marxist theory beliefs

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 7, 2019 | Original: November 9, 2009

As a university student, Karl Marx (1818-1883) joined a movement known as the Young Hegelians, who strongly criticized the political and cultural establishments of the day. He became a journalist, and the radical nature of his writings would eventually get him expelled by the governments of Germany, France and Belgium. In 1848, Marx and fellow German thinker Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto,” which introduced their concept of socialism as a natural result of the conflicts inherent in the capitalist system. Marx later moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1867, he published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital), in which he laid out his vision of capitalism and its inevitable tendencies toward self-destruction, and took part in a growing international workers’ movement based on his revolutionary theories.

Karl Marx’s Early Life and Education

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia; he was the oldest surviving boy in a family of nine children. Both of his parents were Jewish, and descended from a long line of rabbis, but his father, a lawyer, converted to Lutheranism in 1816 due to contemporary laws barring Jews from higher society. Young Karl was baptized in the same church at the age of 6, but later became an atheist.

Did you know? The 1917 Russian Revolution, which overthrew three centuries of tsarist rule, had its roots in Marxist beliefs. The revolution’s leader, Vladimir Lenin, built his new proletarian government based on his interpretation of Marxist thought, turning Karl Marx into an internationally famous figure more than 30 years after his death.

After a year at the University of Bonn (during which Marx was imprisoned for drunkenness and fought a duel with another student), his worried parents enrolled their son at the University of Berlin, where he studied law and philosophy. There he was introduced to the philosophy of the late Berlin professor G.W.F. Hegel and joined a group known as the Young Hegelians, who were challenging existing institutions and ideas on all fronts, including religion, philosophy, ethics and politics.

Karl Marx Becomes a Revolutionary

After receiving his degree, Marx began writing for the liberal democratic newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, and he became the paper’s editor in 1842. The Prussian government banned the paper as too radical the following year. With his new wife, Jenny von Westphalen, Marx moved to Paris in 1843. There Marx met fellow German émigré Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. In 1845, Engels and Marx published a criticism of Bauer’s Young Hegelian philosophy entitled “The Holy Father.”

By that time, the Prussian government intervened to get Marx expelled from France, and he and Engels had moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship. In 1847, the newly founded Communist League in London, England, drafted Marx and Engels to write “The Communist Manifesto,” published the following year. In it, the two philosophers depicted all of history as a series of class struggles (historical materialism), and predicted that the upcoming proletarian revolution would sweep aside the capitalist system for good, making the workingmen the new ruling class of the world.

Karl Marx’s Life in London and “Das Kapital”

With revolutionary uprisings engulfing Europe in 1848, Marx left Belgium just before being expelled by that country’s government. He briefly returned to Paris and Germany before settling in London, where he would live for the rest of his life, despite being denied British citizenship. He worked as a journalist there, including 10 years as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but never quite managed to earn a living wage, and was supported financially by Engels. In time, Marx became increasingly isolated from fellow London Communists, and focused more on developing his economic theories. In 1864, however, he helped found the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) and wrote its inaugural address. Three years later, Marx published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital) his masterwork of economic theory. In it he expressed a desire to reveal “the economic law of motion of modern society” and laid out his theory of capitalism as a dynamic system that contained the seeds of its own self-destruction and subsequent triumph of communism. Marx would spend the rest of his life working on manuscripts for additional volumes, but they remained unfinished at the time of his death, of pleurisy, on March 14, 1883.

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Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx’s theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.

1. Marx’s Life and Works

• 2.1. On The Jewish Question
• 2.2. Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction
• 2.3. 1844 Manuscripts
• 2.4. Theses on Feuerbach

3. Economics

4.1 the german ideology, 4.2 1859 preface, 4.3 functional explanation, 4.4 rationality, 4.5 alternative interpretations, 5. morality, other internet resources, related entries.

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws. A precocious schoolchild, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy, comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus. On completion of his doctorate in 1841 Marx hoped for an academic job, but he had already fallen in with too radical a group of thinkers and there was no real prospect. Turning to journalism, Marx rapidly became involved in political and social issues, and soon found himself having to consider communist theory. Of his many early writings, four, in particular, stand out. ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’, and ‘On The Jewish Question’, were both written in 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , written in Paris 1844, and the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ of 1845, remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime.

The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845, was also unpublished but this is where we see Marx beginning to develop his theory of history. The Communist Manifesto is perhaps Marx’s most widely read work, even if it is not the best guide to his thought. This was again jointly written with Engels and published with a great sense of excitement as Marx returned to Germany from exile to take part in the revolution of 1848. With the failure of the revolution Marx moved to London where he remained for the rest of his life. He now concentrated on the study of economics, producing, in 1859, his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy . This is largely remembered for its Preface, in which Marx sketches out what he calls ‘the guiding principles’ of his thought, on which many interpretations of historical materialism are based. Marx’s main economic work is, of course, Capital (Volume 1), published in 1867, although Volume 3, edited by Engels, and published posthumously in 1894, contains much of interest. Finally, the late pamphlet Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) is an important source for Marx’s reflections on the nature and organisation of communist society.

The works so far mentioned amount only to a small fragment of Marx’s opus, which will eventually run to around 100 large volumes when his collected works are completed. However the items selected above form the most important core from the point of view of Marx’s connection with philosophy, although other works, such as the 18 th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), are often regarded as equally important in assessing Marx’s analysis of concrete political events. In what follows, I shall concentrate on those texts and issues that have been given the greatest attention within the Anglo-American philosophical literature.

