Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx

Marx discovered… the simple fact… that mankind must first of all

Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx”¹

If the order of this book were strictly chronological, the theorist we take up in this chapter would have appeared at the beginning, not here in the middle. Karl Marx (1818–1883), the German social philosopher and guiding spirit of the movement that has come to be known as communism, had lived much of his life before the other figures in our survey had even begun their work. His major writings were completed well before Tylor published Primitive Culture in 1871, while Frazer’s Golden Bough did not appear until some seven years after Marx’s death in 1883. It would be still another twenty years before Freud and Durkheim developed their leading ideas. Nonetheless, it makes sense to consider Marx here and not earlier in our survey. For though he wrote in the middle years of the nineteenth century, his ideas gained little notice in his day beyond a small circle of his own radical associates—and the suspicious eyes of public authorities. Only late in his life, after he published Das Kapital² (in English, Capital), the first volume of his huge critical study of economics, did people in the mainstream of thought begin to pay close attention to his views. From that point on, however, his influence did begin to grow enormously, as anyone now alive certainly knows. In Russia, he won a convert in Vladimir Lenin, the major force behind the Russian Revolution of 1917, which destroyed an empire and shocked the world. Later, in the 1940s, the same shock went through China when another Marxist, Mao Tse-tung, led an army of poor peasants to an equally shattering victory. As similar revolts unfolded around the world in lesser lands, intellectuals in both Europe and America found themselves forced to grapple with Marx’s explosive and all-embracing vision of society. Some have

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About Marx, two things must be noticed from the very start. First, as the shaper of communism, he presents us less with a theory of religion than a total system of thought that itself resembles a religion. Though some have said the same even of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the impact of the Marxist creed around the world has been far greater. For a time in our century, Marxist thought in one form or other was the ruling philosophy of governments in many parts of the world, though—since the great collapse of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union—just a few major outposts remain. Marx’s writings are as sacred to some communists as is the Bible to the most sincere and devout of Christians. Communism offers a system of doctrines with authorized interpretations. It has its own ceremonies, sacred places, and sacred persons. It has missionaries who in the space of one century have won (and now lost) millions of converts; and it has conducted persecutions more fearsome even than those of the Middle Ages or Wars of Religion. Communism in essence claims to present not just a broad theory of politics, society, and economics but a compelling total vision of human life, complete with a philosophical stance on humanity’s place in the natural world, an explanation of all that is past in history, and a prophecy of what is still to come.

Second, because Marx’s philosophy is so far-reaching, what he offers as a “theory” of traditional religion makes up a rather small—and not necessarily central—part of his thinking. In this respect, he is quite unlike Durkheim or Freud or our other theorists. The views he held were clear and outspoken, as we shall shortly see; they have also had tremendous influence in the modern world, especially in officially communist societies. But among all of Marx’s voluminous writings, it is significant that not one addresses specifically or in systematic fashion the subject of religion. Though he touches on it often enough in his many books, letters, and articles on other subjects, he almost always does so in indirect fashion, commenting here on religion in general, there on churches, sacraments, or clergy, and at other places on this belief or that practice. Consequently, this chapter calls for a strategy slightly different from that which we followed in the others. Instead of tracing the argument of a single book, as we could do with figures like Tylor and Durkheim, we will have to reconstruct Marx’s view of religion mainly from certain early philosophical and social writings, where he addresses the subject most explicitly, and from occasional comments he makes in later books on politics and economics. With that exception out of the way, we can still keep to our pattern. We shall look first at Marx’s life and intellectual background, next at the overall framework

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Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, the second of eight children in the family of Heinrich Marx, a Jewish lawyer who lived in the small and beautiful Rhineland city of Trier.⁴ During this time, when Germany was not yet a single nation, Trier was under the control of Prussia, the most powerful of many separate German states ruled by Christian noble families. Marx’s grandfathers on both sides were rabbis, but because of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws, his father had converted to Christianity, in name at least, shortly before Marx was born. The father’s gentle personality contrasted sharply with that of his son, who was intellectually gifted but also stubborn, blunt, and fiercely independent; he rarely showed emotion. Though his high school record was unspectacular, Marx found an informal mentor in a cultivated Prussian state official and family friend, Baron von Westphalen, who kindled his early interest in literary classics. Marx later married the baron’s daughter Jenny, with whom he was to have six children.

For a year Marx studied philosophy and law at the University of Bonn, where he did his share of drinking and dueling. He was able to avoid military service on grounds of bad health. He did not become a truly serious student until he transferred to the University of Berlin, where he adapted at once to its thriving cultural life. The university was a great center of learning in a large city, which was itself a gathering place for scholars, government officials, and serious intellectuals, some with very radical ideas. Berlin and most other German universities were at the time dominated by the towering influence of one man, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s system of thought is extremely important for understanding Marx, but it is not easy to explain in simple terms. We will need to return to it later on. Here we can say, in a word, that Hegel was an idealist, a thinker who solved the age-old philosophers’ question of matter and mind by deciding that mental things—ideas, or concepts—are fundamental to the world, while material things are always secondary; they are the physical expressions of an underlying universal spirit, or absolute idea. Any thinker who wished to be taken seriously in Germany had to respond in some fashion to this idealist system. Marx did so by placing himself in a circle of thinkers—known as the Young Hegelians—who were not just disciples but also critics of their master. Also known as Hegelians of the left wing, they claimed that though Hegel was right to see the problem of matter and mind as fundamental, his solution

