The Christian-Marxist dialogue of the 1960s (Dorothy Solle / 1984)

[struggle4progress]

The Christian-Marxist dialogue of the 1960s

Monthly Review
July-August, 1984
by Dorothee Solle

... As long as religion continues to be seen by Marxists as a hindrance for the building up of a human society, as a category of alienation, as the opiate of the people, as illusion and mere fraud, the Christian-Marxist dialogue is meaningless. The new insight into the Christian faith which came about on the Marxist side of the dialogue was to recognize it, in the words of Cesare Luporini, as "a doctrine of the liberation of man." This necessarily implied a shift of the Marxist epistemology from a vulgarized determinism, which renders all forms of superstructure totally dependent on the basic economic conditions, back to the original Marxist dialectic of being and consciousness. If there is a dialectical interplay between base and superstructure, then religion, too, like other forms of the cultural superstructure, is empowered not only to mirror the given facts, but to change them. Religion, too, has to be understood dialectically in its double function: as apology and legitimation of the status quo and its culture of injustice on the one hand, and as a means of protest, change, and liberation on the other hand. What was seen anew by Marxists in the dialogue was this double function of religion, its veiling power which serves the interests of bourgeois injustice, but its liberating force as well. In regard to the problem of religion, de-Stalinization meant abandonment of the undialectical forms of criticism of religion. Vulgar materialism, as opposed to a historical-materialistic outlook, sees religion simplistically as an enormous swindle invented by priests in order to take profit from superstitious people. Feuerbach developed his criticism of religion out of a deeper philosophical materialism that is capable of understanding dialectical contradictions; religion in his view is a projection from earth into heaven, a projected illusion. The young Marx agreed with Feuerbach's statement, but he wanted to know why and under which social conditions people begin to project the best of their inner life into heaven. Thus Marx added the historical dimension to materialism. Unfortunately, many of his followers fell back either into the Feuerbach position or even into the naiveties of the eighteenth-century materialistic tradition. For Marx it is superficial to maintain that religion is nothing but an illusion, a mere projection from earth into heaven, because Feuerbach's critique does not even raise the question why people need to project and to dream and to create myths. Marx himself went back to the needs and interests of people, which is a much deeper category of human existence than Feuerbach's reason and the rational capacities of man ...

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