Nasser Paydar July 2010
The slogan calling for the separation of religion and state was a slogan of the European bourgeoisie during specific historical periods. It was a time when the bourgeoisie had not yet become the dominant political power; the capitalist class lacked a fully organized and developed state apparatus, and the state was not yet an institution fully aligned with the requirements of the capitalist order be it in production, politics, civil society, or other spheres. By advancing this slogan, the bourgeoisie was articulating the genuine needs of its own class domination; it sought an organized, complete, dominant, and all-encompassing rule of capital. The presence of the church and religion within the state posed a significant obstacle to achieving this goal. Marx referred to the state of this era as a “non-state,” implying that, due to their lack of organization, these states relied on religion to complete themselves. At that time, the church and religion did not represent capital, civil society, governance, or the totality of capitalist social relations; rather, they stood in conflict with them, making the slogan of separating religion from the state a genuine necessity for the bourgeoisie. It was a slogan that the working class of that era also welcomed given its own level of strength, efficacy, consciousness, and capacity to exercise power though, naturally, as with all other formal “points of commonality,” the working class imprinted upon it the stamp of its own specific demands, expectations, and existing power. As the bourgeoisie of Europe and North America transcended these conditions and emerged as the dominant economic and political power, it not only abandoned that slogan but also alongside its other weapons deployed religion, the Church, religious delusions, and the power of ecclesiastical authorities as highly effective tools against the anti-capitalist movement of the working masses. During the Paris Commune, when the Communards issued decrees to dissolve the churches and dismantle the religious instruments used to suppress and subjugate the working class, it was the French bourgeoisie that rose with utter savagery to defend the Church and the power of the clergy. Over time, religion adapting to the exigencies and demands of class struggle became a potent instrument of capital’s coercive power, a role that has only intensified with each passing day.
The bourgeoisie holding political power relegated the slogan of the “separation of religion and state” to the archives of history viewing it as a bitter memory from a time of subordination. In subsequent eras particularly following the widespread dominance of right-wing syndicalist reformism and the ebbing of the European working class’s struggle against the wage-labour system it was generally the broad popular movements aligned with the Eastern Bloc or Maoist camps (and, in any case, tethered to “bourgeois communism”) that took up this slogan. Throughout the twentieth century, these latter currents employed the slogan, presenting it to the working masses alongside a host of other goals, dreams, and expectations such as the “establishment of independent national industry,” “unfettered capitalist growth,” “severing ties with imperialism,” the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants,” and dozens of other illusory concepts. As evidenced by their dreams and their entire outlook, the most radical factions within these movements despite their boisterous, pseudo-leftist posturing harboured no fundamental opposition to capitalism itself. They sought to establish a specific type of capitalist planning for the organization of production, politics, and civil society yet they carried this very shoddy, fraudulent, and anti-worker commodity under a false banner bearing the name and insignia of the “socialist proletariat”! For these movements and for their ideal state models (namely, state capitalism decked out in the colours of “socialism”) concepts such as the separation of religion and state, or the realization of human freedoms and rights, were nothing more than empty sloganeering and mechanisms for manufacturing illusions. These movements were themselves deeply mired in religion; they flirted with the Church and pledged allegiance to rabid Pan-Islamist reactionaries to stoke the fires of a nationalist “anti-imperialism.” In this era, capital could not afford to be anti-religious anywhere in the world. Moreover, in certain regions specifically within the societies where the aforementioned movements were rising and rebelling no capitalist state or form of capitalist organization (whether regarding production, politics, or social order) could dispense with the bludgeon of a rabid, naked dictatorship, nor with the full arsenal of medieval coercion, misogyny, and theocratic rule. In these countries, capital lacked the capacity to tolerate even the slightest degree of human freedom or social rights; its value accumulation, self-expansion, and survival relied and continue to rely on the horrific slaughter of workers’ livelihoods, the driving down of the price of labour to the absolute minimum, and the unbridled destruction of any possibility of well-being for the working masses. In such a situation, to speak of capital tolerating freedoms, welfare, and basic human rights or the separation of religion and state, and the like is not merely a lie; it is a monstrous fabrication.
