Base, Superstructure, and Perennialism: How I Reconcile Religious Tradition and Historical Materialism 

We’ve asked our readers of all faiths to send us brief meditations on what brought them to democratic socialism and/or religion. Some examples can be found here, here and here. In what follows, Jon Hochschartner describes his understanding of Marx and religion.—Eds.

When I first started to form an independent political identity, as a high-school senior in the mid-2000s, New Atheism was ascendant. Politicized spirituality was almost wholly associated with the right wing. Dogmatic atheism seemed to be the price of admission to the socialist Left, and so, with some struggle, I paid it.

However, in recent years, as I’ve faced various personal challenges and the increasingly chaotic world we’ve all experienced, I’ve sought to reconcile a spiritual perspective with my political commitments. Religious tradition and historical materialism are two schools of thought that seem contradictory on a surface level. Historical-materialist analysis divides society into categories of base and superstructure, arguing that the former, which represents the economic foundation, primarily determines the latter, which represents the ideological system. Thus, the classic Marxist view of religion is that, as part of the superstructure, it will wither away as the base changes and no longer serves an ideological purpose.

Friedrich Engels expressed this consensus perspective in his 1877 text Anti-Dühring. “All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life,” he wrote. “When society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage… only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.”

Following the totalitarian experience of the Soviet Union and the way in which state atheism was so often used in Red Scare propaganda, modern-day democratic socialists are still burdened by outmoded beliefs about socialism and religion. U.S. socialist pioneer Eugene Debs has long been an inspiration to me, and I think his example in this respect is a better model for our time. Although he was suspicious of organized religion, he peppered his political commentary with biblical references and had a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth hanging in his cell during his imprisonment for opposing the First World War.

Emma Goldman’s most famous apocryphal quote  goes, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” In a similar vein, I would argue, “If I can’t pray, it’s not my revolution.” This is not only because I feel a genuine pull to spirituality, which I think anyone should be free to pursue, but also because I think government crackdowns on religion of the kind seen in the Soviet Union are indicative of a wider authoritarianism that will ultimately move beyond spiritual communities and affect the whole of society.

I’m not an academic, but  reconciling religious tradition and historical materialism doesn’t seem too difficult theoretically. If we concede that specific forms of religious expression are influenced by a society’s base, then the historical materialist view must acknowledge that at least some people have an innate drive toward spiritual life. It may not be possible for “hardliners” in each school of thought to admit these suppositions, but others should find them easy to adopt. 

For instance, these days, I think of myself as a Christian perennialist, by which I mean I feel most at home in the Christian tradition but interpret it through the lens of perennialism, the belief that all religious traditions are describing a single, universal truth; differences between faiths can be ascribed to different cultural filters through which seekers perceive that truth. Mapping historical materialism over this outlook appears fairly easy. I would argue that these cultural filters, which might be called the superstructure, are largely determined by the base.

Jon Hochschartner lives in Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter: A Biography of Ronnie Lee, Founder of the Animal Liberation Front. He blogs at SlaughterFreeAmerica.Substack.com.