The idea of “alienation” in Marx’s critique of religion.

Generally defined, alienation is a constraining process on human consciousness, arresting the development and ultimate potential of what human consciousness should properly be. "We can give the following definition of alienation: it is the negative process by which a subject makes himself other than himself by virtue of a constraint which is capable of being removed on the initiative of the subject himself."(1) Marx was concerned about the nature and process of alienation and he examined different types, how it happened and how it could be solved. For the purposes of this examination we are concerned with alienation with regards to religion. Marx’s account of religion contains two strands, first, religion as an illusory protest, whispering false hopes and eternal forgetfulness against the actual and exploited conditions of life and secondly religion as ideology, where religion distorts and masks the socio-economic reality of the world. Because Marx’s examination of religion and alienation was intricately involved with his examination of human socio-history and economic/political contexts, any discussion of a Marxist religious critique must involve some understanding and discussion of these issues also. Marx, in his writings uses the term estrangement (entfremdung). Scholars have debated whether the terms alienation and estrangement are inter-changeable; for the purposes of this essay, they are. Initially, we need to be aware of the influences of other thinkers on Marx, namely Hegel, Feuerbach and Bauer.

For Hegel, "…alienation is the fundamental feature of consciousness throughout its history."(2) Hegelian examination of history was in the light of the metaphysical Geist (Absolute human consciousness), and Its estrangement from Itself. Hegel was the most important philosopher of the nineteenth century and Marx believed Hegel had discovered a general historical law – the "dialectic"(3), but Marx applied this dialectic scientifically rather than metaphysically, as Hegel had done. Marx, too, explained history as a process of alienation, but due rather to economic (or materialistic) mechanisms. Hence his "Dialectical Materialism" and the interpretation of history as class struggle rather than national antagonism (as Hegel saw it). With regards to Bauer’s influence on Marx, "The concept of alienation, or estrangement, was particularly important in Bruno Bauer’s thought, and it was he who was responsible for the expression "self-alienation", which was much used by the Young Hegelians."(4) This term is borrowed by Marx as one of his forms of alienation, discussed later. Marx claimed that class division (resulting from the division of labour and hence, capital) caused social problems, all of which resulted in alienation.

Alienation occurs because, due to exploitation (a concept to which we will return shortly) the worker externalises himself in his work, meaning he has objectified the world of production he has laboured in, which then becomes alien and despotic, and so "…the poorer he becomes himself in his inner life… the less he can call his own. It is just the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself."(5) It is interesting to note that later, Nietzsche would make a similar ethical point: "There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings."(6) An effect of this alienation is an illusory consciousness, related to an essentially delusional religious belief.

The "putting into God" of which Marx writes, echoes the thought of Feuerbach, by whom Marx was influenced and also criticised. Before Marx, Feuerbach criticised Hegel, claiming his position was one of "rational mysticism" and "…while he agreed that there was no ontological distinction between the human and the divine, argued that the relationship had been stated upside down…"(7). Feuerbach claimed religion was "the dream of humanity" and God a "projection", by which he means that the characteristics of the divine were human characteristics objectified, theologically systematised and abstracted into an illusory realm.

In alienation theories today, "Objectification, as that which is carried out by a subject, is in every case a source of alienation."(8) Because of this objectification, humanity is divided against itself, and so due to this ontological schism results the creation and reinforcement of the state of alienation. "The objective essence of religion, particularly the Christian religion, is nothing but the essence of human, and particularly Christian feeling, the secret of theology therefore is anthropology…".(9) (One can see the early idea of this anthropological analysis in Xenophanes’ thought, he noted the cultural differences between the known religions and the anthropomorphic nature of the gods). Marx developed this idea of objectification as an illusory belief, arguing that humans are the creations of their circumstances and creators of their circumstances, therefore "Man makes religion"(10).

This is related to Marx’s idea that certain circumstances and creations are false or misguided: "They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations."(11) Religion then, is a mode of production, but an alien product (hence Marx’s analogy to products of labour), unrelated to human reality, "This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i. e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life…."(12)

All of this indicates that religion is an ideology, a term Marx developed through his investigations of the philosophical inversions of Hegel and Feuerbach, in his discussion of the Camera Obscura(13) and through his emphasis on the active rather than the abstract and his notions of objectification. Religion is just one form of ideology to which Marx refers to here, for Marx, ideology does not describe true human reality, but a false human reality. This is an essential idea behind Marx’s concept of alienation. Later Marxists would differentiate between the base of society which is the Marxist term for socio-economic conditions, and the superstructure, which is everything else including religion, conventional morality, art, philosophy, etc, all of which are ideologies. These ideologies mask the base, cloaking the realities of the human condition, resulting in alienation. The ideology of religion (as a part of the superstructure) is related to and casts an illusion over the base in the way described above: through objectification as a result of exploitation.

