for any optimism regarding the future designs of such “opposition”. The progressive and freedom-loving forces of Iran must increase their presence in the protest movement of the masses - more than ever before - providing proper people-oriented slogans, offering sensible guidance and relying on the legitimate demands of the masses for abolishing the existing suppressive regime and ending the economic deprivation, oppression, injustice and plundering of the natural and human resources of the nation, while avoiding reactionary and divisive slogans. We should not let the past repeat itself whereby the heroic struggle of the nation for freedom, democracy and social justice is hijacked by a bunch of reactionary opportunists who do not believe in the people’s rights or democratic freedoms.
Dear compatriots,
The way to save the country is through a joint and organised mobilisation of all the national, anti-dictatorship and freedom-loving forces to abolish the despotic and anti-people theocratic regime of the Supreme Leadership. Our party has been of the resolute belief that the ruling political regime in Iran - a regime that is based on the rule of one individual as the “representative of God on Earth” who is above and beyond all the laws and executive governing institutions, the legislative, the judiciary and the police and military apparatus - is a regime beyond reform and a people-based democratic regime cannot be created through any reworking of the current system. The solution is to wage a joint and organised struggle of all social layers - from the workers and all working people to the militant youth, student, women and progressive and freedom-loving intellectuals - around popular slogans against the rule of tyranny. The experience of our contemporary history has demonstrated that the peoples of Iran have the ability to convey their voice to the ears of the ruling reaction. Once again, we call upon all the national, progressive and freedom-loving forces of the nation to put aside their theoretical-historic disagreements and mobilise together, alongside the people’s movement to effectively help the struggle – the goal of which is to reject the tyranny and to establish the rule of the people and freedom, peace, sovereignty and social justice.
The Central Committee of the Tudeh Party of Iran
29 December 2017


Black Bolsheviks and White Lies: Reflections on the Black Radical Tradition, Peta Lindsay I Social Movement Studies I History I Nov 2nd, 2017




A lot of nonsense has been written about the role of Putin's Russia in subverting "our democracy." As though our democracy had been functioning perfectly (even reasonably) well, until these shadowy Russian forces purchased a few Facebook ads that sent us all into the streets. It's a laughable concept. I'm sorry, did Putin acquit George Zimmerman or Jason Stockley? Did Putin shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice? Russia did not carry out the drug war against African Americans or implement policies of mass incarceration, or pass voter ID laws in the U.S. - all of which have contributed to disenfranchising millions of African Americans over the years. The U.S. has a lot to answer for with regard to systematically denying the democratic rights of African Americans and this is not the first time they've tried to deflect criticism for that by blaming Russia. As a student of history I've mostly just rolled my eyes this time around while the Democrats attempt to make red-scare tactics that are very old, new again. But a recent entry in this canon of "Black activists are pawns of Moscow" writing is so insulting and patently false, that, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it seems very important to reply.
Last month an author named Terrell Jermaine Starr wrote a piece for The Root entitled, " Russia's Recent Facebook Ads Prove the Kremlin Never Loved Black People ."
I've enjoyed entries from The Root before, particularly in chronicling racist attacks against African Americans that are underreported in the mainstream media. But their willingness to toe the Democratic Party line, uncritically in most circumstances, has been noted.
Starr's piece is supposedly historical in scope but is premised upon a huge, glaring, historical fallacy: that of conflating the Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. In one sentence, Starr describes the two as essentially the same (showing you the level of material historical analysis he's interested in engaging in) and then for the rest of the article proceeds to whitewash the history of Black communism, using the favorite arguments deployed by racists - that Blacks who supported socialism did so because they were duped, and that the Soviet Union was only interested in Black liberation insofar as it meant spiting their enemies in the White House.
These assertions deny the agency of African Americans, many of whom were amongst the most prominent Black intellectuals of their time, who looked to the Soviet system as an alternative to American racism and exploitation. This interpretation also denies the real solidarity and support that the Soviet Union expressed in their assistance to liberation movements of many Black, brown and oppressed people all over the world. Since anti-communist propaganda is easily promulgated without evidence in this country, allow me to present some of the evidence that exposes these racist lies for what they are.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was birthed via a revolution in 1917 and overthrown via counter-revolution in 1991. While Russians were in the majority of the population, the USSR itself was actually an extremely diverse and vibrant society for all of its existence. The Soviet Union spanned 14 time zones and comprised many independent nationalities and ethnic groups, such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Tartars - all of whom spoke different languages, practiced different religions - and suffered terrible racist oppression under the Tsar. The triumph of the socialist revolution and the very existence of this unique political formation was the result of a revolution carried out by united oppressed peoples, who rose up as one and took control of society away from their Tsarist and capitalist exploiters. The Bolsheviks always took the task of uniting oppressed people and elevating their struggle very seriously. This was a key to their success and a guiding principle in their work. It was Lenin who pioneered communist opposition to imperialism and he who changed the Marxist formulation, "Workers of the World Unite" to "Workers and oppressed people of the world unite" as an expression of the priority they placed on the struggle of colonized people against imperialism.
Around the world, the 1919 triumph of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was greeted by the imperialists with great dismay and by oppressed/colonized peoples with great enthusiasm, inspiration and hope. In America, 1919 was an infamous year, known for its "Red Summer" of intense lynchings, race riots and gruesome violence against African Americans at the hands of white mobs. The Black American political movement had entered a new era of militancy, as veterans returning from WWI were less inclined to submit to Jim Crow and more inclined to fight for their dignity, wages and rights. A new wave of radical Black intellectuals all but took over the Black political scene, many from the Caribbean and mostly based in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. These men and women were considered some of the premier thinkers and writers of their time and of the majority of these radical African American leaders-regardless of political orientation- held the Russian Revolution in very high esteem.
According to historian Winston James, in his work Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, the appeal of the Russian Revolution to Black people in America at the time lay not in their having been "recruited" by Russia as the Root article asserts, but in their own independent evaluation of the Bolshevik government and where it stood with regard to equality for oppressed and colonized people.
James wrote about three major factors that attracted Black people to Bolshevism in the 1920s and 1930s. The first was the domestic policies promoting national minorities and oppressed groups that were put in place almost immediately after the triumph of the revolution. After the revolution the Bolshevik government undertook what can be described as the most far reaching and thorough affirmative action plan that any government has ever attempted, dedicating much in the way of their limited resources towards raising the standard of living for groups who had been historically oppressed and creating conditions that could facilitate greater equality for those groups.
To Black Americans, the most convincing example was the swiftness and seriousness with which the Soviets began redressing historical inequality suffered by the Jews, including immediately outlawing discrimination against them and putting an end to the violent pogroms that had plagued them under the Tsar. In 1923 Claude McKay, the young Black intellectual, writer and poet wrote: "For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact of the Russian Revolution is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar (166)."
The other two factors explored by James were the "uncompromising rhetoric of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and the right of self-determination for oppressed nations (165)" espoused by the Bolshevik government and the creation of the Third Communist International, an international body that openly encouraged colonized (often Black or Brown) people to rise up against their (mostly European) exploiters all over the world.
At a point when the U.S. government had systematically ignored the pleas of Black people to pass even one federal law against lynching, when city and state governments all over the country were colluding in lynchings, race riots and allowing whites who attacked Blacks to go free, or even reap rewards - it doesn't take a genius to figure out why many Black thinkers were genuinely excited that such a different kind of government, one that spoke to them and had taken action to support and defend its own national minorities, had come into the world.

