Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
Although he was not primarily concerned with studying religion, as a political theorist Marx was interested in the social function religion played and how it made certain political and economic systems possible. Born in Prussia and originally trained as a philosopher, the young Marx turned from philosophy toward the study of economics and politics. In the early 1840s, he formed a life-long friendship with Friedrich Engels, with whom he co-wrote a number of his most famous works and who often financially supported Marx and his family. Historical materialism--Marx's theory of history--is based on the idea that the systems which organize and make possible human productive power (what he termed the modes of production) create the conditions in which human consciousness takes shape. As as materialist, Marx phrased it as follows: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness." His interest in political economy, therefore, had much to do with studying both systems of social rank and privilege, on the one hand, and systems of value and exchange, on the other, along with the types of thought and forms of identity they made possible. Marx paid particular attention to what he considered to be the harmful effects of the economic system known as capitalism; his critique was premised on his assumption that human labor ought to provide an opportunity to fulfill our inherent need for creative, fulfilling work. Inasmuch as capital (the profit that results from exchanging a product [what we could term a commodity] for more than it cost to produce) remains in the hands of those who own the production process (that is, those who own the means of production), and not necessarily in the hands of the person whose labor actually made the product (the worker), Marx concluded that workers in capitalist systems were exploited; he termed the working class "the proletariat," from the Latin proles, meaning offspring; in ancient Rome, the proletarius was the lowest class of citizens. The proletariat, or wage laborers, do not own their own means of production (that is, they own no property and therefore have no access to accumulated wealth, or capital) and therefore have nothing to exchange but their own labor (that is, their bodies and their creativity) in order to make a living. The proletariat therefore live in a constant state of alienation--alienated from the results of their labor (whose purchase price had little to do with the wages they were paid to produce it) as well as from their own essentially creative human nature which has itself become little more than a commodity.
Major Works
The German Ideology (1845-6; published in 1932)
The Communist Manifesto (1848; co-written with Friedrich Engels)
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)
Quotation
"Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed
man's self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found
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 encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular
form, its spiritual point d'honneur, it 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."
- from Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right (1844)
Select Web Resources on Marx
Karl
Marx & Religion
Marx
& Engels Internet Archive
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Karl Marx
Secondary Literature on Marx and Religion
Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introduction.
Chapter 1. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Walter Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline, pp.
40-41. Fortress Press, 1995.
Daniel Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, Chapter 4. Oxford University
Press, 1996.
John Raines (ed.), Marx on Religion. Temple University Press, 2002.