11.

Is Socialism a Religion?

Socialists are denounced by some as godless heathens and by others as hucksters trying to build a new church promising workers their very own kingdom of heaven. I’ll say this for our opponents: they’re good at covering all their bases.

“Religion is the opium of the people.” This is one of Marx’s best-known quotes, and also one of the most misunderstood because it is usually taken out of context from the larger passage that gives it its beauty and depth:

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.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

Marx was less concerned about whether people believed in heaven than about a world that drives so many to console themselves that they’ll be happier when they are dead. Most socialists have nothing to do with those atheists who mock religions and claim that they are the root of all our problems while having nothing to say about the dehumanizing conditions of capitalism that make religion necessary for so many people. I have particular contempt for those who use atheism as a liberal cover for demonizing Islam above all other religions. These hypocrites want to wage a modern-day Crusade without having to bother getting up in the morning to go to church.

If religion is defined as the way we try to understand what place our tiny insignificant lives have in the giant scary universe, then socialists don’t oppose religion any more than we oppose culture, philosophy, or the other foundations of the human intellect. We don’t agree with many of the explanations that organized religions put forward to explain the world, and we often find ourselves opposed to their powerful and wealthy leaders. But you could say the same thing for universities and Hollywood studios, and it doesn’t mean that socialists are against movies.1

I am an atheist, but I would never call myself a nonbeliever. I believe in higher powers inside people that can only be activated in a society designed to bring them out. My belief in these powers is so strong that I have organized my life around them, despite the fact that I cannot prove their existence. Is my socialism a religious faith? That’s a longstanding critique, most famously expressed in The God That Failed, a book written by disillusioned former Communist Party supporters after World War II. I’m not sure why socialism was the only god singled out by the authors for failure. What grade did the regular God get in the wake of the Nazis and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a C+? What had actually failed were these ex-socialists’ hopes, which they and many of their generation had entrusted to political parties that thoroughly betrayed all of their ideals.

Dismissing socialism as a religious fantasy leaves you with no choice but to accept capitalism as the only rational reality, which is a problem because capitalism is real, but it certainly isn’t rational. Capitalist economic theory borrows heavily from religion, replacing God with the Free Market, an invisible but omnipresent force that sometimes works in mysterious ways but should never be questioned because we live according to Its law. When economies succeed, all praise is due to the Free Market. When they fail, we must have done something to anger It, like raising the minimum wage or limiting how much factories can pollute the air. Or at least this is what we are told by the well-compensated high priests who interpret Its workings for the lay people.

Capitalist ideology is not really a religion. It doesn’t tell us if we have a soul or help us to understand what happens after we die. It doesn’t have a deity for us to worship, although it produces more than a few billionaire egomaniacs who think otherwise. Its ethos of ambition and selfishness is the opposite of those of traditional religions, which teach us to accept our place in society. But capitalism does provide answers to existential questions that all religions aim to address.

What is the meaning of life?

To have more tomorrow than I have today.

What is my place in the universe?

To compete against my neighbors for as much as I can gain, and let the Invisible Hand take care of the rest.

These are the central religious tenets across the world today. Of course, the older religions are still very much in force. They guide the dietary habits, daily routines, and deeply held beliefs of billions of people, but they no longer dictate the world’s bigger decisions. Christian presidents and Hindu prime ministers are equally committed to the dogma of capital’s everlasting growth. Unlike earlier religions, capitalism understands that it is people’s labor, trade, and ideas—not their prayers—that produce our species’s tremendous power and productivity.

But it also proclaims that we mortals cannot possibly grasp the complexities of the millions of economic relationships that we ourselves have created. To interfere with the Free Market in an attempt to plan and direct the economy is to commit the cardinal sin of pride, which is destined to meet a fate similar to the boy who flew too close to the sun. Belgian socialist Ernest Mandel writes that the mythology surrounding the unknowable workings of the market suggests that “humanity’s insight into the laws of its own evolution [is] a fruit from which it should be forbidden to partake.”

Socialism makes the bold but reasonable claim that we are capable of taking control of the structures we have created and using them to elevate cooperation over competition. This allows socialism to overcome capitalism’s moral failure of relentless individualism. Socialism doesn’t disregard our individuality. It adds to it while making it part of something bigger. Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto that under socialism “the free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all.” Terry Eagleton elaborates:

In this sense, socialism does not simply reject [capitalist] liberal society, with its passionate commitment to the individual. Instead, it builds on and completes it. In doing so, it shows how some of the contradictions of liberalism, in which your freedom may flourish only at the expense of mine, may be resolved. Only through others can we finally come into our own. This means an enrichment of individual freedom, not a diminishing of it. It is hard to think of a finer ethics. On a personal level, it is known as love.