Black and white (film)
Langston Hughes was a Black intellectual of this generation, this being the same generation that we associate with the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro. Of all the insults buried in that heinous Root article, the disrespect to Langston Hughes, inarguably one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, is one of the most difficult to endure. Starr paints Hughes as a dupe, someone "recruited" to champion the Soviet Union, as if the man had not traveled all over the world, studied and written extensively and was not capable of genuinely supporting a government that he believed to be on the right track. We revere Hughes' poetry that celebrates Black beauty, he is the jazz poet laureate of Black America and we love to recite his words that affirm our deep history and continued struggle in the face of white American racism. But what about his poetry celebrating the Soviet Union? Here's a link to a poem that he wrote praising Lenin . Did they break that one out at your school's Black history month event? Probably not. But that doesn't change the fact that Langston Hughes was extremely sympathetic to the Soviet Union, as is abundantly evident in his autobiographical writing, including in the chapter of I Wonder As I Wander, "Moscow Movie."
The Root provides perhaps the most cynical and shallow reading of this chapter possible, though I hesitate to affirm that that author of that piece has even actually read it. "Moscow Movie" tells an important story about a time in 1932 when Langston Hughes was invited to the Soviet Union by the government, to work on a major film production. This film was called "Black and White" and it was supposed to highlight the struggle of Black workers in the South and give an international showcase to the racism and oppression experienced by Black people in America. According to Langston Hughes, it was "intended to be the first great Negro-white film ever made in the world (80)," though unfortunately it did not come to fruition.
Hughes accompanied a delegation of 22 young African Americans who were supposed to star in the film, though it was odd that most in that group were not actors or performers by trade. Starr erroneously attributes this casting to racism, saying that Hughes determined that the Soviets were so racist that they assumed that all Black people could sing and dance (and play sports?) and so didn't bother to check the backgrounds of the people they hired for the film.
In fact, Hughes said nothing of the sort. He addressed the peculiar composition of the delegation early in the chapter, stating, "That most of our group were not actors seems to have been due to the fact that very few professional theater people were willing to pay their own fares to travel all the way to Russia to sign contracts they had never seen. Only a band of eager, adventurous young students, teachers, writers and would-be-actors were willing to do that, looking forward to the fun and wonder of a foreign land as much as to film-making. There were a few among them who wanted to get away from American race prejudice forever, being filled up with Jim Crow (70)."
It's important that Hughes highlighted their motives as traveling to seek a reprieve from American racism. So high was the esteem for the Soviet Union in the group, that "When the train stopped beneath this banner for passports to be checked, a few of the young black men and women left the train to touch their hands to Soviet soil, lift the new earth in their palms, and kiss it (73)," according to Hughes.
In his accusations of racism what Starr may be referring to is where Hughes says at one point, "Europeans as well as Americans, seem to be victims of that old cliche that Negroes just naturally sing (80)." That is hardly an indictment of any particularly Russian racism and more of a complaint on how African Americans are represented on the world stage.
Lack of specific cultural knowledge about African Americans was a problem throughout the film's production and that is what Hughes believes ultimately damned the film. Hughes was given an early copy of the script and let them know that he did not think it was usable because there were so many errors with regard to what racism and working class struggle actually looked like in the American South. Hughes said that the author of the script was well intentioned but had never been to America. He also said that information from or by Black Americans was rarely translated into Russian in those days. Even with these critiques, it's nearly impossible to interpret Hughes as being at all bitter or resentful at the Soviets for their attempt at making this film. On the contrary, Hughes wrote with unmistakable good humour throughout the chapter and also repeatedly mentioned that they were all paid in full and well taken care of, even when it became clear the film wouldn't be made.
The reception that the students received in Moscow is really remarkable, especially considering the historical context - none of which The Root brings up, of course. The students were "wined and dined" in Hughes' own words, they were put up in the most lavish hotels and treated to free tickets to the theater, the opera, the ballet and dinners and parties with dignitaries and important people, almost every night. They were official guests of the state and treated with the highest honors. No Black delegation has ever been received in America with such grace. Hughes says that they were always introduced as "representatives of the great Negro people (82)" and after describing the incredible amenities at one of the elaborate resorts they were housed in, he adds "I had never stayed in such a hotel in my own country, since, as a rule, Negroes were not then permitted to do so (93)."
On their reception by ordinary Soviet citizens, Hughes writes:
"Of all the big cities in the world where I've been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers. But perhaps that was because we were Negroes and, at that time, with the Scottsboro Case on world-wide trial in the papers everywhere, and especially in Russia, folks went out of their way there to show us courtesy. On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, "Negrochanski tovarish - Negro comrade - take my seat!' On the streets queueing up for newspapers or cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in line would say, "Let the Negro comrade go forward." (74)
This is in 1932! Nowhere in America were Black people treated like this in 1932. Hell, many of us could not get that treatment today, if our lives depended on it (and they sometimes do). This account echoes many others by African Americans who visited or moved to the Soviet Union. In William Mandel's Soviet but Not Russian, Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying of his 1978 visit to the Soviet Union:
"I saw a hundred nationalities. No such thing as a Black man, or a white man, or 'you nigger,' or get back. People say, 'Oh well, they just showed you the best.' You mean all of those white folks rehearsed, said: 'Muhammad Ali's coming!' .. 'All hundred nationalities, pretend you get along. Muhammad Ali's coming!'…'They just took you where they wanted to go.' I know that's a lie. I got in my car and told my driver where to go. Lying about the Russians.. I jogged in the mornings in strange places where they hardly ever saw a Black man. I ran past two little white Russian ladies who were walking to work. They didn't look around and ask what I was doing. I can't go jogging in some streets in America in the morning in a white neighborhood." (85)
The Root tries to paint a picture of a USSR where the same racism that existed in Jim Crow America infected everyone there, but there simply is not enough evidence to say that was the case. They cite the experiences of one Black American man (Robert Robinson), thoroughly. But what about the experiences of the estimated 400,000 African students who were educated for free in the Soviet Union between 1950-1990? These Black youth attended technical schools, Lumumba University and the special Lenin school for leadership, they lived and traveled all over the Soviet Union and upon graduation, they would return to their homelands with skills necessary to aid in the new independence governments. Mandel interviewed quite a few Black Soviets for his book, including other African Americans who moved to the Soviet Union- and the picture they paint is very different from the one in Robinson's account. Providing no evidence, Starr also asserts that interracial relationships would naturally be a problem in the Soviet Union, saying "both Russian and white American men weren't cool with their women messing with black men." Since he introduced the term "bullshit" just before that line, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Langston Hughes' account features many stories of the men in his group dating Soviet women and not a word about anyone batting an eye at such pairings - which in 1932, would have gotten someone lynched in the United States. Please stop projecting American racism onto the Soviet Union, when you just don't have the evidence to back that up. As W.E.B. Dubois wrote on his third visit to the USSR in 1949, "of all countries, Russia alone has made race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms, Russia alone owns no colonies of dark serfs or white and what is more important has no investments in colonies and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap labor in Asia and Africa." The material basis for widespread Jim Crow style racism just wasn't there.
Hughes was aware that the western press celebrated the failure of the movie and spread many rumours that they knew to be false concerning the Soviet government maneuvering against the Black students. He writes that Western journalists, who saw them spending money and carousing in Moscow nightclubs, filed stories in the U.S. about how they were going unpaid and neglected.
Hughes wrote that some in his group suspected that the movie was scrapped because the Soviets were sacrificing the Black struggle to appease the American government - but Hughes himself did not believe that. He was one of the only members of the group who saw the script and he was unequivocal in stating that more than anything else, it was the script that caused the project's failure. Hughes also repeatedly mentioned the context of the international campaign in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a Black struggle that was most certainly not being dropped by the Soviets, as all this was going on.
The Root miscasts this excerpt from the life of Langston Hughes to support their conclusion that "the Soviets' attempts to curry favor with the black struggle" was "insincere and downright fraudulent." I would counter that this anti-communist propaganda is actually "insincere and downright fraudulent" but allow me to present further evidence on the genuine solidarity expressed by the Soviet Union. Sticking with the theme, let's keep talking about film.

