September 21, 2006: Marx on Religion

We all know that Marx invoked opium as a metaphor for religion, but how many readers know the context for this metaphor? I recently found it in a review ("critique") of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that Marx had written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Since I still find the Philosophy of Right to be Hegel at his most impenetrable (which is saying something, given all the other Hegel texts out there), I have to confess that I took a great deal of pleasure in observing Marx have a go at the text with one of his most flamboyant rants. I would not say that religion was one of the major topics in Hegel's text; and, to be fair to Hegel, Marx does not seem to lay out what it is that Hegel says about religion that he opposes. The bottom line is that, Hegel or no Hegel, Marx uses this review as an opportunity to launch a rhetorical salvo at the concept of religion that goes way beyond the metaphor we know so well. Here is the heart of it:

The basis of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion, indeed, is the self-consciousness and the self-esteem of the man who has not yet found himself or who has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being crouching outside the world. Man is man’s world, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because state and society are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world. It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. 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.

The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions.