(1818-1883) Social economist, born in Trier,
Germany. Marx's father was a lawyer who, because his Jewish religion caused him
to be deprived of social and occupational mobility, decided to convert himself
and his children to Protestantism. (His wife converted much later after her
mother's death.)
After university studies at Bonn and Berlin, with a
doctorate from Jena in 1841, Marx assumed the editorship of the Reinische
Zeitung , a newspaper opposed to the ruling political system. Because of his
socialist perspective, Marx had to flee Germany. For a while he lived in Paris,
where in 1848 he and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto
and participated in the 1848-1849 revolution. After its defeat, Marx again had
to flee and settled in London, where he began his studies in political economy
that led to the publication of Capital . He lived in London until his
death.
Theory of
Religion
Marx's theory of religion (Marx and Engels 1975:38
f) must be viewed as an aspect of his general theory of society. Like many
others in his era, Marx too was critical of religion. Unlike them, however, Marx
did not seek to criticize the logic of religion as a set of beliefs. Rather, he
proposed that religion reflects society, therefore any criticism of religion
must ipso facto be a criticism of society itself. "Thus the criticism of heaven
turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the
criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the
criticism of politics ." Religion for Marx is a human product. "Man makes
religion, religion doesn't make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and
self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost
himself again." In short, what Marx proposes is that religion does not reflect
man's true consciousness. Religion, as Marx sees it, is a false consciousness;
religion is the product of men, the product of those in power—those who control
the productive process.
Religion comes to divert people's attention from
their miseries, which are the consequences of exploitation.
This passage clearly illustrates Marx's view that
religion is not the creation of the bourgeoisie but the resulting
conditions of the historical systems of exploitation. Given that religion has
existed long before capitalism, its clear that, even from Marx's view, this is
not the product of capitalism. It is the natural consequence of distress, which
includes both transvaluation and ressentiment .
Both Marx and Engels renounced the anarchists such
as the Blanquists and Dühring who sought to use coercive methods against
religion. For Marx and Engels, religion cannot be eliminated until the social
and political conditions that foster it are eliminated.
A concomitant factor is the development of religion
as a compensatory mechanism. This is achieved through the process of
transvaluation (Nietzsche 1927 [1887]). This is the process by which those of
the lower class when faced with their powerless conditions redefine them and
attribute a positive value to those conditions (see Mannheim 1936: 45 f). This,
for instance, is best exemplified in the Christian teachings of meekness,
turning the other cheek, and the desirability of poverty.
But are not people aware of their interests? Are
not people aware that religion serves the interests of the ruling classes? The
answer is obviously—No. It is no because people are socialized into believing
that what they know is the truth. Marx proposes that religion internalizes in
people a set of beliefs that are contrary to their interest but are in the
interest of the ruling class. In short, it teaches obedience to authority as a
condition for achieving future happiness through salvation. Both Halévy (1971
[1906]) and Thompson (1966), for instance, suggest that the rise of Methodism in
England was a primary force that dissipated political fermentation that, in
their opinion, otherwise would have led to revolution. In fact, Marx was even
skeptical of Christian socialism's ability to serve the interests of the
proletariat. He comments that just "as the parson has ever gone hand in hand
with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. . . .
Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priests consecrate the
heartburn of the aristocrats" (Marx and Engels 1968 [1848]: 55). In the
Communist Manifesto , Marx suggests that religion, like morality and
philosophy, must be eliminated if we are to achieve a new political and economic
existence. "Communism," he and Engels write, "abolishes all religion, and all
morality, instead of constituting them on new basis" (1968:52). The reason for
this is the historical evidence that regardless of previous changes in the
productive systems, religion has always supported the maintenance of the
legitimacy of the exploiter and exploited. Thus, to create a truly free society,
religion as a tie to the past must be eliminated.
Religion as the Social
Superstructure
To Marx, religion is one facet of that whole that
he called the superstructure and that is based on and affected by the
infrastructure . Differences in religion occur with changes in the
infrastructure. Thus Marx and Engels proposed that earlier (precapitalist)
religious beliefs arose from primitive man's helplessness in his struggle
against nature, while in the class society it is rooted in his struggle against
man. In man's quest and struggle against his exploiters, the working masses
experience a different form of helplessness—and this experience is what changed
religion and introduced the belief in a better life in a hereafter, the alleged
reward for his earthly suffering. Moreover, Engels suggests in "Bruno Bauer and
Early Christianity" (in Marx and Engels 1975) that Christianity, with its
concept of salvation, reflects the outlook of utterly despairing people, of
slaves who lost their battles with their masters, of indigent people and Greeks
and other nationalities who lost wealth and status.
Religion as a Dominant
Ideology
In The German Ideology , Marx (Marx and
Engels 1976 [c. 1845]: 67) writes,
One apparatus of the transmission of ideas is the
church through religion. Religion adds legitimacy to ideas (by making them
sacred) that enhance the ruling class's economic position and their hegemony.
(This view has been challenged in Abercombie et al. 1980.) The influence
religion exerts on the lower classes is only possible to the extent that they
constitute a class by itself (eine Klasse en Sich) , namely, a class that
has not developed a class consciousness. However, when a class develops
consciousness, becomes aware of its own interests and become a class for itself
(eine Klasse für Sich) , then the consciousness it develops reflects its
own interests.
Marx and
Judaism
Marx's opposition to Christianity was extremely
mild compared with hostility to Judaism. While on the one hand his hostility
toward Jews may reflect a general anti-Semitism that pervaded Germany, and in
fact made the mid-twentieth-century Holocaust possible, on the other hand it
also reflects his hostility to his mother and her family, the Phillips, who were
wealthy Dutch manufacturers. His hostile view of Jews and Judaism is expressed
in 1843 under the title "On the Jewish Question" (Marx 1977 [1843]). This essay
is Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer's study on the emancipation of Jews in
Germany. In the first part of the essay, Marx seeks to solve the problem of the
duality of egoistic individualism that can be expressed in the "civil society"
and the political individual as a member of the state. In the second section,
Marx turns to the question of Jewish emancipation. Here he advocates the need to
emancipate the Christian world, which made the civil world possible, from
Judaism. The real Jew, in contrast to the abstract Jew, is a selfish huckster
whose god is Mammon.
This hostile attitude was not due to his lack of
knowledge of Jewish history. Feuer (1969: 36 f.) writes of Marx, "He knew the
history of the Spanish and German Jews and their decisions to resist economic
determination and to sacrifice their goods for their religious loyalties."
Marx's hatred of Jews in general and Dutch Jews in particular is so intense, so
dogmatic, that it led him, according to Feuer, to the verge of a conspiracy
theory of history that cannot be but a "reaction-formation," an ego-defense
mechanism of an insecure person.
In spite of a number of problems with his ideology
and personality, Marx's theory of society and of religion, while in many ways
controversial, has nonetheless provided great insight into the functioning of
society. While one may not accept his political views, his social theory based
on the interaction between the social infrastructure and superstructure has been
and continues to be an important departing point for the sociological approach
to the study of society and religion.
—Eugen Schoenfeld
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