Scepticism, class, and the 'New Atheists'

[rug]

28. I think Lenin's take has a lot more clarity.

In all capitalist Countries throughout the world, the bourgeoisie resorts to two methods in its struggle against the working-class movement and the workers’ parties. One method is that of violence, persecution, bans, and suppression. In its fundamentals, this is a feudal, medieval method. Everywhere there are sections and groups of the bourgeoisie—smaller in the advanced countries and larger in the backward ones—which prefer these methods, and in certain, highly critical moments in the workers’ struggle against wage-slavery, the entire bourgeoisie is agreed on the employment of such methods. Historical examples of such moments are provided by Chartism in England, and 1849 and 1871 in France.

The other method the bourgeoisie employs against the movement is that of dividing the workers, disrupting their ranks, bribing individual representatives or certain groups of the proletariat with the object of winning them over to its side. These are not feudal but purely bourgeois and modern methods, in keeping with the developed and civilised customs of capitalism, with the democratic system.

For the democratic system is a feature of bourgeois society, the most pure and perfect bourgeois feature, in which the utmost freedom, scope and clarity of the, class struggle are combined with the utmost cunning, with ruses and subterfuges aimed at spreading the “ideological” influence of the bourgeoisie among the wage-slaves with the object of diverting them from their struggle against wage-slavery.

From The Bourgeois Intelligentsia’s Methods of Struggle Against the Workers, Prosveshcheniye, No. 6, June 1914.

Every ideology, including religion and atheism, is susceptible to this. Islamophobia and elitism are but symptoms of this. Whenever you see a movement based on division, watch out.