One of the most decadent phases in mature capitalism is the unbridled recourse of broad strata of society to religious manifestations, to forms of exasperated mysticism, in general to the entire arsenal that the irrational, the abdication from the world of ‘reason’ – which cannot be represented other than by the trivial and inhuman paradigm of profit – makes available to a humanity stupefied by the drumbeat of the market and of commodities. Religion remains the great consoler of the single individual, cut off from the species, immersed in a rotting society that rejects and denies every form of true human solidarity.

With the driving and regenerating force of the Revolution, of Communism, eclipsed on the historical scene, the hope in a human future free from the moral and material slavery of the wage-earner betrayed and denied, the religious sense regains strength and ground, with the entire arsenal aimed at conservation, at maintaining the status quo, immobilising every impulse and will to destroy the present order. The Catholic Church, the various and sundry other Churches and religious organisations are then one of the strongest pillars upholding this inhuman and putrescent world, and it is for this reason that Communism is not only atheist, but openly, avowedly anti-religious, and the Revolution fully claims the ancient aphorism ‘religion is the opium of the people’; a phrase which, like all ‘antiquities’, reeks of intolerable harshness to the pandering ears of intellectuals and dialoguers.

For Communism, a ‘religious conscience’ is absolutely irreconcilable with the revolutionary struggle for the emancipation, on this earth, of the working humanity.

This is the Party’s long-standing position on the matter.

But to study, to analyse the material reasons that led to the emergence of religions, to grasp their progressive function, and in some ways, their scientific advancement, is just as necessary in order to define and fully grasp all the terms of our century-long battle against religions, especially those that have developed a considerable and sophisticated theoretical and doctrinal corpus, such as the Christian one.

Even if our materialistic doctrine pays homage to, and looks with admiration upon, the achievement that religion represented for primitive man as the highest form of knowledge, and in more recent times upon the development of individualistic and egalitarian forms of religion, without class constraints, in order to provide a theoretical foundation for the desire to abolish the intolerable pressure of the exploiting and enslaving classes, in opposition to the official polytheistic religions, it nonetheless equips itself in its scholarly work to demolish their theoretical foundations, as a weapon in a battle that will only end with the complete disappearance of all forms of exploitation of man by man.

The study that follows clearly takes up, in a clear and sharp synthesis, the basic themes of our historical and materialist critique of religion in general and of Christianity in particular, according to a method that is unique to the class Party; and although it was written several decades ago, it is still perfectly usable now as our response to the insidious and relentless onslaught of reactionary statements by priests of all kinds.

Religion and science are usually considered two clearly antagonistic manifestations of the spirit. Yet a closer examination leads us to conclude that this assessment does not correspond to the truth. Although they appear so different today, they were born from the same causes and are essentially the same phenomenon, only at a different degree of development; the most primitive religion, the most evolved science.

If human knowledge has been able to reach its current degree of sophistication, it is by virtue of an evolutionary potential of his brain that is infinitely superior to that of the so-called superior animals. This evolutionary capacity is stimulated and actuated by the necessity of providing for one’s own needs, a necessity that operates through a mechanism that, to use a paradoxical expression, can in a certain way be compared to that which man exercises on animals when he trains them. It succeeds in producing in their minds, to varying degrees according to the capacities of the various species and individuals, knowledge that would not have arisen without this stimulant. When he finally succeeded, by virtue of this action, in creating the first technical means to produce the necessities of life, man was by the use of these means, which bring with them the necessity of the division of labour, forced into determinate relations, those and not others, with other men. Individual human societies, which can only then be called such, were thus formed.

Not much different happens in certain species of animals, even lower ones (e.g. bees and ants), which perform work in common. The various members of the organisation that these animals create have various functions and hierarchical relationships with each other and these are always the same. If, in these animals, the development of their societies has not gone beyond this, it is because their intellectual evolutionary capacity has come to a halt. In man, it has continued and continues, and, stimulated by the numerical increase of human beings and the new and increased needs that arise, it is induced to the production of ever newer and richer means of satisfying them, which force ever newer and more complex relations, the realisation of which cannot take place without at the same time being expressed in the form of ideas.

