Sociology Contemporary Theory 1200 Word Essat

American Academy of Religion

The Marxist Critique of Religion: A Persisting Ambiguity Author(s): Richard Comstock Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp. 327-342 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1462345 . Accessed: 17/01/2012 15:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press and American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

JAAR 44/2 (1976) 327-342

The Marxist Critique of Religion: A Persisting Ambiguity

RICHARD COMSTOCK

INTRODUCTION

HE critique of religion fashioned by Karl Marx over a hundred years ago is of more than historic interest. It ranks with Freud’s analysis as a powerful secular probe that must be taken seriously in any contemporary

assessment of the role of religion in human culture. Besides its intrinsic importance in this respect, the critique of religion also contributes to a grasp of Marxism as a total system of thought in which it plays a significant role. Furthermore, in the last decade, the attempt to develop a Marxist-Christian dialogue has encouraged a fresh examination of Marx’s approach to religion.’

However, any attempt to further dialogue between Marxism and Christianity (or a broader dialogue between Marxism and religion) seems off to a false start if it tones down the unrelieved rejection of religion and the unqualified statement of atheism that is both implicit and explicit in Marx’s pronouncements on the subject. Still, many critics have suggested that in spite of this pronounced hostility to religion, Marxism has itself assumed a religious or “quasi-religious” form, though for that very reason involved in conflict with the traditional religions of east and west.2

The issue here is in part a semantic one that involves our decision as to how we choose to define the admittedly ambiguous and elusive term “religion.” The apparent paradox that Marxism affirms a radical atheism rejecting religion and is nonetheless a religion is based on a systematic ambiguity in the use of the term religion. Thus, the Marxist rejection of religion deals with religion understood as the espousal of a radical dualism between nature and super-nature, man and God, earth and Heaven, this-world and another world beyond. The assertion by many critics that Marxism is a religion makes use of a different understanding of religion as the realm of the individual’s or a given society’s ultimate commitments. On this second understanding of religion in an extremely broad sense, even the orientation to an atheistic, this-wordly humanism can be characterized as “religious” in the sense that it reveals the ultimate commitments of the society in question. It is in

‘Herbert Aptheker, ed., Marxism and Christianity (New York: Humanities Press, 1968); Paul Oestreicher, The Christian Marxist Dialogue (London: Collier-Macmillan Co., 1969); Russell Norris, God, Marx and the Future (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974).

2Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965); Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter ofthe World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

RICHARD COMSTOCK is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of Primitive Religions and the Study of Religion and numerous articles.

327

328 RICHARD COMSTOCK

this sense that Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, characterizes Marx as “the revolutionary prophet who had transmuted atheism into a new religion.”3

In this paper, I propose to avoid this systematic ambiguity by adopting as a working definition of religion one that affirms the distinction between super- nature and nature, other-world and this world. Such a definition, emphasizing the quality of “transcendence,” is to be preferred in a discussion of Marxism to a definition emphasizing the quality of “ultimacy,” because the former adheres to the kind of understanding of religion Marx himself entertained.

In this vein, the statement made David McLellan in his recent biography of Karl Marx is to be higly commended.

Attempts to characterize Marxism as a religion, although plausible within their own terms, confuse the issue, as also do attempts to claim that Marx was not really an atheist. This is the usual approach of writers who stress the parallel between Marxism and the Judaeo-Christian history of salvation . . . It is true that Marx had in mind the religion of contemporary Germany dominated by a dogmatic and over-spiritual Lutheranism, but he wrote about “religion” in general and his- rejection was absolute … It is of course legitimate to change the meaning of “atheism” in order to make Marx a believer malgr4 lui, but this tends to make the question senseless by blurring too many distinctions.4

While acknowledging the obvious merits of this statement, I wish to argue that an ambiguity remains in Marx’s rejection of super-natural religion in spite of his efforts to attain a radical and unqualified clarity in his rejection. This ambiguity is related to one that also appears in Marx’s judgments concerning utopianism. As is well known, Marx and Engels rejected Utopian socialism with the same fervor that they rejected transcendent religion and for roughly the same reasons. Utopian socialism was defined by them as the attempt to base the construction of a socialist society on some kind of ideal extracted from traditional religion, philosophical idealism, or the poetical imagination. Scientific socialism, on the contrary, would derive a concrete socialist society out of a scientific analysis of concrete, actually existing social conditions.5

Nevertheless, in spite of this explicit rejection of utopianism that is analogous to the rejection of religion, a curious tension pervades the subsequent development of Marx’s position. The humanism espoused in the early writings seems pervaded with a kind of religious aura and ecstatic vision that is communicated in and through the secular pronouncements. Even the later writings of the mature Marx, such as Capital Vol. I or the Critique of the Gotha Programme, seem to present a careful empirical analysis of existing economic structures that is intersected by a visionary or Utopian image of a moment when “the knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated” and “the victory of the proletariat” takes place.6 With this event occurs the “all-round development of the individual” as “all the springs of co- operative wealth flow more abundantly.”‘7

3Karl Marx, On Religion (New York: Schocken, 1964), p. 14. 4David McLellan, Karl Marx; His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p.

89.

5Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Washington Square, 1964); Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965).

6Karl Marx, Capital, I (New York: International, 1967), pp. 763-64. 7Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York; International Publishers, 1938), p.

10.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 329

In spite of Marx’s claim that this hope of a humanistic plenitude derived from a purely scientific analysis, many critics have detected in it Utopian sources. David McLellan, for example, in the work already cited above, points out that both the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse “have in common a Utopian and almost millenial strain.”8

The similarity between the “religious” question and the “Utopian” question in Marx’s thought is striking. In both instance, Marx vehemently denies the presence of an element that many critics yet claim to recognize in his thought. I do not think that this similarity is an accidental coincidence. On the contrary, I think it can be shown that the Utopian element that remains is directly derived from the critique of religion that Marx devised under the influence of Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians. This is so because the critique of religion based on Feuerbach’s transformative method did not succeed in eliminating a transcendent referent with the finality and clarity toward which it aspired.

The argument is not that Marx makes covert use of religious myth and/or Utopian imagery while overtly disavowing them. It is, rather, that the logic or structure of the transformative method which Marx learned from Feuerbach involved him in a curious kind of dialectical inversion whereby he was led to deny religious transcendence as a dynamic causal force at the same time that he retained it as a transcendent (or Utopian) ideal. I thus hope to specify the intellectual source in Marx’s own writings of the ambiguity felt by many readers of Marx who, even while recognizing his drive toward a radical secularity, have also sensed a continued religious aspect in his position.

To clarify and support this cryptic thesis will require a review of both familiar and not so familiar aspects of Marx’s critique of religion. This critique has three major prongs or tenets. The first tenet is the Feuerbachian theme that religion is in its essence a paradigmatic form of the alienated consciousness. The second tenet is an emphasis on religion as the ideological consciousness that reflects a fundamental alienation existing in the political and economic orders. The third tenet is a growing realization that “Humanism” is itself a final form of the religious consciousness that must be overcome as a prelude to revolutionary praxis. In the next three sections, each of these tenets is considered in the light of the thesis that has been proposed.

RELIGION AS THE ALIENATED CONSCIOUSNESS

The first tenet in Marx’s critique of religion is the characterization of religion as the paradigmatic form of the alienated consciousness. Although Ludwig Feuerbach is often given credit for developing this approach, other thinkers – Marx’s teacher, Bruno Bauer, and the socialist thinker Moses Hess, who converted Engels to Communism – also advanced the idea of religion as an alienated human projection. Feuerbach’s book, The Essence of Christianity (1957), had the virtue of stating with classic clarity a position that was generally held by the Young Hegelians.9

According to Feuerbach, the theistic god of Judaism and Christianity is an

‘McLellan, Life and Thought, p. 304. 9Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1966); Willilam Brazill, The

Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969).

330 RICHARD COMSTOCK

imaginative projection of the perfections in man himself. Thus, the love, goodness, wisdom, and creativity projected outwardly into the Biblical god are really the love, goodness, wisdom, and creativity that belong to man himself. In the religion of the common man, these projections are innocent and useful methods whereby man becomes acquainted with his own nature through an objectified image of his own creation. However, in Christian theology, an innocent projection has become a harmful reification, since now this humanly created image seems to appear to man as an external, independently real being who condemns man for his lack of love, his evil, his ignorance, his impotence, which contrast unfavorably with the positive virtues – absolute love, goodness, wisdom, and power – ascribed to his imaginary god.

This critique of religion provided a clear model of religious alienation in particular and thereby indicates the structure of what is meant by alienation in general’0 As understood by the young Hegelians and by Marx, alienation has three aspects. First is an act of objectification whereby man externalizes his inner potentialities in an outer form. Second is a reification whereby the externalized form is frozen into an alien object that is cut off from its origins in the human act and now confronts the human being as an independently existing being. Third, the reification produces a dichotomization or radical division within man. Thus, the alienated consciousness can aptly be described as the divided consciousness.

Religious alienation served Marx as a conceptual model with which to distinguish alienation in the political and economic spheres as well. For example, Marx argues:

Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of human fantasy, of the human brain and heart, reacts independently as an alien activity of gods or devils upon the individual, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It is another’s activity and a loss of his own spontaneity.”

During the early period in which Marx associates with politically minded Young Hegelian thinkers like Arnold Ruge and Moses Hess, Marx points out that the political order reveals a fundamental cleavage between the bureaucratic state, administering a supposedly universal justice, and civil society where business operates according to principles of egoism and laissez-faire individualism. Marx finds this division astonishingly similar in form to the religious dualism between the heaven of the perfect God and the earth of impoverished men.12 Again in the economic order, Marx shows how man’s act of producing the necessary goods of life has been divided in such a way that a fundamental cleavage – between labor and capital, between manual labor and intellectual labor, between the productive act and the results of the act, between man and man, between man and his own social nature – has taken place. 3 Religious alienation, political alienation, economic alienation are thus found to participate in a common structure of which religious alienation is the paradigm.

‘Ilstvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970); Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Anchor Books, 1971); Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge: University Press, 1971).

