Marx and Religion: Seminar Script

My aim here is to spark a discussion; not to describe, in extraneous detail, Marx’s theory of religion. However, some basic description of my understanding of Marx’s thought is needed to know where I am coming from if a discussion is going to be possible. So, I will start with a summarised account of Marx’s theory of religion before moving onto a series of critical questions which arose for me from the reading, and which I hope will be of interest. I was wishing to write something short and informal; however, it seems that I am incapable of doing either. So, I apologise in advance, as what I am about to say might be a bit dry.

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There are many aspects of Marx’s thought which help define his theory of religion – such as it is. Though, arguably the most defining characteristic, and a good starting point for us, is Marx’s insistence that if one wishes to understand religion, one must study the social context which gave rise to it. In this sense, Marx’s theory shares characteristics with Durkheim’s; though the former does not explicitly identify religion and society. Instead, Marx’s claim that religion is dependent on society derives from his argument that religion arises from a state of alienation. His understanding of alienation had its starting point in Feuerbach’s understanding of the term. For the latter, alienation was the result of human history where, increasingly, human self-consciousness produced ideas – aided and enforced by religion – within which humans trapped themselves, taking them away from their true human nature. This state of alienated affairs, created by the mind, was also resolved through the mind. Thus, Marx, early in the 1840s, argued that what was key to eliminate human alienation was the development of self-confidence – confidence, that is, in human freedom, a freedom which, as Marx argued, and I quote, ‘can again transform society into a community of human beings united for their highest aims, into a democratic state’.

Though, as James Thrower (1999) notes, this idealist understanding of alienation was quickly replaced by Marx for one grounded in social contexts. Marx, and I quote,

soon came to realise that transforming human consciousness was insufficient of itself to bring about change in the real world, and both he and Engels also came to see that the philosophical anthropology espoused by (the early) Feuerbach was no less abstract and no less remote from the real concerns of the majority of men and women – from poverty, exploitation and political tyranny – than was the Hegelian notion of Spirit which Feuerbach [and Marx] had criticised. (163)

Marx’s change of view was grounded in the argument that human beings are essentially social beings and that it was social contexts, not the context of the mind per se, that caused alienation. It was people’s economic conditions, being unsatisfactory, which caused alienation – being unable, that is, to match their sense of human fulfilment – a sense of fulfilment grounded in Marx’s view, following Hegel, in the unique human ability to be self-conscious and self-creative (Thrower, 1999, 168). Religion, then, in these social contexts, was not the cause of alienation, as it was for Feuerbach. Instead, religion was the result, a side effect, of the more profound unease created by these social, economic and political conditions.

Religion is not the primary cause of alienation; however, religion is still an expression of the alienation caused by social conditions. That is, for Marx, people trying to process their sense of alienation would turn to religion, which would function to articulate their unease and to protest against that unease. Though – following the traditional interpretation of Marx – Marx thought such expression and such protest, found in religion, was false – religion was ‘the opium of the people’. It did not, in other words, offer a valid means by which people could resolve their sense of alienation. At best, religion was a sticking plaster which enabled people to hobble on through their lives. In this way, Marx still follows the Feuerbach analysis of religion, which argued that religion was used by people to project, as Thrower puts it, and I quote, ‘what the real world denies them’ (167). Instead, for Marx, the only way to truly resolve alienation is to go after the original causes – that is, to deconstruct the social conditions which separate people from their potential of true fulfilment and their true human nature. For Marx, then, the true solution was to end capitalism through the bringing about of a socialist and later a communist social order – the latter especially being defined by the complete lack of alienation, where everyone has the means available to them to meet their sense of human fulfilment and to rehabilitate themselves with their true human nature.

