For Marx, religion alienates our longings; it itself is the alienation of our own wishes. And it is here on earth that such lost longings and abandoned wishes should be first recovered and then fulfilled and realized in full.
Marx’s critique of the alienation resulting from religion does not simply have its roots in a humanist philosophy, in humanist arguments and notions, but in an analysis and understanding of the structures of dominance governing class-societies.
Marx’s critique of religion does not thus revolve around, or emerge from, the human being; it does not take the human being as its origin, but puts the human being into question by investigating the class-based society as a determined historical world in which a historical human being is and is therefore governed.
At the heart of Marx’s critique and interrogation of religion and its ambiguity lies the centrality of the historical; the historical concerning the human being and the world. Human beings are, for Marx, historical and the worlds in which their oppression occurs are also historical. That is, humans are never detached, and their world is never abstract.
Religion as “The Sigh of the Oppressed”
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx, Marx Engels Collected Works
What Marx says here in this passage is often misinterpreted and misquoted, although it says something essential and thus reveals Marx’s understanding of class struggle and theorizing of revolutions.
The sighing “of the oppressed” and the exploited forms the necessary ground from which any possible confronting of the dominant and oppressive side arises. Sighing precedes and founds resistance; it is perhaps the last stage before revolutions take place.
Because religion in this sense is the horizon in which the oppressed humans revolt against suffering and resist the misery made unavoidable by the dominant class, Marx’s critique of religion must be directed at different aspects of religion, but not at the aspect that allows the oppressed to finally to confront their oppressors.
A Dialectical Understanding of Religion
What Marx offers in this passage is a dialectical understanding of religion. “The sigh of the oppressed creature”, which is at the same time “the opium of the people”, means either that religion paralyzes, and takes away, the suffering of the oppressed, or that religion does not make available any possibility of inquiring into or critiquing the dominant conditions in society.
In other words, either religion is the horizon in which people’s anger is simultaneously made active and paralyzed; or religion is where the sighing of the oppressed is constantly heard and forever repeated.
Either religion is where the oppressed wait for different thinkers to take their suffering and misery as possibilities of changing the oppressive historical conditions including those belonging to the dominance of religion itself; or religion is the impossibility of any critiquing and all questioning, where thinking never occurs, especially the thinking that aims at understanding what made this oppression possible in the first place.
Such either/or interpretations are still undetermined in the sense that they leave open and undecided which side of the dichotomy should be taken as what Marx means.
But if “the sigh of the oppressed creature” is to be read and thought on its own, it could be interpreted as follows: social movements that are founded against religious backdrops could direct the “sigh of the oppressed creature” into organized resistance which could end up exposing the irrationality of religion and thus leading to a revolution against the illusions and the paralysis that religion first introduced and made dominant in societies.
Toward the Earth
Although what Marx says concerning religion in the “Introduction” to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law is understood by some commentators as a critique of religion, it is a critique of the Young-Hegelian philosophers’ inability and failure to leave religion behind and to direct their theorizing and thinking toward a domain broader and more comprehensive than the limited domains pertaining to religion.
Marx says that “for Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism”. This means that the task of critiquing religion as human and a human attempt was already carried out in full, and made apparent, by Feuerbach and it is thus now the task of philosophers to start critiquing and theorizing against what happens on earth; the domination, oppression, and alienation residing in society.
Marx says that “criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower”.
This means that it is the task of philosophers to question and critique how alienation and self-alienation occur in society and on earth apart from religion; and not to remain caught up in critiquing how religion facilitates, and takes part in, alienating humans from themselves.
In other words, instead of critiquing heaven, what must be critiqued is the earth; instead of critiquing religion, the law must be critiqued; and instead of critiquing theology, the politics of society must be critiqued.
On the Jewish Question: The Question of Religion and Politics
In On the Jewish Question, Marx notices that in the US church and state underwent a separation from each other in the sense that religion was distanced from the state and placed into civil society. A move that banished religion from the sphere of public law and confined it to the sphere of private law.
