By Gordon Hull
I’ve been developing (first, second, third, fourth) some reflections on what Foucault means by a reference to “Chardino-Marxism,” a disturbing trend that he credits Althusser with “courageously fighting.” The real opposition point seems to be Roger Garaudy, a PCF intellectual who is a leader in the effort to establish a post-Stalinist humanist Marxism, and who had a real sympathy for religion. Last time, I traced some of Garaudy’s sources on religion to Engels. Some of what Garaudy says also sounds like it’s coming straight from the Russian Marxist Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Religion and Socialism (1908). The claim here is categorically not that Garaudy read Lunacharsky – as will become evident in a minute, I think that’s highly unlikely. What I do want to underscore is that there is a coherent line of thought behind Garaudy’s religious impulse. As I’ll note when I get back to Garaudy and Althusser, there is a very specific political context to Althusser’s attacks on Garaudy having to do with the latter’s role in the PCF and his effort to use a humanist Marxism as a (from Althusser’s point of view, failed) alternative to Stalinism.
I know very little about Lunacharsky (Wikipedia here), but apparently he was tolerated by Lenin (despite being criticised heavily), and fell out of favor under Stalin. He died before he could be repressed, but in 1936-8, his memoirs were banned and he was erased from the official histories of communism. He enjoyed somewhat of a revival after Stalin’s death. Religion and Socialism is very obscure now: Google books reports a Yiddish translation (!) as well as a Spanish one from the 1970s. It’s not been translated into English or French. Marxists.org refers only to his later works in English and in French, and he doesn’t even show up on the German part.
Most of the work available on Lunacharsky now seems to be attributable to patient work by Roland Boer (upon whom I am completely dependent here). Religion and Socialism fell out of favor due to Lenin’s denunciation after it was published, was left out of Lunacharsky’s collected works, and was reduced to a few copies. Here is Boer in his paper on the text:
“A Yiddish translation of Religion and Socialism exists, but as far as the original work in Russian is concerned, only a few extant copies remain. The one in the National Library of St. Petersburg turned out to be too fragile to scan. Only after further inquiry (by my colleague, Sergey Kozin) was a copy found in the Lenin Library in Moscow. A high fee for scanning the two volumes resulted in a much-treasured copy being made, which is in our possession and is, to my knowledge, the only PDF version of it in the world. Since then, the text has been screened, converted into modern Cyrillic script (it was published before the 1917 language reform), and proofread. In addition to its republication in Russian, a translation is also planned” (“Religion,” 190).
The text of volume 1 is indeed now available on a site with his works though the translation seems to remain in the planning stages.
This doxography matters because it means that Lunacharsky will be understood primarily through Lenin (on this, see Boer, “God in the World,” 351ff). For example, early in “Lenin and Philosophy,” Althusser notes that “Mach’s empirio-criticism, and all its by-products, the philosophies of Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Bazarov, etc., represented a philosophical crisis.” This line is pretty clearly echoing Lenin. For example, the first words of the preface of Lenin’s Philosophy and empirio-criticism are that
“A number of writers, would-be Marxists, have this year undertaken a veritable campaign against the philosophy of Marxism. In the course of less than half a year four books devoted mainly and almost exclusively to attacks on dialectical materialism have made their appearance. These include first and foremost Studies in (?—it should have said “against”) the Philosophy of Marxism (St. Petersburg, 1908), a symposium by Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Berman, Helfond, Yushkevich and Suvorov” (LCW 14, 19).
A page later, he adds that “our destroyers of dialectical materialism proceed fearlessly to downright fideism* (clearest of all in the case of Lunacharsky, but by no means in his case alone)” (LCW 14, 20), explaining in the footnote that “Fideism is a doctrine which substitutes faith for knowledge, or which generally attaches significance to faith” (ibid.). Shortly after Socialism and Revolution appeared, Lenin repeatedly associates Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and Bazarov (e.g. LCW 15, 474 and elsewhere in that essay).