2. The Early Writings

The intellectual climate within which the young Marx worked was dominated by the influence of Hegel, and the reaction to Hegel by a group known as the Young Hegelians, who rejected what they regarded as the conservative implications of Hegel’s work. The most significant of these thinkers was Ludwig Feuerbach, who attempted to transform Hegel’s metaphysics, and, thereby, provided a critique of Hegel’s doctrine of religion and the state. A large portion of the philosophical content of Marx’s works written in the early 1840s is a record of his struggle to define his own position in reaction to that of Hegel and Feuerbach and those of the other Young Hegelians.

2.1 ‘On The Jewish Question’

In this text Marx begins to make clear the distance between himself and his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation. In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation — essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties — and human emancipation. Marx’s reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of religion, as the contemporary example of the United States demonstrates. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation. Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feud and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the idea of non-alienated labour, which we will explore below.

2.2 ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’

This work is home to Marx’s notorious remark that religion is the ‘opiate of the people’, a harmful, illusion-generating painkiller, and it is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail. Just as importantly Marx here also considers the question of how revolution might be achieved in Germany, and sets out the role of the proletariat in bringing about the emancipation of society as a whole.

With regard to religion, Marx fully accepted Feuerbach’s claim in opposition to traditional theology that human beings had invented God in their own image; indeed a view that long pre-dated Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s distinctive contribution was to argue that worshipping God diverted human beings from enjoying their own human powers. While accepting much of Feuerbach’s account Marx’s criticizes Feuerbach on the grounds that he has failed to understand why people fall into religious alienation and so is unable to explain how it can be transcended. Feuerbach’s view appears to be that belief in religion is purely an intellectual error and can be corrected by persuasion. Marx’s explanation is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and therefore cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away. Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity. However, it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible. One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognize it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. Marx’s view appears to be that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions. At first it is ‘deviously acknowledged’ by religion, which creates a false idea of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, the political liberal state, which is needed to manage the politics of religious diversity, takes on the role offered by religion in earlier times of providing a form of illusory community. But the state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.

Of course we are owed an answer to the question how such a society could be created. It is interesting to read Marx here in the light of his third Thesis on Feuerbach where he criticises an alternative theory. The crude materialism of Robert Owen and others assumes that human beings are fully determined by their material circumstances, and therefore to bring about an emancipated society it is necessary and sufficient to make the right changes to those material circumstances. However, how are those circumstances to be changed? By an enlightened philanthropist like Owen who can miraculously break through the chain of determination which ties down everyone else? Marx’s response, in both the Theses and the Critique, is that the proletariat can break free only by their own self-transforming action. Indeed if they do not create the revolution for themselves — in alliance, of course, with the philosopher — they will not be fit to receive it.

2.3 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts cover a wide range of topics, including much interesting material on private property and communism, and on money, as well as developing Marx’s critique of Hegel. However, the manuscripts are best known for their account of alienated labour. Here Marx famously depicts the worker under capitalism as suffering from four types of alienated labour. First, from the product, which as soon as it is created is taken away from its producer. Second, in productive activity (work) which is experienced as a torment. Third, from species-being, for humans produce blindly and not in accordance with their truly human powers. Finally, from other human beings, where the relation of exchange replaces the satisfaction of mutual need. That these categories overlap in some respects is not a surprise given Marx’s remarkable methodological ambition in these writings. Essentially he attempts to apply a Hegelian deduction of categories to economics, trying to demonstrate that all the categories of bourgeois economics — wages, rent, exchange, profit, etc. — are ultimately derived from an analysis of the concept of alienation. Consequently each category of alienated labour is supposed to be deducible from the previous one. However, Marx gets no further than deducing categories of alienated labour from each other. Quite possibly in the course of writing he came to understand that a different methodology is required for approaching economic issues. Nevertheless we are left with a very rich text on the nature of alienated labour. The idea of non-alienation has to be inferred from the negative, with the assistance of one short passage at the end of the text ‘On James Mill’ in which non-alienated labour is briefly described in terms which emphasise both the immediate producer’s enjoyment of production as a confirmation of his or her powers, and also the idea that production is to meet the needs of others, thus confirming for both parties our human essence as mutual dependence. Both sides of our species essence are revealed here: our individual human powers and our membership in the human community.

It is important to understand that for Marx alienation is not merely a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The bridge between Marx’s early analysis of alienation and his later social theory is the idea that the alienated individual is ‘a plaything of alien forces’, albeit alien forces which are themselves a product of human action. In our daily lives we take decisions that have unintended consequences, which then combine to create large-scale social forces which may have an utterly unpredicted, and highly damaging, effect. In Marx’s view the institutions of capitalism — themselves the consequences of human behaviour — come back to structure our future behaviour, determining the possibilities of our action. For example, for as long as a capitalist intends to stay in business he must exploit his workers to the legal limit. Whether or not wracked by guilt the capitalist must act as a ruthless exploiter. Similarly the worker must take the best job on offer; there is simply no other sane option. But by doing this we reinforce the very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend this condition, and to take collective control of our destiny — whatever that would mean in practice — is one of the motivating and sustaining elements of Marx’s social analysis.

