The following is the first in a series of essays by PRPBN Chairman Comrade Tommy Joshua Al-Raifq that will be exclusively published on peacecomeade exploring issues of religion, spirituality, materialism and secularism within contemporary Marxist and anti-authoritarian thought and practice.

The Polymathematic Critique of the Marxist Conception of Religious Phenomena

Our Honorable Brother and Comrade Tommy Joshua Al-Rafiq, Chairman of the Poor Righteous Party of the Black Nation

EXCLUSIVE TO PEACECOMRADE

For the Polymathematician, that is, the dialectical materialist who bears witness to the Oneness and reality of God, Atheism is a caricature of a materialist analysis.

The Progressive and Metaphysical Role of
Marxist Materialism in the 20th Century Revolution

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”

Source: Marx and Engels, On Religion, Moscow, Progress Publishers,
4th Printing, 1966, page 38

“Religion is the opium of the people–this doctrine of Marx’s is the cornerstone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches and all religious organizations as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to  defend exploitation and to stupefy the working class.”

Source: Lenin, On Socialist Ideology and Culture, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2nd Edition, page 92

Our position is stark and simple: Deny the spook not the laws.

Marx’s position on religion which was part consistent, part radical anti-Hegelian idealism, was also,  We can say, satisfactory in  the  context of the historical conditions of the West’s grossly deformed understanding of the God, upon whom they actually waged war upon.

For Polymathematics there are two aspects here: 1)   Religion “as the opiate of the masses” and 2) What he had recognized as at the same time as a real expression of real suffering and a real longing for  deliverance from the suffering. Again we feel that these were progressive ideas in the context of the backwardness that they were developed.

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