The relationship between religious ideology and proletarian, socialist, communist ideology increasingly falls into the darkness of general aberration.

Not only reverence and deference are shown to the Council of the ill-fated twentieth century, but the Roman Pontiff is already credited with adhering to the formula of peaceful coexistence between countries under capitalist and socialist regimes!

The forces of the united front, which has brought about the ruin in the opportunism of the movements bearing the usurped names of workers’, socialist, communist, Marxist, Leninist, hail this new united front between historical Catholic orthodoxy and the heretical religions, the modern and bourgeois Reformations.

In this ruin of doctrines, which on all sides blaspheme themselves and their history resoundingly, how to introduce the guiding thread of a calm examination?

Friedrich Engels in 1850, under the impression, he said, of the counter-revolution in Europe and Germany, wrote The Peasant War in Germany. He, as he clarifies in the lapidary preface of 1874, wanted to answer a distressing problem: why on Earth had the German nation not had a liberal and bourgeois revolution, and thus a national revolution? And he found the answer; the revolution had been attempted as early as 1525 by the peasant classes heroically and bloodily risen up against the old social forms, but the rising bourgeoisie in the urban centres and the embryonic plebs had responded little or not at all, and the feudal system of the principalities had prevailed.

This powerful essay in historical dialectics serves to revive our Marxist view of the history of religious struggles. For the contemporary historian, those revolts were wars of religion, like those that previously bloodied all the plains of Europe. As a historical phenomenon, saying what the alleged wars of religion are helps us to reiterate our critical relationship with the historical fact of religions, and their kaleidoscopic succession.

We do this, as always, with words from a century ago.

* * *

‘This book, while giving the historic course of the struggle only in its outlines, undertakes to explain the origin of the peasant wars, the attitude of the various parties which appear in the war, the political and religious theories through which those parties strove to make clear to themselves their position; and finally, the result of the struggle as determined by the historical-social conditions of life, to show the political constitution of Germany of that time, the revolt against it; and to prove that the political and religious theories were not the causes, but the result of that stage in the development of agriculture, industry, land and waterways, commerce and finance, which then existed in Germany’.

‘This, the only materialistic conception of history, originates, not from myself but from Marx, and can be found in his works on the French Revolution of 1848–9, published in the same review, and in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’.

Splendid clarity, modesty, and greatness from the revolutionary writer.

He has found for Germany a bourgeois revolution with the aim, as a revolutionary of the proletariat, to put the petty bourgeois of 1525 and the big bourgeois of 1850 to shame. Indeed – after recalling in 1874 his concluding words of 1850, that behind the petty princes of the sixteenth century (who profited from that revolution) stood the petty bourgeois (who failed to do so) whereas behind the great princes of the nineteenth century stand the big bourgeois, ‘[b]ehind the big bourgeoisie stand the proletarians’ – the valiant author says: ‘I am sorry to state that in this [sentence] too much honour was given to the German bourgeoisie’.

The revolutionary literature of the proletariat is born to declare shame upon the big bourgeoisie, while expecting to emerge into the light from behind its shoulders.

And what shall we say today of the cowards who have led the workers behind the consumptive shoulders of the petty bourgeois, and assign to them the task of paving the way for the new history?!

In the magisterial alignment of 1525, the Roman church stands on the side of the great feudal nobility, and the first precursor of the great bourgeoisie is Luther, bold only for a moment, and immediately opportunist, conciliatorist; if not with the pope, then with the German dynasties. Against him Engels raises the vivid figure of Thomas Münzer, and shows him, in raising the townspeople alongside them, the forerunner of the modern proletariat, who, in the struggle against Rome, already feels he must strike at Luther, the German bourgeoisie ready to ally itself with reaction, on whose historical thread the Lutherans of the twentieth century come today to dialogue in the Vatican.

Our Teacher wants it to be known how to interweave the history of superstructures, even those among them that are the religions, with the history of economic modes of production. To lead us to his thread, which here runs through Luther, let us stitch back together a few sections of our rough canvas, from the students’ desk.

As the religious Reformation would be born revolutionary, so the Christian religion was born revolutionary, and its initial intuitions are conquests, to use this overused word, of toiling Humanity, but not eternal conquests for future history. This is not so for Christianity, nor will it be so for its bourgeois Reforms, which open up the modern era, nor will it be so even for capitalist science, which is born with them and for a long time fights against Rome, only to be shipwrecked conciliatorily, together with Art, as good old Carducci would say. Only for our doctrine, born as Engels has just outlined, will there never be a passage to the rearguard.