2.4 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’

The Theses on Feuerbach contain one of Marx’s most memorable remarks: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” (thesis 11). However the eleven theses as a whole provide, in the compass of a couple of pages, a remarkable digest of Marx’s reaction to the philosophy of his day. Several of these have been touched on already (for example, the discussions of religion in theses 4, 6 and 7, and revolution in thesis 3) so here I will concentrate only on the first, most overtly philosophical, thesis.

In the first thesis Marx states his objections to ‘all hitherto existing’ materialism and idealism. Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it. Marx combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create — or at least transform — the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which transcends and thus rejects all existing philosophical thought, is the foundation of Marx’s later theory of history. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘Industry is the real historical relationship of nature … to man’. This thought, derived from reflection on the history of philosophy, together with his experience of social and economic realities, as a journalist, sets the agenda for all Marx’s future work.

Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for commodity production are the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place, and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange. Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value — a use, in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a two stage argument for the labour theory of value. The first stage is to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense of being put on either side of an equals sign, then there must be a ‘third thing of identical magnitude in both of them’ to which they are both reducible. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates the second stage, which is a search for the appropriate ‘third thing’, which is labour in Marx’s view, as the only plausible common element. Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable.

Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; i.e. in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day’s labour power is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Marx’s able expositor Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development , the analysis is problematic.) A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from technical difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this problem now (albeit with unwelcome side consequences), we should recall that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price. But when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. A further objection is that Marx’s assertion that only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an artifact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value. Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.

However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics , picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

4. Theory of History

Marx did not set out his theory of history in great detail. Accordingly, it has to be constructed from a variety of texts, both those where he attempts to apply a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events, and those of a more purely theoretical nature. Of the latter, the 1859 Preface to A Critique of Political Economy has achieved canonical status. However, The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845, is a vital early source in which Marx first sets out the basics of the outlook of historical materialism. We shall briefly outline both texts, and then look at the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history in the hands of his philosophically most influential recent exponent, G.A. Cohen, who builds on the interpretation of the early Russian Marxist Plekhanov.

We should, however, be aware that Cohen’s interpretation is not universally accepted. Cohen provided his reconstruction of Marx partly because he was frustrated with existing Hegelian-inspired ‘dialectical’ interpretations of Marx, and what he considered to be the vagueness of the influential works of Louis Althusser, neither of which, he felt, provided a rigorous account of Marx’s views. However, some scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall focus on is faulty precisely for its lack of attention to the dialectic. One aspect of this criticism is that Cohen’s understanding has a surprisingly small role for the concept of class struggle, which is often felt to be central to Marx’s theory of history. Cohen’s explanation for this is that the 1859 Preface, on which his interpretation is based, does not give a prominent role to class struggle, and indeed it is not explicitly mentioned. Yet this reasoning is problematic for it is possible that Marx did not want to write in a manner that would engage the concerns of the police censor, and, indeed, a reader aware of the context may be able to detect an implicit reference to class struggle through the inclusion of such phrases as “then begins an era of social revolution,” and “the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. Hence it does not follow that Marx himself thought that the concept of class struggle was relatively unimportant. Furthermore, when A Critique of Political Economy was replaced by Capital , Marx made no attempt to keep the 1859 Preface in print, and its content is reproduced just as a very much abridged footnote in Capital . Nevertheless we shall concentrate here on Cohen’s interpretation as no other account has been set out with comparable rigour, precision and detail.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism that had characterised previous German thought. Accordingly, they take pains to set out the ‘premises of the materialist method’. They start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasising that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. As the material means of production develop, ‘modes of co-operation’ or economic structures rise and fall, and eventually communism will become a real possibility once the plight of the workers and their awareness of an alternative motivates them sufficiently to become revolutionaries.

In the sketch of The German Ideology , all the key elements of historical materialism are present, even if the terminology is not yet that of Marx’s more mature writings. Marx’s statement in 1859 Preface renders much the same view in sharper form. Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx’s view in the Preface begins from what Cohen calls the Development Thesis, which is pre-supposed, rather than explicitly stated in the Preface. This is the thesis that the productive forces tend to develop, in the sense of becoming more powerful, over time. This states not that they always do develop, but that there is a tendency for them to do so. The productive forces are the means of production, together with productively applicable knowledge: technology, in other words. The next thesis is the primacy thesis, which has two aspects. The first states that the nature of the economic structure is explained by the level of development of the productive forces, and the second that the nature of the superstructure — the political and legal institutions of society— is explained by the nature of the economic structure. The nature of a society’s ideology, which is to say the religious, artistic, moral and philosophical beliefs contained within society, is also explained in terms of its economic structure, although this receives less emphasis in Cohen’s interpretation. Indeed many activities may well combine aspects of both the superstructure and ideology: a religion is constituted by both institutions and a set of beliefs.

Revolution and epoch change is understood as the consequence of an economic structure no longer being able to continue to develop the forces of production. At this point the development of the productive forces is said to be fettered, and, according to the theory once an economic structure fetters development it will be revolutionised — ‘burst asunder’ — and eventually replaced with an economic structure better suited to preside over the continued development of the forces of production.

In outline, then, the theory has a pleasing simplicity and power. It seems plausible that human productive power develops over time, and plausible too that economic structures exist for as long as they develop the productive forces, but will be replaced when they are no longer capable of doing this. Yet severe problems emerge when we attempt to put more flesh on these bones.

