Not that long ago, I released a controversial podcast titled “Communism Is Not Atheist” on the New Discourses Podcast platform. Without actually hearing what I said, a lot of people got really upset about it. I’d like to make the argument briefly for you here in writing.
Before I do, let me acknowledge the rebuttals. I think there are three things worth addressing. First, obviously, the Soviet Union and other Communist states deliberately implemented what they called State Atheism and declared themselves to be Atheist as part of being Communist. Second, there is the claim that Communism, particularly Marxism, is a materialist ideology that denies the existence of God, so it is clearly Atheist. There is a tendency for atheists to trend in socialist or even Communist directions. Having acknowledged these, I will return to addressing them at the end of the article, after clarifying my actual argument, which reveals that they’re tangential concerns.
Not Merely Atheist
The argument I made, drawing directly from the writings of Karl Marx, is that Communism as Marx conceived it is not merely atheist. The specific writings are namely, the Communist Manifesto, his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and his infamous essay “On the Jewish Question.” Part of my purpose was in fact to read Marx’s explicit hostility toward the Jews and Christians in that last one.
In EPM, Marx himself said very specifically and intentionally that “atheism is at once far from Communism” and then explained that the “philanthropy” of atheism is still abstract and not real, while that of Communism is real.
Therefore, we can conclude from Karl Marx himself that Marxism is not merely atheist. It requires something more, and that something more is Communism, which is its own religious view (worldview with associated duties of conscience). In saying “Communism is not Atheist,” I specifically mean it is something more than mere atheism, and that something more is religious Communism.
Marx’s Hidden Theology
I go a little further too. While repeatedly acknowledging that the answer to the question is Communism atheist? is “yes and no,” I also indicate that Communism still has something like a deity figure at its heart. That figure is man himself. Not you man or me man or any individual man. Mankind, all man, as socialist man.
You can argue that this isn’t a god, God, or any kind of deity, but that denies specifically what Marx was doing. Marx’s program was derived from the Lutheran heretic Hegel’s program before him, and Hegel’s program was to actualize the Absolute Idea, which he saw as identical to God. Marx sought to remove all of Hegel’s theology (literally) and to materialize his philosophy, but this is merely a kind of intellectual slight of hand that Marx played on himself and his followers. He never escaped the idealism of Hegel; he just relocated it “in the material.”
Marx viewed Communism, “as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement,” as the ideal for humanity—literally the Ideal Man(kind). Hegel’s Absolute is just relocated into man who realizes himself to be his own Creator, not in the sense of physical procreation but in the process of humanizing himself through humanizing his environment. Humanizing here is meant both literally and figuratively: literally in the sense of making him human instead of a beast and figuratively in the sense of returning him to what makes him truly human, which is being a Communist. In the same sentence in EPM, Marx described this transcendent Communism as “the complete return of man to himself as a human (i.e., social[ist]) being.”
Because Marx regards man as his own Creator in the sense of putting the human (so “divine”) spark into himself, his idea of Communism is way outside of what atheism would recognize or claim for itself. Because this process returns man to his Absolute state from which he has been alienated (by the introduction of private property, thus individualism), his idea of Communism goes even further outside of what atheism would recognize or claim for itself. Because the parent belief Marx used was Hegel’s, which ultimately believes our state of alienation from which we are returning is human alienation from the Absolute (God), which we are already intrinsically a part of, there’s no good reason at all to accept Marx’s formulation of Communism as being “atheist.” It just rejects existing religions, especially Christianity and Judaism.
My Actual Argument: An Agricultural Analogy
Although what I just said above is sufficient to my point, in the podcast, I made my argument by reading Marx and providing an analogy. The analogy I give is agricultural.
If you have a field that you want to cultivate, the first thing you have to do is clear the field of the existing growth so you can prepare and till the soil and plant your crops. Religion, in Marx’s view, would be like the native growth or some previous cultivated crop that isn’t Communism. In order to “plant” Communism, the existing growth has to be cleared away.
The “atheism” in Communism, then, is like clearing the field so you can plant Communism. Atheism isn’t the point. It isn’t the point at all. According to Marx, it’s not only not the point but also wholly inadequate to how he conceived of Communism.
Atheism is not the point of Communism in exactly the same way that clearing a field isn’t the same as growing crops. This isn’t hard to understand. Marx believed existing religion had to be plowed out of the way so people would be able to become Communists.
He makes this point very clearly in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which is the famous “religion is the opium of the masses” piece. His argument is that the critique of religion—culminating in throwing it off (so, “atheism,” sort of)—is necessary to bring people back to a position where they can recognize their material suffering “without illusions.” Facing their suffering head on without religious “opium” would lead them to want to fix their material suffering. Then you can make them Communists.
