this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Idealism. Claiming that ideas are the root cause of a great deal of the world's problems is the opposite of materialism.
It has actually treated religion very kindly and respectfully. Like Marx read the bible repeatedly in multiple languages. He told his wife to seek spiritual edification in the jewish prophets rather than a secular church. His analysis of religion is constantly and consistently respectful and to the point with the notable and glaring exception of people who say "i'm a christian/jew/etc" and then ruthlessly exploit their workers. And even then, Marx's disrespect is usually quoting scripture to show how far they've gone from it rather than "lol u believe in man in the sky".
Marx actually admits to an existence of a ton of abstract, non-material social things in Capital which exist, objectively, without a material form. The entirety of communism is a belief that Marx had could become reality. As many indigenous folks have argued (for example, deloria jr. in "Same old Rock" in Marxism and Native Americans) Marxism is itself a religion that demands taking a lot on faith (revolutionary optimism is faith; belief in revolution is faith; belief in an eventual better world in the future? Faith.
And if you read indigenous activists, theorists and so forth (e.g. Coulthard Red Skin, White Masks) you will see it argued very strongly that indigenous religions/spiritualities are materialist in that they are methods of describing and organising empirically obtained information, disregarding theology which no longer holds true to investigation. When you research religions besides Christianity in the global north in particular and organised hierarchical monotheistic religions which developed to support material inequalities and sufferings it becomes very evident that this is how most of them work, except for the religions of the nobility who write things down and get obsessed with literalism.
If you don't mind my asking comrade what sorta investigation into religion (past or contemporary) have you done? What sorta investigations into the structure of science and how it works (e.g. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Siltoe ed Local vs. Global Science or Aikenhead and Michell *Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature) have you done?
Faith is belief without material evidence. Revolutionary optimism is belief derived from in material evidence.
Furthermore, religion is a concept that arose alongside the state. Bringing up spiritual practices from Native Americans and calling that "religion" is not based in historical reality, because those practices have been preserved from before rise of the modern capitalist state.
We're broadly on the same side, but I think you're in error on a number of levels in the second paragraph. Most religions are much older than the "rise of the modern capitalist state" and many indigenous religions as-received existed within the context of a state (whether an empire or the smaller national formations that are sometimes called "tribes").
One very obvious difference between a religion and mysticism/spirituality/ritualism/cultural practice/etc is that, once the Bible's canon was decided on, then that was it. It didn't change anymore, you can't discuss it, and if you changed it (through translation or addition of other books) then you had to start a whole new sect of the religion and break away from the church. There's centralization around a head, canonization of specific books, strict definition, etc. Dogma.
It's that process, where a spiritual belief system crystalizes around a centralizing dogmatic power structure, that it becomes a religion. There's a reason Eastern traditions of Christianity had less of an interest in defining a strict religious canon as opposed to Western traditions (though as the West took over the world it imposed religion on everyone, from Hindus to Buddhists to Orthodox Christians). It's modernist, and actually tied quite strongly to the printing press.
I'm confused, the biblical canon was established in the late 300s, over a thousand years before modernism or the printing press.
I also think that dogma is important to organized religion, but that there are lots of things commonly thought of as religion that are less dogmatic, like pre-Imperial Shintoism. tbh I am not that familiar with Imperial Shintoism either, but what little I have heard about it strongly suggests being oriented around the central authority of the state to decide its doctrines. Basically, what I am saying is "folk religion is also religion"
I should clarify: there was a "canon", but every church basically just did its own thing. They all had their own relics and traditions and special sermons passed down, completely different from every other church. There was a unifying holy world of the Catholic canon, but every fiefdom had its own relics and traditions that it adhered to on top of that. That's what pissed Martin Luther off so much, all of this extra fanon that was made up and tacked onto the canon. Folk mysticism was tolerated by the Catholic Church as long as they payed their dues.
When the reformation came and zealots started burning reliquaries and melting down shrines, that was when Christian spirituality became religion.
If Marxism is not a science, it is merely an affectation that has no particular reason to be held as better or worse than other "lenses" of analysis like Lacan or whatever. The most basic point of "scientific socialism" is that it is attempting to be a science, and to discard that is to discard the heart and be left with a corpse.
https://archive.org/details/075_Marxism_as_a_Science_FINAL.lite
Magical thinking is a behaviour, not an idea.
It is absolutely not faith, Marxism is a series of conclusions drawn from evidence.
Spirituality cannot be materialist. Methods of describing and organising information that assumes something beyond what is observed is fundamentally not a materialist approach.