Focus on Africa in film
In the book Focus on African Film, noted film scholar Josephine Woll describes "The Russian Connection" between the Soviet Union and African film, an invaluable alliance in making postcolonial African cinema a reality. As alluded to in the previous section, the Soviet Union expended a lot of resources on aid and development for African nations, who were in the process of throwing off their own colonial oppressors and beginning their independence after World War II. These countries were severely underdeveloped, as chronicled by Walter Rodney and the Soviet Union was a key ally in providing material support, education and technology to allow these countries to thrive without being beholden to their former colonial masters. It's worth noting that the greatest victory for Black liberation to occur in my lifetime, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, involved a great deal of material and political support from the Soviet Union, which was integral to the success of that movement.
Film was another area in which the Soviet Union provided Africans with crucial foundational support. Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, widely considered the "father of African film" was educated in the Soviet Union. This was also the case for other pioneering African filmmakers, like Souleymane Cissé of Mali and Abderrahmne Sissako of Mauritania/Mali and Sarah Maldoror, the French daughter of immigrants from Guadeloupe who made many films about African liberation. In addition to technical know-how, the Soviet Union also provided the essential film and production equipment, distribution and promotion, to bring African cinema onto the world stage.
Dr. Woll seems to believe that the motives of the Soviets were clearly political, but also genuine. Woll wrote: "The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, radically altered how, why, and for whom films were made. Financial profit still mattered but it competed with other goals: educational, political, promotional. The new regime in post-tsarist Russia, like the new leaders of post-colonial African nations, willingly allocated part of its budget to subsidizing cinema because it recognized how effective the medium could be as an instrument of propaganda; and most Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, though they had individual and often compelling aesthetic agendas, readily supported the politics of revolution (225)." In the U.S. we tend to be very cynical of the word "propaganda" but in revolutionary times, propaganda is necessary and the Africans needed aid in producing theirs. Ousmane Sembene clearly agreed; he was adamant about telling compelling political stories through his films and he fully recognized the potential for his films to "help decolonize Africa (225)."
The Soviet Union trained and equipped these African directors, so that they could bring the beauty and the struggle of their people to the world stage. The work of these revolutionary African filmmakers can be seen as a happy ending to the saga that was begun with "Black and White." While we never got the Soviet sponsored film about Black struggle in the U.S. that they wanted to produce, we have since seen a variety of films out of different African countries that highlight their struggle in similar, but undoubtedly much more accurate, ways.

Conclusion
I realize that this was a lot to write in response to a small article that was probably not even this carefully considered by the author himself. But the legacy of the Soviet Union with regard to Black struggle is unique and inspiring and should be celebrated, not horrifically distorted and denied. In Paul Robeson Speaks, the great Black American actor says:
"Mankind has never witnessed the equal of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. . . . Firstly, because of the significance it has for my people generally. Everywhere else, outside of the Soviet world, black men are an oppressed and inhumanely exploited people. Here, they come within the provisions of Article 123 of Chapter X of the Constitution, which reads: "The equality of the right of the citizens of the U.S.S.R. irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life, is an irrevocable law. Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of the race or nationality to which they belong, as well as the propagation of racial or national exceptionalism, or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law." (1978, 116)
While our current President appoints KKK members to the Department of Justice and calls Nazi murderers "very fine people," while his opponent Hillary Clinton called our children "super predators" and campaigned for them to be locked up en masse- we have to appreciate how significant it is that a national government - in 1919 - put laws on the books like the ones described above. They outlawed racism. They invested heavily in Black education and Black artistic expression. They gave guns to those fighting imperialists and fascists all over the world. What more could you want? Terrell Jermaine Starr and The Root may be confused about which government cares about Black people, but I can't say that I am. I'm proud to be a socialist and I'm proud of the legacy of friendship between my people and the USSR.
As I mentioned in the start of this article, calling Africans who fight for their liberation "Commies" or "dupes" is nothing new. John Hope Franklin referred to this in From Slavery to Freedom, saying that the response to Black self-defense against race riots in 1919 caused such speculation: "Many American whites freely suggested that foreign influences - especially … Bolshevik propaganda after the 1917 Russian Revolution - had caused blacks to fight back. Perhaps there is some truth to that… However, black Americans all along the political spectrum (from conservative, to moderate, to radical left) ridiculed the claim that their new assertiveness was the result of 'outside agitation.' American blacks needed no outsiders to awaken their sense of the tremendous contradiction between America's professed beliefs and its actual practices (362)".
That remains as true today as it was when written. Additionally, I'll close with one more statement from that time, which also remains true, for myself at least. The militant Black Harlem publication The Crusader, under the leadership of fiery Black Communist Cyril Briggs declared in 1919: "If to fight for one's rights is to be Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists and let them make the most of it!"

