Excerpt from Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted From the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View
Religion is the opium of the people. The suppression of religion as the happiness of the people is the revindication of its real happiness. The invitation to abandon illusions regarding its situation is an invitation to abandon a situation which has need of illusions. Criticism of religion is, therefore, the germ of a criticism of the vale of tears, of which religion is the holy aspect.
- Marx.
Not only, indeed, is the struggle against religion intellectually useful, but it cannot conscientiously be avoided, for religion is used against the Socialist movement by the possessing class in every country.
But to abolish religion is not to abolish exploitation, because only one of the enemy's guns will have been silenced. The workers have, above all, to dislodge the capitalist class from power. The religious question, and indeed all else, is secondary to this.
The test of admission to a Socialist Party must be neither more nor less than acceptance of the following seven working principles and the policy of Socialism as a class movement:
1. Society, as at present constituted, is based upon the ownership of the means of living (land, factories, railways) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.
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