I will discuss a little further down why the slogan of separating religion from the state is not the slogan of the working class’s anti-capitalist movement; but before that, we must pause briefly to consider what has transpired in history. Not only in current circumstances but for a long time now, the state worldwide has been exclusively a capitalist state. It is a state that derives the very fabric of its existence from the requirements of establishing the capitalist order encompassing production, politics, civil society, social relations, and every other aspect of capital. To fulfil its role as the institution of the capitalist order across all these social spheres, this state exploits without limit and by any means necessary anything and everything: every form of savagery, every instrument of bloodshed, every type of barbarism, every weapon of mass destruction, and anything else conceivable (or inconceivable) to the human mind, now or in the future. Religion, nationalism, fascism, racism, Nazism, democracy, social democracy, populist anti-imperialism, various forms of socialism and communism, naked dictatorship, and religious tyranny all of these serve as ready-made tools, strategies, and weapons for capital to defend its own existence and to repel and neutralize the threat posed by the labour movement. Depending on specific conditions such as the nature and balance of class forces, the potential for the labour movement to exercise power, a given country’s share of global surplus value produced by the world’s working masses, and capital’s capacity to withstand the pressure of workers’ expectations and struggles the capitalist system unsheathes one of these weapons to defend capital and crush the working class’s anti-capitalist movement. Here, religion functions as an organic component of capital understood as a social relation just as nationalism, fascism, racism, Nazism, democracy, social democracy, and other forms of organizing the political or social order of capital are all organic elements of the social relation of capital. The Islamic Republic is neither an Islamic revolt against the modern, civilized capitalist system nor an institution designed to “Islamize” the capitalist mode of production; rather, it is a contemporary capitalist state situated in a corner of the hell of wage slavery that views Islam as a highly effective weapon for exercising rule and for drowning any dissenting voice in a bloodbath. Instead of Islam, the Shah’s regime made ample use of a contradictory concoction comprising rabid Iranian nationalism, the resurrected corpse of Mithraic religious worship, a vicious bureaucratic dictatorship, a caricature of modernity, an “Ahura-style” Zoroastrian monarchy, and yet another version of the very same Islam and Shi’ism that exist today. For decades, capital has ruled over workers across half the globe, wielding the weapon of communism. Even now, the capitalist state of China situated in the most putrid corner of the capitalist hellscape does precisely the same thing to workers. The problem facing the world’s workers is not the religious state, but the very existence of a state standing over society. To separate religion from the state, and to abolish the religious state, one must destroy the state itself and wage a struggle against its very existence. This task must be pursued within the framework of the campaign against the wage-labour system. The struggle against the state must be made an integral part of the struggle against capitalism. From the trenches of the war against capital, one must launch a continuous assault on the capitalist state. One cannot say to the bourgeoisie: “Yes” to the buying and selling of labour power, “Yes” to capital, “Yes” to wage labour, “Yes” to the exploitation of labour power, “Yes” to the worker’s total alienation from their work, and “Yes” to capital’s god-like dominion over human existence accepting all this, but insisting on the separation of religion and state as a “condition,” or demanding political freedom and civil rights as “conditions.” Undoubtedly, one *can* say this and shout these slogans at the top of one’s lungs, but such actions belong to the bourgeois opposition, not the labour movement or, at the very least, not to the working class’s anti-capitalist movement.
Capital or the relation of surplus-value production is itself the most terrifying wasteland of God-making and religion-fabricating. Capital is the god of all gods, the supreme power dominating the entire existence of the people of this era; it is the embodiment of humanity’s total alienation from its own free human essence and the architect of the most appalling forms of human degradation stripping people of freedom, agency, and the capacity to exercise their own conscious, creative, and liberated power. No form of fetishism is more monstrous, sadistic, tyrannical, overpowering, dehumanizing, or ossifying than the fetishism of capital. In every phase of its reproduction process, capital cloaks its inversions, distortions, superstitions, the stripping of humans of their essential humanity, and the wholesale slaughter of freedom, rights, dignity, honour, and human existence in the garb of *Sharia*; it constructs this *Sharia* this religion, creed, and idolatry by mobilizing the entire arsenal of ideological warfare against the very fabric of individual consciousness. Capitalist secularism, insofar as it serves capital’s desires, accompanies its power, and acts as its prop, is itself merely a form of capital’s *Sharia*. Such is the nature of capital; how, then, can one demand that it purge its state of religious contamination and confine religion strictly to the private sphere?!! But the issue does not end there. Let us assume that capital is to yield to this demand. The first fundamental question is: under what conditions and in what specific situation would it consent to such a demand? Is it out of fear of a manifesto calling for the separation of religion and state, or upon witnessing the banners of protest raised by secularist movements, that it prepares to retreat and signs a capitulation?!! Or is it, conversely, only the serious, imminent, and actual threat of a total blockage of the channels for surplus-value production the threat of the crushing, powerful grip of the anti-wage-labour struggle exerted by the masses of workers upon capital’s lifeblood, and the threat of capital’s respiratory system being completely paralyzed by the conscious movement of wage-slaves that compels it to take this step and accept this indictment? Answering the first part of the question in the affirmative is nothing but reformist demagoguery. It is crystal clear that any step of retreat by the bourgeoisie including retreating from the use of religion as a weapon requires the exercise of decisive, pivotal power by the working class’s anti-capitalist movement if it is to result in any improvement in the living conditions and combative standing of the labouring masses; and herein lies a second question. If any degree of capital’s distancing from the weapon of religion and from the sphere of religious expression hinges on a powerful, anti-wage-labour mobilization of the workers’ movement; if it is only the crippling and decline of capital’s power under the fire of the working class’s decisive anti-capitalist force that compels it to abandon the weapon of religion along with its laws, decrees, and religious acts of malice and barbarism then why should we dress this direct confrontation between capital and the anti-capitalist movement of wage-slaves this ongoing war of workers against capital to destroy the capitalist system in the garb of a struggle for the “separation of religion and state,” and peddle it in the marketplace of political trade to the secularist movements associated with this or that bourgeois agenda?
