Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Is Marxism Just Religion by Another Name?

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Dec 15, 2022 Breht responds to the criticism that Marxism is just Christianity mixed with the Enlightenment concept of Progress; that it is basically just a religious faith... Listen to the full episode here: https://redmenace.libsyn.com/desert ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio or here: https://www.patreon.com/TheRedMenace Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio & Red Menace: https://revleftradio.com/  

This text has this interesting critique of politics and radical politics in particular mirroring religion. So is it true that, quote, much of radical politics is religion by another name, end quote? And, you know, is it, as the author says, a mutation of the Christian moral drama equipped with a sort of dogmatic enlightenment's concept of progress? And what would our politics be without this religious form? Yeah, so I think this is an interesting and worthwhile exploration and actually one that I've, you know, try to find outlets to kind of tackle this because this is an interesting criticism of our politics in general. And I've even heard recent content on like YouTube, for example, where this exact argument through a Nietzschean lens is raised against communists and socialists of

various sorts. So it's definitely worthwhile, even though it does kind of depart a tad bit from the bulk of this text because, you know, this thing is thrown out a couple times, but it's not central to the text. But I saw it as an opportunity to tackle it. So let's go ahead and get into it. It reminds me immediately of, as I said, you know, Nietzsche's assertion of the death of God and his profound concerns about what will fill that God-shaped whole in the hearts of modern men and women. He prophesied various forms of nihilism that can take hold in the absence of that almighty moral and psychological ballast that we call God in religion. Many argue that the extreme political movements that arose in the century following Nietzsche's death, most notably Nazism,

but also communism and liberal capitalism and nationalism more generally were one way in which we sublimated in an unhealthy way our deep desire to have our lives made sense of and our sense of self-fortified through the everyday grounding rituals of religious faith, the bedrock of unquestionable religious belief, and the existential relief offered by divinely ordained hierarchies. The horrors of the 20th century are presented as proof

that Nietzsche's concerns were valid, and yet few real, answers to the conundrums he raised are forthcoming. So in this context, there is absolutely a way in which our political commitments and conflicts can mirror earlier religious commitments and conflicts. There is absolutely a way in which consumer capitalism is the perfect instantiation of the nihilism Nietzsche warned us against. After all, under the rule of capital, what meaning do our lives have other than to work and consume? What higher purposes can we strive for other than status and wealth. What transcendence is possible in the empty desert of commodification?

Revolutionary socialism, as Nietzsche himself made clear, can often take the form of Christian faith while replacing its contents. Instead of heaven at the end of life, we have a classless, moneyless, stateless society at the end of history. Instead of Catholics, first Calvinist, first Lutherans, we have Leninist versus Maoist, verse leftcoms. Instead of St. Teresa and St. Francis, we have our own saints, Che, Fidel. Sankara, Rosa, and Marx himself. Under Christianity and socialism, there is the assertion that the meek shall inherit the earth, that God or history is on the side of the oppressed, and the cruel rulers and tyrants that

dominate our societies will one day be brought low and face ultimate justice for their crimes. Add to all of this, the concept of progress with the capital P as generated by the Enlightenment era, a concept that people across the political spectrum fall prey to, and it seems we have built our entire worldview and purpose for life on pillars of sand. Or so the argument goes. I admit immediately that there is a way we can and sometimes do turn our politics into a religion, into a dogma or dead doctrine that our political struggles often offer us the sort of life purpose and meaning, if in a lesser form, that religion used to offer us. I can even see how the idea of communism relates to some historical mix of Christian heaven and enlightenment notions of inevitable progress.

I also admit freely that many of the absolute best aspects of Christianity found today in various iterations of liberation theology have much in common with our revolutionary socialist political projects, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing either. It was for Nietzsche, to be sure, but we can take on board his critiques and concerns without adopting his often vague and hyper-individualistic solutions. Well, let's start by accepting the premise and then running the thought experiment. Let's say our radical politics, anarchist and Marxists alike, are religion by another name, a political mutation of basic Christian doctrine stripped of its supernatural elements and made material.

What are the downsides? Well, insofar as anti-religious people might argue that religion itself is delusional, that the end state it promises is pure illusion and will never ever come, and so dedicating your life or even a portion of it to this delusion-illusion combo is to forsake reality in turn, like a coward, away from the real world as it actually is, and into an imagination palace, as a way of coping with the suffering and pain of this one fleeting insignificant life. A dark conclusion indeed. But the criticism misses the Marx, if you will, as all sin does. For Marxists, at least, we are materialists, meaning we base nothing on anything metaphysical, supernatural, or unknowable, but rather focus as we must on the concrete,

material reality we find ourselves in. Moreover, as there is an evolutionary process occurring in biology in the form of evolution by natural selection and in cosmology in the form of the Big Bang theory, there is also an evolutionary process in human societies in our history. If Darwin discovered evolution and its mechanisms in the realm of biology, Marx and Engels discovered them in the realm of human society and history. Here, we can defeat both the accusation that we are fundamentally religious and that we are blind adherence to a concept of progress that doesn't exist. On the religion front, while certain similarities do and must exist, after all, Christianity dominated European culture and history for a millennia and more