“Karl Marx, Karl Marx Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 125. 12Karl Marx, Karl Marx Early Texts (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 65-67, 92-94,

99. 13Ibid., p. 114.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 331

Part of Feuerbach’s contribution to Marx’s development is the clarity with which he enunciated this paradigm. However, the model itself was a general possession of the Young Hegelians that can ultimately be traced back to Hegel himself. A more significant and original contribution of Feuerbach was the transformative method he developed in the process of explicating the nature of alienation, as Shlomo Aveniri has pointed out.14

The transformative method is based on the conviction that both theology and speculative idealism are an inversion of the true relation between subject and predicate, between independent object and the dependent result. Fpr example, theology declares that God is love; the transformative method turns this into love is divine. Furthermore, since experience shows that man is the one who loves, we see that man is the proper subject, the efficient origin of the real predicate of actual love, and the origin also of the idea of a God who is loving. Again, while speculative idealism declared that the rational idea is the basis of external nature, the transformed truth is that human thought is the result of an already existing world of nature.’5

The transformative method is the key to an understanding of Marx’s use of the term mystification.16 A thinker mystifies his analysis of a human situation when he has a correct perception of the elements involved, but inverts (or transforms) their proper relationship. Thus, religion is essentially a mystification of the human condition, as is also a shrewd speculative philosophy like that of Hegel. In both instances, the truth about man is at the same time revealed (since often various images and categories point to genuine structural relations between man and nature) and concealed (since the true dynamic of the relation between God and man, between thought and existence, between idea and nature, has been turned around). The transformative method is thus used by the early Marx as a technique of de-mystification whereby alienation can be detected and overcome.

In the same manner that Marx applies the model of religious alienation to political and economic phenomena, so Marx also uses the transformative method. Thus, for example, he argues that people make a constitution; the constitution does not make the people. Again, the state is not a preexistent reality that creates mankind; it is men in their concrete social relations (family, civil society, etc.) who create the state. Again, in the economic realm, it is not commodities as independent things who make men, but men who make commodities. It is not capital that creates human labor, but human labor that creates capital; it is not the “heaven” of prices that establishes the value of labor, but the “earth” of human labor that establishes the value of prices.

In such ways, Marx finds the transformative method a useful tool for his purposes; however, as we shall see, it also contributes to a persisting tension and ambiguity in his analysis of religion.

RELIGION AS THE IDEOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The restless mind of Marx soon makes an important advance beyond the 14Shlmomo Aveniri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: University

Press, 1968), p. 11 ff. 15Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of The Philosophy of the Future (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,

1966). 16Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday

and Co., 1967), pp. 165-66.

332 RICHARD COMSTOCK

position of Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians. This advance is occasioned by his encounter with the literature of French and English socialists, but is then accomplished by a more radical use of the transformative method than Feuerbach himself had entertained.

Marx adds to the basically Feuerbachian tenet of religion as alienation a second tenet in which religion is perceived as the false or ideological consciousness. This second tenet emerges at the point when Marx not only stresses the congruence of structure exhibited among religious, political, and economic alienations, but stresses the causal dynamics existing among them. He decides that the Young Hegelians have remained essentially idealists in their philosophical orientation by continuing to give to the religious consciousness a causative role in the human condition of alienation. It is not the case, Marx argues, that religious alienation has caused or generated political and economic alienations. On the contrary, applying Feuerbach’s transformative method in a new way, Marx now argues that it is economic alienation that generates political alienation which in turn generates religious alienation. Religion is an epiphenomenal result, not a substantive cause. It is the symptom of an unwholesome situation, but not the generative origin of that situation.’7

The dialectical movement of Marx’s thought, as he relentlessly seeks to break through the veils of mystification that cover the hidden source of man’s alienated condition, is fascinating to retrace. He perceives that the secret is not to be found in religion, which is only the result of an underlying alienation in the political order. But he soon sees that the political order functions within a dynamic economic system in a way analogous to that of religion. Politics also proves to be an epiphenomenal result of a more basic dynamic cause in the economic realm. It is the fact of alienation in the economic order (i.e., divisions and reifications occurring in the realm of the production of human goods and the means of their distribution) that proves to the be the generative cause of alienation in the realm of politics and religion.

Therefore, frontal attacks on religion are misguided because they are ineffective. To eliminate a symptom is not to eliminate the disease nor its cause. The study of religion is only valuable in the sense that the study of symptoms is important in recognizing the existence of real problems and dangers. But the study of symptom alone cannot effect a cure which can only be accomplished when the underlying dynamics are understood and dealt with in a practical rather than a theoretical way.

In the fourth thesis of the well-known “theses on Feuerbach” written around this time, Marx summarizes the basic thrust of his break with Feuerbach.

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of this world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done … The latter [i.e., the secular basis] must itself. . be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice.’8

Marx now argues that only an objective “praxis” which transforms economic circumstances can free man from his alienated condition. Marx decides that

‘7lbid., p. 401; McLellan, Life and Thought, p. 58; Marx, German Ideology, pp. 163-64. ‘8Karl Marx, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, L.

Feuer, ed. (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1959), p. 244.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 333

consciousness cannot be changed within consciousness alone, but only by changes in material acts, of which changes in consciousness are the reflection. Man’s misery is not caused by incorrect ideas, but by alienated praxis which therrfinds expression in false ideas or the ideological consciousness.