This concept of ideology illustrates Marx’s concern with bringing the claims of philosophers down to earth and to humanise abstract concepts. This is why he criticised Hegel’s Geist and Feuerbach’s philosophical abstractions, "But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society."(14) Marx’s philosophy is a philosophy of action and empirical observation in the spirit of Protagoras’ thought "Man is the measure of all things" (as quoted in Plato’s "Theaetetus"). However, despite Marx’s insistence that everything is explained in human terms, these terms can be distorted or lacking. To understand this we must return to the earlier quote (footnote 5). This objectified alien world is that of the products of labour of the worker which humans "fetishize". This consumerist obsession with commodities is a mistaken values system, where objects are valued more than people, and people are exploited to make these very products. This exploitation is one of the social problems we initially considered and is made possible due to the class system and division of labour (and hence capital) in the capitalist society.(15)

The reason why exploitation leads to alienation is due to the dissatisfaction with life and the enforced nature of work, which necessarily depersonalises. "The domination of the thing over man, of dead over living labour, of the product over the producer...at the level of production...we find the same relationship as obtains at the level of ideology, in religion: the subject is transformed into object and vice versa."(16) Due to the highly technical (but uncontrollable) world of industry, people become unhappy over things that are meant to create happiness. All of this results in damage to human "inner life" (which is perhaps synonymous with consciousness), which becomes alienated from itself due to this damage and the above reasons. Alienation is therefore an important concept as it illustrates not only that capitalist society is failing, but also that religion is essentially the symptom of suffering and delusionment caused by exploitation.

Marx’s critique of religion was a critique of the inequalities rooted in society. "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 a spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."(17) This opiate is used to calm the jangled nerves of the distressing self-alienation, that feeling that one is being exploited, fetishizing products over concerns for others and being dehumanised in work. This opiate is the path of least resistance taken by the downtrodden people to make the disorientation of self-alienation more bearable. Religion, then, can be seen as a form of escapism, a misguided attempt to ease an uneasy life.

The Marxist idea of alienation, however, presupposes a human essence from which humanity can be alienated, a "proper" or "correct" way of life from which humans can be torn. If it did not, to speak of alienation would be meaningless, as humans have to be alienated from something. Furthermore, this human essence was not spiritual "…the essence of man is no abstraction… it is the ensemble of the social relations."(18) Feuerbach and Hegel had their versions of human essence, the (projected) Reason, Will and Love and Geist respectively. We can see Marx as a proto-sociologist who perceived certain patterns of interrelation between material and mental realities. From this he postulated that the human essence was a socio-economic relation with others, a productive relationship, but so far an exploitative one, set in a historical context, "…man cannot enter into an authentic relationship with himself except on condition of entering into a particular relationship with others…".(19) Here, the Marxist use of the term "authentic" means real or not-alienated (and is therefore related to later use of this term by existentialist philosophers, especially by Sartre). This particular relationship is one without religion in a reciprocally productive and communist society.

Yet, for Marx, alienation was more complicated than this self-alienation (resulting in religion) and product-alienation (resulting in fetishism). Product-alienation was a symptom of work-alienation (due to exploitation and dehumanisation) and these alienation types inflamed alienation-from-others and alienation-from-nature and alienation-from-species-being. (Alienation-from-species-being could be Marx’s adaptation of Hegel’s "unhappy consciousness" which characterises medieval, ascetic Christianity, "…men contrast themselves qua spiritual beings with Nature, they thereby contrast themselves with their own bodies… Alienated from the natural world, people think of themselves as immaterial souls."(20) These are later to be Nietzsche’s "haters of the body").

Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this investigation to explore these various forms of alienation, but it is enough to say that they all relate to each other (e.g. alienation-from-nature results in alienation-from-species-being) and are in turn related to the false religious consciousness, which is the symptom of suffering caused by all types of alienation.(21) I use the term "false religious consciousness" because "Marx viewed religion as a transformation, indeed a deformation, of reality."(22) Life determines human consciousness, therefore a mislead or manipulated life results in a mislead or false consciousness, "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness."(23) Furthermore a false consciousness is often due to the trappings of "herd consciousness"(24) (later Nietzsche will have much more to say about "herd mentality"), that type of consciousness which results from humans associating with humans - and their religions.

