The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-02-20

icalism of the Catholics, only injured the cause
of real cultural advance, since he pushed into
the foreground religious divisions in place of
political divisions and drew away the atten-
ton of certain sections of the working class
and of the democratic forces from the urgent
tasks of the class struggle and revolutionary
struggle into the direction of an entirely su-
perfical and deceitful bourgeois anti-clerical-
ism. Engels accused the would-be ultra-revo-
lutionary Duhring of wishing to repeat Bis
marck's folly in another form, and he demand
ed of the workers party the capacity to work
patiently at the organization and enlighten-
ment of the proletariat-a work which leads
to the dying out of religion-without throw
ing itself into the adventures of political war
en- religion. This standpoint has entered into
the very flesh and blood of German Social
Democracy which accordingly supported, for
example, the freedom of the Jesuits, their per-
mission to stay in Germany, and the removal
of all police measures against this or that re-
ligion. Declaration of religion as a private
affair'-this famous point of the Erfurt pro-
gram (1S91) confirmed the above political tao
tics of Social Democracy.
This tactic meanwhile has become routine
and has produced new distortion of Marx
ism in the opposite direction, in the sense of
opportunism. The statement of the Erfurt
program began to be interpreted in the sense
that we Social Democrats and our party ac-
tualy regard religion as private affair, that
for US as party, for us as Social Democrats,
religion is private affair Without entering
into direct polemic against this opportunist
conception, Engels considered it necessary in
the 'nineties to make definite stand against
it, not in polemical but in positive form.
He did this in the form of declaration--on
oh ho.I 81 laid strpSS--that
Democracy regards religion as private affair
in relation to the state, but not at all in rela-
ton to the workers party.
This is the outward history on the views of
Marx and Engels on the question of religion.
For people who handle Marxism carelessly,
who cannot and will not take the trouble to
think, the history is tangle of senseless con-
tradictions and vacillations of Marxism:
mess of Consistent" atheism and Indulgence"
towards religion, an "unprincipled" vacllating
between the revolutionary war on god and
the cowardy wish to suit ones words to the
believing workers, the fear of frightening them
away, etc. In the literature of the anarchist
phrase-makers many attacks on Marxism after
this fashion are to be found.
But whoever is even in the least able to take
Marxism seriously and to go more deeply into
it's philosophical foundations and the exper-
fences Of international Social Democracy, will
easily see that the tactics of Marxism in rela-
ton to religion are completely consistent and
fully thought out by Marx and Engels, and
that what the dilettantes and ignoramuses
consider to be vacillatons are direct and nee
essary conclusion of dialectcal materialism. 1t
would be great error to believe that the APP
parent "modernation" Of Marxsm in relation
to religion finds it's explanation in so-called
tactical" considerations, in the sense of the
wish mot to brighten away" etc. On the
contrary, the political line of Marxism in this
question is inseparably bound up with its phi
losophical foundations.