‘Religulous’: Methadone for the Masses

Amid an escalating crisis, the difficulties of life under capitalism enter conversations quickly. “I lost my home, but si dios quiere (god willing) we’ll get another one soon…as long as I don’t get laid off,” said a friend, a worker and single mother of two. She is not alone, as the California East Bay Area where she used to live has the fourth highest number of foreclosures in the nation. Today more than ever, workers’ lives are directly under attack, so why such faith?

“Religulous,” a documentary featuring comedian Bill Maher, outlines various reasons why people shouldn’t adhere to religion. He interviews creationists, a Christian congregation, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, ex-Mormons, and others. The film debunks religious claims to morality and history, concluding that believing in religion is like believing in fairy tales. “Religulous” links war, politics, and foreign policy to religion — interviewing a senator and using clips of Bush spouting blurbs of god, country, and freedom in relation to the Iraq War.

The combination of facts and comedic ridicule proves entertaining, but Maher’s elitist cynicism (he’s a libertarian apatheist [apathy + atheist] who is pro-Obama and pro-Israel) solves nothing. “Religulous” illustrates the antiscientific nature of religion, but falls short of an adequate analysis of its function under capitalism. Maher tells us why many religions are absurd, and how believers are manipulated, but he does not tell us why they have a grip on a large section of the workers of the world.

Marx and Engels analyzed the material (real-world) conditions that gave rise to primitive religion. These include fear of death, fear of life, material uncertainty and so on. Under capitalism, as workers’ lives fall under more vicious attacks during crises, these insecurities intensify. In tough times, workers often turn to religion, and as Marx said, “this society produces religion, [which is] an inverted world-consciousness.”

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” My California friend’s religious faith then stems directly from the attacks of capitalism and the uncertainty of our lives. Instead of fighting back, workers withstand abuse. Religion deprives workers of class-conscious fight-back.

Marx concluded that religion can only be uprooted through a complete reorganization of society and the material conditions which give rise to religion. A world free from religion entails a world free from poverty, layoffs, unaffordable healthcare and so on. Workers must have faith in the working class’s ability to understand this reality, not a misplaced faith in religion.

Communism may not bring heaven on earth right away, but it will certainly destroy this capitalist hell where workers are made homeless overnight. Lenin too saw religion as taking hold of workers “chronically menaced by the unforeseeable calamities of capitalism.” He stated “the modern class-conscious worker…contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth.”

To save the world, “Religulous “calls to battle all anti-religious people with ‘better judgment’ to rationally argue away the problem of religion. But it cannot simply be argued or rationalized away. Communist revolution is necessary to get at the core of the real problem. The solutions proposed by “Religulous” are in essence anti-materialist, mistaken, and superficial. Workers, through class struggle culminating in communist revolution, will triumph against an unjust world and religion.

Offering a clear path for revolution, Lenin states, “No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.” Religion is one among many of these dark forces, and the struggle continues. Maher is not as clever as he seems…

There will be bloodied capitalists….

The Academy-award nominated film, “There Will Be Blood,” with a spectacular performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, who won Best Actor, is said to be based on Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel, “Oil!” Unfortunately, it is not. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, borrowed only three aspects of the novel – the setting (southern California), the industry (oil) and the time period (first quarter of the 20th century). He omitted the heart of Sinclair’s wonderful book: an exciting and insightful description of the struggle between labor and capital, and the way in which the owners control government, Hollywood and the press for their own ends. It’s an unintended and welcome consequence of the film’s success that many people are reading ‘Oil!”

A terrific novel, it follows two main characters – J. Arnold Ross, a self-made, hard-driving owner of several oil fields, a millionaire who only has two interests. One is getting oil out of the ground and making money, and the second is the well-being of his son, affectionately called “Bunny.” Father and son care deeply for each other. But as “Bunny” grows up and becomes more socially aware, he becomes close friends with Paul Watkins, a young carpenter who works for Ross Sr. Paul helps lead a strike in the oil fields and is radicalized by left-wing organizers. Bunny is sympathetic to the strikers and begins to listen carefully to Paul’s socialist ideas.

During WWI, the newspapers were filled with crude anti-Bolshevik propaganda, believed by most people. But not by Paul, who sees things clearly from the point of view of the workers:

“Bunny,” he said, “do you remember our oil-strike, and what we read about it in the papers? Suppose you have never been to Paradise [an oil field], and didn’t know the strikers, but had got all your impressions from the Angel City newspapers! Well, that’s the way it seems to me about Russia; this is the biggest strike in history, and the strikers have won, and seized the oil-wells.”

Paul, drafted into the U.S. army, is sent to Vladivostok in the Russian far east, part of an intervention by a dozen imperialist armies aimed at helping the Russian aristocracy, the White Army, overthrow the new workers government. His friend comes back in poor health and when Bunny asks what had been the purpose of his expedition, Paul replies:

“I’ve told you – to break the strike. The biggest strike in all history – the Russian workers against the landlords and the bankers; and we were to put the workers down, and the landlords and bankers up! . . . .[T]hey would get together and call themselves a government, and it was our job to rush them supplies, and they would print money, and hire some adventurers, and grab a bunch of peasants and ‘conscript’ them, and that would be an army, and we’d move them on the railroad, and they’d overthrow another Soviet government, and slaughter a few more hundreds or thousands of workingmen. That’s been my job for the past year and half; do you wonder I’m sick.”

Bunny begins to question the capitalist system that was the source of his father’s and his own wealth. He comes to realize that there is a war going on every day in the factories and the fields. Describing one oil field and the accidents that occurred there as the men raced to produce more oil and more profits, Sinclair writes:

… of all the thousands of men who had worked here, seventy-three out of every hundred had been killed or seriously injured during the few years of the field’s life! It was literally true that capitalist industry was a world war going on all the time, unheeded by the newspapers.

His friend Paul becomes an organizer for the Communist Party, which tells the workers that capitalism needs to be overthrown with revolution. One of Bunny’s college friends, Rachel, is a member of the Socialist Party, which tells the workers that capitalism can be peacefully voted out through elections. Although Sinclair gives Paul all the best arguments, Bunny’s temperament – which is to avoid conflict – leads him to side with the Socialists, as did Sinclair himself. Yet Sinclair is respectful of the politics and accomplishments of the international communist movement.

This review only touches the surface of this powerful and thoughtful novel, which ends with both personal tragedy and a hope for the future.