GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

672
ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
absolute justice; there are only those standards of right,
those conceptions of justice which reflect and justify a
particular phase of economic development. Together with
politics, law, religion, and art, morals, individual no less than
social, form a superstructure founded upon circumstance
and modelled to the shape of its foundation. Now circumstance
is, as we have seen, constituted by men's relation
to things and consequential relation to their fellow-men.
That Religion is the Opium of the People* I propose
to illustrate this fundamental concept of communist
philosophy by considering in a little detail two examples
of its application; the first, in the sphere of religion, the
second, in that of literature.
(i) Lenin, as is well-known, described religion as the
opium of the people, 1 and communist Russia is noted for
its hostility to religion. The reason for this hostility is the
conviction that, historically, religion has been used by
the exploiting class as a method for ensuring the sub-
servience of the exploited. Machiavdli recommended that
morals and religion should be used as instruments of power
by the intelligent ruler.1 In the view of communists most,
if not all, of those who have ruled have been in this respect
intelligent.
The grounds for this view, which constitutes a particular
application of the Nietzschean and Thrasymachian attitude
to morals and to religion described in the previous
chapter 8 , are broadly as follows. Society is at bottom based
upon force which the exploiters employ to maintain and
to perpetuate the inequalities upon which they thrive.
But exploitees who lend themselves contentedly to the
purposes of the exploiters are more satisfactory subjects
for exploitation than a working class which must be driven
by the whip. To ensure the desired contentment, the
exploiters invoke the assistance of religion; for religion is
1 The phrase first occurs in the writing! of Charles Kingsley.
See Introduction to Parts II and HI, p. 135.
See Chapter XVI, pp. 626-631.