Prior to Cohen’s work, historical materialism had not been regarded as a coherent view within English-language political philosophy. The antipathy is well summed up with the closing words of H.B. Acton’s The Illusion of the Epoch : “Marxism is a philosophical farrago”. One difficulty taken particularly seriously by Cohen is an alleged inconsistency between the explanatory primacy of the forces of production, and certain claims made elsewhere by Marx which appear to give the economic structure primacy in explaining the development of the productive forces. For example, in The Communist Manifesto Marx states that: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.’ This appears to give causal and explanatory primacy to the economic structure — capitalism — which brings about the development of the forces of production. Cohen accepts that, on the surface at least, this generates a contradiction. Both the economic structure and the development of the productive forces seem to have explanatory priority over each other.

Unsatisfied by such vague resolutions as ‘determination in the last instance’, or the idea of ‘dialectical’ connections, Cohen self-consciously attempts to apply the standards of clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy to provide a reconstructed version of historical materialism.

The key theoretical innovation is to appeal to the notion of functional explanation (also sometimes called ‘consequence explanation’). The essential move is cheerfully to admit that the economic structure does indeed develop the productive forces, but to add that this, according to the theory, is precisely why we have capitalism (when we do). That is, if capitalism failed to develop the productive forces it would disappear. And, indeed, this fits beautifully with historical materialism. For Marx asserts that when an economic structure fails to develop the productive forces — when it ‘fetters’ the productive forces — it will be revolutionised and the epoch will change. So the idea of ‘fettering’ becomes the counterpart to the theory of functional explanation. Essentially fettering is what happens when the economic structure becomes dysfunctional.

Now it is apparent that this renders historical materialism consistent. Yet there is a question as to whether it is at too high a price. For we must ask whether functional explanation is a coherent methodological device. The problem is that we can ask what it is that makes it the case that an economic structure will only persist for as long as it develops the productive forces. Jon Elster has pressed this criticism against Cohen very hard. If we were to argue that there is an agent guiding history who has the purpose that the productive forces should be developed as much as possible then it would make sense that such an agent would intervene in history to carry out this purpose by selecting the economic structures which do the best job. However, it is clear that Marx makes no such metaphysical assumptions. Elster is very critical — sometimes of Marx, sometimes of Cohen — of the idea of appealing to ‘purposes’ in history without those being the purposes of anyone.

Cohen is well aware of this difficulty, but defends the use of functional explanation by comparing its use in historical materialism with its use in evolutionary biology. In contemporary biology it is commonplace to explain the existence of the stripes of a tiger, or the hollow bones of a bird, by pointing to the function of these features. Here we have apparent purposes which are not the purposes of anyone. The obvious counter, however, is that in evolutionary biology we can provide a causal story to underpin these functional explanations; a story involving chance variation and survival of the fittest. Therefore these functional explanations are sustained by a complex causal feedback loop in which dysfunctional elements tend to be filtered out in competition with better functioning elements. Cohen calls such background accounts ‘elaborations’ and he concedes that functional explanations are in need of elaborations. But he points out that standard causal explanations are equally in need of elaborations. We might, for example, be satisfied with the explanation that the vase broke because it was dropped on the floor, but a great deal of further information is needed to explain why this explanation works. Consequently, Cohen claims that we can be justified in offering a functional explanation even when we are in ignorance of its elaboration. Indeed, even in biology detailed causal elaborations of functional explanations have been available only relatively recently. Prior to Darwin, or arguably Lamark, the only candidate causal elaboration was to appeal to God’s purposes. Darwin outlined a very plausible mechanism, but having no genetic theory was not able to elaborate it into a detailed account. Our knowledge remains incomplete to this day. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that birds have hollow bones in order to facilitate flight. Cohen’s point is that the weight of evidence that organisms are adapted to their environment would permit even a pre-Darwinian atheist to assert this functional explanation with justification. Hence one can be justified in offering a functional explanation even in absence of a candidate elaboration: if there is sufficient weight of inductive evidence.

At this point the issue, then, divides into a theoretical question and an empirical one. The empirical question is whether or not there is evidence that forms of society exist only for as long as they advance productive power, and are replaced by revolution when they fail. Here, one must admit, the empirical record is patchy at best, and there appear to have been long periods of stagnation, even regression, when dysfunctional economic structures were not revolutionised.

The theoretical issue is whether a plausible elaborating explanation is available to underpin Marxist functional explanations. Here there is something of a dilemma. In the first instance it is tempting to try to mimic the elaboration given in the Darwinian story, and appeal to chance variations and survival of the fittest. In this case ‘fittest’ would mean ‘most able to preside over the development of the productive forces’. Chance variation would be a matter of people trying out new types of economic relations. On this account new economic structures begin through experiment, but thrive and persist through their success in developing the productive forces. However the problem is that such an account would seem to introduce a larger element of contingency than Marx seeks, for it is essential to Marx’s thought that one should be able to predict the eventual arrival of communism. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations. A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology. The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive. Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory.

The driving force of history, in Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx, is the development of the productive forces, the most important of which is technology. But what is it that drives such development? Ultimately, in Cohen’s account, it is human rationality. Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties. As Cohen himself acknowledges, societies do not always do what would be rational for an individual to do. Co-ordination problems may stand in our way, and there may be structural barriers. Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address scarcity. Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key. Of course it might be argued that this is the social form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times. For example, a ruling class’s absolute determination to hold on to power may have led to economically stagnant societies. Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead of economic needs. This goes to the heart of Marx’s theory that man is an essentially productive being and that the locus of interaction with the world is industry. As Cohen himself later argued in essays such as ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, the emphasis on production may appear one-sided, and ignore other powerful elements in human nature. Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory.