It is in this mechanism of the development of social needs, of social organisations, and thus of the development of knowledge that, at a certain point in the journey of humanity, is formed and appears, at various times and in an almost equal manner in the various groupings of it, that intellectual phenomenon, which, at a certain degree of its evolution, assumes the characteristics for which it is designated by the name of religion.

The first forms of stable social organisation appeared when the nomadic groups, which lived off the food provided by the natural environment, began to settle and cultivate the land. In order to stimulate the vegetative cycles so as to obtain from them more produce, the operations of the primitive farmer had to adapt to seasonal cycles and to rules that the first chiefs and leaders of the tribes had an interest in establishing, enforcing, and making generally recognised. Hence the need to bring attention to the course of the stars, first among which, because of its effect on the climate, the Sun, which in almost all religions is the first of the Gods and one of the strongest. The expression of these rules, having the force of primitive laws disciplining the communities, could not but assume vague, mysterious, and fantastic forms, nevertheless directly arising from a real need and from an experimental procedure. It is not different in the formation of the first sciences; just think of the first astronomical researches of the ancient Chaldeans, or the classic example of the rise from topography (applied science) to trigonometry (theoretical science) its daughter, born out of the need to re-establish, after the fertilising floods of the Nile and the receding waters, the precise limits of the plots cultivated by each family.

The ensemble of all these acquisitions leads to systematising them into the first generalisations, and to this end, the function that philosophy and science have in more recent times begins to be fulfilled by religion, which is originally a hypothesis for explaining what happens between men and in the universe as a whole, and this foundation it also retains at the apex of its development. Its appearance stands to indicate that the human being has reached such a point in his intellectual evolution as to establish the relationship of cause and effect between certain phenomena he witnesses or participates in, and attempts to formulate a theory that can serve to explain all phenomena. If we call science that activity of the intellect that has precisely the task of explaining phenomena, it is evident that any hypothesis that sets out to do so is a scientific hypothesis, even if it is later proven false.

The sciences do not proceed except by constructing new hypotheses which subsequent observations eliminate in whole or in part to allow the construction of new ones. These are possible, and constitute a step forward, insofar as there are previous notions that have served as a basis or as a point of support, even if they are in perfect contradiction with them. The step forward has limits of possibility marked by the knowledge already acquired, not by the greater or lesser genius of this or that other human mind. The new hypothesis, that is, the new doctrine, considered more precise, more exact, more true than that held yesterday as the true one, has not arisen by the thaumaturgic virtue of an exceptional genius superior to others; it is considered more exact, and it is so, not because it has reached or has approached the absolute truth, but because it either succeeds in giving an explanation to phenomena that were hitherto unexplained, or it gives an explanation more acceptable to those minds that, having acquired the most modern notions, recognise as erroneous or inaccurate or incomplete the previous explanations.

To better understand the nature of many phenomena, it is best to observe them at the moment they begin. Having then reached the peak of their development, they very often become overloaded with other elements that mask their genuine original physiognomy. As for religions, it is almost impossible today to recognise their origins by studying them as they are today, at a high degree of development. One must go back to their earliest manifestations and try to reconstruct what notions men had of things and events that served as a basis or starting point for the first religious manifestations.

Those notions must have been very rudimentary when, for example, the first foundations of what became the Greco-Roman religion, with its cortège of gods, goddesses, demigods and so on, began to form. Certainly there existed the age-old observation that there were beings that moved, fed, changed and died, and beings that changed and even died, but did not move or feed. And finally there were beings or things that did not modify and move by themselves and in order to move they had to be transported or pushed by those beings who had the faculty to move.