In Israel, Christ or other great leaders of the masses lead a social revolution, which also takes the form of a war of religions, if the first or one of the great battles against clericalism was the one that swept away scribes and Pharisees. The animistic legend covers the claim that living man cannot be a passive subject of property rights. The revolution overthrows the Roman Empire, heir to the typical form of democracy that placed the majority of men outside humanity and democracy. This plague of history, now blessed even by the Christian God who had once known had to exorcise it, will haunt us for millennia. In this bloody struggle, the slavery form falls, and not thanks to the formula of non-resistance, for the vengeance of the multitudes of those immolated ad bestias will be carried out, by armed hand, by the young vigour of the barbarians, who have always regenerated morbid civilisations.

With long events that do not fit into an elementary outline, the Church of Christ, established in Rome at the head of the world, comes to terms with all the Caesars, as its ancient doctrine, of classical or barbarian origin, required. The new feudal form in which Europe is organised (not because of the supposed medieval sleep, in which human gestation was far higher than that boasted by the centuries of enlightened science and venal technology) is consecrated in a system in which the Church of Rome is at the heart: a magnificent doctrinal system of Thomistic theology, a monopoly of schooling, culture, and language. At the dawn of the humanistic Renaissance and the anti-papal Reforms, anticipating the capitalist and mercantile form of production in its irrepressible turgor, the Vatican Church fights against it: Inquisition, with burnings and torture at the dawn of modern times: and, in its full development, in the mid-century in which Engels was writing, Syllabus, with the repression of science, and of the then daring, now timid anti-faith philosophies.

Luther signifies the historical break with this course, but it is not a theological, philosophical, or literary matter. It is the bold threat, at its inception, of the new bourgeois order against that of the monarchies of divine right propped up by nobles and prelates.

The Roman pope, Luther, and Münzer, represent for Engels not only three parties in Germany at the time, but three modes, three forms of history that cannot be stopped in its overwhelming, iconoclastic destruction of temples.

* * *

We hear of Luther: ‘[T]he first moment of the struggle demanded that all opposing elements be united, the most aggressive revolutionary energy be utilised and the totality of the existing heresies fighting the Catholic orthodoxy be represented (...) Luther’s sturdy peasant nature asserted itself in the stormiest fashion in the first period of his activities’.

‘If the raging madness [of the Roman churchmen] were to continue, it seems to me no better counsel and remedy could be found against it than that kings and princes apply force, arm themselves, attack those evil people who have poisoned the entire world, and once and for all make an end to this game, with arms, not with words. If thieves are being punished with swords, murderers with ropes, and heretics with fire, why do we not seize, with arms in hand, all those evil teachers of perdition, those popes, bishops, cardinals, and the entire crew of Roman Sodom? Why do we not wash our hands in their blood?’

These verbatim words of the eloquent Luther are emphasised by Engels.

‘This revolutionary ardour did not last long (...) [Luther] dropped the popular elements of the movement, and joined the train of the middle-class, the nobility and the princes. Appeals to war of extermination against Rome were heard no more. Luther was now preaching peaceful progress and passive resistance’.

Engels quotes a speech from 1520: ‘I should not like to see the Gospel defended by force and bloodshed. The world was conquered by the Word, the Church has maintained itself by the Word, the Church will come into its own again through the Word, and as Antichrist gained ascendancy without violence, so without violence he will fall’.

Doesn’t all this deserve a chair in the 1962 Council?

When the revolt breaks out, Luther at first even reprimands the feudal lords. But as soon as the revolutionary actions of Münzer’s followers become bolder, Luther goes over to the other side.

‘Luther and the pope united “against the murderous and plundering hordes of the peasants”’.

It is time to leave Luther to talk about Münzer. He was born in 1498. Already at the age of 15 he had founded a secret society against the archbishop of Magdeburg and the Roman church. By 1520 he had immense success as a preacher. He studied the medieval mystics and especially Dante’s ‘Calabrian Abbot Joachim, who had the gift of the prophetic spirit’. His followers, to whom he expounded his doctrine in mystical forms, followed him ‘ecstatic, convulsed, and with prophetic spirit’.

He did not use Latin but German. ‘Before even Luther dared to go so far, he entirely abolished the Latin language, and ordered the entire Bible, not only the prescribed Sunday Gospels and epistles, to be read to the people’. It is known that Luther had translated the two testaments from Latin into the vernacular. In this, bourgeois thought was anticipated. Our progressives boast as a great novelty to have abolished Latin in middle schools at this time: this as a fetishistic bow to the modern Technology-Science pair. But wouldn’t it be better to make accessible to everyone a non-specialised and non-technicised knowledge and to use Latin, which belonged not only to the Church but also to the Renaissance, in the uncorrupted age of Galileo and Kepler, rather than enduring interminable Councils and speeches in Latin?

