Religion
Related: About this forumThe full story: on Marxism and religion (Roland Boer | International Socialism #123)
Posted: 25 June 09
... Most of Marxs discussions of religion appear in his earlier works, especially The Leading Article in No 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung, Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates, Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law (and the separate introduction) and the Theses on Feuerbach.6 Written during his early years of journalism and research, these are only the most substantial. Many of his other works contain comments and observations, but if I listed them here, it would fill up the rest of the article. Capital, for example, is peppered with comments, allusions and references (even to Luther). By contrast, Engels wrote a number of key texts on religion over his lifetime, including Letters from Wuppertal, observations on religious life in Bremen while he was living there, three essays on Schellings lectures in Berlin, a delightful satirical poem on the Bible, extended correspondence with his friends the Graeber brothers on matters theological and biblical, and then a series of major works: The Peasant War in Germany, Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, The Book of Revelation and, towards the end of his life, the influential On the History of Early Christianity. Engels never lost the habit of alluding to or quoting a Bible verse in the midst of his polemic to hammer home a point. These number in the hundreds if not thousands in his works. Two other joint texts are also steeped in religious matters, namely The Holy Family and The German Ideology. Some, but by no means all, of these works have been gathered in various collections over time ...
Given Feuerbachs importance, it is not for nothing that the first section of The German Ideology should be devoted to his work. There is also a section given over to Bruno Bauer. In a number of writings Marx would come back to Bauer, initially to defend him but then later to attack him mercilessly. Even so, many years later they kept in touch and met up frequently in London when Bauer was there. But why attack Bauer? The basic reason was that Bauer achieved a radical republican and democratic position through his biblical criticism and theology. Marx in particular was thoroughly opposed to such a possibility: theology dealt with heaven and was not concerned with earththat was the task of the new historical materialism. For Marx, Bauer was far too much under the influence of Hegels idealist method and in many respects Marxs distancing from Bauer was an effort to come to terms with Hegel. So we find the repeated and often heavily satirical criticism that Saint Bruno Bauer left matters in the realm of theology and thereby stunted his critical work ...
In between his reading of de Brosses and Lubbock, Marx kept adapting the idea of fetishism. He used it for political polemic, but above all it comes into service in his economic arguments, including the categories of money, labour, commodities and capitalism itself. As an example of political polemic, there is an early piece criticising the various decisions by the Rhine Province Assembly (a gathering of nobles) back in 1839. Marx accuses the Rhineland nobles of having a fetish for wood and hares, since they wished to punish the peasants who helped themselves to fallen wood and hares. A little later (1844) Marx would develop the argument that money as a mediator of exchange is analogous to Christ the mediator. Christ is projected by human beings as the ideal mediator, whom we must worship, from whom we have our being, without whom we are worthless, and above all as the one who mediates between us and god and enables our salvation. So also does money become a quasi-divine mediator: before it too we must kneel, we gain our worth from money, its pursuit becomes our goal in life, and it mediates between objects and us ...
Religious suffering may be an expression of real suffering and religion may be the sigh, heart and soul of a heartless and soulless world. But it is also a protest against that suffering. That point has been made often enough but there is an ambivalence in the most well known of Marxs phrases: it is the opium of the people. In an excellent article McKinnon points out that the role of opium was ambiguous in 19th century Europe. In contrast to our own associations of opium with drugs, altered states, addicts, organised crime, wily Taliban insurgents, and desperate farmers making a living the only way they can, attitudes to opium were, in Marxs day, much more ambivalent. Widely regarded as a beneficial, useful and cheap medicine at the beginning of the century, it was increasingly vilified by a coalition of medical and religious forces. In between debates raged. McKinnon traces in detail how opium was the centre of debates, defences and parliamentary inquiries, how it was used for all manner of ills and to calm children, how the opium trade was immensely profitable, how it was one of the only medicines available for the working poor, albeit often adulterated, how it was a source of utopian visions for artists and poets, and how it was increasingly stigmatised as a source of addiction and illness. In effect, it ran all the way from blessed medicine to recreational curse ...
http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=560&issue=123