Many defenders of Marx will argue that the problems stated are problems for Cohen’s interpretation of Marx, rather than for Marx himself. It is possible to argue, for example, that Marx did not have a general theory of history, but rather was a social scientist observing and encouraging the transformation of capitalism into communism as a singular event. And it is certainly true that when Marx analyses a particular historical episode, as he does in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , any idea of fitting events into a fixed pattern of history seems very far from Marx’s mind. On other views Marx did have a general theory of history but it is far more flexible and less determinate than Cohen insists (Miller). And finally, as noted, there are critics who believe that Cohen’s interpretation is entirely wrong-headed (Sayers).

The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. On reading Marx’s works at all periods of his life, there appears to be the strongest possible distaste towards bourgeois capitalist society, and an undoubted endorsement of future communist society. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works. The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one finds.

There are, initially, separate questions, concerning Marx’s attitude to capitalism and to communism. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned. This, then, generates four questions: (1) Did Marx think capitalism unjust?; (2) did he think that capitalism could be morally criticised on other grounds?; (3) did he think that communism would be just? (4) did he think it could be morally approved of on other grounds? These are the questions we shall consider in this section.

The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. Capitalism’s dirty secret is that it is not a realm of harmony and mutual benefit but a system in which one class systematically extracts profit from another. How could this fail to be unjust? Yet it is notable that Marx never concludes this, and in Capital he goes as far as to say that such exchange is ‘by no means an injustice’.

Allen Wood has argued that Marx took this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system. Even though one can criticize particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust (and theft under capitalism would be an example) it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole. This is a consequence of Marx’s analysis of the role of ideas of justice from within historical materialism. That is to say, juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and ideas of justice are ideological, and the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure. Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement applied to those elements of the system that will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism. According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology.

Ziyad Husami, however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination in that the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice which matches communism. From this privileged standpoint of the proletariat, which is also Marx’s standpoint, capitalism is unjust, and so it follows that Marx thought capitalism unjust.

Plausible though it may sound, Husami’s argument fails to account for two related points. First, it cannot explain why Marx never described capitalism as unjust, and second, it does not account for the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of the utopian socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism. Hence one cannot avoid the conclusion that the ‘official’ view of Marx is that capitalism is not unjust.

Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Much of Marx’s description of capitalism — his use of the words ‘embezzlement’, ‘robbery’ and ‘exploitation’ — belie the official account. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G.A. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust (Cohen 1983). In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts.

Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live. Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfillment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should.

Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? In the absence of any special reason to argue otherwise, it simply seems obvious that Marx’s critique is a moral one. Capitalism impedes human flourishing.

Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition. There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible. Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between scientific and utopian socialism. The utopians appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society. Marx wanted to distance himself from this tradition of utopian thought, and the key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step.

This leads us now to Marx’s assessment of communism. Would communism be a just society? In considering Marx’s attitude to communism and justice there are really only two viable possibilities: either he thought that communism would be a just society or he thought that the concept of justice would not apply: that communism would transcend justice.

Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such. However it is possibly truer to Marx’s thought to say that this is part of an account in which communism transcends justice, as Lukes has argued.

If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice. We can see this by reflecting upon Hume’s idea of the circumstances of justice. Hume argued that if there was enormous material abundance — if everyone could have whatever they wanted without invading another’s share — we would never have devised rules of justice. And, of course, Marx often suggested that communism would be a society of such abundance. But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings. Again there would be no conflict and no need for justice. Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice.

Nevertheless we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerning with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light. One compelling argument is that Marx’s career simply makes no sense unless we can attribute such a belief to him. But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in section 2 above apply again. Communism clearly advances human flourishing, in Marx’s view. The only reason for denying that, in Marx’s vision, it would amount to a good society is a theoretical antipathy to the word ‘good’. And here the main point is that, in Marx’s view, communism would not be brought about by high-minded benefactors of humanity. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and the Utopian socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity.

Primary Literature

• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Berlin, 1975–.
• –––, Collected Works , New York and London: International Publishers. 1975.
• –––, Selected Works , 2 Volumes, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962.
• Marx, Karl, Karl Marx: Selected Writings , 2 nd edition, David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Secondary Literature

See McLellan 1973 and Wheen 1999 for biographies of Marx, and see Singer 2000 and Wolff 2002 for general introductions.

