Religion. Why capitalist leaders need it!
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The other day a clearly relieved Tory Community Secretary Eric Pickles announced that the threatened ban on prayers at Council meetings had been overuled. Yet what was so significant when in Bideford, (a quaint market town in Devon and hardly shortlisted for as the most likely area for a communistic atheist revolution) an atheist councillors ‘prayer ban’ court victory was the subsequent alarm it spread throughout the politcal and religious establishments and how desperate they were to get theban overturned! After this court victory, albeit temporary, much of the mainstream media peddled all the normal scare stories about how Christianity was under attack and how such a ‘profaine’ ruling was a fundamental attack on our heritage and culture which would undermine democratic debate in the process!Yet what all this nonsense obscures is why religion is so important to our rulers as it is to all political leaderships throughout the capitalist world. Quite simply if the the bulk of the public can be made to accept many religious myths about the existence of a God then they are more prone to accept many of the political explanations and excuses they are regularly trotted out by experts particularly when the state of the economy which affects everybody’s livelihoods is in such dire straits!Instead of encouraging people to theorise for themselves why the likes of wars, recessions, unemployment and poverty occur religion provides a mythological escape route that implies that all economic and social problems are an inevitable feature of mankinds existence rather than being a direct product of political and economic failure. Hence our rulers would like us to believe that by strictly adhering to religious codes and customs life will be palliatively better for them in the long run!Consequently this is why most mainstream politicians require religion to be a regular feature within our education system, why they promote ‘faith schools’ quite apart from why they urge prayers before council or Parliamentary sessions. They’ll argue that prayers do not obstruct democratic debate, yet when it comes to debating real issues like planning laws, council cuts, house building, social service provision etc the spectre of religion and prayer will always be there to haunt pragmatic decision making in some form or another!
Hi Nick Hmmm. I think your analysis is a bit too pat for my liking. Did the rulers of soviet state capitalism require belief in the existence of a god in order to hold down the Russian working class? Nope. Not at all. To the contrary, this was an “atheistic state”. Are we therefore to deduce that atheism leads us unerringly towards state capitalism? Of course not. And it’s not just state capitalism – there are some ardent atheists who strongly support the free market. Indeed, here are one or two ex members of the SPGB I can think of here. Their atheism did not prevent them from arriving at this unedifying way of looking at the world. Ditto religion. Some religions are fiercely critical of the establishment and mainstream religion. If anything this works to undermine capitalist hegemony rather than reinforce it. I think a more nuanced approach to the religious question is called for – one which firmly separates metaphysical or ontological materialism from historical materialism. That latter is the only thing that really counts as far as the socialist case is concerned and religious individuals are demonstrably capable of thinking in historical materialist terms – every bit as much as non religious individuals – notwithstanding their religious beliefs. Isn’t that all that really matters in the end? Cheers Robin
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