Peter Frase

So I found myself (h/t [Gavin Mueller](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/563733500986413057)) perusing Cyril Smith on [Hegel, Marx, and the enlightenment](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/interim.htm), and by way of that Marx's comments on religion. (For contemporary relevance, see [here](https://twitter.com/pefrase/status/563750648005799936) and [here](http://inthesetimes.com/article/13497/oprah_iate_of_the_people).) Smith quotes an 1842 letter (Marx was 24 at this point; what have I been doing with my life?):

> I requested further that religion should be criticised in the framework of criticism of political conditions rather than that political conditions should be criticised in the framework of religion, since this is more in accord with the nature of a newspaper and the educational level of the reading public; for religion itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself. Finally, I desired that, if there is to be talk of philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label ‘atheism’ (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen, that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people.

This applies, of course, to contemporary anti-religious scolds of the Sam Harris/Bill Maher/Richard Dawkins variety. But the term "religion" could, in many contexts, be replaced with "science" or "reason" today. That is, the authority of science or reason is used as a cudgel against those who might have good---though perhaps misguided---bases for questioning whether the scientific process is distorted by the imperatives of capital accumulation. And so too against those who point out that the right to argue from disinterested reason is not one that is evenly or universally acknowledged. (Repeatedly these days I find myself thinking of [this](https://libcom.org/library/how-overthrow-illuminati) as a model for engaging wrong ideas in the spirit of Lenin's ["patiently explain"](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm) rather than a spirit of arrogant derision.)

And Smith points out that reason, and the enlightenment, were for Hegel and many others fundamentally *religious* concepts:

> The atheists, and especially the Enlightenment materialists, who easily settled this entire discussion with the word ‘superstition’, left no more space for subjectivity than their opponents: we are just matter in motion, governed by the laws of Nature, they said. Spinoza had no trouble identifying the laws of nature with God’s will, and Hegel shows that Enlightenment and superstition in the end agree with each other. ‘Marxism’, coming up with ‘material laws of history’, locked the gates still more securely.

Needless to say I endorse the scare-quoting of "Marxism" in this context. The criticism of ideology generally proceeds more constructively by analyzing the conditions of that ideology's possibility, rather than simply confronting it with counter-ideology. And my favored reading of Marx, from "On the Jewish Question" on outwards, is that the enlightenment ideal of disinterested reason is best posited as the *objective* of communists, an ideal that cannot be realized in capitalism, rather than an existing regime to be defended against the forces of irrationalism.