This article originally appeared at Liberation School .

References
Hughes, Langston. (1984). I wonder as I wander: An autobiographical journey. New York: Hill and Wang.
Robeson, Paul. (1978). Paul Robeson speaks: Writings, speeches, interviews 1918-1974, ed. by P.S. Foner. New York: Citadel.

December 27, 2017

Religion: opium of the people? by Roland Boer, in Culture Matters, 12 December 2017


Tuesday, 12 December 2017 22:16 

Religion: opium of the people? 

Written by  

 307 
Religion: opium of the people?


In the first of a series of essays on Marxism and religion, Roland Boer discusses Marx's description of religion as 'the opium of the people'. It is also available as a free ebook herehttp://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/religion/item/2692-religion-opium-of-the-people

Marx’s most well-known observation concerning religion is that it is ‘the opium of the people’. The meaning would seem to be clear: opium is a drug that dulls the senses and helps one forget the miseries of the present. So also with religion. The catch is that Marx’s use of ‘opium’ is not so straightforward, for it actually opens the door to what may be called a political ambivalence at the heart of religion.
Background: Germany and Theology
But before we can deal with this question, we need to deal with some preliminary groundwork: how much did Marx and Engels know about religion – which in their context meant Christianity? As for Marx, although he never seems to have professed any religious belief, even from a young age, he identified himself ‘of Evangelical faith’,[1] where ‘Evangelical’ means in a German context Protestant. This identification came from his certificate of maturity from the Gymnasium (or high school) in Trier, the town where he was born. Much later, in 1861, when Marx was applying to recover his German citizenship (he had been deported due to revolutionary activity), he wrote: ‘I … profess the Evangelical religion’.[2] But these claims were more cultural than religious, especially since Marx’s Jewish father had formally assimilated for the sake of German identification and rights, being baptised as Heinrich (from Herschel). Not only cultural, but also educational. At the Gymnasium, Marx was taught a full curriculum of theological and biblical studies. He studied Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew, as well as ‘religious knowledge’ and church history. As his certificate observes: ‘His knowledge of the Christian faith and morals is fairly clear and well grounded; he knows also to some extent the history of the Christian Church’.[3] All of this is revealed in one of the final examination papers, which involved an interpretation of the Gospel of John.[4]
As for Engels, his background was somewhat different from that of Marx. In his home town of Elberfeld and Barmen (together known as Wuppertal), the Reformed or Calvinist tradition was strong. Engels grew up a devout young man, attending church more than once a week, sitting at the feet of a minister who was to become the most famous in Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher. At the local gymnasium he had studied similar subjects as those of Marx, notably becoming competent in classical and New Testament Greek (he was also to master a range of other languages). But Engels’s inquiring mind did not find its outlet in university study. Instead, he entered the family cotton production business, first established in Barmen by his grandfather and later to become the Ermen and Engels firm, with factories in Germany and Manchester. Soon, Engels was posted to Bremen for a couple of years before moving to Manchester. Somewhere between Bremen and Manchester, Engels lost his deep faith, a struggle that caused a profound sense of loss, sadness and release. He was never one to accept the dominant orthodoxies at face value, penning biting critical pieces on the hypocrisies of the Reformed burghers around him, who would be dutifully devout on Sunday and yet see no problem exploiting those around them during the week (see especially ‘Letters from Wuppertal’ from 1839).[5] He also observed the fascinating tensions in the preaching and behaviour of his minister, Krummacher. Already at this stage, it is obvious that he found time to read and write, although he had to publish his early pieces under pseudonyms. It is easy enough to maintain one’s faith while being critical of its practitioners. More difficult for Engels were the challenges posed by contemporary philosophy, theology and biblical criticism, all of which he read with enthusiasm.
I will return to Engels’s struggles in a moment, for now we need to set the wider context in Germany at the time. This was a relatively backward context, economically and politically. The German states lagged well behind The Netherlands, England and France in the development of capitalism. On a political register, the Prussian kings, Friedrich Wilhelm III and IV, sought to ensure the continuance of the monarchy, stifle any reform movements and foster the ‘Christian state’. Unlike France, with its revolutionary experiences and the radical atheism of Voltaire and company, and unlike England, with its burst of industrialisation and the growth of deism, in the German states debate over modern issues was mediated through theology and the Bible. Many topics were censored and could not be discussed directly: republicanism, bourgeois democracy, parliamentary representation, freedom (of the press and assembly), individual rights. So they were addressed in coded form through arguments over the Bible and core theological issues. Thus, to criticize the Bible or Christianity was to criticize the reactionary political situation.
It should be no surprise that the most controversial works of mid-nineteenth century Germany were those of David Strauss, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. The furore over Strauss’s The Life of Jesus arose over its argument that the narratives of Jesus in the Gospels are purely mythological and that each person is able to become a democratic Christ.[6] Similarly, Marx’s one-time teacher and collaborator, Bruno Bauer, developed a radically atheistic position through his biblical interpretation. In this work, he challenged the oppressive particularism of religion and urged a democratic self-consciousness. And Feuerbach’s proposal in The Essence of Christianity – a work that deeply influenced Marx and Engels in their younger years – that religion is the projection of what is best in human beings was seen as deeply revolutionary.[7] It is telling that all of them either could not find work in a university or lost the posts they had as a result of their work.
Given such a context, both Marx and Engels could hardly avoid debating and discussing theology. But due to their different backgrounds, they followed different paths until they first met in the early 1840s. For Engels, it entailed a slow break from his faith, passing through different stages as he attempted to hold on. We can see this process intimately in a series of letters with his close friends, Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber from 1838 to 1841. They discussed at length biblical questions, especially the effects of the latest research on internal contradictions and the historicity of the biblical accounts. Engels was unable to reconcile these insights with his faith, not least because he had no role models or mentors who could guide him through to a more critical position. Right up to his break and perhaps even afterwards, Engels’s wrote of calling out to God in prayer, but he also saw the exhilarating if frightening prospects, like crossing the sea: ‘it was like a breath of fresh sea air blowing down upon me from the purest sky; the depths of speculation lay before me like the unfathomable sea from which one cannot turn one’s eyes, straining to see the ground below’.[8] At the same time, this intimate experience of Christianity would sustain a lifelong interest in matters biblical and theological. Instead of turning his back entirely on religion, he sought a different way to understand it in a way that went beyond Marx. We will see in a later pamphlet how this was so.
Marx took a somewhat different path after completing his PhD at the University of Berlin. While there, he had become a close collaborator with Bruno Bauer, with whom he planned books and even a journal, Archiv des Atheismus. Nothing much came of the plans, although Marx wrote a long manuscript called A Treatise on Christian Art. The manuscript is lost, but the themes turn up in Marx’s other work at the time. This is especially so in articles he wrote while editor of liberal newspaper, Rheinische Zeitung. Let me give one example from 1842: ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’.[9] The article is a sustained response to a certain Karl Hermes, editor of the journal mentioned in the title, who was a conservative Roman-Catholic and government agent. Hermes had fired a broadside against the Young Hegelians and the relatively new critical approach to the Bible and theology. We find Marx in a curious position: he wants to defend these new approaches to the Bible and theology, but at the same time he seeks to get past the theological nature of public debate. How does he do so? Theology is presented as an other-worldly, reactionary and traditional venture; against it are ranged scientific research, history and philosophical reason. The catch is that Marx ends up defending a form of theology and biblical research that is scientific, historical and rigorously philosophical. In this article, we also find Marx mercilessly tackling the contradictions of the ‘Christian state’ and introducing one of his first explorations of the fetish.