Some might argue and indeed surely do that the aim of raising this slogan is not to replace a religious capitalist state with a secular one; rather, the goal is not the continuation of capitalist rule but the establishment of a “workers’ state” and it is *this* state that must bring about the separation of religion and state! One can cobble together all manner of nonsense based on ideas derived from the capital relation and the social relations of wage labour, but there are limits to self-contradiction and the weaving of illusions. What this group is essentially saying is that the working class expects its future “state” to do it the favour of *not* being a Shi’a, Sunni, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Armenian, Confucian, Brahmin, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Jewish, or Babi state or anything of the sort! Some might even step forward to claim that they want their future “workers’ state” to avoid taking on any ideological character. In truth, however, such arguments regardless of how they are formulated or packaged represent not only a realm of sheer contradiction but something truly terrifying and appalling. Above all, such theorizing loudly reveals the horrific conception these individuals or circles hold regarding the very notion of a “workers’ state.” This state bears no resemblance whatsoever indeed, it is the exact antithesis of a council-based organization involving the broad participation of the working class in planning labour, production, and social life; it is by no means an institution facilitating the free, independent, creative, conscious, and egalitarian presence of the working masses a presence opposed to wage labour. On the contrary, it looms over the working class like a terrifying spectre; under the duress of the fear, dread, and terror instilled by its functions, policies, laws, decrees, and overall conduct, workers are forced to constantly contend with it from below acting as powerless, downtrodden, yet protesting wage slaves. It is a state that, in every fibre of its being, remains the hideous state of capital yet these circles and groups insist on labelling it a “workers’ state,” or presumably, a “workers’ state of the transitional period.” Let this “workers’ state” remain the exclusive property of these individuals, their parties, and their sects. The “workers’ state” conceived within the framework of the anti-wage-labour approach is defined by the direct, conscious, free, and equal participation of the working class as a whole in all matters concerning the planning of labour and production (deciding what is and is not produced), the definition of work, the distribution of the product of labour, and all decision-making across every sphere of social life, including welfare, communal living arrangements, and the foundational agreements governing human coexistence. This “state” is the direct product and organic continuation of the working masses’ anti-wage-labour movement a movement that, throughout the era of capitalist rule, has waged a struggle against capital and all manifestations of capitalist existence across every social sphere; a struggle against capital’s imposition of dictatorship, repression, and the stripping away of human rights, as well as against the religions, superstitions, rituals, and ideologies propagated by capital. It is abundantly clear that such a nationwide, council-based workers’ power structure emerging amidst the burial of the wage-slavery system would dismantle every aspect of that system, including all its instruments of repression, suppression, and religious superstition. We witnessed the brilliant radiance of such manifestations during the Paris Commune, despite the Communards’ precarious, exhausted, and unstable position. In the very first moments of seizing power, the Communards decreed the complete dissolution of churches and the confiscation of all assets belonging to these centres of power or bastions of support for the power of capital. Is there truly anything more absurd, contradictory, or delirious than conceiving of such a nationwide council-based organization one that opposes wage labour and serves as a conscious, effective, free, and egalitarian arena for workers’ collective intervention as a state required to pledge adherence to the slogan of the separation of religion and state? Certainly, no rational mind would allow itself to be held captive by such contradictions; for this very reason, the slogan of separating religion from state beyond the demand to replace a religious capitalist state with a secular capitalist one can hold no other meaning, substance, or expectation.
The discussion of the separation of religion from the state has a clear meaning. Being a government is yes, being a religion is also yes, but these two should be separate. There is no doubt that the wide range of proponents of this slogan each have their own analysis and narrative of its content or its contents, but there is much room for debate regarding the relevance or correctness of such a slogan for the anti-wage labour movement of the working class. We want the dismantling of any kind of government. The first condition for the victory of the labour movement over the political power of capital is to end the existence of any kind of government over the working masses and society. We are talking about the immediate replacement of the capitalist state by the All-Union Council Organization of Workers for socialist planning of work and production. We consider ourselves to belong to a class and labour approach that is anti-capitalist in the daily demands of the working masses, the organization of the labour movement, the anti-regime of this movement, the way of looking at the process of class consciousness of workers and in all the ups and downs and twists and turns of its class struggle. From within this movement and across all its battlefronts it wages war against the political power of the bourgeoisie; everywhere, and at every link in this nationwide chain of struggle, it fights against capital and against all the consequences of capital’s existence, including the capitalist state precisely from the vantage point of opposition to wage labour, armed with the weapons, strategies, tactics, and the collective power of unity and organization inherent in that opposition. Across all these fields, ramparts, and arenas of combat, it strives to make the laws, rights, contracts, civil norms, politics, culture, ethics, and religion of capital the targets of an anti-capitalist offensive. Given these characteristics, neither this movement nor this approach can possibly advocate for replacing one form of the capitalist state with another such as substituting a religious capitalist state with a secular one!!
