this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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I'm not GP, but:
The idea is that faith is a practice rather than upholding a doctrine, and even that you're a member of the religion if you do the things ('keep the faith') regardless of what you believe.
I think the analogy makes sense, as Christianity placed a new emphasis on belief, which displaced on the one hand membership via kinship and also a whole host of religious practices/rules by declaring them obsolete or void or optional.
There are some major Christian thinkers who retained a partially action-centered notion of belief (Pascal, for instance) and there are some sects that give some primacy to behavior (see various doctrines of 'sinlessness', which take very seriously the imperative to 'go and sin no more'). But I think the analogy still basically makes sense.
I think one could argue that communist internationalism has more in common with Christian universalism than the ethnocentrism of Judaism, but I guess one could draw an analogy between a vanguard and a 'chosen people' (though I wouldn't!).
Imo these religious analogies aren't central to socialism but they are kinda interesting and a useful way to quickly allude to or illustrate a point for those who have some knowledge of comparative religions/history of Christianity.
I'm a bit curious about what analogies people culturally grounded in other religious traditions would make! Maybe we'll get lucky and a comrade with knowledge of some other faith traditions will chime in.
Interesting answer to an interesting question.
In addition, I also wonder whether this is where many Western Marxists go wrong – not realising that they're seeing Marxism through an incompatible Christian lens. Hence there search for betrayers who bring in 'original sin' e.g. Stalin or Deng, depending on who you ask. This may be in Losurdo. I remember it summarised in Roland Boer, SWCC: A Guide for Foreigners (iirc).
I'm not at all qualified to say whether Marxism and Judaism are a better fit. It's not possible to know what Marx would've done if he'd come from a different background but it's interesting to think about that influence and see whether it gives us any fresh insight. Marxism as distinct from Marx is a different thing, again.
Then there's the wariness with which I approach the relationship between Marxism and Judaism because of the Nazi/fascist thing of equating communism with a Jewish plot. Got to be careful of the source of and motivation for the claim of that equation!
I'm disinclined to say that Marxism is truly like any religion at all, but I do think it might be productive to compare certain moments, aspects or divisions within Marxism to religious counterparts. I think your example of the search for a moment of 'the fall' in Trotskyist histories of the USSR or Maoist histories of China is a good example.
I am skeptical, though, that we should take those patterns of thought within certain schools of Marxism to originate with or be caused by religious belief, and I think one test might be the prominence (or obscurity) of such a narrative in China itself, where there is much less Christian influence, among Maoist dissidents or CPC members who see themselves as pushing a return to Maoist roots. (I don't know the answer, idk which way it goes.) I'm more inclined to think of the Christian fall from grace as an incidental instance of a more universally accessible archetype of decisive corruption or working, which may take other forms in other societies. But idk; I'm really out of my depth here, and that may be some Christocentrist ignorance on my part.
It does feel like somewhere in the vast world of Marxist writing, there has to be some good faith thought on Marx's relationship to Judaism and how it might have influenced his thinking and work. Obviously, he was himself pretty hostile to religion and also sometimes wrote (arguably satirically, with a polemical aim against anti-Semitic thinkers) in some anti-Semitic idioms of his time. At the same time, hostility to a religion, or explicit disavowal, doesn't actually mean being free of its cultural or ideological influence. Lots of atheists, myself included, find themselves nonetheless marked by their relationship to a predominantly Christian culture of origin. Idk why that would be different for other religions.
But yeah, your wariness is warranted given the vicious myth of 'Judeo-Bolshevism' and the violence it rationalized. And imo there are more obviously worthwhile points of departure to examine as major influences, like the usual big three (German Idealist philosophy, French utopian socialism, and British political economy, all contemporaneous with Marx).