For both Marx and Engels, the big question was how they could find a way of thinking and acting that was free from the dominant theological frame of German thought in the 1830s and 1840s. Apart from the material I have already mentioned, we can see the beginnings of this process in the first two works they produced together: The Holy Family and The German Ideology.[10] While the first book was a sustained polemic against the theological undertones of much of the work of the left-wing young Hegelians, the second work begins to move beyond that framework and offers the first rough outline of what would become historical and dialectical materialism. This approach arose as a response to the theological context of thought in which Marx and Engels found themselves. Instead of following them down this path, let us stay with what Marx (and later Engels) say about religion. In what follows, I will examine the meaning of ‘opium of the people’, after which I develop its implications in the thought of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Opium and the Ambivalence of Religion
The opium metaphor appears in an early text, written by a 24-year old Marx soon after he and Jenny were married. The text is brief, only a few pages that comprise the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. The full manuscript was not published at the time, but the introduction did appear. For obvious reasons, it has become Marx’s most well-known statement on religion:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.[11]
Three key points can be made about this text. First, to understand the famous phrase – opium of the people – we need to consider the sentences that precede it. Note carefully: religious suffering may be an expression of real suffering. Religion may be the sigh, heart and soul of a heartless and soulless world. But religious suffering is also a protest against real suffering. Religion does not merely try to make one feel better in a world that has gone to the dogs, or passively accept those conditions. It is also a protest, pointing out that such suffering should not be borne. Here is a hint – a slight one – of what may be called the ambivalence of religion, since Marx’s use of the opium metaphor is more complex than we might initially think. Alongside its more negative associations, it may also have positive ones.
This brings us to the second point. In our time, we may associate opium with drugs, addicts, organised crime and destroyed lives. The situation in nineteenth century Europe was quite different.[12] Opium was regarded as a beneficial, useful and cheap medicine, especially for the poor who could hardly afford a doctor. Even in the early twentieth century, opium was used by doctors to treat melancholy and other ailments. As the left-leaning theologian, Metropolitan Vvedensky of Moscow, said in 1925, opium is not merely a drug that dulls the senses, but also a medicine that ‘reduces pain in life and, from this point of view, opium is for us a treasure that keeps on giving, drop by drop’.[13] However, opium was at the same time seen as a curse, doing more harm than good. Opium was the centre of debates and parliamentary enquiries in England; it was praised and condemned; it was a source of utopian visions for artists and poets, but it was increasingly stigmatised as a source of addiction and illness. To be added here is the ambivalence of colonialism: opium had been forced by the British Empire on the Chinese, so as to empty Chinese coffers of gold and silver. Thus, a significant portion of the wealth of the British Empire was based on the opium trade. Perceptions of opium ran all the way from blessed medicine to recreational curse.
Third, Marx himself used opium regularly. He consumed it to deal with the many illnesses that were produced by obsessive overwork, lack of sleep, chain smoking, and endless pots of coffee: liver problems, toothaches, eye pain, ear aches, bronchial coughs, and of course his infamous carbuncles. On one occasions, Jenny Marx wrote to Engels:
Chaley’s head hurts him almost everywhere, terrible tooth-ache, pains in the ears, head, eyes, throat and God knows what else. Neither opium pills nor creosote do any good. The tooth has got to come out and he jibs at the idea.[14]
Opium, it turns out, was a multidimensional metaphor. This is precisely why Marx chose it as a metaphor for religion. Like opium, religion may be source of hope, a way of curing an illness, a sigh for a better world; but it is also a result of world out of kilter, and may even be a source of harm in its own right.
Lenin and Spiritual Booze
What was the subsequent history of the opium metaphor? I would like to give one example, from Lenin. In 1905 he wrote:
Religion is opium of the people [opium naroda]. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image [obraz], their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.[15]
I have actually changed the translation of Lenin’s text. Why? The English translation in Lenin’s Collected Works has ‘opium for the people’, which changes the meaning. ‘Opium for the people’ gives the sense that religious beliefs are imposed upon people rather than emerging as their own response: religion is no longer ofthemselves, but has become something devised for them. But this not what Lenin’s text says. He writes ‘opium of the people [opium naroda]’, which is a direct translation of Marx’s ‘opium of the people [das Opium des Volkes]’.
However, in the USSR ‘opium for the people’ became the dominant sense. People mostly used the phrase ‘opium for the people’ rather than ‘opium of the people’ as the standard definition of religion. Perhaps the most famous example is the line from the movie, Twelve Chairs (based on Ilf and Petrov’s satirical novel of the same name from 1928) where the main character keeps greeting his competitor, the Orthodox priest, with the line: ‘How much do you charge for the opium for the people?’ It may be that Lenin hints in this direction, since he does say that religion is ‘a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image’. At first sight, this seems to mean the conventional ‘drowning of your sorrows’. Religion becomes a flask of vodka that dulls the pain of everyday life.
But Lenin’s text is not so straightforward. He also speaks of ‘human image’ and ‘demand for a life more or less worthy of human beings’. Something else is going on here, more than simply drowning your sorrows. I suggest that Lenin is alluding to theological language, especially from Russian Orthodoxy. How so? This tradition offers an intriguing interpretation of a key text from the Bible, Genesis 1:26: ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’. Russian Orthodoxy argued that the two terms – image and likeness – indicate different meanings. Thus, Adam and Eve may have been created in the image of God, which meant that they could participate in the divine life. However, sin (Genesis 3) has blurred and fractured the union of divine and human, resulting a less-than-human existence, with the unnatural result of death. Now we get into the intricacies of theology: according to Eastern Orthodox theology, the first human beings had missed the likeness to God. They may have been created in the image of God, although this had been distorted through sin. Likeness is another matter. The reason is achieving likeness to God is actually the task of Jesus Christ. This is a new state of existence, beyond that of Adam and Eve. They called this process of becoming like God theosis, or deification. This is a closer fellowship with God than even the first human beings experienced.
Did Lenin allude to this complex interplay between image and likeness, with his usage of ‘human image’ and ‘worthy human life’? Our human image may be obscured, drowned, inebriated, blurred – as though one were blind drunk – but even so the demand for a decent life persists. That is, a life worthy of human beings echoes not merely the broken image that runs through Russian Orthodoxy, but especially the restoration to the likeness of God through Christ.
This is not all, for ‘booze’ is also more ambivalent. As the Moscow Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexander Vvedensky, pointed out in 1925, ‘booze’ is a good translation of ‘opium’. Vvedensky was fully aware of the theological dimensions of Lenin’s phrase, but he was also aware of the role of alcohol in Russian culture. Even today, one finds that beer has only recently (2011) been designated an alcoholic drink, although most people continue to think that it is not. Two-litre bottles are still available in most shops and the famous vodka may be bought in useful bottles that fit comfortably in one’s hand. And there is the great Russian tradition in which an opened bottle must be emptied. Italy and France may be fabled as wine cultures, Germany, Scandinavia and Australia as beer cultures, but Russia’s drinking identity is inseparable from vodka.
