A short piece by the International Communist Party affirming the fundamental incompatibility of critical communism and religion.

PDF-Version: Il Programma Comunista – Religion and Marxism are Incompatible

Speaking of Communist priests… (see issue 4 of Il Programma), and religion in general, we can see the rare pearl thrown to the proletariat by the eminent updaters of “Leninism”, Trevisani and Canzio, authors of the monumental Marxist work, the “Encyclopedia of Socialism and Communism” with the worthy help of great politicians and theorists of the Italian Communist Party, such as Terracini, Radice, Spano, Gerrattana and other subordinates. Read and run to make communion!

“Scarce religious faith shows – we read on page 581 of the above-mentioned Encyclopaedia – those who sustain the incompatibility between religion and socialist regime, even when it has been demonstrated that this regime respects religious faith, ensuring all churches full freedom of worship”.

We transcribe the following piece because it’s a real treat:

“The experience of the Soviet Union offers a first confirmation of these statements. During the revolution and the civil war, the orthodox clergy, who had already been linked for a long time to the old tsarist regime, sided (sic!) among the counter-revolutionary forces; and from this fact, certainly not attributable to the will of the communists, religion too had to suffer” [what a pity, for the last cry “communists”!].

We concede a pause to the player astounded or disdained, and we resume:

“But, having consolidated the socialist regime, relations of peaceful cohabitation between religion and the new regime were soon re-established. Religious freedom in the SSR today (also guaranteed in the constitution) shows. that the socialist regime is perfectly compatible with religion”.

And so conclude the “Encyclopaedists”:

“The hostility shown by the catholic church towards the socialist regime and towards the communist parties is not due to theoretical reasons of ideological incompatibility, but only to practical reasons, to the position of defence of certain material interests assumed by the catholic church”.

Now, that religion and church can coexist peacefully with the Russian regime is beyond doubt, because Soviet society is, to use Marx’s scientific words,

“a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products [therefore also the religious fetish] as commodities”;

In short, it is not a communist society. If it were communist, or tended to become so, the church would have long since been destroyed and religion would have become extinct, or it would have become extinguished, because – Marx says –

“The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.”

Then men eat, work and live together enjoying the fruits of nature and social work without ever having to pray either to the master on earth or that in heaven because they are no longer vulgar commodities that are purchased at its “right price” of the market against a monetary equivalent, but men freely associated and taken away from the dominion of the “blind productive forces”, men aware of their “rational” human relationships.

As for the perfect compatibility between communist ideology and religion (and even worse between communist dictatorship and church), the fact that the communists do not fight as a reality in itself the faith or the ecclesiastical organization, but frame the demolition of one and the other in the general struggle for the destruction of the capitalist regime that, like every social regime based on the division into classes, and moreover as the maximum expression of man’s alienation, continuously generates them from his bosom, this fact has nothing to do with a licence of reconciliability with communism as theory and as practical realization granted to the religion-church binomial. Do we want to read Lenin in his writings “on religion”?

“Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”

“In modern capitalist countries these roots [of religion] are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc.”.

““Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost”.

And in an article, written in 1915, on war and the effects of conflict on the masses, Lenin points out – that where there is “fear” and “despair” there is also “a strengthening of religion”, and that in those dramatic sufferings of which the mass is the direct payer

“Once more the churches are full, the reactionaries rejoice. “Wherever there are sufferings, there is religion,” says the arch-reactionary, Barrès. He is right, too.”

So, fetid opportunists of today that have renege, as Lenin and as the communists must explain the class character of religion. Other than reconciling the litany of “suffer here and enjoy there” with the living revolutionary struggle of the proletariat to break the chains of earthly hell, controlled by the handsome capitalist and his gurus who, with all their psalms, do not neglect an instant of stripping away the tortured prey!

But, you cannot give these explanations to the proletariat, because otherwise you would first have to admit that where there is religion and ecclesiastical organizations there is class struggle, there is capital and work that contend for power, and how could you admit all this for the great country of “socialism”? How, moreover, can you claim the title of a democratic, national and legal party? And then go around with nuns and priests claiming that “socialism and religion” are two sides of the same coin: which, for your socialism, is very true!

But, for the Marxists worthy of the name, religion and communism are incompatible!

Source: «Il Programma Comunista», n.8, aprile 1962