   Though Marx, again following the traditional interpretation of him, did not just think that religion offered, as Thrower puts it, ‘false consolation’. Instead, he went further and argued that religion was ideological. As Craig Martin (2013) notes, despite the ubiquity of the term ‘ideology’ and its connections with Marx’s thought, Marx did not flesh out a theory of ideology in any systematic way. Though again following Thrower, for the time being, we can define ideology as a set of ideas which reify social facts, to make them seem natural, ideas, which, moreover, support the ruling class in the maintenance of a status quo which benefits them. When Marx labels religion as an ideology, then, he is not just arguing that religion provides false comfort which is nonetheless innocent; instead, he is arguing that such false comfort has an agenda behind it, as it provides a distraction from the real causes of human suffering, therefore preventing the opportunity for real change. Marx believed that is was only when people realised that society was socially constructed by themselves, and not governed by the equivalent of natural laws, that they would realise the true power which rested in their collective hands and how, together, they would be able to create a new society which worked for their fulfilment and not just the fulfilment of social elites.

There is further detail I could go into at this point, especially concerning Hegel’s understanding of externalisation and alienation which provide an important point of reference for understanding how Marx believed alienation could be overcome by socialism and communism. Moreover, I have not touched on how Marx and Engels believed there to be a two-tier hierarchy in the development of religion – that distinction being captured by the terms ‘natural religion’ and ‘religion in civil society’. Though, the former term encapsulates an understanding of religion little different from naturist theories of so-called religious origin – such as Max Muller’s – and, therefore, offers nothing original. The former term – ‘religion in civil society’ – encapsulates what I have talked about above. So, with my description of Marx now complete, I will move onto more critical reflections on Marx’s work. Doing so, I wish I ask three questions, or tackle three issues, which I thought were of interest – firstly concerning the usefulness of Andrew M. McKinnon’s (2005) nuance of standard readings of Marx; secondly concerning reductionist critiques of Marx’s theory of religion; and, thirdly and finally, concerning the logical consistency of Marx’s understanding of ideology. These questions are meant to start a discussion; not provide an evaluation of Marx’s theory per se.

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Above I referred to ‘traditional interpretations’ of Marx. That is because, as Andrew M. McKinnon (2005) argues, Marx’s famous ‘opium of the people’ definition of religion may be, due to the fossilisation of an interpretative consensus, misunderstood in an overtly negative way. To save time, I am not going to unpack McKinnon’s argument in full. The primary point is that, for McKinnon, the word ‘opium’ has been taken too literally, and that when looked at in the context Marx was writing, opium’s semantic content was more nuanced and multi-layered than is often assumed – yes, it had negative connotations, but it also had positive ones. Moreover, McKinnon argues that there is a distinction between form and content in Marx’s writings. ‘Form’ references the societal organisation which dictates a condition where, say, the proletariat lack property ownership, while ‘content’ references the state of property-lessness. Thus, the proletariat lack private property in a capitalist society as they do not have the means of purchasing such property. Though in a communist society, the proletariat also lacks private property, but that is because private property has been abolished – abolishing what it means to be proletariat and what it means to be property-less. The content is the same; the form is different – what is meant by aufhebung  – ‘Overcome and Preserved’ (12).

McKinnon argues that Marx uses the form and content dichotomy to understand religion. That is, following the more nuanced presentation of opium, Marx supposedly disagreed with and critiqued the form of religion, the social relations within which it found itself, but not the content of religion, which consisted of protesting against the current state of alienation. As McKinnon argues, and I quote:

The object of Marx’s critique is not the sigh […] Marx’s critique, by contrast, is thoroughly in situ; it is “this state, this society” which are the object of his critique. The content in this dialectical phrase is in fact preserved, at least in seed form. (17-18)

Marx did not want to abolish religion, as is often assumed; instead, he wanted to transcend or supersede religion. Moreover, religion does not, necessarily, prohibit the possibility of structural change, as traditional interpretations of Marx suggest; rather, religion, by imagining a different world free from alienation, even if false, opens the logical possibility of a new way of organising society. What might start as pie-in-the-sky thought, overtime can become a concrete plan for social change – a plan which guides and motivates human actors towards the world of communism where alienation is a thing of the past.

