The Foundations of Christianity: Class Struggle in the Roman Empire

Translated by Saeed Al-Alimi. A number of rankings have chosen to place this book among the hundred most important books published in the twentieth century, and it is still considered today the most important reference on the origin of religions from a historical materialist standpoint. It is one of the most important publications of “Dar Al-Maraya”, the foundational text “The Foundations of Christianity” by the German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky. A book by Kautsky?! This may surprise some, especially those familiar with the history of Western Marxism. For Karl Kautsky is the man whom many followers of Marx and those influenced by him came to know as nothing more than “the renegade Kautsky”, according to the description given to him by the most famous leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Perhaps it is an irony of history that Kautsky’s fame came at the hands of his enemies, and that he is therefore mentioned in countless writings as “the traitor renegade”, which deprived many readers of access to his scholarly output. But this is a great loss. As Saeed Al-Alimi, the translator of “The Foundations of Christianity” and the author of its introduction, points out: “One’s legacy has an ‘objective’ existence independent of the vicissitudes of one’s fortunes, which calls on us not to deny it but to return to it and benefit from it.” This applies most of all, in Kautsky’s case, to “The Foundations of Christianity”, published in 1908. This text is considered the first comprehensive attempt to interpret Christian history according to the historical materialist method. Kautsky linked the nature of the social formation in the Eastern Roman Empire (the slave economy, the oppressed free peasants, and so on) with the appearance of messianic saviours who rebelled against the Roman yoke from standpoints that took a spiritual, redemptive form, while their social content expressed the conditions of class struggle in the ancient East. Although the archaeological and historical research that followed Kautsky’s book (published more than 110 years ago) has taken humanity to an entirely different level, deeper and more precise, in understanding the history of Christianity and the empires of the East, this does not negate the fact that the broad lines of Kautsky’s analysis still retain their theoretical force. Kautsky’s research, and that of other early Marxist theorists, opened the door wide to establishing a significant tradition of historical materialist analyses of the religious phenomenon, which do not reduce it to the economic base of society but at the same time focus on the manifestations of the class conditions of societies in thought, spirit and belief. Even if modern Marxists such as Ronald Boer (as Saeed relays) have things to say about Kautsky’s biases, which led him, for example, to accumulate weak evidence in an attempt to prove the communism of the early Christian community, the truth is that even Boer himself acknowledges that Kautsky was the one who opened the door to a cognitive project whose door has not been closed to this day.