Not that long ago, I released a controversial podcast titled "Marxism Is Not Atheist" on my New Discourses Podcast platform (follow
@NewDiscourses). Without actually hearing what I said, a lot of people got really upset about it. Let me make the basic argument here for you (link to podcast in tweet below).
The argument I made, drawing directly from the writings of Karl Marx, is that Communism as Marx conceived it is not merely atheist. Marx himself said very specifically and intentionally that "atheism is at once far from Communism" and then explained that the "philanthropy" of atheism is still abstract and not real, while that of Communism is real. Therefore, we can conclude from Karl Marx himself that Marxism is not merely atheist. It requires something more, and that something more is Communism, which is its own religious view (worldview with associated duties of conscience).
The analogy I give to make this clear is agricultural. If you have a field that you want to cultivate, the first thing you have to do is clear the field of the existing growth so you can prepare and till the soil and plant your crops. Religion, in Marx's view, would be like the native growth or some previous cultivated crop that isn't Communism. The "atheism" in Communism, then, is like clearing the field so you can plant Communism. It isn't the point. It isn't the point at all. It's not the point in exactly the same way that clearing a field isn't the same as growing crops.
This isn't hard to understand. Marx believed existing religion how to be plowed out of the way to render people in a position where they can recognize their material suffering "without illusions." That would lead them to want to fix their material suffering, as Marx explained clearly in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Once people are ready to tackle the real conditions ("root causes") of their suffering, he believed, they could be easily led to become Communists.
That is, Marx believed that getting religion out of the way is like clearing a field so you can plant Communism in the bare soil of their material suffering, which religion had previously obscured from them.
Okay, James, you might ask, if that's really the case, why didn't you titled your podcast "Communism Isn't MERELY Atheist"? Hmmmmm...?!
Well, if you listen to the podcast, you'll understand why. As Communists rapidly learned in Soviet Union and its satellites, and beyond, stamping religion out of people is effectively impossible, especially with faithful Christians and Jews. Clearing the ground, so to speak, is a lot easier written about in theoretical critiques than it is in practice with actual faithful people.
Communism doesn't care about how it achieves operational success, though. It only cares about achieving operational success.
So, if you can't beat the religion out of people or convince or coerce them to adopt atheism as a bare-soil starting place to become Communists, but you need them to become Communists, what can you do?
The answer is simple: you co-opt their religion to Communism.
The KGB was particularly good at this, whether in establishing the Registered Church in the Soviet Union as a replacement for the Russian Orthodox Church, helping to establish the World Council of Churches, or co-opting Catholicism through Liberation Theology. Protestants, through a different pathway, developed something called a "theology for the Social Gospel" that did roughly the same thing. The Christian Left, as it is called, has been marching various forms of Marxism into the West through Christian religion specifically, and quite successfully (including by being strongly positioned to discredit Bible-believing churches as houses of bigotry and extremism).
Virtually all of what we call Woke (Leftism) today came to us through the crucible of Liberation Theology instruction turned into "secular" education. The tool is called "critical pedagogy," and it was developed from Paulo Freire's adaptation of Liberation Theology to peasant literacy campaigns under the branding "Education for Liberation."
In short, the largely Judeo-Christian West was mostly impervious to Communism through the method Marx advocated, which included the idea that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion. That is, Marx believed you make the people atheists, then they'll recognize their true suffering in a "real" way, and you can use that to make them Communist. And... it didn't work, at least not in the Judeo-Christian West. It didn't even work in the Orthodox Christian East, tbh.
The result of Marxist Pragmatism as their general approach to life was not to keep doing something that doesn't work (or to do only that). It was to co-opt religion itself and turn it into a vehicle for producing Communists.
In the agricultural metaphor, as someone offered me later, after the podcast was released, this would be like realizing that you can't uproot certain stems in the religious field, so rather than trying to dig them up (impossible), you cut them strategically and graft Communism on.
Imagine an apple tree, for example, that grows healthy, good apples. Now picture Communism like really bad, awful crabapples. The method would be to make cuts in the healthy apple tree an graft in crab apple limbs, allowing them to start growing. Bit by bit, as they establish, you cut the good apple limbs off and let people have the bad crabapple limbs in place. Eventually, all the good apple limbs are cut off, and all the limbs are Communism that has been grafted on. Do you get it?
Jesus said that a bad tree can only produce bad fruit, and a good tree will produce good fruit. The diabolical mind of Communists figured out a way around this. They take a good tree and graft on limbs of a rotten tree and slowly, bit by bit, remove the good limbs. Now you have a tree with good root stock that only produces bad fruit. Isn't that something?
Of course, Jesus told us what to do with this situation too: judge them by their fruits. What the Communists do is enable people to go on judging by the good root stock while the fruiting limbs themselves have been wholly replaced by bad fruiting stock. Judging them by their fruits (which is an appeal to Common Sense Realism and Empiricism, btw) turns out to be the necessary test of discernment, not judging by the root stock.
Anyway, because of this second avenue to producing Communism not from (manufactured) atheism but from the religious root stock itself, it isn't adequate to title my argument "Communism Isn't MERELY Atheist." As it turns out, the atheism part is not a necessary condition to Communist radicalization and misintegration.
Now you understand why I titled the podcast what I did, which obviously means you can not care a bit about this and go on with your butthurt, and I can go on laughing at you for it. Have a happy day!