It might be argued that the anti-wage-labour movement advances all its demands that are inherently anti-capitalist precisely within the context of capitalist domination; it treats them all as immediate issues in the struggle of the working masses and places their realization on the labour movement’s agenda. If this approach is valid if it is indeed possible to pursue anti-capitalist demands while wage slavery remains entrenched and dominant then why should we not regard the replacement of a religious state with a secular one as one of these demands, and why should we not struggle to achieve it? Why is it that, even amidst the brutal grip of capitalism, we speak of attaining political freedoms, social and welfare rights, the elimination of gender inequalities, the prohibition of state interference in personal lives, the abolition of child labour, the resolution of environmental pollution, and the end to all forms of “ethnic,” “national,” and “racial” disenfranchisement, yet the slogan of separating religion from the state is treated differently and excluded from the working class’s fundamental, immediate demands? Why are the former all considered anti-capitalist while the latter is not? Why do struggles for the former constitute interconnected links in the fight against capital, whereas the battle to separate religion from the state is deemed to lack an anti-wage-labour character? The answer to this question or these questions is quite clear. We are engaged in a struggle against the capitalist system as a whole including every individual capitalist state; for us, the existence of this system with the entirety of its political, civil, and legal arrangements, its state apparatus, and all its structures represents a catastrophe of exploitation, misery, disenfranchisement, barbarism, insult, humiliation, and the negation of human existence. The relationship of our class to this system is not one of making requests and awaiting their fulfilment; on the contrary, it is the relationship between two hostile classes on opposite sides of a genuine class war: the class whose labour, product of labour, freedoms, rights, capacity for growth, power of social influence, and very human existence have been completely usurped and subjected to the most savage assaults; and the class that plans and executes this entire occupation, aggression, and onslaught. The former is the class that sells its labour power, suffering the consequences of being compelled to do so, while the latter is the class that owns capital, deriving all its authority, dominance, barbarism, and rule from the existence of capital and the social relations of capital itself. No relationship other than war is permissible between these two classes; any interaction, agreement, dispute, ceasefire, or treaty—insofar as it concerns the working class must operate within the precise framework of war fortifications and the strengthening of military apparatus and capacity, serving to pave the way for victory and minimize the damage of defeat. In a state of war, it is not the case that one of the two hostile poles or powers lists its wishes, demands, and expectations while the other simply grants or fulfils them. Such an interpretation of the relationship between the working masses and the wage-slavery system is merely the familiar view held by right-wing and left-wing reformists, as well as the functionaries of trade unions and political parties. The demands of the labour movement can be viewed and dissected through various lenses and based on entirely different, even contradictory, approaches. To reformists including many left-wing reformists, anarchists, and anarchy syndicalists these demands represent a set of social rights belonging to the working masses that capital owners are obliged to honour. This conception of working-class demands is merely a reflection of the very beliefs and ideas instilled by the capital relationship the notion that workers, as citizens of the capitalist system, possess rights and are entitled to certain social and welfare benefits; that the ruling political power represents the interests of all and must address the demands of every citizen, including workers; and that articulating these demands is a legitimate right, requiring capitalists and the capitalist state to devise strategies and policies to realize them in the interest of society as a whole. The anti-wage-labour approach views the matter in precisely the opposite light, adopting a fundamentally different perspective. The demands of the working masses regardless of the sphere, context, level, or conditions are absolutely not a matter of citizenship rights; workers are not citizens of capitalist society. The existing society is by no means *their* society; its laws, conventions, structures, order, rights, and civility fail to address even the most basic of their genuine human and social needs. On the contrary, they serve to ruthlessly eradicate these needs in the interest of capital acting as instruments for boosting profit, mechanisms for intensifying the horrific exploitation of workers, and vehicles for the unbridled expansion and accumulation of capital. Whether a specific worker or a group of workers perceives the situation this way or holds the opposite view makes no fundamental difference to the reality of the matter. Masses of workers may under the pressure of illusion and ignorance, and driven by the lethal goad of capital’s relentless, rampant, and overwhelming indoctrination see things in reverse, viewing the world through the eyes of the bourgeoisie and reasoning according to the logic of the wage-slavery system; but such distorted, illusory perspectives and reasoning do not transform them into citizens of the existing society, nor do they render their social existence congruent or compatible with the system of wage slavery. Regardless of whether they are conscious or unconscious of it, this existence stands in fundamental conflict and contradiction with the existence of capital; the relationship between them is not one of peaceful coexistence, but rather one of war, strife, and mutual negation. Framing workers’ demands within the context of civil, social, and citizenship rights is the approach taken by right-wing trade union reformism and this is precisely what capital desires and enforces. If the worker is to view their situation not through a bourgeois mindset but through the lens of their own reason recognizing themselves as a human being who sells their labour power then every demand they make (ranging from higher wages to political freedoms, social rights, welfare