Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion.
Published: Proletary, No. 45, May 13 (26), 1909. Published according to the text in Proletary. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1973,Moscow, Volume 15, pp. 402-413. Translated: Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Issacs. Transcription and Markup: R. Cymbala, B. Baggins, D. Walters, and K. Goins.
