Communism, Atheism and Mass Murder

Many theists have argued that atheism is responsible for much of the mass murder in modern times.  Many have mentioned Hitler as an example, although he did not profess atheism and seems to have publicly opposed it.  In one debate, a theist mentioned the French Revolution.  Deaths here were attributed to Robespierre, who was a Deist and not an atheist, and perhaps Napoleon, a Roman Catholic.

So it seems that the only part of this mass murder that can justly be attributed to actual atheists is connected with Communism.  Stalin and Mao did indeed profess atheism.  Therefore, anyone who is considering whether publicly declared atheism should disqualify one for holding political office will be interested in whether or not atheism played a role in this mass murder.

Some theists argue that mass murder is more likely to be committed by atheists due to lack of moral restraint on their part.  While it would seem that belief in an afterlife would restrain people from committing atrocities, we also need to examine what gave birth to the murderous impulses in the first place.  By far most murders are committed due to strong moral impulses rather than weak ones.  Murder is most often punishment for some perceived offense.  There is some evidence to indicate that religion may increase the willingness to punish.  Hence atheism could either increase or decrease the tendency to commit mass murder.

Since the two mass murders we are working with constitute a small number of samples that are not in any sense mutually independent, we have little to go on empirically.  We cannot rule out chance or other factors shared between the two events as competing explanations.

For this reason I want to examine Bolshevism to see whether there are any factors that might stand out as explanations for the violence associated with Communism.  We see that the chief tenets are Communism, vanguard party, democratic centralism, Marxist-Leninist atheism, central planning, single party state, new man, and socialist patriotism.  I take these to be given in descending order of importance.  Hence if we find obvious causes of violence in aspects of Bolshevism that appear earlier in this list, then these would serve very well as alternative explanations.

First we have Communism.  We see that this entails revolutionary socialism and seeks to create a classless, moneyless and stateless social order structured on common ownership of the means of production.  Here socialism adds nothing since common ownership of the means of production would be socialist.  Revolution is simply a change in the constitution.  There is nothing about this that stands out as being an obvious source of mass violence.  The social order is completely unrealistic, but that might lead to abandoning the unworkable aspects rather than killing massive numbers of people.

What I think is the best candidate as a source of violence is the idea of the vanguard party.  This idea developed in reaction to Lenin's observation that conditions under capitalism were not leading to class consciousness, but only to trade union consciousness.  In order to counteract this, it was necessary to politically organize the most militant section of the working class.

Democratic centralism means that leadership positions are determined by votes and that there is strict party discipline.  All decisions made by the higher councils are absolutely binding on lower councils and majority votes within councils are absolutely binding on members.  This means that the leaders can expel anyone they want from the party.  This makes it difficult to change the leadership and goes far in explaining how the Bolshevik revolution had the impact of installing a dictatorship.  For me this stands out as a source of violence, although it might not be so obvious to others.

Marxist-Leninist atheism is the idea that the essence of religion should be abolished.  This is indeed a possible source of violence, but no more so than the religious idea that atheism should be abolished.  Neither stance follows from atheism or theism.  Atheism is necessary for one and theism for the other.  It is not immediately obvious whether atheism would have a more serious problem here than theism.  However, this certainly is rightly seen as a potential source of violence within Bolshevism and under subsequent Communist Regimes.  The idea that religion should be abolished is inherently violent.  The idea that it should peacefully pass out of existence is not.  I should point out that this destructive idea goes back to Marx who was influenced by Feuerbach.  Anyone who advocates the ideas of Marx and Feuerbach bears some responsibility to any violence that results if they fail to distance themselves from this aspect of their ideas.

Of the remaining tenets central planning seems to follow from socialism and the New Man seems like fluff, lacking in any real content.  The single party state combined with democratic centralism is almost certainly responsible for dictatorship in the Soviet Union and probably China.  Socialist patriotism also seems like a likely candidate as a form of violence.

Mao modified Marxist-Leninism for use in China.  The differences were the agrarian nature of the movement and a more ambiguous role for the party.  Maoism focused more on the peasantry as a class.  It was less clear whether the party was to teach the people or vice versa.  Basically all of the causes stated above for Bolshevism apply equally to Maoism, and it is not clear that there are any additional factors here.

We see obvious sources of violence here that have no obvious relationship to atheism.  The one feature that is related has a theistic analog.  I contend that we would need an obvious relationship or a strong empirical case to hold atheism responsible for these mass murders in a way that would implicate other atheists who were not directly responsible.  The sample size is too small for us to draw a conclusion from the empirical evidence.

Perhaps there are easier questions to answer, such as whether atheism makes dictatorship more likely as is suggested here.  Unfortunately I'm too cheap to buy the article so I read only the abstract.  I suspect that the association may be due to Marxist-Leninism rather than being an inherent feature of atheism.  The study looks at 100 countries and finds negative effects for Islam and no religious affiliation after controlling for economic factors.  However, this could be explained by a sizable number of Communist countries since Marxist-Leninism is likely to encourage both dictatorship and lack of religious affiliation.

Incidentally, a negative relationship was also found between urbanization and democracy when those economic factors were taken into account.  Here I suspect that the result is due to the fact that urbanization is the result of either economic development of the country as a whole or handouts to people in the capitol city.  The latter case favors dictatorship.  Thus urbanization that is not a result of economic growth will be associated with a lack of progress in democratization.  This doesn't mean that we should oppose urbanization.