The entanglement of Marxism and theology is a symptom: A response to the “Theory in crisis” panel
Tom Canel
Platypus Review 174 | March 2025
THE PANELS AT the 2024 Platypus East Coast Conference in Boston and Cambridge generated a number of interesting threads of discussion. One thread, which I found particularly engrossing, was initiated by “Hegelian e-girl” Nikki Kirigian in the “Theory in crisis” panel.[1]
Noting that the contemporary Left seems mired in a sterile postmodern and nihilistic relativism, reflecting the limitations of the stance of the rational individual, Kirigian argued for a break with the critical rationality of the Enlightenment, and for recognition of the need for transcendent authority, i.e., the need, as she put it, to humble oneself before God. She clarified that she was advocating for the general epistemological stance of extra-rationally yielding to transcendent authority and was less interested in the theological specifics involved. Nikki argued that the Marxist revolutionary party was to be the vehicle for said transcendent authority. Her talk of transcendent authority and/or God challenges the materialist and secular biases found throughout (most of) the Marxist tradition.
In Marx’s writings, communism, naturalism, and atheism are frequently associated with each other. Thus, while it is true that in the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Marx does acknowledge that religion can perform the seemingly benign function of a painkiller, i.e., it can be the “opium of the people.”[2] In texts such as “Theses on Feuerbach,”[3] Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,[4] and The German Ideology,[5] Marx clearly avers that religion (as well as philosophy, by the way) constitutes a kind of distorted thinking that, in its very essence, serves to reproduce human social alienation. It does this by casting what is a product of our own subjectivity as an external force. According to Marx, the emancipatory overcoming of social alienation will therefore involve the supersession of religion through materialist critique and revolutionary praxis. Even in the aforementioned “Contribution,” where Marx does allow religion a palliative function, Marx sees the theoretical sublation of religious thought as necessary for social emancipation. Pre-empting the invocation of these revered texts by Marxist traditionalists seeking to rebut her, Nikki stressed the importance of shedding the Marxist “purity fetish” that excludes religious tropes from Leftist discourse. Her argument seemed to propagate an unabashed recourse by the Left to positions incompatible with Enlightenment sensibilities. It is a bracing argument that merits serious engagement.
As mentioned above, the standard Marxist stance has been taken to see religiosity as irretrievably entwined with social alienation. This alienation, Marxists have argued, needs to be overcome through revolutionary praxis informed by rigorous rational critique. Thus, revolutionary praxis will involve the theoretical, at least, liquidation of religious thought. (Marx nowhere suggests that religious liberties should be abridged.[6]) Marx predicts the inability of non-dialectical and contemplative rationalism to complete this task of supersession, just as Nikki does. In the 11th thesis on Feuerbach, for example, Marx says that philosophical rationalism in itself can only interpret the world, not change it.[7] In Enlightenment thought devoid of the material dialectic, according to many Marxists, this foregrounding of the rationality of an atomized subject reproduces the alienation inherent in bourgeois social relations as much as theism and other religions do. (Our atomization is a product of our social organization, rather than an objective trans-historical fact.) Lukács crossed the “T”s and dotted the “I”s here by arguing that in the historical context of capitalism, only dialectical, praxis-based thought, reflecting the viewpoint of the proletariat as a collective subject, can elide the antinomies and impasses of bourgeois contemplative thought, however rational the latter purports to be.[8] Dialectical materialism, it is argued, offers a viable route beyond both individualistic contemplative reason and religious mystification. The lionization of dialectical materialist thought is linked to the acceptance of a Marxist philosophy of history, according to which the proletariat necessarily enacts social emancipation and enables historical self-consciousness. In particular, the historical necessity of the proletariat constituting itself politically, that is, as a party that drives the revolutionary process, is assumed. However, since the dialectic of history has not unfolded as Marxists expected (there is at the time of writing, I claim, no genuine revolutionary party), the underlying philosophy of history has, for the moment at least, failed to pan out. Its solidity as a foundation for dialectical materialist thinking becomes wobbly as a result. The resort to pre- or non-Marxist epistemologies and metaphysics may become more attractive. Political defeat of proletarian insurgency inevitably has philosophical consequences for Marxists.
Fellow panelist, Spencer Leonard, acknowledged the interest and importance of what he termed Nikki’s provocation. In response, he suggested that rather than “purity,” Marxists should respond to theoretical challenges with an appeal to the claims of orthodoxy.[9] Spencer was forthright in recognizing that any notion of Marxist orthodoxy was necessarily curious or peculiar, so my expanding on its peculiarity should not be taken as an invalidation of such Marxist orthodoxy. I take the orthodox Marxist, according to this interpretation, to be one who feels able to justify a view or a claim, at least in part, by demonstration that it is consonant with the perspective of some seminal Marxist author or other, optimally Marx himself. Orthodoxy here seems to involve the recognition of intellectual authority partly on the basis of the individual’s personal status as a seminal Marxist thinker. Thus, the words of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. seem to hold weight precisely because they are the words of Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves.