The idea of motion was among the first to be formed. A significant step in knowledge was the formulation of the hypothesis that bodies such as the Sun and the Moon must be pushed or pulled by beings similar to humans or animals, even if not visible. Once this initial hypothesis, an attempt at scientific explanation, was admitted, even if no longer acceptable today, subsequent lucubrations had to give these beings whose existence had been admitted, the qualities necessary to perform the actions they were believed to perform, namely power, infinitely superior to that of men, and eternity, i.e. immortality. What more is needed to affirm that the idea of divinity had been formed?

And man, still primitive, could not but attribute to these beings the same qualities that he had, albeit infinitely greater, or qualities that were negations of those of man. These powerful beings performed actions that were not all beneficial to men, who judged and judge events by the good or evil they received from them. And these actions of theirs men had to suffer, so they were also the masters of human destinies. If they did harm, it meant that men had induced them to anger and a way had to be found to render them favourable. Already at this moment one is far removed from the first attempts to explain the phenomena men witnessed: to render them favourable, one could only behave as one had to behave with the mighty ones of the earth, to whom are offered gifts and addressed prayers. All this had to be done to an even greater extent, since they were far more powerful than even the greatest powers on earth.

For these intercessory functions the most suitable were precisely those who cultivated, knew, taught these things. The caste of priests was thus created. They also had to be given a house to perform their functions. And thus temples were born. None of the constituent elements of a religion are lacking. Thus arose in the Greco-Roman world that religion that was called paganism, in whose mechanism of production the pure and simple factor of the increase or improvement of knowledge did not act alone: the development of paganism followed that of human events.

But the events are nothing but the vicissitudes of the classes and the conflicts that arise between them and that led in the Greco-Roman world to the constitution of castes distinct from each other by special privileges, beneath which existed the infinite mass of slaves, into which man, once entered, ceased to be such to become, legally, a thing. Following the events does not mean fulfilling the modest office of commentator.

Pagan religion, like all in general, had its impetus from the castes, the classes, the privileged leaders who used it as an instrument of domination, enslavement, and oppression of the subject classes, thus making religion part of the phenomena derived from the class struggle. The more the class structure grew and became more complicated, the more the family of gods grew, their functions increased, and their hierarchy became more perfected, based on the hierarchy that was formed in human society. Men could not and cannot conceive anything else.

If this may have been the origin of paganism, a religious sentiment in the Greco-Roman world, not so was it for Christianity, having found this sentiment already a constituent part of the human spirit for centuries. It was born in the vast world of Romanity in the period of decadence of the slave regime and of the Empire, which was the superstructure and at the same time the support of that regime. It was born as an expression of a rebellion of the oppressed classes and oppressed peoples by that regime, expressing its demands. This ideological complex was later denominated Christianity, because he who formulated it with greater precision was Christ, just as the legend, that is the Gospels, have handed down.

It is irrelevant to our argument whether and to what extent Christ was a historical figure. What does matter is the fact that the oppressed masses, driven by the necessity of their existence to rebel, and incapable of translating this aspiration of theirs except in the terms of a religious image, began to give themselves as guide and as support a being superior to men, a divinity. It was necessary to fight against an arch-powerful social organisation, which had constituted in its own defence a cortège of supernatural forces, that is, of Gods. The God of the oppressed could not belong to that Olympus whose Gods were only and always concerned with helping the oppressors. The God of the oppressed had to be of a different nature from them, and stronger than all of them together. A coexistence of Gods was not possible, with one commanding, friends of one part of humanity, and the others, friends of another. The question arose and imposed itself as to who among them were the true Gods.

On the other hand, it is clear that an early embryonic pre-scientific expression, in keeping with both the knowledge of the leaders and the unculture of the crowds, of the need to overthrow the traditional theocratic regime, failing to translate into an egalitarian postulate that elevated the slave to the level of the master, would be symbolically formulated in the asserted equality of all human beings in an afterlife, and the claim against the oppression of the propertied class was presented, for example, to the naive crowds of the oppressed as the prohibition of the former from the kingdom of Heaven.

