Letter: Ever-interesting topics (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever-interesting topics

I read with interest your publication this month, and I find that you seem to contradict yourself or the aspect of religion. One of the main themes of your publication is that one should not equate Socialism with the Labour Movement. I ask, then, why is it not possible not to equate Christianity with the Church of today?

Secondly, in reply to N. Fox’s letter in this month’s edition, you state that many people are deserting their religious beliefs “which palpably stand against their material well-being”, and yet in the preceding paragraph you condemn religious institutions “for their role in upholding property and exploitation”. Isn’t there a contradiction in terms here?

Finally, I wish to point out that ever since Adam, man has been interested in three things: politics, religion and sex. Whatever your efforts, you are not going to change that. Far from religion being “an obstacle to understanding” for man, it is the explanation of his being.

G. J. Rajakarier

Sheffield

Reply

To re-state your first point as we understand it, you are saying that Christianity need not be identified with the established churches, and you attempt an analogy with Socialism for Christianity and the Labour Party as the Church. It does not answer our case that Socialism is both valid and desirable, and Christianity (in or out of churches) is neither. We see religious beliefs as an obstacle to understanding that man makes his own history out of material conditions.

An example of people abandoning religious beliefs which conflict with their interests is the Catholic Church’s teaching on birth control. It is founded on the doctrine that the soul is infused by God at the moment of conception : therefore, birth control thwarts the divine intention. Despite that awesome thought, fewer and fewer Catholics adhere to this teaching and the numbers of the Catholic Church are falling. Why? Because, for the working class today, outsize families mean an unacceptable degree of poverty and discomfort.

You apparently have in mind that the capitalist class, who obtain their well-being from property and exploitation, would approve of religion’s upholding rôle. As individuals a good many of them do, of course. But for the capitalist system as a whole, materialism is the necessary basis for scientific and technical development to keep large-scale production profitable in the modern world.

Your final paragraph is mistaken, even overlooking “ever since Adam ’. Politics means participation in the powers of government, and until recently in history it concerned small sections of society. Only since the appearance of capitalism have increasing numbers of the population been widely interested in politics, being required to approve rulers of their nation-states—“dragged into the political arena”, as Marx and Engels put it. The forms taken by man’s interest in sex are closely bound up with changes in society; it has become a subject by itself to the extent that it has become separated from reproduction. As for religion being "the explanation for man’s being”, what religion we are talking about? Voodooism, sun-worship, the Aztec blood-sacrifice?

Editors.