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Marxist-Leninist atheism is part of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. It rejects religion and relies on a materialist understanding of nature. Marxist-Leninism promotes atheism and argues that religion should be abolished. It has its roots in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, George Wihelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and V.I. Lenin. (Wikipedia)
Feuerbach was mainly motivated by a desire to remove certain limitations on human behavior that traditionally were imposed by religious belief. The trick was to remove the restrictions that one doesn't like while retaining those one does. How to get rid of a restriction about sex without also destroying the prohibition against violations of human rights and dignity since those prohibitions are there traditionally because God says so? He attempted to address fundamental concerns of human rights and dignity, morality, and the purpose of existence by reformulating them in a way that was not supernatural. His solution was to create a belief centered on worship of humanity. Marx was attracted by Feuerbach’s way of thinking and incorporated it into much of his own writing.
Marx tended to see religion in terms of either a means of controlling the people for the benefit of the ruling classes and at the same time a means for the poor and dispossessed to find comfort and consolation. Marx disapproved of religion in both senses because it turned the poor away from the idea that they could improve their lot through revolution. Marx thought that with revolution and the realization of the communist utopia that religion would disappear altogether there being no more reason for it to exist. Marx clearly saw elimination or undermining of religion as a means of deliberately provoking violent revolution against the established order.
Lenin rejected the idea that religion could be replaced with a Feuerbach type worship of humanity and insisted on a purely materialistic philosophy, going further than Marx and many other Marxists were willing to go. According to Lenin a true communist could only be atheistic.
Official policy in the USSR under Lenin and later Soviet rulers was that religion was tolerated, but the state was to do whatever was deemed necessary in order to eliminate it. Anti-religion efforts thus became a central part of the attempt to produce the “New Soviet Man.”
The thought initially was that religion would die away spontaneously with the coming of the socialist system. When this didn’t happen anti-religious campaigns were begun. Huge amounts of money and resources were spent, legislation was passed, arrests were made, and violence was used to suppress religion, but the whole effort failed.
Refusing to accept the idea that it might be the oppression of the Soviet state that caused people to hold on to their religious beliefs, Soviet leaders re-adapted their thinking about religion such that religion became the cause of harsh conditions in the Soviet Union rather than a result of those conditions. Religion was thus blamed for at least part of the Soviet Union’s failures.
Marx’s understanding of religion underlines his basic lack of understanding of human nature. He thought that people would give up religion when the political conditions supporting it ceased to exist. He was wrong about this because he was wrong about why people believe in the first place. By the same token he was wrong in his idea that the state would cease to exist when the socialist idea was realized. In truth the Soviet state became an entrenched class interest in itself that appropriated resources for itself to the detriment of everyone else. A basic understanding of human nature would have allowed Marx to foresee this. He thought that it would be possible to mold men in the image of the ideal socialist – that it would be possible to create the New Soviet Man. This also was a miserable failure resulting only in a selfish, self centered and nihilistic generation of apparatachiks that plague the Russian Republic even to this day. He thought that if the people held property in common they would work as hard to improve it as they would if they owned it themselves. The squalor, want and waste of captial that characterized the Soviet Union puts the lie to that idea.
Feuerbach was mainly motivated by a desire to remove certain limitations on human behavior that traditionally were imposed by religious belief. The trick was to remove the restrictions that one doesn't like while retaining those one does. How to get rid of a restriction about sex without also destroying the prohibition against violations of human rights and dignity since those prohibitions are there traditionally because God says so? He attempted to address fundamental concerns of human rights and dignity, morality, and the purpose of existence by reformulating them in a way that was not supernatural. His solution was to create a belief centered on worship of humanity. Marx was attracted by Feuerbach’s way of thinking and incorporated it into much of his own writing.
Marx tended to see religion in terms of either a means of controlling the people for the benefit of the ruling classes and at the same time a means for the poor and dispossessed to find comfort and consolation. Marx disapproved of religion in both senses because it turned the poor away from the idea that they could improve their lot through revolution. Marx thought that with revolution and the realization of the communist utopia that religion would disappear altogether there being no more reason for it to exist. Marx clearly saw elimination or undermining of religion as a means of deliberately provoking violent revolution against the established order.
Lenin rejected the idea that religion could be replaced with a Feuerbach type worship of humanity and insisted on a purely materialistic philosophy, going further than Marx and many other Marxists were willing to go. According to Lenin a true communist could only be atheistic.
Official policy in the USSR under Lenin and later Soviet rulers was that religion was tolerated, but the state was to do whatever was deemed necessary in order to eliminate it. Anti-religion efforts thus became a central part of the attempt to produce the “New Soviet Man.”
The thought initially was that religion would die away spontaneously with the coming of the socialist system. When this didn’t happen anti-religious campaigns were begun. Huge amounts of money and resources were spent, legislation was passed, arrests were made, and violence was used to suppress religion, but the whole effort failed.
Refusing to accept the idea that it might be the oppression of the Soviet state that caused people to hold on to their religious beliefs, Soviet leaders re-adapted their thinking about religion such that religion became the cause of harsh conditions in the Soviet Union rather than a result of those conditions. Religion was thus blamed for at least part of the Soviet Union’s failures.
Marx’s understanding of religion underlines his basic lack of understanding of human nature. He thought that people would give up religion when the political conditions supporting it ceased to exist. He was wrong about this because he was wrong about why people believe in the first place. By the same token he was wrong in his idea that the state would cease to exist when the socialist idea was realized. In truth the Soviet state became an entrenched class interest in itself that appropriated resources for itself to the detriment of everyone else. A basic understanding of human nature would have allowed Marx to foresee this. He thought that it would be possible to mold men in the image of the ideal socialist – that it would be possible to create the New Soviet Man. This also was a miserable failure resulting only in a selfish, self centered and nihilistic generation of apparatachiks that plague the Russian Republic even to this day. He thought that if the people held property in common they would work as hard to improve it as they would if they owned it themselves. The squalor, want and waste of captial that characterized the Soviet Union puts the lie to that idea.