The emphasis of Marx on ideology is part of his increasing emphasis on the social dimension of human existence. Marx had already accepted from Hegel and Feuerbach the understanding of man as a social being, but he now concretizes the notion “social” to refer, not to an abstract “I-thou relation,” but to specific political and economic ties. Man is no self-sufficient monad but the point of intersection of a manifold of political and economic relations.19 Marx comes to see more clearly that “consciousness” is best understood, not as an individual subjective mode of feeling and perception, but as the awareness, interpretation, and valuations entertained by sets of individuals as they participate in the larger structure of a given class or other social group.20 Just as language functions as a set of meanings and interpretations bequeathed to the individual by his diachronic and synchronic heritage, so consciousness is social.21 When “consciousness” so understood misrepresents the social and economic situation it supposedly reflects, the consciousness may be called a “false” or “ideological” one.22

Marx evidently picked up the term ideology from certain French philosophers, and it became an important element in the development of his social and economic analysis.23 In twentieth-century sociological thought, the category of ideology has had an ambiguous history. On the one hand, some writers use ideology to refer to a system of ideas, metaphors, and values that express and give focus to the ultimate valuations and commitments of the society in question. In this usage, there is no sense of deception or distortion. Ideology is synonymous with world-view and is the attempt to honestly express the true values operating in the given society. On the other hand, ideology is also used in a negative or pejorative sense to refer to a system of ideas, metaphors, and values that are used to deceive and hide from view the situation as it exists and the values according to which groups in that society are really operating.

It is clear that the two meanings depend on two understandings of what is meant by a society. According to the organic model, a society is a unified interacting organism whose value center is expressed in its ideology; according to a conflict model, a society is made up of antagonistic groups and classes that do not necessarily have the same interests and goals.24 In this case, ideology is used by the dominant class to confuse and mystify the other classes so that they may be deprived of a proper awareness of their true situation and their proper goals.

Marx obviously held to the second model, and hence the term ideology is used by him in a predominantly negative sense. When Marx sometimes presents ideology in a positive light, this is because he believes that the interests of a

19Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, p. 71; Marx, Early Writings, p. 158; Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1964).

20Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: New World, 1970), p. 20.

21Marx, Early Writings, p. 158; Marx, German Ideology, p. 42. 22Marx, German Ideology, pp. 323-24. 23George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books,

1967). 24Robert Friedrichs, A Sociology of Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970).

334 RICHARD COMSTOCK

dominant class – say, the feudal aristocracy, or the bourgeoisie – may for a time represent the forward movement of society as a whole. However, the thought of the dominant class assumes an ideological cast in the pejorative sense because it presents its ideas and values as 1) immutable; 2) universal in their application to all people; 3) and independent of the material circumstances from which they have in fact arisen. Thought thus becomes ideological when it is used to legitimize, socialize, and perpetuate existing conditions in the political and economic order instead of to understand these conditions as a transitory phenomenon to be surpassed by new sets of material conditions in process of constant change and transformation.25

In this respect, once again religion is seen as the basic paradigm of what is meant by the ideological consciousness, just as previously it was also seen as the prime example of the alienated consciousness. For example, in both early and late writings, Marx has some interesting observations to make about the appropriateness of Protestantism as the religion of a capitalist economy. The gist of his argument is that capitalism is based on a fundamental individualism in which each laborer as an independent monad sells his labor in a free market to an equally independent capitalist. Protestantism, with its stress on the private individual entering into a free personal relation with God, uncoerced by priest or king, seems to be a perfect epiphenomenal expression of the underlying economic relation between man and man as understood by capitalist economists.26 Furthermore, the sense, in classical forms of Protestantism like Calvinism, that God is a kind of inevitable fate, hard and inexorable even in his mercy, seems to reflect the experience of human beings in a capitalist economy, buffeted, controlled, and ground down by “alien” forces beyond their power to influence in spite of the fact that each individual is absolutely free. Finally, since Protestantism presents God as an immutable and eternal power with whom man always engages in the same way, we may decide that such a religion is also ideological in the sense that it presents man’s present state of existence, which he has the power to change and transform, as an immutable state which he can never change or transform in any fundamental way.

Alienation and ideology are two sides of the same coin or two foci of a single ellipse. Alienation stresses the divided, broken nature of man’s present condition. Ideology stresses the mystification that prevents him from seeing both the full extent of his misery and the possibilities of becoming free of that misery. Religion, according to the Marxist critique, thus contributes to social therapy one positive benefit: a model by which man can recognize in clear outline the lineaments of his distress. But beyond this, it leads to an exacerbation of his dilemma by confusing him about both the seriousness of his problem and the genuine possibilities for real solutions of it. Thus, Marx remains irreconcilable to any notion that religion may have any positive contribution to make to the liberation of man. He looks forward to that time when the liberation of man will be coterminous with the complete vanishing of religion. Only then will the consciousness of man, both individual and social, enter into a meaningful engagement with the concrete circumstances of man’s real life.