This notion of orthodoxy based on the identity of the thinker, obviating to some extent at least a need for empirical or theoretical confirmation, can seem pre-modern, more reminiscent of the way medieval philosophers treated the teachings of Aristotle than the way modern critics are supposed to evaluate ideas. In contrast, the specific identity of the theoretician and their status would not normally be invoked in this way in contemporary natural scientific milieus, when one argues for or against acceptance of claims about physical reality by Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, or even Richard Feynman, for example. Experimental evidence would be demanded, whatever the prominence or professional standing of the physicist whose claims are being considered. Nevertheless, whether a claim is consonant with a classic Marxist text can help determine whether orthodox Marxists take it to be true or not. Any notion of orthodoxy has religious connotations. Indeed, anti-Marxists, and sometimes those on the road to becoming such, discern a theological aspect to Marxist invocations of orthodoxy and cast Marxism as being theological and not rational/scientific, as it ostensibly claims. An example of a seemingly pathological lapse into theological thinking is that of a certain Francois Cohen declaring that “for a Communist . . . Stalin is the highest scientific authority in the world.”[10] Cohen’s declaration came at a time when Stalin was setting Soviet life sciences back by decades through the authoritarian and violent imposition of the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko’s obscurantist rejection of Darwinian theory. Arguably, If we could just reference the ideas expressed to justify our case, we would not resort to appeals to the personal authority of Marx, et al. This authority is in excess of the rational content of their thought. So it appears that Marxists attribute to these authors some arguably ineffable quality of authoritativeness, as another panelist at the event, Benjamin Studebaker, would point out. Some Marxists oppose granting such ineffable authority to the likes of Stalin, but continue to do this to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and selected others.
In his remarks, Studebaker pointed out that when we allow some individual to be our pedagogue regarding theoretical or political matters, we cannot help implicitly acknowledging an ineffably based authority that the pedagogue possesses.[11] Ben invoked here the classical concept of auctoritas,[12] some ineffable property of a person, the discernment of which legitimates the pedagogic and/or political authority we grant them. Ben expressed appreciation of Nikki for raising this issue of authority, recognizing that she was helping us focus on a crucial issue that, as a rule, many on the Left seem loathe, for whatever reason, to address. (To their credit, all three panelists were exceptions that “prove” this rule.) It is interesting to consider to what extent Ben’s recognition of our implicit acceptance of ineffable authority does or does not validate Nikki’s call for an acceptance of transcendent authority. Entertaining the value of the ineffable does not necessarily entail recognizing the reality of metaphysical transcendence or even divinity, Stalinist claims that Bolsheviks are made of a “special stuff” notwithstanding, but it does tend to foreclose a positivist knee-jerk dismissal of such invocations of the materially transcendent. Providing an opening for such notions potentially enables a challenge to what have been taken as Marxist shibboleths regarding materialism, science, and mysticism. Critical theorists have frequently invoked theological considerations in recent decades, whether it be through interest in the theological aspects of Walter Benjamin’s or Theodor Adorno’s thought, Alain Badiou’s notion of revolutions as quasi-miraculous “Events,”[13] or Slavoj Žižek’s recent turn to “Christian atheism.”[14] Nikki’s call for Marxists to humble themselves before God is reflective of recent trends in Marxist thought and critical theory. These trends are part of the legacy of the Left’s many defeats in the last hundred years or so.
The argument could be made that any aspiration to a Marxist purity, such as eschewing all hints of the theological or the religious, is necessarily quixotic. Unalienated thought will not be, at least until social emancipation has been realized, inevitably pervasive. Some Marxists might aver that only full communism will transcend social alienation allowing fully unalienated thinking to develop. Therefore, until the emancipatory process has been completed, we will never fully cleanse ourselves of conceptual residues of alienation, i.e., of theoretical and epistemological distortion. One is tempted to resurrect Lenin’s admonishment that anyone waiting for the pure proletarian revolution, i.e., one inflected solely by genuinely proletarian consciousness, will wait forever.[15] Real revolutions, Lenin argued, will always be impure in terms of ideological content and class composition and therefore “impure” from a Marxist or proletarian viewpoint. Similarly, as far as epistemology and metaphysics are concerned, Marxists (at least in pre-communism) may not be able to escape some form of alienated thought (be it philosophy, religion, or something else), at least not before the revolution.