So what is the “God building” of Lunacharsky up to? Here’s a comment from Religion and Socialism:
“The communist spirit of early, popular Christianity is not in doubt. But was it revolutionary? Yes, of course. In its negation, the radical, merciless negation of the civilized world of the time, in posing in its place a completely new way of life, it was revolutionary. Any ideology that truly reflects the mood of the oppressed masses can only be revolutionary in its depth” (qt in Boer, “Religion,” 199. It’s from R&S Vol. 2, 139).
The language is reminiscent of Marx’s 1843 letter in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in which he calls for the “ruthless critique of everything existing:”
“But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be [Ist die Konstruktion der Zukunft und das Fertigwerden für alle Zeiten nicht unsere Sache, so ist desto gewisser, was wir gegenwärtig zu vollbringen haben, ich meine die rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden, rücksichtslos sowohl in dem Sinne, daß die Kritik sich nicht vor ihren Resultaten fürchtet und ebensowenig vor dem Konflikte mit den vorhandenen Mächten (MEW I, 344)]
Lenin cites this passage in the biographic portion of his 1914 encyclopedia article on Marx, arguing that “Marx’s articles in this journal showed that he was already a revolutionary, who advocated ‘merciless criticism of everything existing [беспощадную критику всего существующего (here)],’ and in particular the ‘criticism by weapon,’ and appealed to the masses and to the proletariat” (LCW 21, 47).
I’m under no illusion that these comments constitute adequate historical work – for one, I don’t have access to the second volume of Religion and Socialism to see what precise words Lunacharsky is using. Nor do I know the history of access to the relevant Marx article. But I do think they likely indicate that Lunacharsky is appropriating very specific Marxist language and applying it to early Christianity. Lenin’s citation, though well after Lunacharsky’s remarks, indicate a way of approaching revolutionary thought that isn’t fully Marxist in the sense that most of the interesting theoretical developments in Marx occur well after Lenin says you can tell that Marx is a revolutionary.
Boer comments that for Lunacharsky:
“The true tradition of revolutionary religious communism is ancient indeed, running back to the biblical prophets and expressed in a dimension of the Hebrew God, Yahweh. Beyond the biblical text, Lunacharsky also discerns this prophetic tradition in the ‘everlasting Gospel’ of Joachim of Fiore (a favourite of Ernst Bloch), adding Francis of Assisi, Fra Dolcino, Thomas Müntzer and the Peasant Revolution, the Münster Revolution of 1534-35, even the Puritans of the English Revolution. All of which leads Lunacharsky to mention ‘the greatest of the prophets – Karl Marx’” (349).
A common source for both would appear to be Engels’ Peasant War in Germany, which Garaudy at least cites directly. Boer says that Lunacharsky “follows an established line on the Left, deriving from Engels and from Karl Kautsky” in his characterizations of early Christianity (n15), as I discussed last time.
Religion for Luncharsky can thus be reactionary (urging quietism or a return to traditional ways of life) or revolutionary. This is also a position taken up by Garaudy, who suggests the “lack” of “the species-life, the specifically human life, the life, that is, which shares in all that has been won in history by mankind. Religion is both a reflection of this lack, and a revolt against it, even if the revolt remains purely subjective” (120).
It is not hard to draw a line between this line of thought and the early Marx’s famous discussion of religion (one assumes there is a deliberate allusion, given Garaudy’s reference to the species-life, which is a concept specific to the early Marx), where Marx declares 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 heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Just before this line, Marx suggests:
“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion”
Here - and we can see an inkling of why Garaudy etc. like this line of thought and Althusser and Foucault do not – the emphasis is on “man.” At the same time, there is a fundamental ambiguity in Marx’s language. It is fairly easy to imagine theories of human nature that declare an abstract human nature which is then realized in the world, and Marx can easily be read this way. It’s how the humanist Marxists want to read him, and ability to recuperate religion into this narrative is a plus for Garaudy and the fideistic-leaning Lunacharsky and the other “god-builders.” But it’s also possible to emphasize the “world of man” and prioritize “state” and “society” as concrete entities. That emphasis is the one that an Althusser or a Foucault want to prioritize.
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