The purpose of this article is to say:
- Religious art, myth, rituals, symbols and techniques for altering states of consciousness should be taken over by socialists and used to our benefit.
- The Knights of Labor and some socialists the 19th century knew how to do this and we must learn from them.
Plan for the article
The plan of this article is first to ask if socialism is a religion. My response if that I don't think it's a religion. Then I will examine the characteristics of romantic socialism in the first half and second half of the 19th century. I then turn to the Christian mythology of the Bible, the positivism and the religion of humanity and lastly the pagan claims of Jules Michelet and the work of Ricard Wagner. I then discuss socialist art, including the work of William Morris and William Crane. Next, I examine the political application or romantic socialism to the organization of the Knights of Labor.
In the last part of my article, I will discuss how romantic socialism was gradually replaced by modernist socialism. I close with a discussion of how romantic socialism missed the boat by relying on the slave religion of Christianity for its inspiration rather than a pagan tradition which is much more consistent with the anti-authoritarian nature of romantic socialism.
Is socialism a religion?
There is a beehive of conservatives who were all too happy to claim that, contrary to its atheist claims, socialism is a religion in its own right. In the Psychology of Socialism, Le Bon points out many quasi-religious phenomena of socialism like feasts, saints, martyrs, canonical texts, revolutionary myths, holy symbols and ritualized speech. Georges Sorel argued that the value of socialism does not rest with its material success or failure. Socialism as a kind of myth which gives people hope. It is fair to say that like any religion, socialism has a list of mythological events - Thomas Muntzer leading the German peasants, John Ball leading the English peasants in England, and Robin Hood (myth or not) robbing the rich to give to the poor. In the 19th and 20th centuries we had the Paris Commune, the storming of the Winter Palace in Russia, worker's self-management during the Spanish Revolution and the life of Che to name a few. Even now, socialism still depends on symbolism - the red rose of the social democrats, the red star of revolutionary socialism and the encircling A of anarchism all show that socialism needs images to inspire.
Modern socialists, especially Marxists, have resisted the idea that it may be appropriate to label socialism as a surrogate religion because they claimed that socialism is scientific. In addition, as a Marxist I would claim that socialism is not a religion because the root meaning of religion is to bind-back, implying that something was lost. What was lost is a community which bound classless, pagan, and tribal societies together. Religion is a social emulsifier designed to paper over class differences. As Marx writes, it is the heart of a heartless world. Socialist attempts to create a classless society are designed to create a real binding, a heaven on earth, a return to primitive communism, but on a higher level. But polarizing socialism to be the opposite of religion was not the way socialists of the 19th century framed things. These socialists understood that religious means could be used to create socialist ends.
Romantic socialism
Romanticism is not an easy term to define and it covers the entire political spectrum.
Arvidsson names five "colors" of romanticism. Blue romanticism is the dreamy, sublime artistic romanticism of Schiller, Shelley and Byron. There is white romanticism which is a religious and clerical tradition of revolutionary romantic lodges, and Christian socialists and the Knights of Labor. This form of romanticism wanted to take the individualist blue romanticism to the masses. Red and black romanticism is the romanticism of the anarchists, Sorel and artistically the symbolists' writers. Green romanticism is the romanticism of the radical arts and crafts - Morris, and life reform movement. Yellow romanticism is what I would call the art-for-art's sake of Oscar Wilde.
1st half of the 19th century
The socialism of early 19th century, what Marx and Engels would have called utopian socialism, began with the experiments in communist living of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. These societies operated on a small scale and combined farming and artisan work, prior to the specialization of labor. Here workers did many more parts of the job than what happened in the specialization of labor in the second half of the 19th century. The emphasis in this community is characterized by Arvidsson as fraternity, intensity, and authenticity. These values were most clearly embedded in the work of Jean Rousseau, John Ruskin and later, William Morris. What made them so different from the socialism of the end of the 19th century was their incorporation of religion with its myth, rituals and art.
2nD half of the 19th century
Surprisingly, the thinker who had the most impact when it came to spreading the expression "religion of socialism" was the person whom Marx characterized as "our philosopher", Joseph Dietzgen. His was a kind of the Feuerbach-inspired religion of humanity. For Dietzgen, this new a new religion has two parts:
- scientific knowledge wherein nature is tamed; and
- science through "magic" - that is, the creative power of labor. It is magic because nature is transformed through work. Work is the name of the new redeemer.
Some advocates of the religion of socialism wished to appropriate socialist hymns, socialist saints, socialist sacraments, socialist rituals and even a socialist Ten Commandments.
Even funeral rites began to be ritualized within the religion of socialism. The great revolutionary socialist Ferdinand Lasalle believed that his political meetings were reminiscent of the very earliest religions. In the early years Wagner, the Viking revivalist, dreamed of creating an opening for revolutionary change with his epic opera. Later on, we will revisit this period and examine the practices of the Knights of Labor. Feeding forward a bit, in the early 20th century Russian authors Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Alexander Bogdanov seized the initiative to create a "god-building" movement. The idea was to merge positivists and left-wing Hegelian religion of humanity, a-la Dietzgen and Wagner.
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