This aspect, external we shall say, more passionate and more understandable, takes the upper hand: the struggle that ends with the disappearance of paganism and the victory of Christianity, but which is in essence the precipitate and collapse of the slave regime, takes on the aspect, in the history of humanity, of a struggle of religion. But the Christian God, unique, so powerful as to give victory to the oppressed, cannot only be the God of these ones without being at the same time the master, indeed the creator of the Universe, of which he rules, commands, creates, and directs every manifestation.

At this point in its development, the Christian idea, born as an expression of the aspirations of the oppressed, becomes a hypothesis, a new hypothesis, for the explanation of human phenomena and of the universe, and as such expresses in its developments the events of the society of which it gradually became the ideological superstructure. We do not want here to retrace the complex historical path whereby the Christian religion, born as an ideological formulation of the revolt of the oppressed plebs, and as such rich in revolutionary leaven even if not translatable on the level of a radical transformation of society, became the religion, the ideology of the ruling classes, first of the Roman Empire, of the feudal regimes later, and therefore modelled itself on the concrete needs and structure of these societies, while maintaining the postulate of the abstract equality of all men before God (and therefore of their brotherhood), at the same time validating on earthly life the iron hierarchical division of classes to which it indeed sanctioned as inexorable divine law.

Just as the nascent bourgeoisie struggled against the constraints of relations of production that curbed its dynamism as a revolutionary class, so it struggled in the late Middle Ages and in the beginnings of the Modern Age against the rigid dogmatic Christian ideological scaffolding, against also its world view that jealously justified and theoretically defended the ancient relations between the classes and which found concrete manifestation in the hierarchical and centralised apparatus of the Church. And it was the struggle of modern science against the bastions of dogma and the Church.

Yet, having accomplished the destruction of feudal society by the revolutionary bourgeoisie, it was the same victorious class that made its own a religion that, in its secular codification, was well suited to sanction the inexorable subjugation of the oppressed classes, the new slavery of wage labour. Just as it had reconciled itself with the Church, while destroying so many of its privileges, so the Enlightenment and rationalist bourgeoisie, the creator of modern science, the revolutioniser of the medieval economic world as well as of Thomist ideologies, made the Christian religion its own, appealing to its egalitarian and humanitarian postulations against the old ruling classes and its hierarchical construction against the subject classes.

Modern science, child of the rising bourgeoisie, had already eliminated the necessity of admitting the presence of a superior being to explain the phenomena of the world: nevertheless, as one has seen, it had left religion intact with its armoury of dogmas openly contrasting with that principle: it had allowed it to subsist because, child of the new ruling class, it recognised its necessity for the purposes of social conservation. That principle, recognised on the level of the sciences as an interpretation of the phenomena of the universe, was not transported to the level of human relations, to interpret their unfolding and progressing as products of forces that arise from men as producers and act between them and upon them.

This scientific conception of human relations, to become a dominant idea and an active force, it must be the expression, the thought of a class that, for the necessity of its development, its existence, and therefore its struggle, must make it its own. It is the class that suffers from the new slavery of wage labour that, investigating into its miseries, arrives at this conclusion: just as it is not a supernatural being that governs the world studied and interpreted by natural science, neither are its conditions but the fruit of human activity. And if it is so, it is human activity itself that must heal it. This class is the proletariat.

But to the proletariat, for its life and its function as a revolutionary class, this ideological negating element is not enough: it needs a more complex doctrine, destructive and constructive at the same time. That doctrine is Marxism. Marxism is born in conditions very analogous to Christianity, in fact it is born from the class struggle, and specifically that of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie today, and in function of this struggle. It was born as the ideological expression of the proletarian class, of which it indicates the necessity of the attainment, the path and the manner of this attainment. Marxism exists not because one day there appeared in the world a certain individual called Marx, who set himself to philosophising and extracted from his brain the doctrine that bears his name. Marxism exists inasmuch as there exists, and already existed before, the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The experience and critique of this struggle necessarily provokes within the active, that is, revolutionary, class the formulation of ideas around it. Within the class, even if the first formulators of the doctrine and its greatest theorist do not come from it. It is the class that has initiated and carries out the struggle, whose theorists give the explanation, having accepted and made its aspirations their own (see Prometeo, no. 12, January 1949).

