Religion and the question of Islamic fundamentalism

The question of the attitude that communists should adopt towards religion is by no means a new one, on the contrary it goes back to the beginnings of the workers' movement. In more recent times, the question of resurgent Islam has been posed since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. In these two articles, we examine the attitude of marxists to religion, and more specifically the way in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks approached the question at the time of the Russian Revolution. They then go on to study the resurgence of islamist movements since the 1980s

The fundamental source of religious mystification is economic slavery

Unlike Marx, who thought that the fog of religion was being rapidly dispersed by capitalism itself, later marxists recognised that capitalism in its decadent phase has seen a resurgence of religion, which expresses the increasingly patent bankruptcy of bourgeois society. In the underdeveloped countries, especially, this has taken the form of a turn towards militant “fundamentalist” movements. In the developed countries, the picture is more complex; religious observance in the established denominations has more or less steadily declined over the past fifty or so years, while “New Age” and other alternative religious cults have been growing, side-by-side with a complete turn away from religion and belief in God by some sectors of the population on the one hand, and a resurgence in “fundamentalist” creeds on the other.

Islamism: A symptom of the decomposition of capitalist social relations

Not for the first time, capitalism is justifying its march towards war by invoking the idea of a 'clash between civilisations'. In 1914 workers were marched off to war to defend modern 'civilisation' against the Russian knout or German kaiserism; in 1939 it was to defend democracy against the new dark age represented by Nazism; from 1945 to 1989 it was to fight for democracy against Communism, or for the socialist countries against the imperialist ones. Today the refrain is 'the Western way of life' against 'Islamic fanaticism', or 'Islam' against the 'crusaders and Jews'.

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