‘[Münzer] did not, however, preach quiet debate and peaceful progress, as Luther had begun to do at that time, but he continued the early violent preachments of Luther, appealing to the princes of Saxony and the people to rise in arms against the Roman priests. “Is it not Christ who said: ‘I have come to bring, not peace, but the sword’? What can you [the princes of Saxony] do with that sword? You can do only one thing: If you wish to be the servants of God, you must drive out and destroy the evil ones who stand in the way of the Gospel. Christ ordered very earnestly (Luke 19:27): ‘But these mine enemies, that would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me’. Do not resort to empty assertions that the power of God could do it without aid of our sword, since then it would have to rust in its sheath. We must destroy those who stand in the way of God’s revelation, we must do it mercilessly, as Hezekiah, Cyrus, Josiah, Daniel and Elias destroyed the priests of Baal (...) God said in the Fifth Book of Moses, 7, ‘Thou shalt not show mercy unto the idolators, but ye shall break down their altars, dash in pieces their graven images and burn them with fire that I shall not be wroth at you’”’.

But very soon Münzer abandoned the idea of convincing the princes against Rome in the name of God and by means of the Scriptures, of which, as a theologian, he was well versed. First the philosopher arises in him, and then the party man, the revolutionary leader who wants the rising up of the oppressed classes.

We cannot take from the text, to which we refer the reader, the history of the terrible class war of 1525, but it is necessary to draw from it the synthesis of these two aspects of the figure of Münzer, significant insofar as the times were immature.

‘His theologic-philosophic doctrine attacked all the main points not only of Catholicism but of Christianity as such. Under the cloak of Christian forms, he preached a kind of pantheism, which curiously resembles the modern speculative mode of contemplation [in 1850, even bourgeois speculation did not employ the categories of the transcendence of the spirit and of god – our note to Engels], and at times even taught open atheism. He repudiated the assertion that the Bible was the only infallible revelation. The only living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation which existed among all peoples at all times. To contrast the Bible with reason, he maintained, was to kill the spirit by the latter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Bible spoke was not a thing outside of us; the Holy Spirit was our reason. Faith, he said, was nothing else but reason become alive in man, therefore, he said, pagans could also have faith (...) Christ, he said, was a man, as we are, a prophet and a teacher, and his “Lord’s Supper” is nothing but a plain meal of commemoration wherein bread and wine are being consumed with mystic additions (...) Münzer preached these doctrines mostly in a covert fashion, under the cloak of Christian phraseology which the new philosophy was compelled to utilise for some time...’.

‘Münzer’s political doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptions very closely, and as his theology reached far beyond the current conceptions of his time, so his political doctrine went beyond existing social and political conditions. As Münzer’s philosophy of religion touched upon atheism, so his political programme touched upon communism (...) less a compilation of the demands of the then existing plebeians than a genius’s anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had just begun to develop among the plebeians (...) By the kingdom of God, Münzer understood nothing else than a state of society without class differences, without private property, and without superimposed state powers opposed to the members of society. All existing authorities, as far as they did not submit and join the revolution, he taught, must be overthrown, all work and all property must be shared in common, and complete equality must be introduced. In his conception, a union of the people was to be organised to realise this programme, not only throughout Germany, but throughout entire Christendom’.

A doctrine so bold soon proved itself to be no less bold in action.

‘The first fruit of this propaganda was the destruction of St. Mary’s Chapel in Mellerbach near Allstedt, according to the command of the Bible (Deut. 7:5): “Ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire”’.

* * *

The princes took up the challenge, and the peasants answered the call. The history of that class war, which saw formations of tens and tens of thousands of armed men in the field, had bloody battles and destructive massacres on both sides. The peasants razed noblemen’s castles and religious convents to the ground. The princes formed an alliance with mercenary troops (which sometimes, it is notable, went from one side of the front to the other), but first used the weapon of deception and betrayal; there were pacts, armistices, and finally bloody ambushes. The peasants and their leaders fell under mass executions; to avenge the executions of nobles whom they had finished off as a sign of insult, not with the axe but by impaling them on spits.

We have said that the petty bourgeois and city plebeians themselves were unable to support the peasant revolution. This, after heroic and often naive last-ditch defences, was drowned in blood.

Thomas Münzer was only twenty-eight years old when, having fallen into the hands of his enemies, he faced the ultimate punishment without trembling. Perhaps he was not turning his gaze to a god, but to history, which still had to wait centuries.

