We Need a Marxist Account That Can Make Sense of Europe’s Reformation
The Reformation was a fundamental transformation in European society, blending religious disputes with political ideology and class conflict. Marx and Engels fully understood its importance for their view of history, and today’s Marxists should do the same.
Philip Melancthon, Martin Luther, Pomeranus, and Cruciger, the four great German Protestant theologians shown working on Luther’s translation of the Bible. Engraving ca. 1860. (Photo12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In 1844, Karl Marx wrote: “In our own day we are approaching an era of revolution analogous to that of the sixteenth century.” Six years later, in 1850, Marx’s comrade Friedrich Engels would address the failures of the 1848 revolutions by writing a pamphlet about the peasant war in Germany — the high point of class struggle in the Reformation era. The movements for religious reform that convulsed Europe in the 1500s had an enormous influence over the thought of the founders of scientific socialism.
There appears to be something incongruous in the fixation. They were both members of a generation of socialists still reeling, with the rest of society, from the French Revolution. Those events had birthed the modern world, and its republican ideals and insurrectionary heroism continued to be an inspiration for socialists. Why reach back over three hundred years to the Reformation — a movement of bible scholars still bearing the mark of the medieval epoch?
The Criticism of Religion
Marx and Engels were of course concerned with German events and searching for national analogies and traditions. But their concentration on 1517 and 1524 has a greater relevance. For Marx, “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism,” and criticism of religion begins in earnest with Martin Luther’s assault on Catholic theology.
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