Against All False Idols

The Socialist Party, being a voice of the needs and aspirations of the working class, takes as its aim the emancipation, by means of class struggle, of the whole working population from the yoke of capitalist society. To this end, the Socialist Party, linked to the World Socialist Movement is carrying on the struggle for the total transformation of society. The working class will take possession of the means of production (land, mines, factories, means of communication), which in the hands of the capitalists are the means of exploiting and oppressing the working masses, and will make them into social property. By suppressing the division of society into classes, workers will put an end to the exploitation of man by man, and will make it possible for all people to enjoy the fruits of their own and collective labour.

Nationalism is a bourgeois ideology which developed with the emergence of nations and the rise and development of capitalism. Nationalism serves the bourgeoisie in the sense that they are seeking a market for their goods, and their national market is always primary as capitalism develops. And nationalism serves to help that bourgeoisie secure its national market. It is nationalism that can divide the workers so that the workers of one nationality are struggling against the workers of another nationality for a few illusory crumbs the rulers throw out exactly for that purpose! It is nationalism that can pit groups of workers against each other with the most hideous rage, while their mutual oppressors skip off with both their purses for a little sun and fun. Nationalism means exclusivism and isolation. Any nationalism finally implies that those people are better than all others. We are the victims of nationalism that preaches superiority and inferiority. We have seen its obscene terror and oppression. We are not fighting so that we can put these on somebody else. Nationalism ultimately does not serve the real interests of the masses of that nationality. As ironic as this sounds, nationalism does not even ultimately serve the nation. This is true and has been proven correct time and again. Nationalism after a certain point isolates the oppressed people from their allies and delivers them into the hands of the exploiters and reactionaries of their own nationality. Zionism should teach us this more forcibly than anything else, how even the most “justifiable” nationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, can end up justifying the repression of almost anybody else outside the nation. The struggle that unifies the working class completely must be the struggle to abolish capitalism forever.

Despite recurring crises of the capitalist economy, capitalist society will not collapse spontaneously. Capitalism requires the conscious actions of the people to over-throw it. The victory of the working class, the destruction of the economic and social bases of the possessing classes, the putting into practice of the principles of the planned socialist economy – all these will lead to the creation of the classless society, where there will be no exploited or exploiters, nor class struggles, and all the efforts of society will be deployed to the common good. From the moment of the revolution and the establishment of the classless society it will make possible the complete achievement of socialist democracy and the abolition of the State. Society will then determine for itself the forms of its confederations and its organisational structure. The victory of socialism means the emancipation of all humanity. Socialism will create not only the new economic and social order, but also the higher civilisation of free mankind.

Religion is a social phenomenon in present-day society. Hence no amount of merely negative and critical propaganda can destroy it. Hence, to seek to abolish religion in a society founded on exploitation is futile. The ancient Greek and Roman freethinkers such as Epicurus and Lucretius demolished every theological argument as well as their modern successors have done, but when Paganism passed from the scene it was Christianity, not Atheism, which took its place. Only the positive achievement of a classless society can do that by abolishing its causes. It follows that religion cannot die out or be abolished in a class society, it follows equally and by the same reasoning that it could not survive inside socialism. Once a socialist society is fully established the twin foundations of religion, ignorance and fear, will be torn up by the roots. Socialism, by doing away with class exploitation and by developing to the fullest possible extent the unfathomed productive potentialities of the modern-age, hitherto hardly touched under capitalism, would make poverty and insecurity absolutely meaningless terms in an age of universal plenty. Whilst war, the third partner in the unholy capitalist trinity, would necessarily pass into oblivion along with the competitive capitalism and imperialism which is its sole efficient cause. All the social roots of religion would thus simultaneously disappear. And, of course, it goes without saying that the last remains of barbaric ignorance and superstition which still survive from pre-civilised eras would vanish before the impact of universal free education based on the scientific humanism that is inseparable from socialism, and no longer twisted as today by class domination into a mere machine for producing standardised wage-slaves, mechanical minders of machines, and servile robots. Whosoever therefore is capable of reasoning scientifically from cause to effect must realise that socialism means inevitably the definitive end of religion; which, deprived of all reason for existence, would become a mere anachronism in such a society. Religion becomes ever more obviously a parasite. With world socialism we shall arrive at that pleasing state of things where the Social Revolution will destroy religion by abolishing its effective causes and humanity itself takes the place of god.

In the meantime, the Socialist Party continues its necessary propaganda against all manifestations of capitalism, including those which belong to the sphere of religion. Whether it is necessary to attack religion specifically depends on local and on particular circumstances, but every reactionary movement of the Churches in our current society should be exposed. In all fairness we must draw attention to such movements as those of the Lollards and Anabaptists which were anti-ruling-class, and in some cases, even ‘communistic’ in their tenets. It is undeniable that such movements existed, that they reflected their contemporary class antagonisms and were, even, to a certain extent, revolutionary in their relation to contemporary states and society. To that extent accordingly they must be excempt from the strictures passed above on their official counterparts, the ‘orthodox’ churches.  We must also add, however, that their ‘communism’ was pre-scientific and therefore backward -looking: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span where was then the gentleman?’, as the Lollards phrased it: viz, in the beginning class distinctions did not exist. In all such Utopian ‘Communism’ history chases its own tail. Moreover, most of these movements were dominated by clerics—for example, John Ball and Thomas Munzer, etc. Had they succeeded they would have inevitably become themselves theocracies. Voltaire has summed up, once for all, the social character of all theocratic communism in his satirical description of the clerical ‘communistic’ state founded by the Jesuits in Paraguay (eighteenth century): ‘In Paraguay perfect communism existed: the Jesuits shared the wealth; whilst the Indians shared the work!’

What has been said of Christianity is equally true in respect of other religions also. For example, Islam has always stubbornly opposed even the modernization of the bourgeois revolution: Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, still strongholds of Mohammedan clericalism, are almost completely feudal. Whilst Hinduism, by means of its doctrine of reincarnation, has cleverly allayed the discontent of the Indian masses with their frightful conditions in this life! Even the originally rationalistic Buddhism had in Tibet become an obscurantist and oppressive monastic despotism. As far as the class struggle is concerned, official religion is, and always has been, on the side of the exploiters. Indeed, granted its social background, it could not have been anything else. And the same is true today.

The war against the gods is equivalent to the class war for a socialist society: Forward to the Social Revolution! Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the Earth.