• Acton, H.B., 1955, The Illusion of the Epoch , London: Cohen and West.
• Althusser, Louis, 1969, For Marx , London: Penguin.
• Althusser, Louis, and Balibar, Etienne, 1970, Reading Capital , London: NLB.
• Arthur, C.J., 1986, Dialectics of Labour , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Avineri, Shlomo, 1970, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bottomore, Tom (ed.), 1979, Karl Marx , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Brudney, Daniel, 1998, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Carver, Terrell, 1982, Marx’s Social Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Carver, Terrell (ed.), 1991, The Cambridge Companion to Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Carver, Terrell, 1998, The Post-Modern Marx , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Cohen, Joshua, 1982, ‘Review of G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History ’, Journal of Philosophy , 79: 253–273.
• Cohen, G.A., 1983, ‘Review of Allen Wood, Karl Marx ’, Mind , 92: 440–445.
• Cohen, G.A., 1988, History, Labour and Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cohen, G.A., 2001, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence , 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Desai, Megnad, 2002, Marx’s Revenge , London: Verso.
• Elster, Jon, 1985, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Geras, Norman, 1989, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice,’ in A. Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Hook, Sidney, 1950, From Hegel to Marx , New York: Humanities Press.
• Husami, Ziyad, 1978, ‘Marx on Distributive Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 8: 27–64.
• Kamenka, Eugene, 1962, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Kolakowski, Leszek, 1978, Main Currents of Marxism , 3 volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Leopold, David, 2007, The Young Karl Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lukes, Stephen, 1987, Marxism and Morality , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Maguire, John, 1972, Marx’s Paris Writings , Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
• McLellan, David, 1970, Marx Before Marxism , London: Macmillan.
• McLellan, David, 1973, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought , London: Macmillan.
• Miller, Richard, 1984, Analyzing Marx , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Peffer, Rodney, 1990, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Plekhanov, G.V., (1947 [1895]), The Development of the Monist View of History London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Robinson, Joan, 1942, An Essay on Marxian Economics , London: Macmillan.
• Roemer, John, 1982, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class , Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press.
• Roemer, John (ed.), 1986, Analytical Marxism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rosen, Michael, 1996, On Voluntary Servitude , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Sayers, Sean, 1990, ‘Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen’, in S.Sayers (ed.), Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader , London: Routledge.
• Singer, Peter, 2000, Marx: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sober, E., Levine, A., and Wright, E.O. 1992, Reconstructing Marx , London: Verso.
• Sweezy, Paul, 1942 [1970], The Theory of Capitalist Development , New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Wheen, Francis, 1999, Karl Marx , London: Fourth Estate.
• Wolff, Jonathan, 2002, Why Read Marx Today? , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1984, Understanding Marx , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Wood, Allen, 1981, Karl Marx , London: Routledge; second edition, 2004.
• Wood, Allen, 1972, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 1: 244–82.

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Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

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In 1845, Karl Marx declared : “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Change it he did.

Political movements representing masses of new industrial workers, many inspired by his thought, reshaped the world in the 19th and 20th centuries through revolution and reform. His work influenced unions, labour parties and social democratic parties, and helped spark revolution via communist parties in Europe and beyond.

Around the world, “Marxist” governments were formed, who claimed to be committed to his principles, and who upheld dogmatic versions of his thought as part of their official doctrine.

Marx’s thought was groundbreaking. It came to stimulate arguments in every major language, in philosophy, history, politics and economics. It even helped to found the discipline of sociology.

Although his influence in the social sciences and humanities is not what it once was, his work continues to help theorists make sense of the complex social structures that shape our lives.

Read more: Explainer: the ideas of Foucault

Marx was writing when mid-Victorian capitalism was at its Dickensian worst, analysing how the new industrialism was causing radical social upheaval and severe urban poverty. Of his many writings, perhaps the most well known and influential are the rather large Capital Volume 1 (1867) and the very small Communist Manifesto (1848), penned with his collaborator Frederick Engels.

On economics alone, he made important observations that influenced our understanding of the role of boom/bust cycles, the link between market competition and rapid technological advances, and the tendency of markets towards concentration and monopolies.

Marx also made prescient observations regarding what we now call “ globalisation ”. He emphasised “the newly created connections […] of the world market” and the important role of international trade.

At the time, property owners held the vast majority of wealth, and their wealth rapidly accumulated through the creation of factories.

The labour of the workers – the property-less masses – was bought and sold like any other commodity. The workers toiled for starvation wages, as “appendages of the machine[s]”, in Marx’s famous phrase. By holding them in this position, the owners grew ever richer, siphoning off the value created by this labour.

This would inevitably lead to militant international political organisation in response.

It is from this we get Marx’s famous call in 1848, the year of Europe-wide revolutions:

workers of the world unite!

To do philosophy properly, Marx thought, we have to form theories that capture the concrete details of real people’s lives – to make theory fully grounded in practice.

His primary interest wasn’t simply capitalism. It was human existence and our potential.

His enduring philosophical contribution is an insightful, historically grounded perspective on human beings and industrial society.

Marx observed capitalism wasn’t only an economic system by which we produced food, clothing and shelter; it was also bound up with a system of social relations.

Work structured people’s lives and opportunities in different ways depending on their role in the production process: most people were either part of the “owning class” or “working class”. The interests of these classes were fundamentally opposed, which led inevitably to conflict between them.

On the basis of this, Marx predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism leading to equally inevitable working-class revolutions. However, he seriously underestimated capitalism’s adaptability. In particular, the way that parliamentary democracy and the welfare state could moderate the excesses and instabilities of the economic system.

Marx argued social change is driven by the tension created within an existing social order through technological and organisational innovations in production.

Technology-driven changes in production make new social forms possible, such that old social forms and classes become outmoded and displaced by new ones. Once, the dominant class were the land owning lords. But the new industrial system produced a new dominant class: the capitalists.

Against the philosophical trend to view human beings as simply organic machines, Marx saw us as a creative and productive type of being. Humanity uses these capacities to transform the natural world. However, in doing this we also, throughout history, transform ourselves in the process. This makes human life distinct from that of other animals.

The conditions under which people live deeply shape the way they see and understand the world. As Marx put it:

men make their own history [but] they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.

Marx viewed human history as process of people progressively overcoming impediments to self-understanding and freedom. These impediments can be mental, material and institutional. He believed philosophy could offer ways we might realise our human potential in the world.

