Karl Marx is an important philosopher in the Western tradition of philosophy not just because of his ideas, but because those ideas led to significant changes in the world in the 20th century as his ideas were adopted to fuel political movements and also in the structuring of new systems of government. The philosophical issue that Marx explored was a political philosophy on the divide between those of economic means, and workers who in order to get by needed to sacrifice their humanity to work lands they did not own, or factories in which their labor contributed to the wealth of the upper classes. Marx looked at religion, politics, and human nature and believed that all three of these things, in the 19th century when he was writing and thinking, were currently at odds with each other in the world´s current state of affairs.
Marx looked at the current structures of government and politics and saw that the alienation of the worker from the work he did was being brought about by the fact that he had no ownership of what he was producing; he merely was a cog in a human machine that had been brought about by the industrial revolution. He also looked at religion, and saw that it was forced on people not as it claimed to, to save their souls, but as a mechanism of controlling the masses and offering them a better life in the next world in order to cajole them into toiling their lives away in this world. Political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Marxism’s central thesis that religion is a weapon always used by the established social forces” (Niebuhr, viiii).
Marx, while critical of religion, and is mostly especially critical of the current state of religion in the 19th century. He believed that religion was not being used to promote morality, but instead was being used as a tool of masked manipulate, writing, “The social principles of Christianity justified slavery in antiquity, glorified medieval serfdom, and when necessary, also know how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, although they may do so with a piteous face” (Marx, 184). The upper classes, called the bourgeois in his writing, were using religion in order to promote their own self-interest. The lower class, called the proletariat by Marx, was being taught theological principles as a way of pacifying them.
Marx saw religion mirror the political goals of the time, and not the other way around. He wrote that religion is nothing more than “absurb babble about societies duties of solidarity” and saw “imaginary surpluses and blank checks drawn on God the Father, Son and Company” (Marx, 184). Marx was especially critical of Christianity; whose fundamental dogmas he believed lowered the state of humans as less than they were. He did not believe the argument that religion needed more time to develop, since after eighteen centuries it had served as a political tool of oppression. Christian theology forwards the edit that humans are in a deplorable state and it is the fault of humanity that they are in such a state. This is a very clear message from the belief in original sin, which comes from the Genesis where humans lived in a state of perfection until their disobedience to God cast them into their current state of suffering and hardship. Religion is about perfecting a person or a soul in order for them to be better. Implicit in all of this is the understanding that humans are fundamentally flawed and need to be “saved.” But if one already believed that man has an inner capacity for being a supreme being, as Marx believed, than the role of religion in a person´s life must be called into question. Marx believed that this recognition, as humans as supreme beings, “overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being” (Marx, 184).
Marx disagreed that humans were contemptible beings because of their own disobedience. Marx´s view on religion, and how it was able to be utilized as a tool for oppression goes to the heart of Marx´s view on human nature, he believed that mankind needed to find meaning in things, and religion offered a packaged meaning to suffering which fulfilled the need for knowing how and why the world exists as it does. Marx wrote, “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. . . it is the opium of the people” (Marx, 175).
Marx saw religion at its worst as standing in between a person and his or her self-actualization, writing, “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not” (Marx, Estranged Labor XXII).
In a different sphere of society, Marx saw that the current state of economic affairs in the developed world, with a supporting role from religions, led to the alienation of the worker. Workers were not in a situation where they were, say, making something and then selling it. Rather, they were mostly being paid a low wage to spend half of their lives creating something so that the owner of the means of productions, the factory owner, could turn around and sell it for a big profit. The more money a factor made mattered nothing to the worker since he was paid for a set amount of hours, not for what he produced during those hours or how hard he worked. This led to what Marx termed as the alienation of the worker (Engels, 12). Marx believed that the only way to do away with the alienation of the worker was for him to take possession of his own creations. There are certain overlaps here between Marx´s economic ideas and Marx´s religious ideas. When a person is in control of his own destiny economically, he is free. Likewise when a person no longer needs an outside entity for religion, but is able to search for transcended meaning within himself, religion will no longer be “hostile” to that person, but instead an important part of his psychological and spiritual development (Carver, 83).
Marx´s ideas are the products of the time that he lived. His take on human nature was a reflection of the effect that industrialization had on workers. Arguably, Marx is the most important philosopher of the 19th century because of the reaching ramifications of his ideas. He is an example that philosophy as a discipline has always had effects on the world around it. In countries like Cuba and China, his ideas are still at work in the governments of these countries. In historical phenomenon such as The Cold War, there is a direct relation between Lenin´s Soviet Russia and ideas influenced from Marx.
Works Cited
Carver, Terrell. The Cambridge companion to Marx. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labour, Marx, 1844." Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm (accessed April 8, 2013).
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On religion. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On religion. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.
Reinhold Niebuhr, introduction to Marx and Engels: On Religion (New York: Schocken, 1964)