Socialism is even less of a religion than capitalism because it doesn’t offer the false comfort that some mysterious force beyond ourselves is taking care of us. But a socialist society might offer healthier answers to some of the Big Questions.

What is my place in the universe?

To contribute my individual talents and ideas along with the rest of humanity, and to also be a part of decision-making bodies that figure out how to best use these contributions.

What is the meaning of . . . Yeah, I’m not going to go there.

At its height in the early twentieth century, the socialist movement confidently spread its own version of the Christian message of “good news”—as the historian Lars Lih puts it—that it was the historic destiny of workers to overthrow capitalism and create a better world. A hundred years of failed revolutions and betrayed hopes later, it’s fair to say that our predecessors might have been a tad too optimistic. We can see more clearly now that Marx and others had a tendency at times to make socialism seem inevitable and to underestimate capitalism’s ability to resolve its deep crises (at the expense of workers) and evolve into different forms—including some that went by the name of socialism. We are more aware than ever that in the contest Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed between socialism and barbarism, our side is the underdog.

The danger for radicals to guard against today is not smug and passive certainty that the revolution is on its way but despair that it will never come. We live in a cynical age. From the top of society, political and business leaders with no clear plans for addressing the economic and ecological dilemmas of this decaying society content themselves with picking the remaining meat off its bones: workers’ pensions, the real estate underneath public schools and post offices, and whatever remaining oil and gas they can find.

In popular culture, every good deed and honest emotion is rewarded with a thousand sarcastic tweets. The atmosphere of relentless negativity seeps into the left, where many find it easier to run down everything that their fellow activists are doing wrong than to put forward suggestions for what we can do right. Today we know that the revolution will not only be televised, it’s going to be trolled real hard.

It’s easy to forget that it was only 2011 when the planet’s atmosphere buzzed and cracked with the electricity of the biggest global revolt since the sixties. Dictators were toppled and shaken in the Arab Spring, public squares were taken over in Spain and Greece, and the Occupy movement spread from Wall Street to cities across the world. As people rose up in 2011 they discovered each other. In the occupations of public spaces, teachers, construction workers, veterans, and immigrants came together and recognized that they were united in a common class.

In the Middle East and North Africa, where the uprisings went furthest, so too did the breaking down of old barriers. Here is a New York Times report from Yemen in June of that magical year:

In the sprawling tent city outside Sana University, rival tribesmen have forsworn their vendettas to sit, eat and dance together. College students talk to Zaydi rebels from the north and discover they are not, in fact, the devils portrayed in government newspapers. Women who have spent their lives indoors give impassioned speeches to amazed crowds. Four daily newspapers are now published in “Change Square,” as it is called, and about 20 weeklies.

New lines of communication were established not just within societies but also between them. Protesters exchanged messages of solidarity—and pizza deliveries—between Wisconsin and Egypt. Organizers used Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to create an alternative global media that publicized the occupiers’ bravery and creativity in the face of state repression. On a more fundamental level, there was the beginning—or revival—of a worldwide conversation among ordinary people. The international ruling class has regular summits and conferences to discuss how the world should be run. 2011 provided a glimpse of how the international working class could do the same—through social media but also through the language of mass action.

The global dialogue was kicked off by Tunisians declaring that it was time to rise up against US-backed dictatorships. Egyptians responded by occupying Tahrir Square in Cairo, which spread the message to millions in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Elsewhere, working people occupied the Wisconsin capitol building and public plazas across Spain and Greece, broadcasting that it was time for people beyond the Middle East to rise up. Within months, a few hundred activists in New York City took the conversation to the fortress of the worldwide enemy, branded the movement Occupy Wall Street, and gave the conversation a common vocabulary of the One Percent and the Ninety-Nine Percent.

Over the next few years, as each of these protest movements receded or was repressed, some proclaimed—whether out of joy or bitterness—that they never had a chance and that we shouldn’t have fallen for their promise. Do we really think the spirit of Change Square and Occupy is gone just because we can’t see it? Seeds were planted across the globe in 2011, and we’re going to need millions of socialists to feed them, protect their shoots, and make them strong enough to weather all the poison this world can pour on them.

It takes a certain degree of faith to devote yourself to a cause you can’t always see—not a dogma to clutch in the face of challenging new ideas and circumstances but a confidence to keep fighting for your vision of a different world. We don’t know exactly what that world will look like, or how long it will take to win it, because those answers aren’t in any bibles, religious or secular. We’re going to have to write that history ourselves.

Can I get an amen?

 

1. When I first joined a socialist group, I remember being asked by some friends if I was “still allowed to watch TV” like I had joined a monastery. The nineties, man. Stupid times.