It is in the light of this analysis that we are now better prepared to appreciate the meaning of the famous opening paragraphs to “Contribution to the Critique of

25Marx, German Ideology, pp. 323-24. 26Marx, Capital, I, p. 79; Marx, Early Texts, p. 95.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 335

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”.27 In these aphoristic sentences, Marx is anticipating and summarizing the main elements of his mature critique of religion. He writes: “Man has found in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, only his own reflection .. .” This is a statement of the Feuerbachian view of religion as alienation.

Marx continues: “Man is the human world, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, the spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification.” This is a statement of the Marxist view of religion as ideology.

Marx concludes: “The struggle against religion is therefore, indirectly, a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion . . . The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears, of which religion is the halo.”28 This is a statement of the dynamics between circumstances and ideological expression as Marx understands it. These are the basic tenets of the Marxist critique of religion. In their light, we can perceive added meaning to the much-quoted statement with which this section begins: “The criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF THE RELIGIOUS CRITIQUE

The two tenets of the Marxist critique of religion noted above are familiar themes. However, I now wish to consider a third tenet in Marx’s discussion of religion which has not been stressed to the same degree as the factors already noted. This additional element is found in the German Ideology, and it represents a dialectical advance in Marx’s thought, a kind of embryonic critique of his own critique of religion. The fact that his thought is here exploratory and never definitively developed and completed is responsible for unresolved tensions that have been recognized in both Marx’s views on religion in particular and in his thought as a systematic whole.

This third tenet is most fruitfully examined through a consideration of Marx’s engagement with the thought of Max Stirner. This encounter in the pages of the German Ideology has been noted but not sufficiently emphasized by Marxist scholars with the exception of Nicholas Lobkowicz.29

Stirner published his interesting but eccentric defense of a radical individualism in The Ego and lin the fall of 1844.30 Its appearance thus followed the publication of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (Feb., 1844) and the writing of the Paris Manuscripts (summer, 1844). From the tone of Marx’s reaction, the reader gains the impression that Marx learned nothing from Stirner’s eccentric arguments. However, it is surely of some significance that at least a half of the voluminous German Ideology is devoted to a critique of this figure who had

27Karl Marx, Gesamtausgabe, (MEGA), 1, no. 1 (Berlin: Marx-Engels-Verlag G.M.G.H., 1927), pp. 607-21; T. B. Bottomore, trans.; Marx, Early Writings, pp. 43-59.

28Marx, Early Writings, pp. 43-44. 29Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice (London: Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 392-93. 30Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, Steven Byington, trans. (New York: Libertarian Book

Club, 1963).

336 RICHARD COMSTOCK

only a brief moment of notoriety among the Young Hegelians before disappearing from public view and influence. It may be, of course, that Marx’s attention to Stirner simply represents his propensity to marshal his heaviest artillery to break a window pane. However, Marx said that the German Ideology had achieved for him the purpose of “self-clarification.” We may well consider why Stirner should appear as such an important figure to Marx in this respect.

On one important point, Stirner serves as a negative foil against which Marx is able to present his own alternative view with greater clarity and force. This issue concerns the perennial tension between an emphasis on the individual and on society. Stirner presents a radical defense of an absolute individualism in which each man is “the unique one,” devoid of any essential social ties with others other than those he chooses to make out of his own autonomously determined needs.31

Marx has no trouble in showing that this gambit of an extreme nominalism has ended with the most abstract and empty of all concepts32. The “unique one” turns out to be a mere term without qualities or determinable relationships of any kind. While Stirner is right in rejecting the concept of “society” or “community” as an abstraction, so also is this “individual” devoid of any essential relationships with something other than his own individuality. In opposition to both abstractions, Marx turns, as we have seen, to “the social individual” who, as an individual, is a nexus of social relations – biological ties with nature and the family, political ties with the network of laws and customs relating various groups to one another, economic relations by which man produces and distributes the goods of life according to social forms in which their individual energies are manifested.

This position of Marx’s, in which both the “individual” and “social” components of man are recognized and judiciously balanced, is impressive and obviously superior to the one-sided individualism espoused by Stirner. Nevertheless, in the course of his argument, Stirner makes two points directly relevant to the concerns of a critique of religion. It is not important to our argument to insist that Stirner necessarily is a direct positive influence on Marx’s intellectual development, though there are indications that such is, in fact, the case. It is sufficient for our purposes to point out the obvious fact that the German Ideology and subsequent works reveal Marx’s acceptance of two points made clearly and brilliantly by Stirner, whether or not Marx had developed them independently of his book.

Thefirst of these points is Stirner’s relentless insistence that the Feuerbachian Humanism and the emphasis of communist writers of his day on “social man” retain a religious and theological cast in spite of efforts to escape it. Stirner attempts to bring the secularization process inaugurated by the Young Hegelians to its logical conclusion. He accepts the Feuerbachian critique of religion as far as it goes and then demonstrates that it has not gone far enough according to its own presuppositions. Feuerbach has shown that although Hegel had subjected Christianity to a critique, Hegel’s own concern with the “absolute” is as theological as a concern with “God.” However, Stirner now argued that Feuerbach’s concern with “humanity” or the “species-nature” of man is as theological as the rest. Abstractions like “Human Nature” are reifications in the same way as are terms like the “Absolute” or “God” and contribute in the same way to the condition of alienation. In other words, humanism is as religious as

311bid., p. 134. 32Marx, German Ideology, p. 125.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 337

theology or speculative idealism. In each case, a reified term functions like an oppressive power that inhibits and impoverishes the concrete existing individual.