provisions, and the fight against discrimination, as well as any aspiration for a better, freer life for themselves and all humanity) must serve as the stone, cement, iron, mortar, and architectural tools for constructing the ramparts of their struggle against the wage-labour system. The working class’s anti-capitalist movement pursues its immediate demands in precisely this manner. When this movement advocates for free healthcare or, more accurately, services removed from the sphere of monetary exchange it does not appeal to the owners of capital and their state, asking them to graciously grant these citizenship rights out of respect for human dignity or to adopt policies to realize them. On the contrary, it treats such demands as an indictment of capital. This constitutes an indictment by the class that, through its own labour, has produced the entirety of capital and all existing social and welfare resources whereby doctors, medicines, healthcare, hospitals, medical and research institutions, discoveries, inventions, and medical knowledge itself represent but a minuscule fraction of its world of labour and production. Having been deprived of all these, the class declares through this very indictment that it will wage war against the bourgeoisie with the full force of its struggle to reclaim this fraction. The movement against wage labour views its relationship with capital and the content of its ongoing struggles across all spheres of social and human life through this lens. When it raises demands for wage increases, housing, education, childcare, elderly care, or any other welfare provision all to be delivered without monetary exchange it regards these as interconnected links in a passionate, historic class indictment; by advancing them, it declares war on capital and identifies the exercise of united class power as the means to realize this indictment. Around each of these, he creates a world of anatomy and class analysis and explanation, makes these dissections and explanations the fabric of the consciousness of the workers, and turns this consciousness into a weapon for the more effective campaigns of the labour movement for the ultimate destruction of capitalism. The anti-wage labour approach extends the same view of struggle and demands to all areas of social life, including political freedoms, the fight against gender discrimination, children’s rights, and the fight against government power and the like. In these fields too, the workers do not demand from the bourgeoisie or the capitalist state political freedom and the elimination of gender inequality or the guarantee of children’s rights. It is capital that has killed various forms of human freedoms, the ego of being a seller of labour implies a fall from the most elementary freedoms and human rights. The relationship of buying and selling labour is the origin, producer, originator and guardian of all injustices, oppressions and anti-human acts. By its very nature, capital has stripped the worker of every freedom and right, inflicting upon them every form of injustice and oppression. The worker’s struggle for political freedom and social rights constitutes an indictment of capital’s aggression, encroachment, and plunder of their human existence. The imposition of these crimes upon the worker is a necessity of capital’s existence an integral part of its war to survive and precisely for this reason, the worker’s struggle for freedom, social rights, and the elimination of oppression cannot be reduced to a mere demand for civil rights from the system of wage slavery. Securing these freedoms and eradicating these injustices are integral parts of that same class indictment one that encompasses the entire existing reality, must be levelled against capital across every sphere of the working masses’ social life, and must serve as the focal point of the struggle. In short, whenever the working-class movement views the world with class consciousness whenever it truly understands capital and capitalist relations it recognizes that the realization of political freedoms, welfare, and social rights is not achieved by replacing capital’s savage dictatorship with capitalist democracy; rather, it is attainable solely through the process of an organized anti-capitalist struggle aimed at abolishing the very existence of wage slavery. The anti-wage-labour movement is fully aware that the extent to which workers secure any form of freedom or social right is strictly a function of the scope, intensity, and power of their struggle against capital.
Here, too, some will object, arguing that the working masses do not act in this manner. They claim that workers do not start from an anti-capitalist struggle to formulate their demands; rather, it is under the pressure of livelihood needs that they turn to fighting capitalists. This argument wears a polished guise being a caricature of a valid point but, precisely because it is a caricature and divorced from reality, it is not only fundamentally misleading and false, but also in a manner “more Catholic than the Pope” defends the very foundations of capital’s existence and the mechanisms that generate the illusions, distortions, and essential falsifications of the capitalist system. The core of the valid argument which Left reformism has distorted into a caricature is that the working masses do not approach their demands for welfare, livelihood improvements, and political freedoms from a starting point of active hostility toward capital. The actual process is the reverse: they ascend from the latter to the former. This is an entirely valid point; yet, what the reformists propound is not this accurate statement, but rather a distortion a profound, capital-serving travesty and inversion of it. They obscure the vital fact that the workers’ failure to move beyond opposition to capital stems precisely from the myths, deceptions, and false paths fabricated by capital itself. It is the very relationship of buying and selling labour power that, in every moment of its reproduction, generates a world of inversion, ignorance, and self-alienation, feeding the minds and lives of the working masses. It is capital through every conceivable channel, mechanism, and the full might of its arsenals that instils in the worker the illusion that they have sold their *labour* rather than their *labour power*! It is capital that tells the worker that the prevailing reality is a *human* reality, and that its laws, rights, politics, civic life, order, culture, literature, art, knowledge, and all else are grounded in the collective interests of the citizens!