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This general principle, that what is fundamentally real about the world can be found in material forces rather than mental concepts, became the philosophical anchor for all of Marx’s later thinking. In particular, it underlies two themes that took center stage as his thought developed: (1) the conviction that economic realities determine human behavior and (2) the thesis that human history is the story of class struggle, the scene of a perpetual conflict in every society between those who own things, usually the rich, and those who must work to survive, usually the poor.

Marx had hoped for a career as a university professor, but his association with the Young Hegelians and his own increasingly radical ideas made that impossible. He turned therefore to journalism, first writing for a German political newspaper, then moving to Paris, where he read the works of French social and economic thinkers and began to develop his own theories in depth. This early period was, in fact, the key phase of his career as a thinker. Over an interval of about seven years from 1843 to 1850, during which he moved from Paris over to Brussels, then back to Germany, Marx wrote a cluster of his most important political essays and philosophical treatises. Among these were On the Jewish Question (1843), Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Holy Family: Or a Critique of all Critiques (1845), and others. In these writings he formulated his overarching materialist view of human nature and destiny. In them he also framed his key ideas on history and society, on economics and politics, on law, morals, philosophy, and religion. As for the general perspective he adopted, we can take a clue from the motto on the masthead of one of the newspapers he edited: “The reckless criticism of all that exists.”⁵

What Marx wrote in this period was truly decisive for the rest of his life, but he did not do it entirely on his own. For at just this key moment he met and began a lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels, the son of a German factory owner. Living in England, where he observed the depressing lives of factory workers, Engels, on his own, had developed materialist economic and social views that closely resembled those of Marx. In 1845, Marx and Engels found their way to something that rarely happens among intellectuals: a nearly perfect collaboration. They were men of like minds, but with very different talents. Marx, the more original thinker, served as the philosopher

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and oracle, a man often obscure but also profound. Engels was the interpreter and communicator, always able to express ideas in ways that were clear, direct, and persuasive. Over the years, they visited factories together; they shared results of their studies; they criticized each other’s ideas; they joined in writing for their common cause; and they combined to support and advise new political parties. Together in 1848 they wrote the celebrated Communist Manifesto. Consequently, it is not really Marx alone, but Marx and Engels jointly who are the fathers of “Marxism” as we know it today. Together they promoted their message of materialism, class struggle, communism, and revolution in a way that neither could have managed as effectively on his own.

During this time Marx also tried to remain active in what he regarded as the ongoing class struggle, the battle of workers against their capitalist oppressors. He gave advice and assistance to socialist parties in France and Germany. He was a leader in organizing the Workingmen’s International Association (more simply, “the International”), whose aim was to represent the common interests of the workers, regardless of their national home. All the while he continued his writing. Capital was the first of three volumes on that subject. He continued work on two others, which were in manuscript but not complete, and which were to be part of the great project he envisioned under the general title Economics. His work habits were strange. Some days he would be drunk or asleep, while on others he would work fanatically through the night and into the day despite a house full of noisy children. He was fortunate to have almost limitless energy, and when he wished, he could apply

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it with a mental discipline made of iron. Only during the last ten years of his life did his energies abate, as illness began to take its toll. A timely inheritance and some financial help from Engels had at least taken his family out of poverty. Although he continued to read and correspond with friends, all of his major writing was by then behind him. His wife, Jenny, died in 1881, and two years later he followed. With Engels at the graveside, he was buried in London—largely unmourned and unnoticed in the land where he lived, studied, and wrote for the last thirty years of his life.

Few thinkers have ever presented their main thesis in words as blunt or as disturbing as those of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and

The message of these ringing sentences is unmistakably clear. If we wish to understand what humanity and its history are all about, we must recognize what is truly fundamental. And what is fundamental is the following: From their first emergence on earth human beings have been motivated not by grand ideas but by very basic material concerns, the elementary needs of survival. This is the first fact in the materialist view of history. Everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter. Once these needs are met, others, like the drive for sex, join them. Reproduction then leads to families and communities, which create still other material desires and demands. These can be met only by developing what Marx calls a “mode of production.”⁷ The necessities and even comforts of life must in some way be produced—by hunting and gathering foods, by fishing, growing grain, or entering on some other labor. Moreover, because various people are involved in these activities in different ways, they sooner or later fall into a division of labor; different people do different things. Marx calls the ties or connections among those who divide their labor in this fashion “relations of production.” I may be a boat maker; you may make nets to fish with. In the earliest, simplest form of society, the kind which Marx calls primitive communist, both the boat and the net are commonly owned by everyone in the village, where each shares all things as need may arise.