In this case, freedom from the control of religion is not the simple disappearance of religion, but rather the freedom of worship. Religion, at that moment, finally left its place within a community and became an individualistic endeavor in the sense that it ceased to be “the essence of community” and started being the “essence of difference”, through which the historical individual became separated from others.
Marx says that because of this move, a “sphere of egoism” began to take shape, forming the roots of a detachment residing in bourgeois-civil society, the detachment of one from others.
According to Marx, this privatization of religion and the religious sphere accompanied a process of making politics more religious. This means that freedom from religion became a political endeavor, an endeavor controlled and governed by the state itself. That is, through a passage through the state, a passage that was itself religious, freedom from the dominance of religion occurred.
Separation and Egoism
Religion in this sense becomes a horizon in which humans recognize each other through the modern state. In other words, the modern state becomes what separates humans from their freedom. This passage through the state makes one unfree.
This separation marks the moment when religion entered into politics and the political sphere, allowing, and yet obliging, people to become involved in “a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life”.
Humans, at that specific moment, underwent a form of superficial individualization from which they emerged withdrawn, separated, private, and egoistic. According to Marx, “withdrawn [. . .] into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community”, the human being becomes only an abstraction lacking real individuality: Only an “abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person” that is also “deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality”.
This is why in Marx’s political economy theorizing is directed toward not only the political emancipation of the human, but toward total, universal, and radical human emancipation in which the separation of citizen and bourgeois becomes ineffective and dissolves
Marx’s critique is thus turned toward thinking the conditions of turning the human being into “a species-being in his everyday life”, of allowing human beings to take control of their social forces, of opening up the real individual in such a way that the abstract citizen becomes wholly absorbed within; of disrupting the political power in such a way social powers regain their unity with the individual citizen.
Alienation
For Marx, where there is religion and where there is production governed and dominated by the laws of bourgeois society, there is always alienation. That is, both bourgeois society and religion lead to the same outcome, the alienation of human beings.
Concerning the alienation resulting from the mode of production pertaining to bourgeois society, Marx says that “the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and [. . .] the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself .” And concerning the alienation resulting from religion, Marx says that “the more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself”.
Marx says that the same alienation is also experienced in human beings’ productive and religious activities. The worker “feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home”. Regarding the sphere belonging to religion, Marx says that “the spontaneous activity of the human imagination [. . .] operates on the individual [. . .] as an alien, divine or diabolic activity”.
Fetishism: From Religion To Capital
There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. I
Religion and religious analogies find another expression in Capital. The “misty realm of religion” provides Marx with a way of critiquing how products hold sway over, and are in total control of, those who carry out the actual production itself, the workers.
The notion of fetishism allows Marx to place his critique of religion at the heart of his refusal of the capitalist economy and his criticism of bourgeois society. Fetishism, as a notion, was already used in the literature critiquing religion and its role in this world; for example, in Charles De Brosses’s inquiry.
Marx only takes this notion up and argues further that modern bourgeois ways of thinking are founded upon an irrationality, which he calls fetishism, through which money becomes prioritized over labor, capital over life, and exchange-value over use-value.
This is made possible only because those who carry out the actual production do not control what they produce, how they carry out their production, and how the surplus of production is distributed.
That is, the whole production of those who carry the actual producing is nothing but an addition to the wealth of the capitalist owners. What the workers produce is thus used in this case against the workers themselves, making them even poorer and further alienating them, until the replacement of these workers happens or new technologies emerge. This irrationality, in its oppression and dominance, requires that free people come together so that it can be overcome, according to Marx.
Hence, Marx’s critique of religion arises from the same site where bourgeois society is criticized and thought against; both criticisms belong together; they are related to each other and pass through each other. There is the God of religion and there is the god of bourgeois society. The difference is that the god of bourgeois society wholly holds sway and governs how humans live by even commodifying God and their traditional gods.
This closeness of religion to bourgeois society in the thinking of Marx is made further apparent in Capital, where Marx refers to notions such as the “trinity formula” and the “religion of everyday life”.
For more articles on Marx’s thought, visit this webpage.
For a general overview of Marx’s thought, visit The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.