Marxist doctrine, like any other doctrine, finds its foundation in the preceding doctrines and existing historical experiences and conditions. Of the preceding doctrines, some it uses, others it rejects and recognises as erroneous and corrects. It too cannot go beyond the limits that these pre-existing and existing conditions permit. It is a dialectical term in the historical becoming of class struggles; it applies as long as the conditions that gave rise to it have not been modified to the point of generating other developments. It accompanies, guides, and directs the proletariat in its revolutionary struggle until it has accomplished what it is compelled to do by the necessity of its development, which is to destroy the present society, bourgeois society, in order to create through the phase of its dictatorship the classless society.

Marxist critical enquiry deciphers the why of the emergence and constitution of bourgeois society, and the antagonism that exists in it between the oppressed proletarian class and the ruling bourgeoisie. It shows how the very development of bourgeois society, by virtue of this antagonism, creates the conditions for the proletariat to destroy it. The explanation given by Marxism to human phenomena is a scientific hypothesis insofar as it is an explanation of them, and it is the only hypothesis that can be formulated today on the basis of the doctrinal acquisitions that humanity possesses. From the critical examination of the bourgeois epoch of humanity, the theory extends to the interpretation of the becoming of all human societies, whose succession is always the fruit of the struggle of antagonistic classes, created by necessities deriving from modes of production.

But from this explanatory hypothesis of human phenomena, the Marxist conception broadens. The leap forward in the deciphering of the social mechanism and the historical turn was achieved by overcoming the traditional scholastic and abstract conceptions of society, the individual, and justice, and by substituting for this method, which Marx called metaphysical, the investigation of conflicting interests and class wars. Likewise, the natural sciences had progressed in a formidable way by freeing themselves from the Aristotelian and Thomistic immobility of the Heavens, from the absolute concepts of matter and spirit, to research the infinite interplay of the attractive and repulsive forces and influences in all fields of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena.

Hence the general vigour of the dialectic, which counts as the revolutionary destruction of all outdated and fossilised concepts, defended by the forces of authority and conservation. Hence the threat to the modern world, to the bourgeois world, halted in the application of philosophical criticism to the field of the natural sciences, to extend the critique to the field of political economy and overcome its class resistance with the criticism of revolutionary weapons.

The formation of the Marxist conception presents certain analogies with the formation of the Christian one, both in terms of the causes that have produced it and its evolution into a general explanation of the phenomena of the universe. But the content of the two conceptions is not only different, it is antithetical. Christianity was the doctrine of that certain historical period, that is, of the revolutionary transition which determined the collapse of the slave economy and laid the foundations for the society that still endures, despite the immense transformations that followed. It was founded on the existence of supernatural forces.

The Marxist conception, born in a period of vast development of knowledge, which, in the phase of investigation and dissemination, exclude the recourse to the intervention of supernatural forces, is called upon to accompany that revolutionary action of the proletariat that must lead to destroy precisely the society that Christianity has helped to form.

