Marxist–Leninist atheism

Marxist–Leninist atheism, also known as Marxist–Leninist scientific atheism, is the antireligious element of Marxism–Leninism. Based on a dialectical-materialist understanding of humanity's place in nature, Marxist–Leninist atheism proposes that religion is the opium of the people; thus, Marxism–Leninism advocates atheism, rather than religious belief.
To support those ideological premises, Marxist–Leninist atheism proposes an explanation for the origin of religion and explains methods for the scientific criticism of religion. The philosophic roots of Marxist–Leninist atheism appear in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, of Ludwig Feuerbach, of Karl Marx and of Vladimir Lenin.
Marxist–Leninist atheism has informed public policy in various countries, such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, for example. Some non-Soviet Marxists have opposed this antireligious stance, and certain forms of Marxist thinking, such as the liberation theology movements in Latin America, have rejected Marxist–Leninist atheism entirely, and some Marxist-Leninist states, like Vietnam, Laos and post-Fidel Castro Cuba, abandoned anti-religious thinking and policies in favor of cooperation between religious bodies and the state for the promotion of socialism and anti-imperialism.

Philosophical bases

Ludwig Feuerbach

In training as a philosopher in the early 19th century, Karl Marx participated in debates about the philosophy of religion, specifically about the interpretations presented in Hegelianism, i.e. "What is rational is real; and what is real is rational." In those debates about reason and reality, the Hegelians considered philosophy an intellectual enterprise in service to the insights of Christian religious comprehension, which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had elaborately rationalized in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Although critical of contemporary religion, as a 19th-century intellectual, Hegel pursued the ontology and the epistemology of Christianity, as a personal interest compatible with Christian theological explanations of Dasein — explanations of the questions of existence and of being — which he clarified, systematized, and justified in his philosophy.
After his death in 1831, Hegel's philosophy about being and existence was debated by the Young Hegelians and the materialist atheists — such as Ludwig Feuerbach — who rejected all religious philosophy as a way of running the world; Karl Marx sided with the philosophy of the materialist atheists. Feuerbach separated philosophy from religion in order to grant intellectual autonomy to philosophers in their interpretations of material reality. He objected to the religious basis of Hegel's philosophy of spirit in order to critically analyse the basic concepts of theology, and he redirected philosophy from the heavens to the Earth, to the subjects of human dignity and the meaning of life, of what is morality and of what is the purpose of existence, concluding that humanity as a species possessed within itself all the attributes that merited worship and that people had created God as a reflection of these attributes. About the conceptual separateness of Man from God, in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach said:

But the idea of deity coincides with the idea of humanity. All divine attributes, all the attributes which make God God, are attributes of the species — attributes which in the individual are limited, but the limits of which are abolished in the essence of the species, and even in its existence, in so far as it has its complete existence only in all men taken together.

Feuerbach thought that religion exercised power over the human mind through "the promotion of fear from the mystical forces of the Heaven", and with "an intensive hatred of the old God" said that houses of worship should be systematically destroyed and religious institutions eradicated. Experienced in that praxis of materialist philosophy, thought, and action, the apprentice Karl Marx became a radical philosopher.

Karl Marx

In his rejection of all religious thought, Marx considered the contributions of religion over the centuries to be unimportant and irrelevant to the future of humanity. The autonomy of humanity from the realm of supernatural forces was considered by Marx as an axiomatic ontological truth that had been developed since ancient times, and he considered it to have an even more respectable tradition than Christianity. Marx held that the churches invented religion to justify the ruling classes' exploitation of labour of the working classes, by way of a socially stratified industrial society; as such, religion is a drug that gives an emotional escape from the real world. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx described the contradictory nature of religious sentiment, that:

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 heart-less world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Thus for Marx atheist philosophy liberated men and women from suppressing their innate potential as human beings, and allowed people to intellectually understand that they possess individual human agency, and thus are masters of their individual reality, because the earthly authority of supernatural deities is not real. Marx opposed the social-control function of religion, which the churches realised by way of societal atomization; the anomie and the social alienation that psychologically divide human beings from themselves and that alienate people from each other. Hence, the social authority of theology must be removed from the law, the social norms, and the traditions with which men govern society. In that vein of political emancipation, represented in the culturally progressive concepts of citizen and citizenship as a social identity, in On the Jewish Question, Marx said that:

The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state, as such, is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine.
At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society, and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.

Therefore, because organised religion is a human product derived from the objective material conditions, and that economic systems, such as capitalism, affect the material conditions of society, the abolition of unequal systems of political economy and of stratified social classes would wither away the State and the official religion, consequent to the establishment of a communist society, featuring neither a formal State apparatus nor a social-class system. About the nature and social-control function of religious sentiment, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx said that:

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. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

In that way, Marx transformed Feuerbach's antireligious philosophy into a political praxis, and into a philosophic basis of his nascent ideology, dialectical materialism. In Private Property and Communism, Marx said that "Communism begins from the outset with atheism; but atheism is, at first, far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction", and refined the atheism of Feuerbach into a considered critique of the material conditions responsible for the invention of religion. He therefore held that atheism was the philosophical foundation stone of his ideology, but in itself was insufficient. About the social artifice of religious sentiment, in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx said:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself, and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself, be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then, itself, be destroyed in theory and in practice. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the "religious sentiment" is, itself, a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

The philosophy of dialectical materialism proposed that the existential condition of being human naturally resulted from the interplay of the material forces that exist in the physical world. That religion originated as psychological solace for the exploited workers who live the reality of wage slavery in an industrial society. Thus, despite the working-class origin of organised religion, the clergy allowed the ruling class to control religious sentiment, which grants control of all society — the middle class, the working class, and the proletariat — with Christian slaves hoping for a rewarding after-life. In The German Ideology, about the psychology of religious faith, Marx said that:

It is self-evident, moreover, that "spectres", "bonds", "the higher being", "concept", "scruple", are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception, apparently, of the isolated individual , the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life, and the form of intercourse coupled with it, move.

In the establishment of a communist society, the philosophy of Marxist–Leninist atheism interprets the social degeneration of organized religion — from psychological-solace to social-control — to justify the revolutionary abolition of an official state religion, and its replacement with official atheism, the latter being characteristic of a Marxist–Leninist state.