Theories, he said, were not just about “interpreting the world”, but “changing it”.

Individuals and groups are situated in social contexts inherited from the past which limit what they can do – but these social contexts afford us certain possibilities.

The present political situation that confronts us and the scope for actions we might take to improve it, is the result of our being situated in our unique place and time in history.

This approach has influenced thinkers across traditions and continents to better understand the complexities of the social and political world, and to think more concretely about prospects for change.

On the basis of his historical approach, Marx argued inequality is not a natural fact; it is socially created. He sought to show how economic systems such as feudalism or capitalism – despite being hugely complex historical developments – were ultimately our own creations.

Read more: Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful

Alienation and freedom

By seeing the economic system and what it produces as objective and independent of humanity, this system comes to dominate us. When systematic exploitation is viewed as a product of the “natural order”, humans are, from a philosophical perspective, “enslaved” by their own creation.

What we have produced comes to be viewed as alien to us. Marx called this process “alienation”.

Despite having intrinsic creative capacities, most of humanity experience themselves as stifled by the conditions in which they work and live. They are alienated a) in the production process (“what” is produced and “how”); b) from others (with whom they constantly compete); and c) from their own creative potential.

For Marx, human beings intrinsically strive toward freedom, and we are not really free unless we control our own destiny.

Marx believed a rational social order could realise our human capacities as individuals as well as collectively, overcoming political and economic inequalities.

Writing in a period before workers could even vote (as voting was restricted to landowning males) Marx argued “the full and free development of every individual” – along with meaningful participation in the decisions that shaped their lives – would be realised through the creation of a “classless society [of] the free and equal”.

Marx’s concept of ideology introduced an innovative way to critique how dominant beliefs and practices – commonly taken to be for the good of all – actually reflect the interests and reinforce the power of the “ruling” class.

For Marx, beliefs in philosophy, culture and economics often function to rationalise unfair advantages and privileges as “natural” when, in fact, the amount of change we see in history shows they are not.

He was not saying this is a conspiracy of the ruling class, where those in the dominant class believe things simply because they reinforce the present power structure.

Rather, it is because people are raised and learn how to think within a given social order. Through this, the views that seem eminently rational rather conveniently tend to uphold the distribution of power and wealth as they are.

Marx had always aspired to be a philosopher, but was unable to pursue it as a profession because his views were judged too radical for a university post in his native Prussia. Instead, he earned his living as a crusading journalist.

By any account, Marx was a giant of modern thought.

His influence was so far reaching that people are often unaware just how much his ideas have shaped their own thinking.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Marx's Political Thought

Introduction.

• Selections of Marx’s Early Writings
• Selections of Marx’s Mature Writings
• Biographies of Marx
• Introductory Overviews of Marx’s Thought
• More Substantial Studies of Marx’s Thought
• Classical Marxist Developments of Marxism
• The Present as a Historical Problem: Historical Materialism
• Studies of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
• Applying Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
• Overviews of Marx’s Politics
• Marx’s Political Practice
• The State Form
• Social Class
• Environmental Politics
• Trade Unionism
• Engagements with Liberal Political Philosophy: Marx’s Ethics
• Freedom, Alienation, and Human Nature
• Imperialism and Colonialism
• Marxism and Nationalism
• Women’s Oppression: From Classical Marxism to Second Wave Feminism
• Marxism and Women’s Oppression: Contemporary Contributions
• Theorizing Racism
• Marxism and Religion
• Studies of Engels’s Thought
• Theorizing Stalinism

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Marx's Political Thought by Paul Blackledge LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0171

Karl Marx (b. 1818–d. 1883) is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential thinkers of the modern period. Nevertheless, although much of what he wrote has been sedimented into contemporary culture, many of his ideas, especially his political ideas, are far too scandalous ever to be fully incorporated into academic common sense. Part of the reason for this is that his legacy has consistently been attacked and misrepresented by individuals and groups who are, so to speak, on the other side of the barricades. At a much more interesting level, however, academic incomprehension of Marx’s thought is rooted in a structural gap between his totalizing methodology and academia’s tendency to fragment along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. It is because Marx’s thought marks a profound break with this standpoint that any serious attempt to map his ideas onto the categories of modern academic thought will be fraught with dangers. Indeed, the deeply historical and revolutionary character of Marx’s thought makes it almost unintelligible from the essentially static perspective of modern theory. It is not that modern theory does not recognize change; it is rather that it tends to conceive it in effectively reformist terms: change is fixed within boundaries set by more-or-less naturalized capitalist social relations. Any attempt to write a study of Marx’s supposed political theory must therefore confront the problem that his thought cannot be fully incorporated within this standpoint. He was neither an economist nor a sociologist nor a political theorist, but his revolutionary theory involves the sublation of these (and more) categories into a greater whole. Consequently, though Marx’s thought can be said to have economic, political, and sociological, etc., dimensions, it cannot be reduced to an amalgam of these approaches, and critics should be wary of Procrustean attempts to fit aspects of his work into one or other academic sub-discipline, or indeed to reduce his conception of totality to a form of inter- or multi-disciplinarity. Specifically, whereas modern political theory tends to treat politics as a universal characteristic of human communities, Marx insists that it is a historical science: states, ideology, and law are aspects of broader superstructural relations that function to fix and reproduce minority rule within class-divided societies. Politics, from this perspective, is best understood as an epiphenomenon of the relations of production by which one class maintains its control over humanity’s productive interaction with nature: it has a beginning with the emergence of class societies, hopefully an end with what Marx calls the communist closure of humanity’s “pre-history,” and can only properly be understood by those involved in the struggle to overcome the conditions of its existence.