In his 1982 book, Is There a Future for Marxism?, Alex Callinicos brings up that some leading communist philosophers in the 1960s and 70s, such as Roger Garaudy, found it necessary to blunt the materialist and critical edge of Marxism, not necessarily by pursuing a Christian Marxist dialogue at all, but in the manner that they justified that pursuit. Callinicos shows that they argued that the political need for opposing religious mystification had passed and that it now behooved Marxists to attend to Christian philosophers such as Pere Teilhard de Chardin.[16]
In previous decades, as we have noted, the international Communist movement had accepted dogmatically Soviet pseudoscience, denying the truth of Darwinian genetics,[17] following the personal scientific authority of Stalin in a semi-religious manner, just as “Stalinist hacks” (Callinicos’s phrase), such as François Cohen, had advocated.[18] Such ostensible aberrations from Marxist scientificity can be dismissed as Stalinist revisionism. But what if some form of theoretical revisionism is unavoidable, at least before socialism has been established?
Revisionism is, we are told, the liquidation of Marxist theoretical orthodoxy. I have heard Spencer define Stalinism as the liquidation of Marxism, and therefore designate it as a common form of revisionism. If residues of pre-Marxist thought will be unavoidable before social alienation has been completely transcended, is then significant revisionist deviation in the thinking and practice of socialists not also inevitable, at least before proletarian victory? Amongst the forms such revisionism would be social democratic reformism and Stalinist authoritarianism. (Full disclosure: I myself deviate in the direction of social democratic reformism.)
Rejecting allegedly overly literal approaches to reading canonical texts, Platypus thinkers such as Spencer advocate that we should discern the spirit of the writing we examine and access genuine Marxism through the via negativa,[19] which allows an understanding of what genuine Marxism is to emerge from an understanding of what it is not. Of course, the notion of via negativa has an explicitly theological provenance as well.[20] (Negative theology by Roman Catholic thinkers has, on multiple occasions, buttressed orthodox [with a small “o”!] Church teachings about the nature of God.) Platypus’s interpretative readings according to the “spirit” of the text, even if the reading follows a via negativa, feel reminiscent of the hermeneutic strategies of Hans Georg Gadamer. As one can tell from reading Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method (1960), philosophical hermeneutics of this kind also have deep roots in explicitly theological writings. To acknowledge this disjuncture between Enlightenment methodologies and Platypus pedagogy concerning texts does not in any way negate the value or insightfulness of Platypus interpretations, but it does raise the question of the extent to which one’s Marxism should be limited by Enlightenment norms.
In the months after the East Coast Conference, I came across the recently released The Shadow of God[21] by Michael Rosen. The thesis of the book is well captured by its subtitle “Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History.” Rosen argues that German Idealists transformed their aspiration for divine redemption into an aspiration for historical redemption. Marxism itself could be understood as, in part at least, the culmination of this evolution of German Idealism. However, following the containment of the Russian Revolution in 1917, a swathe of earthly political defeat of proletarian insurgency, has made the prospect of historical redemption seem almost as elusive as that of divine redemption. The sharing of such sentiments may lie behind the increased emergence of theological themes in recent critical theory that was previously noted. The salience of Nikki’s intervention becomes ever clearer. |P
[1] Nikki Kirigian, Spencer A. Leonard, and Benjamin Studebaker, “Theory in crisis” (October 13, 2024), <https://youtu.be/eampanB995A>, hosted at Harvard University as part of Platypus’s 2024 East Coast Conference.
[2] Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1843), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 54.
[3] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), in Marx-Engels Reader, 144–45.
[4] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844), in Marx-Engels Reader, 85.
[5] Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part I (1845–46), in Marx-Engels Reader, 154–55.
[6] Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875), in Marx-Engels Reader, 540.
[7] Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145.
[8] See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923).
[9] Kirigian, Leonard, Studebaker, “Theory in crisis.”
[10] Alex Callinicos, Is There a Future for Marxism? (London: The MacMillan Press, 1982), 55.
[11] Kirigian, Leonard, Studebaker, “Theory in crisis.”
[12] [Latin] (1) A production, intervention, cause; originator, inventor; (2) a view, opinion, judgment, counsel, advice; decree of the senate, the popular will; (3) an example, pattern, model; (4) a warrant, security for establishing a fact, assertion, credibility; (5) right of possession, etc.
[13] See Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2010), 1–14.
[14] See Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
[15] See V. I. Lenin, “The Irish Rebellion of 1916,” in “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” (1916), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm>.
[16] Callinicos, Is There a Future, 55.
[17] Ibid., 54.
[18] Ibid., 55.
[19] [Latin] By way of negation, the negative; the negative way, etc.
[20] Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology.
[21] Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2022).
