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> wrote:
>Off-list, a comrade asked me for a source for my claimed Lenin quote -- I
>have to say that this has only the status of hearsay; I'll try to find one,
>if no one else can supply a source, but in the meantime many may find a
>(re?)reading of the following timely. It comes from the very wonderful
>Marxists Internet Archive at
>
>http://www.marxists.org/
>
>The paragraphs I've marked *** seem to bear on current issues.
>
>Julian
>
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>Lenin Internet Archive
>
>Socialism and Religion
>
>Written: approx. December 3, 1905 First Published: Nozvaya Zhizn (No. 28),
>December 3, 1905 Source: Collected Works Volume 10, p. 83-87
>Transcription\Markup: Brian Basgen Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive
>(marxists.org) 2000
>
>
>Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses
>of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the
>landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the
>"free" workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are "entitled"
>only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of
>slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of
>capitalist slavery.
>
>The economic oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders
>every kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening
>and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses. The workers may
>secure a greater or lesser degree of political liberty to fight for their
>economic emancipation, but no amount of liberty will rid them of poverty,
>unemployment, and oppression until the power of capital is overthrown.
>Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs
>down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual
>work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes
>in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to
>the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his
>battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the
>like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion
>to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the
>hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are
>taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a
>very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and
>selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion
>is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the
>slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or
>less worthy of man.
>
>But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to
>struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The
>modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and
>enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices,
>leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better
>life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of
>socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion,
>and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them
>together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
>
>Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists
>usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these
>words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We
>demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is
>concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far
>as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and
>religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority.
>Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no
>religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a
>rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious
>convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen's
>religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No
>subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances
>made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become
>absolutely free associations of like minded citizens, associations
>independent of the state. Only the complete fulfillment of these demands can
>put an end to the shameful and accursed past when the church lived in feudal
>dependence on the state, and Russian citizens lived in feudal dependence on
>the established church, when medieval, inquisitorial laws (to this day
>remaining in our criminal codes and on our statute-books) were in existence
>and were applied, persecuting men for their belief or disbelief, violating
>men's consciences, and linking cosy government jobs and government-derived
>incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established
>church. Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist
>proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.
>
>The Russian revolution must put this demand into effect as a necessary
>component of political freedom. In this respect, the Russian revolution is
>in a particularly favourable position, since the revolting officialism of
>the police-ridden feudal autocracy has called forth discontent, unrest and
>indignation even among the clergy. However abject, however ignorant Russian
>Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the
>thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. Even they are
>joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic
>practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the
>"servants of God". We socialists must lend this movement our support,
>carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their
>conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that
>they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police.
>Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete
>separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be
>declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these
>consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held
>captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently
>still cling to your cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in
>which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your
>weapon and continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the
>class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you.
>
>So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is
>not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious,
>advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an
>association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of
>class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious
>beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able
>to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological
>weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our
>association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such
>a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the
>ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole
>Party, of the whole proletariat.
>
>*** If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are
>atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join
>our Party?
>
>The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important
>difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois
>democrats and the Social-Democrats.
>
>Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the
>materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore,
>necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic
>roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the
>propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific
>literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly
>forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work.
>We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the
>German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the
>eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and
>atheists.["Fluchtlings-Literatur", Volksstaat (No. 73) June 22, 1874)]
>
>*** But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the
>religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an "intellectual"
>question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by
>the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to
>think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of
>the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely
>propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that
>the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and
>reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and
>no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not
>enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity
>in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the
>creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of
>proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
>
>That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our
>Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who
>still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves
>with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it
>is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various "Christians". But
>that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be
>advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean
>that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and
>political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or
>senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being
>swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development.
>
>Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now
>beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious
>strife - in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the
>really important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being
>solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in revolutionary
>struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the proletarian forces,
>which today manifests itself mainly in Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow
>conceive some more subtle forms. We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly,
>consistently and patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the
>scientific world-outlook - a preaching alien to any stirring up of secondary
>differences.
>
>The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really
>private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political
>system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and
>open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of
>the religious humbugging of mankind.

==
(Martians Go Home!)
AIM: BeesKillPeople

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