Russians may be admired for their fabled drinking prowess, vodka may be a necessary complement to any long-distance rail travel (as I have found more than once), it may be offered to guests at the moment of arrival (for otherwise the host is unforgivably rude), it may be an inseparable element of the celebration of life, but it is also the focus of age-long concern. One may trace continued efforts to curtail excessive consumption all the way back to Lenin. For example, Khrushchev and Brezhnev sought in turn to restrict access to vodka with tighter controls, although their efforts pale by comparison to the massive campaign launched by Gorbachev in 1985. And Lenin fumed at troops and grain handlers getting drunk, molesting peasants and stealing grain during the food shortages of the Civil War (supported by foreign forces). Nonetheless, vodka was a vital economic product. Already in 1899 in his painstakingly detailed The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin provides graphs and data concerning the rapid growth of distilling industry. Finally, when Russians drink they toast the Holy Trinity. They say ‘soobrazit’ na troih’, that is, ‘to do the thing among the three’, or, even more literally, ‘to co-image among the three’. To drink is therefore a co-imaging the Trinity.
Booze turns out to be a metaphor as complex as opium, if not more so. It is both spiritual booze and divine vodka: relief for the weary, succour to the oppressed, inescapable social mediator, it is also a source of addiction, dulling of the senses and dissipater of strength and resolve. Religion-as-booze thereby opens up even more complexity concerning religion in the Marxist tradition.
Between Reaction and Revolution
By now it should be clear that religion is politically ambivalent. It can go one way or the other, to reaction or revolution. Throughout history, we find that a religion like Christianity – on which I focus since I know it best – has easily supported all sorts of tyrants and despots. From the moment the Roman Emperor Constantine decided to make Christianity the religion of empire (from 312 CE and confirmed by Theodosius I in 380 CE), it became clear that religion fits very easily into this role. To be sure, there was plenty of preparation in Christian literature and thought (already in the Bible), as the text of Romans 13:1 reveals: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God’. But Constantine’s act made this process perfectly clear.
The danger, however, is to assume that this is the default position for a religion like Christianity. We can easily assume that religion is inherently reactionary, supporting the worst forms of oppression, holding onto outmoded thoughts and practices. The list of examples is long indeed, but perhaps the best example is the condemnation of Galileo’s proposal that the earth goes around the sun. This took place at the hands of the Inquisition between 1616 and 1633. The error was not acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church until 1992.
But we would be mistaken for thinking the church is at its heart reactionary. A common position is to argue for a conservative core to religion. This could be the church’s support of reactionary power, its support of slavery for many centuries, opposition to marriage equality, or simply the idea that believers should be ‘good’ citizens and not upset the status quo. So if some group challenges its conservatism, they are variously branded as ‘heretics’, anti-religious, persecuted and – as so often happened in the past – executed. On this approach, the rebels are outsiders, developing alternatives at the fringes of religion and its institutions. They distort the core ‘truths’ of religion to suit their political purposes.
However, among these groups we can also find a reverse approach. They sometimes argue that the original ‘truth’ of Christianity was a rebellious, revolutionary and communistic one. Jesus himself was seen as a revolutionary and therefore executed, and the early Christian movement was a form of communism in terms of its social organisation. A favourite text here is Acts 4:32 and 35: ‘Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common … They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need’. We find this approach even in Engels and Karl Kautsky, but many on the religious Left would hold to it as well. Thus, the various churches and their accommodation with power constitute a betrayal of the original nature of Christianity. This understanding leaves two options: try to reform the church from within, as many have done throughout history, or move outside the church to form new movements, which has also taken place again and again.
The problem here is not the efforts themselves, but the assumption that there is a core and original truth and that it has subsequently been betrayed. In itself, this is an approach that draws from the Bible, especially the story of the ‘Fall’ of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Once there was an almost perfect state of existence, but human beings betrayed that state and now we live with the consequences (as an aside, this narrative often appears among Marxists as well when dealing with new developments in Marxism elsewhere in the world).
I would like to suggest another approach. It is not that the truth of Christianity lies with either the conservative or radical approach, with either the religious Right or the religious Left. Instead, both approaches come from the core of religion. It is not either-or, but both-and. At one and the same time, Christianity is reactionary, with self-serving institutions validating despotic power, and rebellious, so much so that Jesus was seen as a revolutionary and that Christians should be opposed to imperialism and colonialism. Both positions are possible and they do not require any twisting of biblical texts or theology to justify their approach. What we find throughout the sacred texts, theological debate and historical examples is a constant tension between reaction and revolution, between the religious Right and the religious Left.
‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat’: Interpreting a Text
However, since Christianity is primarily a religion based on a collection of texts, the Bible, I would like to focus on one specific text that illustrates this point very well. It comes from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: ‘anyone unwilling to work should not eat’. I will need to put the text in its context, before dealing with two ways this text has been interpreted. The first and more reactionary interpretation is usually found among biblical scholars and conservative politicians, while a more radical interpretation appears with none other than Lenin.
Context
Let me set the context for this biblical verse: the problem for the letter as a whole, which was sent by an unknown author to the small group of Christians in Thessalonica, was the delay in the return of Christ. Many of the early Christians (the Apostle Paul among them) believed that Christ would return very soon, well within their lifetimes. Soon enough, it became clear that Christ was in no hurry to return and bring in a new age. How to deal with this problem? This particular letter proposes that an increasing number of conditions have to be met before Christ would do so: first there must be a time of turning away from the faith (apostasy) and even rebellion; then a mysterious figure called the ‘man of lawlessness’ (or anti-Christ) must appear; then another comes, called the ‘one who restrains’, but he must be removed. Only after these conditions have been met will Christ come and begin the new age by destroying the lawless one.
The language is very mythological and may well have been as much a mystery to its first recipients as it is to us. But I want to stress a few points in relation to this text. First, it was very important in Eastern Orthodoxy, which provided the cultural context for Lenin and other Bolsheviks. This theological tradition had a strong sense of the tribulations leading up to the end time. The Antichrist (man of lawlessness) looms large, resisting God, if not trying the appear as God. And this time was not to begin at some point in the future: it had already begun when Jesus Christ was on earth. It would come to an end only with his return.
Second, the transition period would become drawn out, so much so that it became the new normal. During this period, one should of course await Christ’s return. But since that moment is unknown and it may take quite some time for it to happen, everyone needs to pay attention to keeping the faith while under threat, focus on the importance of the tradition, and work steadfastly. This is where the text from chapter 3, verse 10, comes into play: ‘anyone unwilling to work should not eat’.
Conservative Interpretation
 The verse – really a slogan – seems clear enough: if you do not want to work, you should not be provided with the means for living – specifically food. But interpretations of the verse reveal a fascinating division along class lines. Many biblical commentators suggest that the target of the verse is made up of labourers and artisans. In the new Christian community, they have – argue these commentators – been avoiding work, so the text is telling them to get back to work. Explanations may vary in their details:
  • ‘idle beggars’ who took advantage of Christian ‘brotherly love’;
  • noisy and troublemaking poor who depend on rich patrons;
  • lazy and greedy unemployed manual labourers who no longer wanted to work and relied on wealthy Christians;
  • some manual labourers among a larger number who shirked work and left the burden to others.
Obviously, class plays an important role here. This is expressed clearly in Nicholl’s commentary: ‘It is not difficult to imagine that some from the manual labouring class would have exploited the opportunity to be indolent rather than return to a life of hard manual work’. They are doing nothing less than ‘leeching’ and ‘sponging’.[16]
