I hear this a lot, particularly in arguments from the religious right. I understand that On the Jewish Question is very confusing to read because of how the word "jew" was equated with "usurer" in the 19th century leads to this conclusion - this is often used to discredit all of Marx's work.

Was he, or is this another case of misinterpretation?

  • RowPin [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    To add to this, I'm going to try to explain Marx's view of religion here. Apologies if this is slightly confusing; I'm used to talking to people who have already read Marx but have some questions.

    Now, "On The Jewish Question" also makes the point that one cannot abolish religion throuhg demanding atheism, without knowing the conditions from which religion springs. The text was notably written a year before Marx's "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right", which starts thus:

    The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

    Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

    Marx knew that man made religion and bows down to it, but his critique was an attempt to discover how humanity had trapped itself within inhuman forms that attempted to explain the irrational way we live, such as religion, philosophy, and political economy. Because the world of commodities & money are insane (more on that later), inverted forms of thought are needed to give them theoretical expression with 'objective' validity. (I will be speaking mostly abstractly in terms of class here, for brevity, but of course, this is why Marx called economists the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie.)

    Marx in Capital does not merely attempt to say why current economic theories were wrong, but to show how they were unable to resolve apparent contradictions in themselves, because they were attempting to give a rational account of what is essentially irrational. For the shortest example, Ricardo could not resolve contradictions in the labor theory of value, because he could not see the actual contradiction (the role of labor-power and that wage-labor is inherently exploitative) within society that Marx discovered. In Capital vol III:

    We shall now consider labour-power in contrast to the capital of the national debt, where a negative quantity appears as capital — just as interest-bearing capital, in general, is the fountainhead of all manner of insane forms, so that debts, for instance, can appear to the banker as commodities. Wages are conceived here as interest, and therefore labour-power as the capital yielding this interest. For example, if the wage for one year amounts to £50 and the rate of interest is 5%, the annual labour-power is equal to a capital of £1,000. The insanity of the capitalist mode of conception reaches its climax here, for instead of explaining the expansion of capital on the basis of the exploitation of labour-power, the matter is reversed and the productivity of labour power is explained by attributing this mystical quality of interest-bearing capital to labour-power itself.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch29.htm

    Still, Marx had great respect for Ricardo and Adam Smith, for their work was useful in attempting to construct a consistent model of a contradictory, yet then-recently-emerging society. They were revolutionary, albeit revolutionary for the emerging bourgeoisie. As a side note, the development of criticism follows the development of society, which is why current economists (vulgar) have gone much crazier with theories like marginalism, and do not even bother to attempt a rational account, and... oh, sorry, religion. Anyway.

    But political economy relates to religion and philosophy in that it attempts to show that these apparent contradictions are actually indicative of natural, human nature. Hegel, the apex of philosophy, knew that philosophy was a form of religion that attempted to give man peace with a world with which he cannot be reconciled. Philosophy does this through logic, while religion does this through faith, which makes the latter more accessible to the lower-classes: note what Marx said earlier on how religion is "logic in popular form". Both reflect the actual world in which people cannot live without illusions and must comfort themselves through the knowledge that this is natural. (Hegel's world-spirit, Adam's invisible hand.)

    • RowPin [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Like political economy, philosophy & religion cannot merely be done away with in thought (or through atheism), but through the practical reconcilation Marx spoke of through communism and the abolition of private property. This is why he called it the riddle of history solved. Now, I'm nearly finished, but religion also shares properties of capital for Marx:

      (...) we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

      "Fetishism" here is not the typical way in which schoolgirl skirts arouse heterosexual men, but in an inanimate object that appears to be inhabited by a religious spirit. Man creates religion and bows down to it in thought. In reality, products are produced and appear to immediately be commodities, often owned by someone who is not the one who produced it, and whose overproduction 'causes' crisies and 'forces' people to go homeless or struggle to pay for food & the likes, despite that, obviously, it is all by our own hands.

      The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. (...) The religious reflex of the real world can only then finally vanish when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

      Were the relations of humanity transparent and recognizable, we would not need special experts (like priests/economists/philosophers) to 'explain' them to us or what we are like: they would be immediately intelligible. At the end of Capital's first chapter, Marx describes communist society through the section on Robinson Crusoe's labor which is directly produced for his needs and is immediately understandable.

      Now, I would always recommend people read "On The Jewish Question" themselves, but I'll end on these oft-quoted passages:

      What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

      Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

      An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

      There's a line in the great Cassavetes movie "The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie" where one gangster opines that Karl Marx was wrong, and it is not religion that is the opium of the people, but money. "Money is God." A great line, but one I was always extra-amused by because Cassavettes didn't understand that Marx would have also agreed with that. One cannot simply mandate atheism without knowing where religion comes from and subsequently how to abolish it. (Which, obviously, does not mean by violence, but through it practically becoming superfluous.)

      For a less abstract example of all of this, here is, lastly, Lenin explaining the attitude of the workers' party towards religion:

      (...)Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion.

      We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc...

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm