Page 160 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
158

Communism's hostility to religion is beyond dispute. Look at the
writings of any Communist ideologue, and you will find this expressed
openly. Marx himself called religion the "opium of the people," de-
scribed it as created by the ruling class to narcotize the poor, and pro-
posed that religious belief must be destroyed if Communism were to
advance. Engels wrote that human beings are descended from monkeys,
claiming that religion developed as merely a stage in the process of evo-
lution.
To destroy religion, what kind of policies do Communists imple-
ment? Lenin gave the first comprehensive answer.. In 1900, as leader of
the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (later to become the
Communist Party), he wrote an article titled "The Attitude of the
Worker's Party to Religion," published in the Proletary magazine. In that
article he wrote:
Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism,
i.e., Marxism. T The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels re-
peatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over
the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of
Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany -- a material-
ism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let
us recall that the whole of Engels's Anti-Dühring, which Marx read in
manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and
atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist
and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious
philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig
Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combat-
ing religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to
renovate it, to invent a new, "exalted" religion, and so
forth. "Religion is the opium of the people" -- this dic-
tum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist
outlook on religion. 111
In 1905, he published an article entitled
"Socialism and Religion" in the magazine
According to Lenin, Nozvaya Zhizn in which he called religion a "fog"
Communists are responsi- that must be dispersed. In that article, he also de-
ble for translating and
publishing the works of
ardent opponents of reli-
gion like Feuerbach.