Capital which loudly proclaims itself the government of all classes masks the reality of the savage exploitation of the worker and the horrific, catastrophic subjugation of the working masses; it architects the minds and consciousness of workers using the very materials and mortar needed to reproduce the relations of surplus-value production; it frames the worker’s unbridled alienation from self, from labour, and from the product of that labour as an inexorable decree of nature and history; and it declares the worker’s captivity within the coercive grip of their own ” Dead-end work ” now wielding god-like power to be an inherent law of existence. Mired in the swamp of ignorance, distortion, and superstition that capital has excavated and imposed upon them, the worker fails to formulate their demands based on a struggle against capital; meanwhile, reformists validate this very crime of capital and rise with all their might to defend it. From all sides, voices clamour that workers do not begin by articulating their expectations and demands regarding capital, critiquing capitalism, or waging war against capital; therefore, any attempt to steer the labour movement toward framing its day-to-day demands within an anti-wage-labour charter is dismissed as misguided, utopian, and anarchistic! I have explained elsewhere why reformists act this way, so I will not repeat those arguments here.
With this context established, I return to the slogan of the separation of religion and state. The anti-wage-labour approach does not struggle for the establishment of a secular, democratic capitalist state. Calling upon the working masses to replace the existing bourgeois state with such a state is an integral part of the politics, planning, and practice of certain factions within the capitalist class, alongside right-wing and left-wing reformist elements within and on the fringes of the labour movement. It is precisely these groups that engage in this activity out of dishonesty and with the aim of deceiving the working masses. We struggle against capital, and no aspect of our struggle from immediate demands to organization, opposition to the regime, and the content of our consciousness-raising work can or should be severed from the chain of the anti-capitalist fight. Our goal is not to reform the capitalist state; we view the instilling of such expectations and demands in the working masses as a blatant attempt to mislead the labour movement. It will certainly be argued and a vast number of people, including some who claim to belong to the anti-capitalist movement, do argue that a secular, democratic state is less detrimental and destructive to the labour movement and its stance against wage labour than a rabidly theocratic, dictatorial state. While this claim may appear plausible and well-reasoned, it is fundamentally mired in the quagmire of reformism, completely ignoring or obscuring numerous realities. There is no dispute that a theocratic, dictatorial capitalist state deals the most horrific and savage blows to the struggles of the working class and its anti-capitalist movement; however, this does not imply that the unchecked dominance of other forms of the capitalist state opposing the ongoing workers’ struggle and the communist aim of abolishing wage labour is somehow limited, restrained, or bound by strict demarcations. Every form of the capitalist state possesses its own specific tools, institutions, strategies, and mechanisms designed to stifle and crush the anti-capitalist movement of the working masses. The deployment of these instruments and apparatuses depends on their efficacy and impact; a capitalist state regardless of its name, banner, or label will only employ its specific strategies, mechanisms, and institutions (while eschewing other types of apparatuses, methods, and tools) so long as it remains confident in the effectiveness and potency of those particular instruments. Otherwise, it will inevitably resort to the most rabid and horrific methods. If it can ensure the survival of capitalism through the use of labour unions, a multiplicity of parties, or certain political freedoms, it will have little need for a religious state, a state religion, or religious savagery thereby avoiding the adverse consequences associated with employing such measures. However, should these strategies prove ineffective or lack the necessary material basis for implementation, it will not hesitate to resort to any form of brutality and barbarism, including religious ones. Secondly, we have repeatedly explained on numerous occasions and in various contexts that talk of establishing a democratic, secular state committed to the minimum human rights and political freedoms of the working masses in societies like Iran, within the current global capitalist order, is nothing more than delusion and part of the bourgeoisie’s deceptive machinations against the labour movement. Clearly, the state of the labour movement and the working class’s capacity to exert power in the class struggle will ultimately determine the course of events and dictate what is and is not possible. This, in turn, confronts us with a fundamental question.