Marx’s account of human essence is similar to his contemporary Herbert Spencer, but "What does distinguish his account is its context – very specific idea of what is real – ‘the religious production of fancies’ contrasted with ‘the real production of the means of subsistence’ and human nature as alienated."(25) For Marx, religion is first seen as a fantasy of alienated human beings and later seen as class ideology (which under communism would vanish). In this latter case, some later readers of Marx would interpret this ideology as a form of social control, especially V. I. Lenin, who viewed religion as a form of metaphysical policing. In his examination of religion, Marx is similar to Nietzsche and Freud "…religion was viewed as a symptom with meaning that needed deciphering through some kind of ‘geneology’."(26)

There are, however, problems with Marx’s account of religion and alienation. Perhaps the most problematic is Marx’s relativist attitude towards consciousness. As we have seen, he views consciousness as socio-historical, "Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?"(27) But if values of consciousness are relative to each society, this includes his own, indicating that his ideas cannot be understood as an objective and absolute yard-stick for measuring the "reality" of consciousness. Furthermore, Marx has no justification for any attempt to establish broad, general laws of history. Marx does not show for certain that communist historical processes are inevitable, nor can he provide a valid basis for predicting the end of religion (through the advent of communism) and therefore de-alienation. His view "…led him to over-optimistic and sometimes straightforwardly false estimations of the present and future state of religious belief, as when, for example, after blithely equating the proletariat with ‘the masses of men’, he claimed that their religious ideas ‘had long been dissolved by circumstances’."(28) Furthermore "…religion can also be a protest against alienation and exploitation… But it does not follow, for the Marxist, that there could be good religion or bad religion – just as there could be good politics or bad politics."(29)

That said, however, McLellan does not take into account that religion is a symptom of alienation, and alienation is a false and delusory state – therefore a bad state. So, for the Marxist, religion is always bad "To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion."(30) Marx’s critique is of an epiphenomenon of reality, superfluous, abstract and not in touch with reality. However, because of Marx’s quest for a humanism, he has excluded a priori the possibility of God.(31) This problem of a priori exclusion noted however, is not so damning. Anthony Flew’s philosophy of "Falsification" illustrates how the onus of proof for God rests on the believer. Therefore Marx is under no obligation to except religious language, though this would prove problematic in a theist-Marxist discourse. Furthermore, Marx’s critique of religion as alienation works insofar as we except his definition of human essence and his examination of human relations in their socio-historical context.

But his account alone will not stand and needs development. The study of sociology, history and economics is far more complex now than in Marx’s time. For example, the defuse and elusive nature of power as illustrated in Michel Foucault’s "History of Sexuality" highlights how difficult it is to claim one class has power over another, or that religion is a form of social control, or indeed that any class or ideology has any total control. Also, one might argue that workers are suffering far less in capitalist society now than they were in Marx’s time and that his critique of religion is really a pained cry of his era. True, one might argue people still suffer and lead alienated, unenlightened lives, that they follow the path of least resistance, but workers are far less exploited now than they were then (though according to the theory of surplus labour they are still exploited). Still, one might hold the view that fetishism is even more endemic than it was in Marx’s time, and that we live in a wasteful, polluting, consumerist culture par excellence. With these problems still in place (mainly that we still live in a capitalist society, no matter what new and "progressive" form it has taken since Marx’s time), and evidently with some of these problems getting worse, the "symptom" of religion still remains, if it is indeed a symptom and not something more complex, or all together different.(32)