For this failure of a historical revolution of the German people Engels blames the lack of unitary centralisation in that country, which, if it weakened the feudal exploiters, equally weakened their servants in revolt, despite the fact that the great Münzer had perceived the function of the party in the revolution. Likewise, for Engels, the same occurred in 1848. His words on the last page of the splendid re-enactment deserve to be etched with fire on the foreheads of the cowards and traitors, who everywhere blaspheme, as in Italy by extolling the extortionate Regions: Whoever, after the revolutions of 1525 and 1848, still dreams of a federal republic deserves no other place than the madhouse.

* * *

Luther, who anticipated the capitalist bourgeoisie, broke with Catholic Rome but compromised with the German feudal order and helped it avoid a great liberal revolution.

The situation in 1962 shows that the Church of Rome has closed its sixteenth and early nineteenth century phase and has made a pact with the bourgeois capitalist historical form. Luther can return to the fold.

But Thomas Münzer, who sounded the reveille of an oppressed class, the proletariat, and did not set as its goal the transition to a domination over unequals, will not return there.

Those false representatives of the modern proletariat, who have discarded truths that, in a Münzer, had the power to glimpse a Marx, an Engels, a Lenin, can bow their foreheads incapable of blushing towards the same fold. Those truths of doctrine and of life, today renounced, are class war and the extermination of the oppressor, the dictatorship of the party of the oppressed, the magnificent cycle that rises from Faith (not a useless stage two thousand years ago) to Reason (not useless two centuries ago) to Class Force that overcomes the knowledge of the class of modern tyrants, of today’s vampires, the mercantile bourgeois.

More than the Faith of the Middle Ages and the Reason of the liberal revolutions, the Dictatorship of the Ignorant and the Wretched, which rose brightly in Lenin’s time in the councils of the Communist Revolution, will have to win.

The doctrine of the lower class in economic society is the brightest. Engels offers us another period: ‘The German workers have two important advantages compared with the rest of Europe. First, they belong to the most theoretical people of Europe; second, they have retained that sense of theory which the so-called “educated” people of Germany have totally lost (...) Without a sense for theory, scientific Socialism would have never become blood and tissue of the workers. What an enormous advantage this is, may be seen on the one hand from the indifference of the English labour movement towards all theory, which is one of the reasons why it moves so slowly in spite of the splendid organisation of the individual unions; on the other hand, from the mischief and confusion created by Proudhonism in its original form among the Frenchmen and Belgians, and in its caricature form, as presented by Bakunin, among the Spaniards and Italians’.

This was the assessment of 1874 and the old Engels did not see the collapse of the German proletariat. He did not see its theoretical sense resurge within the, much more illiterate, Russian proletariat. Nor did he see the new collapse of the great light of Moscow, among whose ruins we proceed.

Rome or Moscow, it was said in 1922 when bourgeois totalitarianism first won in Italy, the only alternative to the failed victory of red totalitarianism, which we were aiming for.

Rome and Moscow. Let such be the motto of today. On all sides in this epoch of degeneration, people blaspheme their own faiths in order to devise hybrid fronts. All are updaters of their own tablets, and the historical reasons for this are in any case clear, along the line we have sketched here. The political front of all traitors to the proletarian doctrine is equivalent to the front of all religions. An auto da fé of all Bibles flares up, and the new formulations are of an equal flavour. Just as the Italian road to socialism and the coexistence of capitalism and socialism has been codified at the Council (as they say) as a new dogma, perhaps Mary Mediatrix and a fourth person of the Trinity may be.

At times the previous Pontiff in his allocutions lashes out at unrestrained plutocratic greed, and many manifestations of capitalism, the most inhuman of forms of production, which those who believe in God should consider the most irreligious.

Today, Byzantine skill no less than that of Moscow is displayed and what is written is changed because it is a compromise between all Christian churches and the powers of capitalism, among which Russia has no reason not to take sides. Key to the economic substructures!

Medieval Faith and modern Reason have been reconciled, and not only here; in a hundred proclamations of the ‘free world’ from Wilson to Roosevelt, to whose Atlantic homilies Stalin agreed to bow.

We have no partisan preference for democratic secularism over papal clericalism, we only provide a historical account of the transition from Faith to Reason. But we also hope for the downfall of scientific reason, vile simony of the capitalist form, and we cry out in this sinister atmosphere to the proletariat: Not Christian faith, not bourgeois science, but the dictatorship of your crude, virgin force, which will one day free man from the dictatorship of all darkness!

Afterwards there will be light.