The question arises: if the labour movement through mobilization and the exercise of power is capable of preventing the bourgeoisie from wielding religion as a weapon, why should it not exert maximum effort to achieve this goal, and why should it not make the separation of religion and state a key arena of its struggle? This is certainly an important question, yet we have already addressed and explained the answer within this very text. The answer is that the working class’s anti-capitalist movement is an indictment of the very existence of capitalism, and it pursues all its immediate and future objectives within the battlefield against this system. We emphasized that, regarding issues such as political freedoms, social rights, and welfare provisions, the movement neither adopts a path of compromise, negotiation, or appeasement with capitalists, nor does it fixate on merely replacing the current capitalist state with another form of state within the same system. To secure these freedoms, rights, and amenities, it does not allow itself to become entrapped in a campaign to replace an overt dictatorship with a democratic state. To escape the barbarism of capital, the path toward establishing a civilized society and a state loyal to modernity does not involve accepting wage slavery. It does not seek an escape from the poverty, misery, and wretchedness spawned by wage labour by sacrificing one’s meagre assets in a struggle at the altar of the capitalist welfare state. It does none of these things; instead, it launches an offensive against capital itself and against the very foundations upon which capital strips human beings of their freedoms, rights, welfare, and opportunities. It does not call for replacing one government with another; rather, it fights against any state that stands over and above the workers and society. The same applies to the discourse on the separation of religion and state. It does not latch onto this slogan for raising it implicitly validates the legitimacy of both religion and the state but instead fights with all its might against capital and every form of capitalist barbarism, including its religious manifestations. It pursues this struggle by continuously mobilizing and equipping its class forces against the wage-labour system, aiming for the ultimate abolition of the state in all its forms. The working class’s anti-capitalist movement does not seek to replace a religious state with a secular one; rather, it is engaged in a campaign to abolish the state in all its forms a campaign it deems non-negotiable under any circumstances, regarding it as an organic component of its anti-capitalist struggle. Through the continuous practice of this struggle commensurate with its existing organized class power it not only pushes back capital but also cripples its state, targeting the state’s use of religion, or any other weapon, as a focal point of its offensive. For a century, the working class has been suffocated and stripped of its very existence, mired in the foul swamp of clinging to a “democratic revolution” and the hellish mirage of secularism, modernism, civility, and capitalist democracy. To continue on this path is nothing more than acting as a sacrificial offering at the altar of capital at the expense of future, unborn generations of its own class.
Not only is religion inseparable from politics, but the capitalist class cannot be barred through mere conditions, slogans, or utopian fantasies from politically exploiting religion. There is no corner of the capitalist world where religion does not serve, in one form or another, as a weapon of power, a crutch, or an instrument of brainwashing, repression, and suppression used by capital against the labour movement or even as a means for settling internal scores among different factions of the bourgeoisie to further consolidate the foundations of capitalist power. Capitalist governments worldwide particularly as internal capitalist contradictions intensify, economic crises deepen, and the system of wage slavery becomes increasingly vulnerable are moving with ever-greater speed, organization, and planning to wield religion as a weapon against the global labour movement. Religion and Islam in particular have historically served both as a vehicle for the exercise of power by ruling classes and as a tool for factions within the ruling establishment to mislead and derail the struggles and protests of the downtrodden masses who are crushed under the weight of exploitation. From its inception to the present day, Islam has played this role. The Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid power apparatus, the Samanid Emirate, the Ghaznavid Sultanate, the Seljuk and Khwarazmian regimes, and even the Mongol and Timurid rulers all transformed Islam into an instrument of power and a weapon for maintaining Iranian feudal rule. During the feudal reigns of these dynasties, various movements such as the Mu’tazila, Khurramites, Black-Clad (Siyah-Jamagan), Ismailis, Sarbadars, and others also exploited Islam to the fullest; they used it as a vehicle to capitalize on the delusions of the masses peasants, artisans, and the downtrodden thereby diverting their anti-feudal struggles and settling scores with the ruling powers of the time. The militaristic feudalism of the Safavids elevated the use of Islam in statecraft to its zenith, while the Zand and Qajar monarchs and others likewise turned the lethal weapon of Islam, the power base of the mosques, and the role-playing of high-ranking clerics into highly sharp, functional, and effective mechanisms for perpetuating the old feudal order. With the dawn of the twentieth century and the accelerating development of capitalism, the bourgeoisie whether holding political power or acting as the opposition never relinquished the weapon of religion. The “Astan-e Quds Razavi” foundation which by the mid-1960s owned 400 of the most prosperous villages in Khorasan province joined the ranks of feudal lords-turned-capitalists; through massive capital accumulation, it transformed into one of the country’s colossal financial and industrial giants. Likewise, the Shah’s court never ceased to observe the rituals of Muharram, other mourning periods, and religious festivals with great pomp. The clamour of lamentation orchestrated by the bourgeois monarchy mourning the alleged damage inflicted upon Islam by “Islamic Marxists”!! still rings in many ears like a siren. Furthermore, the scars left by thirty-one years of the Islamic capitalist state’s reign of terror marked by the lash, massacres, savagery, and barbarism will never be erased from the back of history nor vanish from human memory for as long as the world endures and a single human being draws breath on this earth. Alongside the bourgeoisie’s various methods of invoking Islam to exercise rule and orchestrate the bloodletting of working-class struggles, we have witnessed and continue to witness reactionary bourgeois opposition factions latching onto Islam to settle scores with their rivals in power. What clearly emerges from all these realities is that not only is religion inseparable from politics, but for the bourgeoisie whether in power, in the opposition, or anywhere else its religion is its politics, and its politics is its religion. One cannot tell the capitalist class to rule but please leave religion aside! Just as one cannot tell this class to govern but “lay down your gun,” if the weapon of religion is to be wrested from capital, capitalism itself must be destroyed. As long as capitalism exists, the only way to remain safe from the lethal blows and grievous wounds inflicted by its religious weapon is to force it to its knees under the pressure of the working class’s anti-capitalist struggle, thereby stripping it of the ability to wield this deadly weapon.