  • (1) "Sartre and Marxism" p80
  • (2) "Existentialism" p26.
  • (3) Taken from Plato’s use of the word and developed as a theory of historical processes following the schema of "thesis", "antithesis" and "synthesis", a triad of development followed by reaction followed by resolution.
  • (4) "Karl Marx and Religion" p9
  • (5) Quoted from K. Marx "Selected Writings" in "Marxism and Religion" p16
  • (6) "Human All Too Human" p89
  • (7) "Karl Marx and Religion" p8
  • (8) "Sartre and Marxism" p88
  • (9) Feuerbach’s "Essence of Christianity" quoted in "Karl Marx and Religion" p8
  • (10) "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law" p175
  • (11) "The German Ideology" p23
  • (12) "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" p297
  • (13) "If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process." "The German Ideology" p36 One ideology Marx is referring to is religion, and possibly also Hegel.
  • (14) "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law" p175
  • (15) This exploitation is mainly due to the Theory of Surplus Value – the worker lacks Capital, so he forced to sell his labour as a commodity. The difference between the amount of economic value he produces and the amount he receives for this is "surplus value". The employer takes the surplus value for himself. This is exploitation for profit and the source of social conflict and alienation.
  • (16) Marx "Selected Writings" in "Marxism and Religion" p25
  • (17) "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law" p175
  • (18) "Thesis on Feuerbach" p7
  • (19) "Sartre and Marxism" p128
  • (20) "Existentialism" p28
  • (21) "At this point the Marxist theory of alienation reveals certain ambiguities of major relevance. In one aspect (A) it presents itself as the outcome of a scientific analysis of a complex of socio-anthropological phenomena which are linked to a determinate mode of production. In another (B) it assumes the character of a metaphysical prophecy to the effect that alienation will disappear once the advent of communist society has removed the cause of economic alienation. Even if one confines aspect (B) to romantic eschatology and retains only aspect (A), the ambiguities are not finished with, because within (A) we have the alternative of either (A.1) seeing the Marxist theory of alienation as the simple denunciation of a phenomenon termed ‘economic alienation,’ together with a suggestion as to the techniques for its removal (the passage from a capitalist to a communist economy) – and in this case one would leave the problem of the continued existence of other forms of alienation wholly undetermined, and thus too the problem of their possible connexion with economic alienation; or else (A.2) seeing in the Marxist restriction of the theory of alienation to an examination of economic alienation, an explicit recognition of the assumed inexistence of other forms of alienation deserving of investigation. Thus three possible interpretations of the Marxist theory of alienation present themselves: 1) it is the outcome of an enquiry which neither in its assumptions nor its predictions transcends the sphere of the verifiable (A.1); 2) it is the implicit negation of the continued existence of other forms of alienation (A.2); 3) it is the assumption that economic alienation is the metaphysical principle of the causation and removal of every other form of alienation (B)." p131 "Sartre and Marxism"
  • (22) "Marxism and Religion" p162
  • (23) "The German Ideology" p37
  • (24) "The German Ideology" p44
  • (25) "Marxism and Religion" p21
  • (26) "Marxism and Religion" p160
  • (27) "Manifesto of the Communist Party" p503
  • (28) "Marxism and Religion" p21
  • (29) "Marxism and Religion"p168
  • (30) "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law" p176
  • (31) A good example of this is found is Marx’s "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" (p305): "Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question… When you ask about creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing… your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning."
  • (32) Philosophers like Sartre have criticised and developed Marx’s account of alienation and religion. "The very notions which Marxist research employs to describe our historical society – exploitation, alienation, fetishizing, reification, etc – are precisely those which most immediately refer to existential structures." ("The Problem of Method" p175). The Marxist notions of philosophy as action (or engagement), rather than interpretation, are also explored by Sartre, "But alienation presupposes that man is primarily action. Servitude is based on freedom..." ("Critique of Dialectical Reason" p181). However, Sartre felt that de-alienation (and the resulting disappearance of religion) was too easy, as simple economic change is the foundation of the Marxist solution. Sartre’s thesis was "…that a co-existing multiplicity is incompatible with the process of de-alienation…" ("Sartre and Marxism" pxiii) as the structure of existence for humans is as existential praxis-project (this is an activity chosen by an individual or group of people to achieve an end), and the human state is one of alienation due to the subject-object relation and the relation of humans to the world of things as one of "scarcity" (scarcity being the impossibility of satisfying all the needs of a collection of individuals). As explored initially in his "Being and Nothingness" (especially in the Chapter "Being-for-Others" where Sartre explores the concept of objectification through "The Look" and the impossibility of inter-subjective consciousness) "Every man is a project of alienating objectification for every other." ("Sartre and Marxism" pxii), which means the present (capitalist) state of society is alienating due to the multiplicity of praxis-projects objectifying each other through necessary confrontation due to scarcity. One can see that Sartre’s praxis-project explanation encompasses both the structure of relations to others and to things, as Marx’s economic explanation of production does, but that Sartre’s account is more complicated due to the necessary existential construction of relations aside from (but also including) economic considerations. If alienation is a deeper problem than just economic exploitation and rooted in conflicting praxis-projects and scarcity, then de-alienation and the fading away of religion as a result, will be more difficult than Marx claims.

Bibliography

Chiodi, P. – “Sartre and Marxism”, (Harvester Press Ltd 1976)

Cooper, D. E. – “Existentialism”, (Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996)

Foucault, M. – “The History of Sexuality”

Ling, T. – “Karl Marx and Religion”, (The Macmillan Press Ltd 1980)

Marx, K and Engels, F. – “K. Marx and F. Engels on Religion”, (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1957)

McLellan, D. – “Marxism and Religion”, (The Macmillan Press Ltd 1987)

Nietzsche, F. – “Human All Too Human” (Penguin 1994)

Sartre, J. P. – “The Problem of Method”, (translated Hazel E Barnes, Vintage Books Edition 1968)

Sartre, J. P. – “The Critique of Dialectical Reason”, (translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, NLB 1976)

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