Once people are ready to tackle the real conditions (“root causes”) of their suffering, Marx believed, they could be easily led to Communism as the proper solution to the causes of their suffering. That is, Marx believed that getting religion out of the way is like clearing a field so you can plant Communism in the bare soil of their material suffering, which religion had previously obscured from them.
Guess What: Marx Was Wrong
Okay, James, you might ask, if that’s really the case, why didn’t you titled your podcast “Communism Isn’t Merely Atheist”? Hmmmmm…?! Well, if you listen to the podcast, you’ll understand why.
As Communists rapidly learned in Soviet Union and its satellites, and beyond, stamping religion out of people is effectively impossible, especially with faithful Christians and Jews. Clearing the ground, so to speak, is a lot easier written about in theoretical critiques than it is accomplished in practice with actual faithful people. If nothing else, the horrifying Pitesti Prison experiments from Soviet Romania prove this fact, though it was shown over and over again throughout the entire Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.
Communism doesn’t care about how it achieves operational success, though. It only cares about achieving operational success. So, if you can’t beat or torture the religion out of people or convince or coerce them to adopt atheism as a bare-soil starting place to become Communists, but you need them to become Communists, what can you do? The answer is simple: you co-opt their religion to Communism. Marx didn’t suggest this, but the Soviet Union figured it out.
The KGB was particularly good at this, whether in establishing the Registered Church in the Soviet Union as a replacement for the Russian Orthodox Church, helping to establish the World Council of Churches for the West, or co-opting Catholicism (especially in South America) through Liberation Theology. Protestants, through a different pathway, developed something called a “theology for the Social Gospel” that did roughly the same thing. The Christian Left, as it is called, has been marching various forms of Marxism into the West through Christian religion specifically, and quite successfully (including by being strongly positioned to discredit Bible-believing churches as houses of bigotry and extremism).
As it happens, virtually all of what we call Woke (Leftism) today came to us through the crucible of Liberation Theology instruction turned into “secular” education. The tool is called “critical pedagogy,” and it was developed from Paulo Freire’s adaptation of Liberation Theology to peasant literacy campaigns under the branding “Education for Liberation.” Henry Giroux, a disciple of Freire who frequently described his work in explicitly religious terms like “prophetic,” made critical pedagogy out of Freire’s model plus some of the “European theorists,” namely some postmodernists and Critical Theorists.
In short, the largely Judeo-Christian West was mostly impervious to Communism through the method Marx advocated, which included the idea that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion. That is, Marx believed you make the people atheists, then they’ll recognize their true suffering in a “real” way, and you can use that to make them Communist. And… it didn’t work, at least not in the Judeo-Christian West. It didn’t even work in the Orthodox Christian East, to be honest, hence requiring the KGB-run Registered Church.
The ethos of Marxist Pragmatism as their general approach to their agenda (operational success justifies the means—“practice is the criterion of truth”) is not to keep doing something that doesn’t work (or to do only that), like trying to force people out of their religion. It is more practical than that. The solution was for Marxism to co-opt religion itself and turn it into a vehicle for producing Communists.
Extending the Agricultural Analogy
In the agricultural analogy, as someone offered me later, some time after the podcast was released, Communists co-opting religion would be like realizing that you can’t uproot certain stems in the religious field, so rather than trying to dig them up (impossible), you cut them strategically and graft Communism on.
Imagine an apple tree, for example, that grows healthy, good apples. Now picture Communism like really bad, awful crabapples. The method would be to make cuts in the healthy apple tree and graft on crabapple limbs, and allowing them to start growing alongside the native limbs. Bit by bit, as they establish, you cut the good apple limbs off and let people have the bad crabapple limbs in their place. Eventually, all the good apple limbs are cut off, and all the limbs are Communism that has been grafted on.
A co-opted religion in this analogy would be one that still looks and sounds like a Christian church or Jewish synagogue but that bends the teachings toward Marxism. The root stock of the religion is still the same, but what it’s actually teaching is different. Both the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology are explicit examples of this in practice in Protestantism and Catholicism—and the Registered Church in the Soviet Union is extremely obviously another.
The result is straightfoward co-optation of religion rather than its replacement. A “good tree” is slowly transformed into one that only produces bad fruit.
This offered the Communists a second method other than just atheism for overcoming religion and replacing it with the religion of Communism. First, they could clear the ground (atheism), and, second, they could co-opt the existing crops (subversion). Both methods can be used, and in the latter case, the Communism may never have to take on “atheistic” forms at all. It can go on being a simulacrum of the religion it has co-opted.
For this reason, I couldn’t meaningfully say that Communism isn’t merely atheism because it doesn’t have to take the atheist route at all. In fact, in practice throughout the West, the co-optation path has been much more successful than the criticism of religion path, though they have worked together fruitfully in recent decades. As it turns out, the atheism part is not a necessary condition to Communist radicalization and misintegration.
