Thoughts on this statement about Marxism and spirituality?
I’m currently reading The Great Cosmic Mother (published in 1987) by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor.
For context: Sjöö was an anarchist and both she and Mor wrote in the radical feminist / feminist spirituality area. This book is a history of goddess worship and the idea that it was replaced with more patriarchal religions that led to all these other things happening.
I’m on a chapter about Marx where they say the following: “They rightly wanted to save humanity from religious exploitation; but in their narrowing of focus, their economic and class reductiveness, they split the human being into two conflicting parts: material existence versus spiritual existence. This split was just the mirror image of the already existing religious dualism. As dogmatic Marxist communism unfolded in country after country, this split reinforced the same “alienation” of the human condition that Marx had wanted to resolve. It has created the dreary state capitalism of Soviet Russia and its satellites, in which the state works, dourly and mechanically, to enforce its definition of human life as spiritless mechanism. It has given fuel to the propaganda engines of the reactionary systems in all countries, so that the world is ripped apart in a false dichotomy between ‘godless communism’ and ‘divine capitalism.’ For if communism is atheistic, its opponents can claim to be mandated by God, however phony this claim might be.”
I am still learning a lot about Marxism, but I wanted to hear this community’s thoughts on this. Do you think spirituality has a place in a Marxist society? Should it?