Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle

Louis Althusser once insisted that "we . . . have no religion, not even the religion of our theory, still less that of the goals of history" ("Introduction: Unfinished History," in Dominque Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, trans. Grahame Lock [London: New Left Books, 1977], p. 9). Following Althusser, I would argue, then, that one of the greatest crimes of the Stalinist regimes was precisely the attempt to transform the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin into a new religion of "Marxism-Leninism." Given the disturbing increase of religious and political intolerance around the world today, critical Marxists must strenuously reject such officially sanctioned atheism and insist--as Marx himself did, especially in his early writings--on the strict separation of religion and state. In other words, we should reclaim a political not a metaphysical Marxism.