Opium and the Family in the Writings of Karl Marx

Abstract

Marx's assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” is his most famous invocation of opium, but references to the drug appear throughout his work, providing a window into his theories of gender, the family, and the state. Responding to moral panics around a spike in rates of infanticide by opium among the working class in 19th-century England, Marx suggests that the spike was caused by women's increasing workforce participation. Marx uses trades of opium and cotton between England and China to exemplify problems with prevailing economic theories of money and exchange, but he also explains why opium and cotton were not comparable trades: the illicit opium trade in China undermined the Chinese government by promoting corruption. While many accounts of commodity trades in the 19th century treat opium as either a normal commodity or a moral disaster, Marx's invocations of opium and infanticide encompass a debate about working-class subsistence, changing bourgeois norms, and state power.