My first question, then, at this stage, is whether such a nuanced reading of Marx makes much of a difference at a practical level? Thus, it seems to me that this reading of Marx is useful if one is a follower of Marxist thought and wants to maintain a positive understanding of religion, or if one is a critic of the negative understanding of religion which is commonly held by Marxist theorists. Though, if one holds onto the category of religion because they believe that it points to something meaningful, perhaps something which has an existence outside of the category altogether, is such a reading of Marx going to make a difference? The teleological goal is still the same for Marx: communism – and religion is still the result of alienation. Thus, if the teleological goal is reached, the need for religion, regardless of whether it was useful to achieve the teleological goal, becomes superfluous to requirements. That is, religion is still abandoned as communism negates the need for it. That abandonment is probably going to be more peaceful if religion is ‘transcended’ than it would if religion was ‘abolished’, but the end result is still the same: no religion. Though, is this a real problem, or is this only a problem if we hold onto an old understanding of religion, which derives from its previous form as established by capitalist societies? If so, however, would the new ‘religion’ of communist societies be so different as to make the connection between pre-communist and post-communist religion meaningless? Is not the real problem, then, that the category of religion is a social, and contextually dependent construct, which has little meaning if treated as a mind-independent object with cross-cultural, cross-temporal and cross-societal analytical value? Indeed, McKinnon touches of the issue of religion being a social construct at the end of his essay, and suggests that due to, and I quote:

Marx’s emphasis on concrete and dialectical thinking, we cannot legitimately take his concrete analyses of religion in a particular time and place and make abstract-universal theories that would apply to every “religious” phenomenon. (24)

The problem with this quote, of course, is that McKinnon still assumes that religious phenomenon exists outside the realm of theory – in other words, he ignores the argument, made by Timothy Fitzgerald (2000) and others, that religion is constructed by theory.

Though this issue of construction brings me onto my second question; since Marx developed his theory of religion, scholars have critiqued him as being a reductionist. I see reductionism being used, predominantly, in two ways: first, reductionism is argued to be the act whereby one explains a phenomena in terms which are alien to the internal logic of the phenomena itself, or the logic used by insiders of the phenomena; second, I see it used to mean the reduction of complexity to a set of simple theories. Thus, Marx is critiqued as insider’s to so-called religious traditions often do not understand what they are doing as the pacification of their desire for human fulfilment in favour of supporting a capitalist status quo, and it is suggested that such a theory is, moreover, too simplistic to appreciate the multifarious factors contributing to people’s identification as religious. But this view requires the assumption that there is something to reduce, that there is something which exists with an inherent internal logic, as phenomenologists do. Is this assumption not flawed? If we argue that religion is a social construct, is it possible to reduce at all, or is it, rather, only possible to create? Legitimately one can ask, create from what? But do we need to assume a realist ontological reality as the basis of construction – cannot construction be founded upon construction? Is it not the case, then, that Marx is not reducing religion; he is constructing religion. He is crafting a worldview, with particular semantic divides, not because that is how the world really is, but because it helps him establish a communist society, the idea of which is as constructed as the idea of religion.

The issue of ontology brings me, finally, to the issue of ideology, which Craig Martin’s (2013) article deals with. It is here where I see Marx’s theory being the most problematic. As Martin notes, Marx makes a distinction between the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. The former refers to materialist social relations connected to the means of production. The latter refers to more idealist discourses, such as culture etc., which arise from and reflect, the base (404). The problem is that Marx seems to prioritise the former as being more real than the latter. Thus Marx argues that, and I quote, ‘It is not the consciousness of men [or women] that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx and Engels, 1978, 4, quoted in Martin, 2013, 404). The problem is not only that this dichotomy is a false one – material reality is dependent on idealist reality and vice versa, and there is little reason to suggest that one has an ontological priority over the other. The problem is also that such a dichotomy seems to contradict Marx’s understanding of ideology.