Judge Them By Their Fruits
Jesus said that a bad tree can only produce bad fruit, and a good tree will produce good fruit. The diabolical mind of Communists figured out a way around this, at least with the poorly discerning. They take a good tree and graft on limbs of a rotten tree and slowly, bit by bit, remove the good limbs. Now you have a tree with good root stock that only produces bad fruit. Isn’t that something?
Of course, Jesus told us what to do with this situation too: judge them by their fruits. What the Communists do is enable people to go on judging by the good root stock while the fruiting limbs themselves have been wholly replaced by bad fruiting stock. Judging them by their fruits (which is an appeal to Common Sense Realism and Empiricism, by the way) turns out to be the necessary test of discernment, not judging by the root stock or what it “should have been” absent subversion and co-optation.
Addressing Objections
I promised to address the objections people have raised, at least in brief, at the end of the essay, and here we are. These were: first, that the Soviet Union pushed State Atheism; second, Communism is materialist; and third, atheists tend toward socialism.
About State Atheism
Yes, the Soviet Union and Mao’s China were explicitly running State Atheism and officially persecuted religion. Their hard Marxist materialist worldview demanded getting belief in God out of the way. This is a historical fact. (It’s also a historical fact that, at least in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, they couldn’t keep a good thing down and had to switch to a hybrid program that included a lot of co-optation too.)
This fact doesn’t make Communism atheist, though. All it does is say that the Soviet Union, for instance, tried to use a bulldozer to clear the religious field in line with Marx’s prescriptions for his man-centered religion. The goal of the program was to produce Communists with no competing religious loyalties as the belief in Communism is that it will not work when anyone has competing loyalties, whether to self or to God. In Christianity and Judaism where loyalty to God is considered a personal relationship, there is an obvious problem Communists have to overcome.
The goal, though, is total loyalty to Communism because the only way Communism is believed to be able to work is by man, as a collective, making a complete return to Communism.
Regarding Materialism
This objection has actually already been addressed at the start of the essay. Marx’s materialism was a false materialism located within the broader German idealist tradition. Marx’s entire Communist project was to idealize the world and man in it. The word he used for this program was “humanize.” By humanizing the world—meaning remaking the world including “man as his own object” in his own image—man would complete himself and realize his true (ideal) nature: Communist.
So Communism claims not just to be a “scientific” and “materialist” ideology but also uniquely scientific and doubly materialist (only the material world exists, and material conditions are socially and political determinate), but it’s just lying to itself. Marx couldn’t escape Hegel’s heretical theology by “turning it on his head,” and once we see Marxism for what it is, it’s clear he didn’t really even try. Marxism is bad, heretical theology posing as socioeconomic analysis.
But Atheists Go Socialist
Of these objections, this one has the most purchase. While I titled a section above “But Marx Was Wrong…,” as it turns out, he wasn’t always entirely wrong about everything.
When Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that people who give up religion perceive “real” (material) causes of their problems and thus set to solving them in the real world, he wasn’t completely wrong. I don’t agree with him that religion is some “opium of the masses,” but he did manage an insight that people who accept a materialist worldview realize we have to solve our own problems without God’s help (even if that be blasphemy on their part, they will believe it).
Atheists therefore do have a tendency to try to figure out ways to incorporate human beings intentionally and deliberately to solve larger human challenges, some of which seem resistant to private-sector and individualist solutions. Often naively, they imagine the state is a good tool for incorporating the “general will” of the people and solving these problems.
Of course, this puts them in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, as we run down the course of Continental thought, both Hegel and Marx. Hegel believed the state is in fact the incorporation of the people’s general will and as such represents “the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.” Though it’s more than I’ll explain here, Marx accepted this idea negatively, believing the state to be an instrument of transforming man (who are their own end) to a Communism so perfect a state wouldn’t be necessary.
I agree that there is a temptation in atheism that will lead someone, especially someone ignorant about economics and naive about statism, to tend toward socialist views. That is, atheism can be (but isn’t necessarily) fertile soil in which the seeds of Communism can be planted, even on its own terms. In the same way that fertile soil isn’t a watermelon that grows from it, though, this possible disposition does not make Communism atheist. It just suggests that atheists are, under certain circumstances, quite predisposed toward Communism as a potential means of solving societal problems they don’t know how to solve.
On the other hand, as the Communist co-optation and subversion of religion amply proves, so is ignorant and naive religious belief. Much Communism has come our way out of a completely misappropriated line attributed to Jesus as a central Christian precept: love thy neighbor. The same ignorance of economics and naivety about statism can lead Christians of sincere belief to the same incorrect conclusion as their atheist counterparts: that righteousness can somehow be incorporated through the state.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, then, Communism isn’t atheist, even though Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others aimed to mandate atheism, and even though Marx saw it as a necessary precondition (and, in fact, consequence) of Communism. The story is simply more textured than that.
