Are you anti-theist? Or Normal about Muslim, Pagan, Christian, etc etc communists and socialists?
I don't believe in the existence of a god or any gods but I don't care what my comrades think about it, and historically religious groups have been powerful parts of and allies to worker movements. I'm going to use this ask as an excuse to talk about them.
Jewish socialists in 19th and early 20th century central Europe made up the backbone of some of the most successful Marxist parties in history. (excluding those who actually hold a monopoly on state power ofc). 'Red Vienna' was their creation, and while some of them were also atheists, a lot of them actually weren't, and they often united both the religious and non religious Jewish communities together to achieve their goals. Rosa Luxemburg is probably the most famous, but Otto Bauer and Victor Adler are names people familiar with this period might recognize. They organized the Warsaw ghetto uprising, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and even established a short-lived Soviet Republic in Hungary under BΓ©la Kun. The reason the Nazis linked Judaism to Marxism so successfully was in large part because there were so many prominent Jewish Marxists fighting against fascism. (it should go without saying that the Nazi myth of "international jewery" is nonsensical, and ofc there were many Jewish capitalists who opposed Marxist movements, and support zionism, but the idea that Marxists and Jewish communities did not have significant overlap is historical revisionism the state of israel has been pushing for decades.)
Liberation theology in Latin America united the working class across national boundaries from PerΓΊ to El Salvador to Brazil. It was behind the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan revolution more generally, and the movement put in the work that eventually resulted in the election of Mauricio Funes in El Salvador and Lula de Silva in Brazil, and was an organzining principle for a truly inspiring amount of direct action on the ground saving countless lives under brutal dictatorships from ChilΓ© to Honduras, where the movement established farmer unions in a country known for being a bannana "republic".
During Lenin's leadership of the USSR in particular, and to various extents over the country's entire history, initially the Jadids, and later through organizations like SADUM, the communist party allied with Muslim groups in Azerbaijan and central Asia. They often did so imperfectly, especially during and after Afghanistan, but there was always a sizeable contingent of Muslim Soviet citizens who supported their government not just in spite of their religion, but at least in part because of it.
In Algeria, both Marxists and Muslims (and Marxist Muslims) united under the FLN to win independence from France, a war in which as many as 15% of all Algerians were murdered by the French. It was (probably) the bloodiest war of independence in history, and only possible because of this cooperation.
And today, right now in Palestine, the DFLP and PFLP, two Marxist-Leninist organizations, work with the Islamic Resistance Movement, even fighting under their command, all in service of creating a future where Palestinians can be free.
Admittedly, a lot of these movements had failures and challenges. Liberation theology has lost most of its radical politics. Judaisim's strong connection with Marxism did not really survive the holocaust and cold war, and was already under serious strain even before 1933. The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan led to them enacting a lot of policies I think were in error, and even before then frequently made mistakes in dealing with central Asian communities generally, including on matter of religion. The FLN would lose and then renounce its Marxist character after the revolution, at least in part due to rampant corruption, and lost power soon afterwards anyways. Today the party's politics seem vaguely left of center but it's hard for an outsider like me to really say.
It is simply an undeniable historical fact that religious people, Marxists, and religious Marxists have done serious work throughout history for the global working class. These examples are not outliers, if they are highlights, there are dozens more to choose from. On every (inhabited) continent, religious people, religious Marxists, and atheist Marxists have fought side by side. If, in the face of this overwhelming historical evidence, I decided that co-operation with religious people was universally a bad idea, I would be forsaking the scientific nature so critical to the continued and historical success of Marxism, not championing it.
2087
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