Looking at Martin (2013), we can build on the definition of ideology I provided above. Martin suggests that, for Marx, ideology consists of three components. First, ideology is defined as a means by which those in positions of power, ensure that their material interests are protected. Second, ideology is defined as a reflection of the material conditions of a society. Third, and finally, ideology is defined as the means by which socially constructed facts are reified to seem part of a natural world order – this is achieved through commodity fetishism, alienation in general, and naturalisation. The third point here is important, as it is the means by which people stop hoping for an alternative, and accept that the lot they have, even though it does produce feelings of alienation within them, is the only possibility – it is, in other words, the means by which a capitalist society can achieve peaceful and long-term consent from the people it governs. The problem, though, is that Marx’s base and superstructure dichotomy, as well as the notion of ideology itself, rests on the idea that there are socially constructed facts that are mistakenly presented as realist, but that there are also correct ways of viewing the world – i.e. viewing the world without ideological influence, seeing the base as it is. The problem, then, is that Marx’s thought relies on the dichotomy he deconstructs. Marx is equally an ideologue and naturalises his analysis of society as if it achieves an accurate understanding of the world as it is.

As Martin notes, this critique of ideology is made by Foucault, who argues that there is no difference between ideology and truth. Instead, everything is ideological – everything is a power play. Marx is not replacing the ideology of capitalism with the truth of communism; he is replacing the ideology of capitalism with the ideology of communism. For me, and I wonder if anyone agrees, the point is not that ideologies need to be defeated by factual accounts of society, religion and politics; instead, ideologies must be defeated by ideologies which argue that their internal logic is preferable to those of others. Such an approach would then require an analysis of the means by which political messages are spread and received, the role of capital in such processes, and the motivations behind them. Such an approach is more complicated than just deciding, in a supposedly detached way, that one political message is inherently correct and another ideological and false. As Martin notes, following Foucault, it is, and I quote, ‘extremely difficult to maintain an epistemology according to which we can clearly establish something as “definitely” true’ (409).

Martin finishes, however, by arguing that we can take on board the arguments made by Foucault and still believe that ideology can mystify states of affairs; I wonder whether anyone agreed with this point? Martin seems to make it without any supporting evidence and confidently claims, following an example he uses in his article, that, and I quote, ‘The world was not created through the killing of and dividing up of a primal man into four social classes’ and that the ‘The ancient Indian story in the Vedas is in a very important sense “imaginary”’ (409). The problem is that this assumption rests on the ideology and truth dichotomy that Martin has just deconstructed with the aid Foucault. It might be the case that ideologies can mystify each other, but even that labelling – that is, to suggest that one ideology mystifies another – is an ideological act.

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Other questions arose from my reading of Marx, and other aspects of Marxist thought I have not touched on – e.g. post-Marxist thought – but I am aware of how long I have been talking and thus will only make one final observation. It seems that, when boiled down, religion for Marx arises from a state of alienation, caused by social conditions, which tries to imagine a new world, but which also is ideological in the sense that it reifies the current social order. Though, if this understanding of the category of religion is to have any analytical value, we must ask whether religion, in this functional sense, is unique. Does not, for instance, public schools play a similar role? Does nationalism play a similar role? My question, then, is that if religion is functionally like public schools, for example, how valuable is Marx’s theory as a theory of religion? As I have argued, I do not believe that this problem is one unique to Marx, but instead is a logical consequence of not only the category of religion being socially constructed but religion itself – as there is no difference between the two. It is a problem, in other words, that derives from the fact that religion is a discourse.

Anyway, to finish, these where the questions/issues which I thought were important and of interest. We can discuss these now, or we could take up other questions which arose for yourselves. I do not mind either way. 

Delivered at the University of Chester, 22/01/20

Jack Lewis Graham