before modernity and thus informed every intellectual movement that came out of its decline, even fully secular and atheistic ones, but Marxism at least is dedicated to a materialist and scientific analysis that undermines ultimately any fundamentally, in a fundamental supernatural or religious explanation for phenomena, meaning our tradition is open-ended, experimental, updatable, and always subject to real-world testing and falsifiability. On the progress with the capital P front, evolution is not synonymous with progress. While there is a certain inner logic and environmental relationship matrix that drives the biological, and in our case cultural evolution of a species in certain directions, it also

always keeps open the possibility of mutation, of apocalypse, of common ruin, and of extinction. Any ostensible progress we as a species have made, with all our horrific tragedies as well as our gorgeous accomplishments, has been a product of blind evolutionary forces

that care little as to how we interpret them or where we assume they are going. But by studying those forces, having a philosophical framework to understand them better, and creating testable theories about them, we can come to an increasing consciousness of evolution's mechanics, and thus suss out various trajectories our future biological

and cultural evolution might or can take. Just as cosmologists study the history of the cosmos and based on that, develop theories as to where it might go from here, we can study the history of the development of our species and its societies through history and develop theories as to where we might go from here. Communism is one possible place we could go, and that conclusion came from the world historical apprehension of the evolutionary process of human social history. None of this is predetermined.

Nobody knows for sure where a given organism or human civilization or the cosmos itself will ultimately lead, or if there is an endpoint at all, which deserves much thought in skepticism, but we can use the historically developed tools of scientific inquiry and our ever-evolving technology to come to better and better

understandings, and thus better and better theories. In this sense, Marxism falls much more into the science box, then the religion box, even if both science and religion share the common goal of trying to understand who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. And just as science itself is flawed, has its truths overturned, makes mistakes, and is ultimately limited by our evolutionary and civilizational history thus far, so too is the science of socialism. Lastly, I will reiterate what I said earlier in this response. There are absolutely ways in which we can hold our politics

that does become a form of religion in the negative sense asserted by the author. This is, to simplify it a bit, dogmatism, the holding of a set of truth claims and beliefs that are impervious to new information, that is held dogmatically, and that generates bitter and unnecessary sectarianism. In addition, we can relate to our politics in such a way that we become identified with them, and thus they become a part of our ego itself. To prevent this, we simply need to emphasize the scientific, open-ended, dialectical aspects of our revolutionary politics, cultivate within ourselves a real sense of humility, openness, and curiosity to hold our politics in a way that does not cement them into our ego

structures, etc. Now, there is much more to be said on this topic, and there are people much smarter than me who could take this inquiry into new and exciting places, but suffice it to say for now that there are ways in which our political projects are not merely reiterations of religious faith in a heavenly plan or in the idea of inevitable progress, but neither do do we cling to the dogma that progress is an impossibility or that religious forms and ideas have nothing to offer us here in the mud of our material earth. The religious impulse in human psychology need not be usurped wholly by the political impulse. Both have their proper place and both are their own unique terrains of struggle. Our politics need not be anti-religious

and our religions need not be anti-politics. In fact, we can and should explore their intersections and develop approaches to these things rooted in material analysis that refuses to make a dogma out of them. In this way, we can avoid the trap of sublimating our existential anxieties and deeply rooted religious impulses into political zealotry and dead-eyed dogmatism and thus dismantled the accusations that we revolutionaries are simply religious fanatics without a religion. Allison? Awesome. Yeah, I think there's so much there that you said that's really important. A couple of thoughts. One is that, I think this is really a criticism that's worth diving into beyond just the relevance of this text.

I mean, as you mentioned, this text brings this up over and over again. But this is a criticism of Marxism that kind of is really interesting in that it comes from the left and the right. So you hear this from anarchists generally, but also like Murray Rothbard, the narco-capitalist, kind of theorist. You know, he put forth almost this exact same critique of Marxism as well. So I do think that it's worth giving the level of attention that you've given to it here, because we do hear it kind of from all sides. And I think you do a good job for, you know, addressing this. And for me, I think it really comes down to what you get at,

which is that the form content distinction actually matters, right? Like, things can be formally similar, but their content can be very, very different in a way that's actually meaningful and has to be accounted for. And I think to get into a little bit of what you talked about, I think it's true, right? Both Marxism and religion offer us kind of a vision of the world that can feel like the world is moving towards something, right?

