I’ve been struggling for a while to reconcile my faith (Islam) with communism. I’ve run into a lot of leftists who tell me flat out that you can’t be religious and a Marxist. They quote Lenin, Bukharin, and the ABC of Communism to argue that religion is ‘idealist’ and that any believing communist is a ‘revisionist.’
But recently, someone on this platform responded to one of my posts with something that really stuck with me. They suggested that the leftists I’ve been arguing with might be confusing mechanical materialism with dialectical materialism. They put it this way:
‘A dialectical materialist view would say that somebody receiving a message from a god is part of their material conditions… either way, it’s still a real thing impacting them.’
They argued that a mechanical materialist treats humans like passive objects, reduces consciousness to brain chemistry, and sees religion as just ‘false consciousness’ to be eliminated. A dialectical materialist, by contrast, understands that consciousness is real, that ideas emerge from material conditions and then react back on them, and that religion is a complex phenomenon that can be a force for resistance or oppression depending on the context.
This really resonated with me, but I want to understand it more deeply.
So I want to ask you all:
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In your own words, what is the difference between mechanical and dialectical materialism?
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How does dialectical materialism approach the question of religion, compared to mechanical materialism?
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Does dialectical materialism require atheism as a philosophical commitment, or is it compatible with someone who holds religious faith as a personal and communal practice so as long as they don’t use their faith as their analytical tool or basis for an argument?