Stirner proposes a process of radical de-mystification whereby all abstractions, whether theological, speculative, or humanistic, are abandoned in favor of concrete existence. Each of us has been haunted by ghosts. Stirner aspires to an act of radical exorcism; all spooks are deprived of power, and for the first time the unique individual, the source of all values and ideas, emerges into the light of a disenchanted day.33

Whether independently of his reading of Stirner or in creative response to him, Marx begins from this time to avoid appeals to humanistic abstractions like “universal human nature” or a “species-nature” of man.34 If he sometimes continues to use such phrases, he insists he does not mean them in the sense of some kind of non-empirical norm that determines how we are to understand man. During this period, Marx subjects the writings of Utopian, religious, and humanistic socialists to a fierce attack because they seek to base their revolutionary hopes on transcendent ideals like “universal love,” “Human Nature,” “the will of God” instead of grounding them in the historical-material conditions of concrete social existence.35

Nevertheless, while accepting the critique of Feuerbachian Humanism as retaining a religious character, Marx still insists that Stirner has missed the main point. Marx’s attack on Stirner is to be understood as an example of dialectical movement in which Stirner’s argument is accepted and then transcended by a further development of the critique. If Hegel has de-mystified theology, then Feuerbach has de-mystified Hegel’s speculative idealism; Stirner in turn has de- mystified Feuerbachian Humanism. Marx now proposes to de-mystify Stirner’s version of a radical secularism and, in so doing, de-mystifies critiques of religion in addition to religion.

In other words, Stirner’s exorcism is itself a religious act since it ascribes to the Feuerbachian predicates a kind of effective power over the lives of men. Thus, Stirner’s project is the liberation of man from these ghostly entities which will thereby free man from all inhibitions against the realization of his “unique” potentialities. To Marx, such a critique of religion still gives to religious entities a kind of substantive power and thus contributes to the very alienation it supposedly is attempting to destroy. Thus, Marx decides that even a critique of religion can remain religious, and he counsels against direct frontal attacks on religion as supporting the very position one seeks to eliminate.

Stirner’s second contribution to the critique of Feuerbachian Humanism is his attack on the transformative method.36 At first glance, the transformative method seems clear, insightful, and extremely useful in its task of de-mystifying religion and philosophy. But Stirner argues that to change a religious “subject” into a religious predicate is not thereby to exorcise religion since the predicate can be as oppressive as the subject. Thus, a love that is divine can reign in tyrannical force over human consciousness just as irresistibly as a God who is love. Divine predicates continue to haunt man as reified abstractions as much as divine subjects.

33Stirner, Ego and His Own, pp. 39-59; Marx, German Ideology, pp. 311-33. 34Marx, German Ideology, pp. 259, 484-85, 517-18, 530, 548. 35Ibid., pp. 513-656; Marx, Communist Manifesto, 3; cf. Frederich Engels, Socialism Utopian

and Scientific (New York; International, 1935). 36Stirner, Ego and His Own, pp. 47-59; cf. Marx, German Ideology, pp. 258-63.

338 RICHARD COMSTOCK

In an important passage, Marx seeks to transcend the entire Young Hegelian parameters by considering that “the opposite of what Feuerbach says took place;” that “neither God nor his predicates have ever been the main thing for people;” that “this itself is only a religious illusion of German theory.” Marx decides that although Feuerbach’s critique of religion has “paved the way to the materialistic outlook on the world,” it is now necessary “to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality.”37

Nevertheless, although Marx is dealing with an important issue, it cannot be said that he developed his critique of Feuerbach’s transformative method to that degree of clarity which would have hopefully enabled him to transcend the dilemmas in the original position. Instead, his clear perception of the difficulty, together with his failure to resolve it effectually, is the source of ambiguities that remain in both the Marxist critique of religion and in the Marxist position as a whole.

Marx declared that the criticism of religion is the basis of all criticism. If this is so, at least so far as Marx’s own thought is concerned, then it follows that problems in that basic criticism will reappear in all the other secular critiques of politics and economics as well. The problem is that Marx’s critique of religion has as one of its constituent elements an application of the transformative method to the relation between man and God. If Marx now entertains doubts about the viability of this method, these doubts naturally should apply to the critique itself, which would require a thorough reworking. Instead, Marx continues the original critique in an uncriticized form as he proceeds with the further developments of his mature position. As a result, an ambiguity pervades Marx’s thought in that his thought reveals both an uncritical use of the transformative method and the critical construction of a different method which he never succeeded in articulating completely in a methodologically self-conscious form.

This point is important both for our understanding of Marx’s critique of religion and for our understanding of larger issues in his position. To see how this is so, let us return to the Feuerbachian critique of religion with critical eyes that have been sharpened by the later observations of Stirner and Marx. We now notice that what at first glance seemed like the strident proclamation of a militant atheism and anti-religious stance turns out not to be so at all.