Some argue that, given the current historical juncture and because the bourgeoisie is by no means a champion of the slogan calling for the separation of religion and state it falls to the labour movement, and specifically the working class’s anti-capitalist movement, to take up this cause! On this basis, they insist that wherever this slogan is raised, workers must be the ones constructing a bulwark against wage labour! This assertion is incorrect in every respect. First, at no point in history has the bourgeoisie pledged to anyone that it would refrain from exploiting this slogan or any other in whatever manner it saw fit to achieve its own ends. After all, a class capable of transforming “Communism” into a framework for regulating the buying and selling of labour power, an instrument of capital’s dominion, and a weapon to massacre anti-capitalist worker protests across half the globe why should such a class not also hoist the banner of secularism and call for the separation of religion and state to settle scores with political rivals within its own ranks, to delude workers, or to achieve any other inhumane goal? For any faction of the bourgeoisie, what is fundamental and vital is holding the reins of power in order to secure a dominant role in planning labour and capital production, defending the existence of the wage-slavery system, and imposing this system upon the working masses. What is entirely a matter of indifference to them is the specific weapon or strategy chosen to achieve this goal. In this context, religion plays the same role for them as the deceptive slogan of irreligion might; they are just as likely to champion “Pure Muhammadan Islam” as they are to advocate the ruse of separating religion from the state. Even now, numerous factions within the Iranian bourgeoisie whether under the banner of “Left” or “Right” are loudly calling for the separation of religion from the state; indeed, they do so far more vocally and powerfully than any worker. The claim that the bourgeoisie in the current historical era is unwilling to raise the slogan of separating religion from the state flatly contradicts the visible realities before us unless, of course, the proponents of this view intend to dress groups like the *Fada’i-ye Tudeh *, the Tudeh Party, secular republicans, various monarchist and nationalist factions, and other similar cliques in workers’ clothing and embed them within the working class’s anti-wage-labour movement! Proponents of this theory might well argue that these groups are lying that they chant this slogan but will not act upon it, or that they will replace a divine religion with a form of earthly religion and party ideology. Our response to this argument is: “You are voicing our very own sentiments.” We, too, maintain that they are lying; but what conclusion do we draw from the fact that these parties are being dishonest? That the working class and its anti-capitalist movement should demand the replacement of a religious capitalist state with a secular state based on the wage-slavery system? This is precisely the sort of anti-worker theorizing characteristic of “Left reformism” and the spectrum of parties or movements associated with it. For years, they have been telling workers that the bourgeoisie has lost its capacity to champion democracy, and that it is now the proletariat’s turn to pick up the fallen banner of the bourgeoisie and carry the democratic revolutions along with capitalist civility and secularism to their ultimate fruition. Although this statement borders on satire due to its sheer absurdity, we must not forget that for many circles and parties claiming to represent the Left and the working class!!! it still carries the weight of divine scripture. Thus far, our argument has been that what the proletariat pursues and regards as an organic component of its day-to-day struggle is not merely the separation of religion from the state; rather, it is an offensive against capital across all spheres of social life (including capital’s political power), a continued fight for the total abolition of the state in all its forms, and the paving of the way for a nationwide system of workers’ councils and a communist civilization free from the wage-labour system. To round out this discussion, I must emphasize that a broad struggle against religion against *any* form of religion is also an integral part of this very fight. We do not view the separation of religion from the state as a solution to any of the working class’s problems; on the contrary, we regard the existence of religion in any guise or form as a major problem for humanity. Our struggle against capital is, at the same time, a struggle against religion in all its forms. When we speak of the process of consciousness of the evolution of the workers’ spontaneous anti-capitalist existence into a conscious existence opposed to wage labour, and of the transmission of the communist critique and the abolition of the wage-labour reality of capitalism into the awakened, insightful, and conscious being of the working class and when we view this consciousness as a vital weapon in the working class’s anti-capitalist struggle, it becomes evident that we regard the critique of wage labour and of religion in all its forms as an integral part of this very process of consciousness-raising among the working masses. Religion is a testament to human ignorance and helplessness, entailing a descent from freedom, agency, and human dignity. Religion stands as a barrier to class struggle; it is a weapon wielded by ruling classes to slaughter and massacre workers, while simultaneously serving as a vehicle to lead their struggles astray. Both religion and the state are integral components of capital. One must struggle against capital, against the state, and against religion, while also exposing how any opportunistic bourgeois opposition might exploit the slogan of the separation of religion and state. This book ends here.