Just as the society in which the proletariat will prevail is destined to destroy the present one, so the Marxist hypothesis or doctrine is destined to do justice to the previous ones and in particular to Christianity, in the same way as this in turn did to the pagan religion. What will remain of Christianity will be the historical memory, the memory of a past fact, just as the pagan religion is today a historical memory, with this profound difference: that in relation to paganism, Christianity was a pure and simple overcoming, both because as an explanatory hypothesis of phenomena it does not go beyond the same concept of the necessity of the intervention of the divine idea and because, as a social action, if it contributed to the elimination of slavery in the classical sense of the word, it has done nothing but contribute to the replacement of this with new and more refined forms of slavery. Whereas, before it, one bought the slave, effectively buying his labour capacity, and gave to him the bare essentials to live on, in the bourgeois society that still harks back to Christianity, it is the worker who no longer sells himself but his labour capacity to the market, and the capitalist who buys it gives him in compensation the bare essentials to live on, that is, to keep his labour capacity efficient. This is the form of slavery that Christianity has helped to create and which today is called wage labour. To the zealous worker, Christianity offers the unfulfilling illusion of a reward after death, the kingdom of heaven, as a reward for his resignation to accept the sadness of present misery.

Marxism, on the other hand, by aiming to destroy precisely this form of slavery with the elimination of wage labour, aims to demolish the fundamental pillar upon which the whole of modern society rests, to create a society without classes and therefore without ideologies that refer to the division into classes and its projection into all fields of knowledge.

The doctrine and practice of the class struggle are at the core of Marxism, but they cannot be proposed in isolation from the reduction of political and historical facts to the economic substructure in which needs are determined and interests are affected. There is no Marxism unless one investigates by the same route the origin of all facts of a moral and cognitive nature. In this investigation, as we have recalled, the historical origin of religious as well as scientific conceptions finds its place, treated as analogous processes neither responding to different spheres nor interpretable outside the field of material and natural relations.

Nothing would remain of the Marxist description of the subsequent historical clash of social classes in struggle if one were to treat the worlds of physics, economics, law, and ideology as separate.

The position of the slave masters who had constructed a theology forbidden to their oppressed servants was usefully opposed by a more evolved mysticism which, by pretending for each individual the same expectation of a life beyond the grave and a judgement on one’s actions, lent itself well to conducting the egalitarian struggle.

When Christian ideology was used to defend the monarchy of divine right and political absolutism, it was convenient for the bourgeoisie, driven by its economic needs, to carry out the critique of all supernatural presuppositions. Having become the ruling class, it did not fail to halt its destructive work in the face of the danger of the collapse of every legal and ethical barrier, of all those systems that change, yes, but remain indispensable to regimes founded on class privileges. It is therefore only with the proletariat’s struggle to overthrow capitalism that a radical scientific critique can be pushed thoroughly to remove all the ideological encrustations handed down by successive class systems.

To want to accept Marxist economic determinism as the key to social shocks in the present world, and thus also in past history, to want to take part in the struggle from the side of the working class and with an anti-capitalist programme, is not remotely admissible where it is claimed that such a position and action are limited to a narrow field and foreign to that of scientific knowledge, of the profession of philosophical ideas, or of religious confession.

Doing so makes it impossible to consider and develop the contrast between the new productive forces, primarily the class struggling to emancipate itself, and the existing relations and forms of production, which for Marx are at the same time the social system, the prevailing law, the State, ethics, traditional ideas corresponding to the justification of the domination of the class in power, and the ideologies constituting the remnants of the defence of even older social systems.

There can therefore be no greater monstrosity than the assumption of an independent and superior spiritual process of a religious or even philosophical nature in which one can participate with manifestations of opinion and even with acts of professed worship, and the contemporaneous adherence to and participation in the proletarian class struggle.

Such an adherence to Marxism is doubly contradictory. Firstly because it obliterates the dependence and derivation of intellectual and emotional processes from the material and economic conditions in which the individual and class live. Secondly because it destroys the historical succession of the social classes in struggle. It makes it impossible to understand how they also deployed in offence and defence their own ideological and propaganda weapons, a reflection of their interests. The formation of the theoretical weapon of the workers’ struggle, a weapon in which we see a force just as concrete as those economic and military ones, is Marxism itself; as Marxism can be nothing other than this revolutionary weapon. Hence it cannot allow itself to be professed by conformists of any kind, by believers in the lies of bourgeois civilisation or even in the remnants of a paradise that the bourgeoisie itself had already considered shattered.