According to Feuerbach, theism affirms that man was created by and is dependent on God. A de-mystified humanism turns all such statements around. It is not God who created man in his (God’s) own image, but man who created God in his (man’s) own image. Man is not the image of God. God is the image (i.e., the ideal projection) of man.

At first glance, this analysis seems to represent a radical atheism. However, it is clear that Feuerbach was not able, nor did he particularly aspire, to disentangle his critique from some of the theological aura of that which he studied. Feuerbach was himself ambiguous as to whether his thought is itself religious or non- religious, theological or anti-theological, theistic or atheistic. As he puts it: “I… while reducing theology to anthropology, exalt anthropology into theology;” or “No religion! That is my religion.” Again, his observation “God was my first thought, reason the second, and man the third and the last” becomes even more significant when he later agrees with the statement “the first must also be the last.”38

37Marx, German Ideology, p. 258. 38Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, (New York: Harper and Bros., 1957), p. 38;

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook; Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (New York; Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 292, 294, 296.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 339

We have here the real problem in Feuerbach’s critique of Christian theology. His transformative method has changed internal relations within the grammar of the system (subjects become predicates, and predicates subjects) but the qualities or predicates themselves remain intact and valid. In other words, the values or ideals of perfect love, perfect wisdom, perfect truth remain as the ideal toward which existing man aspires.

To make clear the importance of this point, let us consider what Feuerbach does not say. He does not suggest that when man in his misery projects the ideal form of God onto a speculative grid, this ideal image has been inflated to compensate in the imagination for a real human impoverishment. On the contrary, Feuerbach accepts the content of the projection as a proper mirror image of man and only objects to its reification into an imaginary external being.39 The importance of this point is that it involves Feuerbach’s critique in a utopian element that is part of the heritage that continues to beset Marx’s thought with an unresolved ambiguity. In other words, in the Marxist critique of religion God as substantive and causal subject is denied; but God is retained as an ideal predicate, as the image of a form of human existence in which ordinary love, wisdom, goodness, and power have been enhanced and enlarged into an unalienated perfection.

We have already noted Marx’s conscious and explicit attempt to disengage communist thought and revolutionary theory from utopian elements. However, many readers of Marx have been unable to escape the sense of a continuing utopian element in his thought in spite of his explicit contention to the contrary. But if this is so, how is it to be explained? We can simply accept the tension as an evidence of a contradiction between Marx’s conscious, deliberate desire to be scientific in his thought and a utopian element that continues on a unsconscious sublimated level. Or we may say that, on the conscious explicit level, Marx simply contradicts himself, as many thinkers do. I am here suggesting a third possibility. It is more constructive, I think, to view this tension in Marx’s thought between utopian and scientific elements as an ambiguity (not a contradiction) generated by the fact that the Feuerbachian critique of theism leaves the utopian element (God as an ideal perfect person) intact and simply transforms its relation-to man from an efficient energy to an ideal final end. In other words, on one point Stirner has the last word. Marx laughs at Stirner’s fear of reified ghosts, but it turns out that neither Feuerbach nor Marx have succeeded in exorcising the ghost of God, an ideal model still haunting man’s dreams. The transformative method has retained “God” as the ideal of human perfection functioning as the model according to which man now proposes to create himself through his own concrete act.4

In the exploratory pages of the Paris Manuscripts, Marx announces his clear rejection of theism and at the same time develops what might be called an ecstatic humanism in which man’s present powers are enlarged, enhanced and perfected. The two (the atheism and the humanism) appear as dialectical components of the same position. The atheism is so radical that it seeks to transcend itself as atheism. Marx declares that “communism begins from the outset (Owen), with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, it is still mostly an abstraction.”4′ Marx seeks to develop a positive humanism that does not even require reference to atheism. Thus: “Atheism … has no longer any meaning, for

39Feuerbach, Christianity, p. 37. 40Marx, Early Texts, p. 99. 41Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, D. J. Struik, ed. (New

York: International, 1964), p. 136.

340 RICHARD COMSTOCK

atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation . . socialism is man’s positive self consciousness, no longer mediated through the annulment of religion.”42

The descriptions of man which follow this radical rejection of God become endowed with the kind of ecstatic predicates formerly attributed to the divine only. Thus, where Feuerbach had declared: “The more empty life is, the fuller, the more concrete is God. The impoverishing of the real world and the enriching of God is one act. Only the poor man has a rich God,”43 Marx now looks forward to a society that “produces man in this entire richness of his being – produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses – as its enduring reality.””44 Such references are not restricted to the Paris Manuscripts, but can be found in the German Ideology, the Grundrisse, even Capital Vol I, and other writings as well.45

This point leads to the problem of an apparent contradiction in Marx’s position. If it is true, as we have asserted, that Marx, from 1844 on, rejected a normative humanism, how can this be reconciled with our contention that he continues to refer to an image of man realizing expanded potentialities? I think a reconciliation can be obtained by suggesting that Marx’s later thought can be characterized as a kind of “negative humanism.” I use this phrase deliberately to suggest structural similarities with the tradition in Christian thought called “negative theology.” According to this theological method, God is to be defined only in terms of negations. God is to be described in terms of what he is not, in terms of the limitations that he negates by transcending them. Negative theology does not affirm an ultimate nihilism but simply asserts that the positive plenitude of God cannot be explicitly stated but only indicated indirectly through negations.