For Marx this original tribal communism was in a sense the most natural of human organizations. It allowed people to enjoy variety in their lives by participating in a healthy mix of meaningful work and refreshing leisure. They belonged to the group but also knew the worth of their separate selves. A fateful turn occurred, however, once the notion of private property was introduced, and its effects are most markedly evident in the stage of history known as classical civilization. Here, Marx explains, the relations of production are greatly changed. The maker of the boat claims it as his own property, as does the maker of the net. They can deal with each other only by exchanging what they have made—that is, by selling the products of their labor. And before long, by talent, crime, or good fortune, some acquire more and better private property while others are left with little or nothing. In addition, as the mode of production changes from hunting and gathering to the growing of grain, those who happen to hold property find themselves in a position of tremendous advantage. They own not just products but also the very means of production—the land on which crops are grown. Since others do not, the landowners are masters; the rest must fall in as their dependents, assistants, or even slaves. Private property and agriculture—two hallmarks of early civilization—thus help to frame the central conflict of all humanity: the separation of classes by power and wealth, and with it the beginnings of permanent social unrest. Later, in the medieval era, the mode of production remains largely the same. It is agricultural, and the strains of class conflict continue unaltered. The feudal lord and serf simply replace the ancient master and slave. Even among craftsmen, the master artisan and his lowly apprentice reenact the old conflict between the Roman patrician and plebeian.

In the final, modern stage of development, this age-old conflict of classes persists, but it acquires a new intensity and a darker coloring. Modern capitalism introduces a new mode of production: commercial manufacturing; and with it comes also a profound change in the relations of production. Owner and worker are still with us, but the conflict between them becomes more intense. By introducing commercial activity and the profit motive on a large scale, capitalism produces great wealth for some, for those whom Marx calls the bourgeoisie, or “middle class.” (By this term Marx means what we would call today the affluent upper middle class, the owners and managers of corporations.) Meanwhile workers, those whom Marx calls “the proletariat,” are left with almost nothing; they must sell their precious daily labor to the owner-managers in return for wages on which they simply subsist. This grim situation is made even worse because capitalism has also become industrial. It has given birth to the factory, the place where workers spend long, exhausting hours at machines that make objects in huge quantities and bring a fabulous return of wealth—of course only to their owners. The spread of

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In such a world, it is quite clear that communism has a double mission. Part of its job is education: it must explain these realities to people who cannot see them. The other part is action: it calls proletarians everywhere to prepare for revolution. With the commanding voice of an ancient Hebrew prophet, the Communist party denounces the state and the ruling class. It urges workers to organize, to swim with history’s powerful current, to add their weight to its waves, and to throw themselves forward till the day comes for them to crash down upon the edifice of capitalism, shattering its frame and very foundation. Only then, only after this stormy surge of destruction, will genuine freedom and peace return to the social order of humanity. To achieve this paradise, there will first have to be a phase of transition, a preliminary interval marked by what Marx calls the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The poor, once powerless, will be truly in control. Their rule will then gradually give way to the final phase of history, in which true human harmony arrives and the evils of class division and private property cease any longer to exist.

In outlining his great scheme, Marx did not himself invent the concept of social classes or even social struggle; he did feel, however, that he had discovered the connection between the social class divisions and certain stages of economic development, and he believed that he alone had seen how, in the future, this struggle would lead to revolution and the end of classes altogether. But if so, where did he get these ideas? How did he reach the unusual notion of human history moving toward a happy future, but only after passing through a sequence of oppositions marked by ever more bitter and violent episodes of struggle?

To answer this question we must recall Marx’s early years in Berlin and, once more, the influence of Hegel. We have already noticed Hegel’s idealism; he found material objects to be secondary things. He spoke of ultimate reality as “the absolute spirit,” or “absolute idea”—what religious people

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We noted above that Marx rejected Hegel’s idealism. But he did not reject either the concept of alienation or the idea that history moves along by a vast process of conflict. On the contrary, he folded both of these ideas into his materialism and put them at the very center of his own view of the human story. History, he says, is indeed a great scene of conflict, and Hegel is right to see “alienation” at the core of it. But he fails to see just how deeply alienation and historical progress are rooted not in ideas but in the basic material realities of life. Like the theologians with their Creator God, when Hegel speaks of alienation, he thinks chiefly of how the physical world never lives up to the perfection of its spiritual source, the absolute idea, or mind. But in fact, Marx counters, things are just the other way around. It is concrete, actual, working human beings who create their own alienation, and precisely by attributing to others the very things that properly belong to themselves. That is the real alienation and the true source of human unhappiness. In religion, God is

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always being given the credit, the worship, that properly belongs to human beings. In philosophy, Hegel gives his absolute spirit all the praise for what human sweat and toil actually accomplish. Even in politics he makes this mistake; he sees government—the modern nation state—as a great and recent expression of the absolute spirit, with the naturally conservative conclusion that human beings must resign their individual interests and desires to those of a king or some ruling elite. But why do people choose in the first place to give all this glory to God and all this power to kings? Not because there really is a God or because there are people deserving to be called royal, but because something is fundamentally wrong with human thinking—because at the very core of our being, we suffer from self-alienation, a deep sense of inner separation from our natural human character as it ought to be.