Biblical commentators are not the only ones who have offered a conservative interpretation of the verse. Not a few politicians and apologists for capitalism have also invoked it. For example, when James Smith arrived at the Jamestown settlement (North America) in 1908, he quoted the verse in order to correct – as he saw it – the problems in the colony. The anti-socialist clergyman, William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), used the verse to promote laissez-faire economics. More recently, ‘shock jocks’ in the United States, such as Glenn Beck, use the verse to attack any form of welfare for the ‘undeserving poor’ (the former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, used it exactly the same way). Not to be outdone, Margaret Thatcher quoted the verse at least once. In her infamous ‘Sermon on the Mound’, delivered to the Church of Scotland General Assembly in 1988, she suggested that this verse offers a biblical ‘principle’ for social and economic life: ‘We are told we must work and use our talents to create wealth’. In short, 2 Thessalonians 3:10 has been used again and again to target the poor unemployed: they are poor because they are supposedly lazy and do not want to work. They should not expect any support from the state.
Revolutionary Interpretation
We may also read the verse in a very different direction: it is not unemployed workers who shirk honest work, but the members of the ruling class, the rich who do not engage in productive labour. They are the ones who sponge off those who actually work. In the history of interpretation of this text, it is difficult indeed to find this reading. The only one who comes close in the Christian tradition is the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus (1371-1415), who – in a work called On Simony (1413) – denounces the practice of church leaders, who were enmeshed with the ruling class and held many estates so as to generate income without working themselves. Hus writes: ‘Woe to the canons … bishops … and prelates who eat, gorge themselves, guzzle, and feast abundantly, but in spiritual matters amount to nothing’.[17]
The first person who really offers a thoroughly new interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 was none other than Lenin. He does so in ‘The State and Revolution’ from 1917, precisely when he is interpreting Marx’s brief comments on the stages of communism in his late piece, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. Lenin reinterprets the initial and subsequent stages as socialism and communism – the first time such a distinction was clearly made. Under socialism, argues Lenin, we still have wage labour, contradictions, classes and recompense in terms of work done rather than needs (the latter would comprise communism).
What is the most appropriate slogan for the stage of socialism? Lenin writes that the ‘socialist principle, “He who does not work must not eat” [Kto ne rabotaet, tot ne dolzhen estʹ], is already realised’.[18] Note carefully: Lenin reinterprets the biblical verse in a small but important way. He does not write ‘he who is unwilling to work’ (as in the biblical text), but ‘he who does not work’.[19] And to spell out what he means, Lenin adds: ‘An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labour’.[20]
A year later, Lenin makes use of the same biblical verse. Now he addresses a gathering of workers in Petrograd. Grain was short, due to the destroyed transport network from the ravages of the First World War and the internationally supported ‘civil’ war. Grain speculation was rife, despite the effort at fixing prices. So Lenin attacks the bourgeoisie for profiteering, bribery, corruption and for trying to undermine the new workers’ state. In reply, he defines the ‘prime, basic and root principle of socialism’:
‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat [kto ne rabotaet, tot da ne est]’. ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ – every toiler understands that. Every worker, every poor and even middle peasant, everybody who has suffered need in his lifetime, everybody who has ever lived by his own labour, is in agreement with this. Nine-tenths of the population of Russia are in agreement with this truth. In this simple, elementary and perfectly obvious truth lies the basis of socialism, the indefeasible source of its strength, the indestructible pledge of its final victory.[21]
This biblical slogan was erected in villages, towns and cities during the worst days of the food shortages during the ‘civil’ war. In this situation, it entailed state control of grain supplies, bans on private hoarding and trading, strict registration of grain, delivery to places in need, and a ‘just and proper distribution of bread’ among all citizens. Obviously, this did not favour the rich, for the old capitalists and the bourgeoisie did not engage in productive labour. Now they would have to do so.[22]
Of all people, it was clearly Lenin who first offered a fully revolutionary interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Indeed, for Lenin this biblical text embodies the ‘prime, basic and root principle of socialism’. Socialism defined through a biblical text, radically reinterpreted! Quite a stunning development. But Lenin is also clear that while this may be socialism, it is ‘not yet communism’.[23]
This socialist biblical verse, or at least the new socialist interpretation became a standard shorthand for identifying the realities of the distinct stage of socialism. Thus, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 contains this verse in one of its opening statements: ‘In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat [kto ne rabotaet, tot ne est]’.[24]
Conclusion
To wrap up: for Marxists, religion is not merely reactionary, but is actually caught up a profound ambivalence when it comes the political matters. Without any twisting, it may find itself all too comfortable with oppressive and exploitative power. At the very same time, it can offer a distinct alternative, challenging and even overthrowing the very same powers, with a communistic form of community. I began with the question as to how much Marx and Engels actually knew about their religious contexts. The answer, obviously, is very much. Through their education, they learnt it thoroughly indeed – and Engels experienced it first-hand as a young man. I will have more to say about Engels in another pamphlet, but here I pointed out that Marx’s famous metaphor of opium is actually ambivalent in its nineteenth-century context. This ambivalence was brought out even further with Lenin’s gloss as ‘spiritual booze’: the intersection of Russian Orthodoxy and the complex role of alcohol (vodka) in Russian culture made this restatement perhaps even more complex. Finally, with these possibilities in mind, I explored an important text from the Bible itself: ‘anyone unwilling to work should not eat’. While the tradition of Christian interpreters and not a few politicians and commentators overwhelmingly read and continue to read this in a reactionary direction, Lenin and then the Bolsheviks offered a different – and very feasible – alternative interpretation in a revolutionary direction.
Perhaps Ernst Bloch, a Marxist in between eastern and western Europe, expresses it best: while the Bible is ‘often a scandal to the poor and not always a folly to the rich’, it is also ‘the Church’s bad conscience’.[25]
Bibliography
Bartlett, Joseph. "Bourgeois Right and the Limits of First Phase Communism in the Rhetoric of 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15." Bible and Critical Theory 8, no. 2 (2012): 36-56.
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———. "Marx's Application for Naturalisation and Right of Domicile in Berlin." In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 19, 355-56. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1861 [1984].
———. "The Union of Believers with Christ According to John 15:1-14, Showing Its Basis and Essence, Its Absolute Necessity, and Its Effects." In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 636-39. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1835 [1975].
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "The German Ideology: Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets." In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 5, 19-539. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1845-46 [1976].
———. "The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism." In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 4, 5-211. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1845 [1975].
McKinnon, Andrew M. "Opium as Dialectics of Religion: Metaphor, Expression and Protest." In Marx, Critical Theory and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice, edited by Warren S. Goldstein, 11-29. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Nicholl, Colin. From Hope to Despair in Thessalonica: Situating 1 and 2 Thessalonians.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Stalin, I. V. "Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, With amendments adopted by the First, Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., Kremlin, Moscow, December 5, 1936." In Works, vol. 14, 199-239. London: Red Star Press, 1936 [1978].
Strauss, David Friedrich. Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet.  Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835.
Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich. "Otvetnoe slovo A. I. Vvedensky." In Religia i prosveshchenie, edited by V. N. Kuznetsova, 214-23. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1925 [1985].
———. "Sodoklad A. I. Vvedensky." In Religia i prosveshchenie, edited by V. N. Kuznetsova, 186-93. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1925 [1985].