They offer us grounding. They offer us some level of stability. But one of the questions is how did they deduce their conclusions about what the world is and where it's moving? And if we think about religion, right, that is not a scientific explanation. It is God told us, right? This is divine revelation. Whereas in Marx, fuck, you can go read the books where he does the work, right? You can see the argument for why things are moving in the direction of communism.

why capitalism carries the seed of communism within it. And that's a substantiated analysis based on political economics and based on an understanding of history. So the form and the content are very distinct from each other. And the content matters a lot. And the other thing that you got that to me, I, you know, I think stands out. I think you and I maybe have a view of religion that is different from many other Marxists. But to a certain degree, when someone says, this sounds religious, I kind of think, so what? Right. Like, I don't understand why that's necessarily a problem. I do think there is something in the human psyche like a religious impulse that you've got at. We have a desire for a system of explanation and meaning

that can account for the world around us and help guide our actions. And the question isn't so much like, are we filling that desire, but what are we filling it with, right? Are we filling that with metaphysics? Are we filling that with defined revelation? Are we filling that with a system of analysis that we can expand, use, and adapt as the world changes around us in order to understand and demystify. So yeah, Marxism has the form of a religion. It makes me and many other people feel better about the world to have an analytic that can provide some understanding, to have an analytic that can guide action. But I just don't see what's wrong with that on a certain level. So I think there's that as well. And the other thing that I think

you started to hint to at the end is I really think that if we want to play this game of formal similarities to religion. It's not clear to me how this text or any other of these kind of more post-structuralist, anarchist texts aren't also religious in their own, right? This text puts forth its own, like, eschatology, its own view of the end times, right? But its view of the end times is just chaotic rather than unified. It's pluralistic rather than monistic. So I think it's engaging in that same thing. And it also has its own view of history that is not progressive, but is kind of still linear, right? It's linear almost in a regressive direction. but it's just an inversion of the very thing that it's critiquing in Marxism, flipping it in the other direction.

And I don't understand how a commitment to like, oh, the world is fundamentally pluralistic. There will be many anarchies is any less religious than the idea that we might be moving towards a global socialism, right? They're the inversion of each other to a certain degree. So it kind of feels like a game that you just can't get out of. And maybe that is, I would, you know, kind of conjecture is because of a fundamental human impulse towards something like religion that cannot necessarily easily be escaped. So I find that frustrating about this text, but I do think to a certain degree, we can respond to these claims with so what?

Religion and dogma are not necessarily the same thing. When we become dogmatic, that is a problem. But the nice thing is that Marxism as an analytic, which is critical of literally everything, is also a solution to dogma, right? It has a self-critical bent to it that religion does not have. that is distinct and useful for avoiding that. So it's kind of some additional thoughts there. But I just kind of think, even politics like this,

which is so post-structuralist, so pluralistic in its perspective, is just doing its own kind of religion to a certain degree. Yeah, I love those responses. Absolutely incredibly thoughtful. Another core difference, of course, is that in our radical politics and Marxism, et cetera, we can act on reality and change it, a fundamental aspect of any supernatural explanation of phenomena

is that this is above and beyond our capacity to change or, you know, alter in any sort of way. So that's another fundamental difference. Right. And the post-structuralist critique of Marxism as another religion is also applied to basically everything else. You could say science, and they often will make these sorts of arguments. Science itself is nothing but, you know, the updated modern religion of our times. You know, instead of priests, we have scientists in lab coats, and you can go down this sort of relatively shallow comparison. of two, you know, magisteria, two human things in separate realms and categories that of course

have certain, you know, overlapping areas, but are not reducible to one another. And then the very final thing before we move on to the next question is simply to reiterate that idea, which I passed over fairly quickly in this response, which is that evolution is not synonymous with progress. Right. We believe in an evolutionary process, but we don't believe that that is simultaneous and synonymous with progress with the capital P. And I think when you ever hear that critique of Marxism or radical revolutionary politics,

which says that, you know, we've taken this enlightenment idea of progress and fetishized it, we can respond with a sort of dialectical slash evolutionary response that that's not exactly what we believe at all. And you actually don't understand our position. So some things to think about. Yeah. And one last thing that you said that I'd like to just build on for one moment, perhaps,

is that idea that Marxism lets us actually affect the world, right? And I think a good, like, litmus test to try to understand how this is different than religion is to kind of think about this criticism that Marxism and religion both have an eschatology or an end time that they're building towards. And that actually really relates to the ability to the effect of the world, though, right? So if we think about Christianity, the end times is the return of Christ, right? Christ is coming back, bringing a heavenly kingdom, et cetera. If we think about Marxism as it's portrayed here, the end times is communism, right? we are going to create this communistic society. But here's the difference is that in 2,000 years of Christianity,

what tangible thing has made that end times come closer to existing, right? What proof is there that we're any closer? But my God, in 100 years of Marxism, the revolutions we've had, the transformations of entire countries guided by communist parties, have actually moved us towards that thing in a way that you can see, in a way that can be tested. And I think that links, again, yeah, there are these, kind of views that we're moving towards something. But in one case, we have a tool that tells

us to pray and to reflect and to live good lives. And in the other, we have a tool that tells us how to fight and transform. And you can see the product of that transformation moving us towards that predicted thing. And I think that is also a fundamental difference. Amen. All right. Oh, yeah, absolutely wonderful, wonderful thoughts. And I really hope that that is interesting and useful to listeners out there.