By the same token, Marx argues that any present-day description of the possibilities and potentialities in man must necessarily fail to describe what is truly there. According to Marx, present-day man is the social individual in an alienated (i.e., divided) condition of existence.46 Any attempt to describe in explicit detail the future condition of unalienated man would simply assume an ideological function of freezing some present imperfect model into a norm that would inhibit rather than support growth and development into an unalienated state.47

This point is stated clearly in the Grundrisse, where Marx declares,

. . when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his native potentiality with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick.48

42Ibid., pp. 145, 185. 43Feuerbach, Christianity, p. 73. 44Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 141, 144. 45Marx, German Ideology, p. 495; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 51;

Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1956), pp. 254-55. 46Marx, German Ideology, p. 488. 47Ibid., pp. 496, 529. 48Marx, Grundrisse, p. 488.

THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF RELIGION 341

Here we see clearly that Marx’s suspicion of references to human nature (even though he makes one in this very passage) is based on his rejection of a “predetermined yardstick.” Marx’s idea is that his science will aid in the liberation of man from his present economic alienation, which should strike away the fetters holding back the inevitable and natural expansion of the total man.

If this interpretation is rejected on the grounds that Marx clearly considered his view of the development of man to be based on science and not a secularized mysticism, then we are left with an important part of Marx’s thought that cannot be integrated into his position as a whole, since Marx’s own critique of religion retains the religious ideal in the very act of offering a critique of religion. We must insist that a purely scientific Marx has no critique of religion and that the use made by “scientific” Marxists of the Marxian critique of religion (based largely on the early writings) is inconsistent.

On the other hand, if the Marxian critique of religion is an authentic part of Marxism, indeed, its foundation, then we have an explanation for three persisting ambiguities in the Marxist system of thought. First is the suggestion of a normative ethic together with clear denials of the same. Second is the evidence of utopian motifs together with their vehement rejection. Third is the tension between a Marxism that affirms the power of theory together with a denial of the power of ideas in history.

It is my suggestion that these ambiguities can be traced back to the initial ambiguity in the critique of religion whereby religion is explicitly rejected in favor of man but is nevertheless retained in modified form by means of the transformative method. It is thus the structure of Marx’s own thought that brought about the situation in which his position is based on a systematic ambiguity, i.e., that religion is denied as an effective force even while it is retained as a transcendent ideal.

CONCLUSION

The basic purpose of this paper is now completed. It has supported the position that Marx’s thought contains a religious (i.e., transcendent and utopian) motif in spite of his explicit statements to the contrary. However, it has located this motif in a different place than is customary. Whereas many students of Marx have argued that the religious aspect is an extraneous element that appears in spite of his critique of religion, I have argued that it rather appears because of the critique and is a structurally necessary feature, integrally involved in the very dialectic of his argument. This is so because Feuerbach’s transformative method changes the internal relations between man and God but leaves the idea of God intact as a transcendent ideal.

In the light of Marx’s own later misgivings about the transformative method, it is possible now to see that this method, while promising, is limited. It actually proves to be an abortive application of Hegel’s dialectical method rather than a step beyond it. The dialectical method moves through various kinds of oppositions, contradictions, and polarities to ever more concrete comprehensions of the reality indicated by the character of the tension between its terms and not by a focus on one term of a given opposition only. Such an inversion simply substitutes one abstraction for another.

The transformative method is useful as a heuristic technique that exposes the tendency to reify predicates into purported objects of dynamic power over events.

342 RICHARD COMSTOCK

However, the mere inversion of subject and predicate in a sentence, whether theological or philosophical, does not alone succeed in reaching the real subject that transcends the realm of abstraction in which the given sentence is trapped. Both subject and predicate of the sentence may be forms of reification. This Marx discovered when he came to see that Feuerbach’s “man” was as abstract as theology’s “God.”

This insight, which is clearly evident in the German Ideology, marks the point of transition and maturation of Marx’s thought. The most interesting theme in contemporary Marxist scholarship is the discussion of how Marx’s mature method of approach to man as a social phenomenon is to be properly described. Many extremely promising avenues of exploration have been opened.49 However, what is important to the thrust of this paper is that whatever degree of methodological sophistication Marx may have developed after the German Ideology, there is no evidence that he redirected this new sophistication back to the concerns of his critique of religion. What might have resulted from such a project is difficult to predict. However, we can see that Marx’s failure to do so left his critique of religion on the horns of a dilemma he never resolved. His critique of religion is based on the transformative method. If this method is rejected, then Marx is able to reject utopian elements from his thinking, but at the same time has no coherent critique of religion. Insofar as he retains, in an uncriticized form, his critique of religion based on the transformative method, he cannot escape from the influence of religion as a transcendent ideal. From this basic tension, the strength, complexity, ambiguity, and paradoxical quality of Marxist thought is ultimately derived.

49Cf. Meszaros, Theory of Alienation, p. 115; Louis Althuser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969).