[1] ‘Certificate of Maturity for Pupil of the Gymnasium in Trier’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 643-44 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1835 [1975]), 643.
[2] Karl Marx, ‘Marx's Application for Naturalisation and Right of Domicile in Berlin’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 19, 355-56 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1861 [1984]), 355.
[3] ‘Certificate of Maturity for Pupil of the Gymnasium in Trier’, 644.
[4] Karl Marx, ‘The Union of Believers with Christ According to John 15:1-14, Showing Its Basis and Essence, Its Absolute Necessity, and Its Effects’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 636-39 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1835 [1975]).
[5] Friedrich Engels, ‘Letters from Wuppertal’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 2, 7-25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1839 [1975]).
[6] David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835).
[7] Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums (Stuttgart: Reclam, Ditzingen, 1841 [1986]).
[8] Friedrich Engels, ‘Landscapes’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 2, 95-101 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1840 [1975]), 99.
[9] Karl Marx, ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 184-202 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1842 [1975]).
[10] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 4, 5-211 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1845 [1975]); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The German Ideology: Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 5, 19-539 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1845-46 [1976]).
[11] Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, 175-87 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1844 [1975]), 175.
[12] Andrew McKinnon, ‘Opium as Dialectics of Religion: Metaphor, Expression and Protest’, in Marx, Critical Theory and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice, ed. Warren S. Goldstein, 11-29 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
[13] Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky, ‘Otvetnoe slovo A. I. Vvedensky’, in Religia i prosveshchenie, ed. V. N. Kuznetsova, 214-23 (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1925 [1985]), 223. This comes from a very popular debate between Vvedensky and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar for Enlightenment in Soviet Russia, on September 20–21 in 1925. It is the first observation concerning the ambivalence of the opium image.
[14] Jenny Marx (senior), ‘Jenny Marx to Engels in Manchester, London, about 12 April 1857’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 40, 563 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1857 [1983]), 563.
[15] V.I. Lenin, ‘Socialism and Religion’, in Collected Works, vol. 10, 83-87 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1905 [1966]), 83-84.
[16] Colin Nicholl, From Hope to Despair in Thessalonica: Situating 1 and 2 Thessalonians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174.
[17] John Hus, On Simony, ed. Matthew Spinka, Advocates of Reform (London: SCM, 1953), 247.
[18] V.I. Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’, in Collected Works, vol. 25, 385-497 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1917 [1964]), 472.
[19] Joseph Bartlett, ‘Bourgeois Right and the Limits of First Phase Communism in the Rhetoric of
2 Thessalonians 3:6-15’, Bible and Critical Theory 8, no. 2 (2012): 37.
[20] Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’, 472.
[21] V.I. Lenin, ‘On the Famine: A Letter to the Workers of Petrograd, 22 May, 1918’, in Collected Works, vol. 27, 391-98 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1918 [1965]), 391-92.
[22] The biblical text also featured in the debate (mentioned earlier), between Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar for Enlightenment, and Metropolitan Vvedensky, the leader of the Renovationist movement in the Russian Orthodox Church. Vvedensky observes: ‘When you say you are for the principle of work, I remind you of the slogan, “he who does not work shall not eat.” I have seen this in a number of different cities on revolutionary posters. I am just upset that there was no reference to the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Thessalonians, from where the slogan is taken’ Vvedensky, ‘Sodoklad A. I. Vvedensky’, 193.
[23] Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’, 472.
[24] I. V. Stalin, ‘Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, in Works, vol. 14, 199-239 (London: Red Star Press, 1936 [1978]), article 12. Indeed, this verse was used to reinterpret the old socialist slogan (itself originally drawn from Acts 4:32 and 35). As the next line in the constitution states: ‘The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’. Communism, which was now a distinct stage (as Lenin first argued), was defined as ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’.
[25] Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J. T. Swann (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 25, 21.


Last modified on Friday, 15 December 2017 15:09 
Roland Boer

Roland Boer is a Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle (Australia), and also teaches at Renmin University, China. He blogs at stalinsmoustache.org.

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