Marxism and religion

Abstract

1. Our thesis is provided by Marx's own life-long commitment to an atheistic, or, more precisely, a beyond-atheism position. In his Hegelian youth Karl Marx concerned himself a great deal with religion, which the Young Hegelians viewed as the most extreme and archetypal form of alienation. The essential movement from Hegel to Marx led through the discovery that the human spirit, man's own self-consciousness, is the source of religion, God being a projection of human needs and wishes; and, secondly, that the distortion by which real human urges became embodied in a 'fantastic reflection' (Engels), rather than recognized for what they were, had resulted from a morbid social order, religion being the sigh of the oppressed creature or a fantasy wrung from inadequate consciousness. If in later years Marx, who had interested himself along with Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Ruge in the Archives of Atheism during his student days, said less about the subject, this was because he thought the case closed and saw no need to waste effort in tilting at believers in God. Socialism is the synthesis which follows the nega tion of theism by atheism; it is "the positive self-consciousness of man, no longer mediated by the suppression of religion, just as in real life communism is man's positive reality, no longer mediated by the suppression of private property".1 In brief, religion like the state is simply abolished and surpassed; what supplants it is a new consciousness socially rooted in socialism or Com munism, certain to come if not very clearly defined. Only vestiges of the philosophe movement or anarchists thought it necessary to continue haran gues against religion instead of simply building the socialist consciousness. Marx still refers to the 'phantasmagoria of religion' in Critique of the Gotha Program (1874); he never deserted his emotionally rooted hatred of what he thought of as 'religion' (Judaism and Christianity being the paradigms) as a mode of false consciousness, even though he lost interest in it as a subject of discussion. He did of course extend the area of this false consciousness to include much more than religion ? the whole 'ideological superstructure'. He would have none of Feuerbach's 'Religion of Humanity' or other such secular substitutes for religion. Marx may well be seen, basically, as one of those who