There are numerous Marxist journals available in the Anglophone world, each catering in differing degrees to academic and activist audiences from perspectives rooted in Marx’s legacy. The oldest continuously published journal on the English-speaking Marxist left is Science and Society , which was launched at the height of the “Popular Front” in 1936. Just over a decade later Monthly Review was launched in much less propitious circumstances at the beginning of the Cold War—and its editors faced the wrath of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Both journals were and continue to be open and independent vehicles of debate and analysis on the Marxist left. New Left Review , International Socialism , New Politics and Socialist Register were launched at the time of the British and American New Lefts at the turn of the 1960s and have continued publication as distinctive voices on the left long after the collapse of the movement that gave them life. Critique and Capital and Class came into being more than a decade later to cater to a new audience of ex-students who had been radicalized in the 1960s and subsequently moved into the academy. As the left went on the defensive in the 1980s, new journals such Capitalism Nature Socialism , Rethinking Marxism , Socialism and Democracy , and Studies in Marxism were launched to response to the crisis of Marxism as both social democracy and Stalinism retreated before neoliberal capitalism. More recently, since its launch in 1997 Historical Materialism has become an important voice on the academic Marxist left.

Capital & Class .

Launched in 1977 by the Conference of Socialist Economists in the United Kingdom. The initial focus of Capital and Class was, as its title suggests, on economic issues. Subsequently, however, it has expanded its remit to include articles on all aspects of Marxist theory.

Capitalism Nature Socialism .

Launched in 1988 by academics and activists in California, Capitalism Nature Socialism reflected a growing awareness that the emerging environmental crisis was a capitalist phenomenon best understood in terms drawn from but also extending Marx’s critique of political economy.

Launched in 1973 by Hillel Ticktin and others around him at Glasgow University, Critique is renowned for its analysis of Stalinism as a new and dysfunctional form of class rule and capitalism as an endemically crisis-prone system.

Historical Materialism .

Launched in 1997 by British activists and academics many of whom were affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, Historical Materialism was intended to be, and has largely succeeded in becoming, the leading Anglophone forum for debate and theoretical innovation on the academic Marxist left.

International Socialism .

Launched in 1960 International Socialism was initially associated with a heterodox Trotskyist attempt by Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron to reorient the revolutionary left to the new postwar realities through, most importantly, their writings on Soviet state capitalism, the permanent arms economy as an explanation for the postwar boom, and “deflected permanent revolution” in the Third World. It has subsequently continued its focus on raising theory to the level of revolutionary practice and is linked to the British Socialist Workers Party.

Monthly Review .

Launched in 1949 by independent Marxists in New York, Monthly Review became associated most importantly with the work on modern capitalism by Paul Baran and Paul Sweey and more recently with John Bellamy Foster’s contribution to a Marxist analysis of the environmental crisis.

New Left Review .

Launched in 1960 by the merger of the two British New Left journals, Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner, New Left Review was initially conceived as a forum for activist debate. Very quickly thereafter it morphed into an austere academic journal under the auspices of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Robin Blackburn and subsequently played a key role as gatekeeper of ideas from the Continental left to the Anglophone world. After a brief flirtation with Trotskyism in the 1970s, NLR has since become associated with Anderson’s pessimistic anti-capitalism.

New Politics .

Launched in 1961 by Julius and Phyllis Jacobson, New Politics is associated with Third Camp politics. This standpoint was most famously articulated in an essay first published in the journal in the journal in 1962: Hal Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism.” According to Draper, Marx’s ultra-democratic politics is best understood as a radical alternative to the statism of both Stalinism and social democracy which have more in common with each other than they do with his conception of socialism.

Rethinking Marxism .

Launched in 1988 by academics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Rethinking Marxism was intended to confront the crisis of the left in the 1980s by literally rethinking Marxism in light not only of the retreat of the left over the 1980s but also of subsequent theoretical innovations beyond Marxism.

Science and Society .

Launched in 1936 by left intellectuals close to or affiliated with the American Communist Party, Science and Society has nevertheless maintained itself as an independent and non-sectarian vehicle for debate on the Marxist left.

Socialism and Democracy .

Launched in 1985 by academics and activists linked to the City University of New York, the initial editorial of Socialism and Democracy framed its future orientation to act as an arena of debate around a dual problematic: if modernization was to mean developing society as a whole then it needed to be through some form of socialism; while socialism and democracy are best understood not as alternatives but rather as two aspects of the same thing.

Socialist Register .

Launched in 1964 on the basis of disagreements about the orientation of New Left Review , Socialist Register saw itself as continuing the socialist humanism associated with the New Reasoner tradition of the original New Left Review synthesis. It is an annual whose center of gravity has moved from England to Canada and the USA.

Studies in Marxism .

Launched in 1993, Studies in Marxism is the in-house journal of the Marxism Specialist Group of the British Political Studies Association.

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The Marxist Perspective on Religion

Marx and Engels saw religion as a conservative force which prevented social change by creating false consciousness. This post summarises their key ideas and offers some supporting evidence and criticisms.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on February 24, 2023 by Karl Thompson

From Marx’s materialistic perspective, religion serves to mystify the real relations between men and inanimate objects.

In reality, according to Marx, nature is an impersonal force which imposes limitations on man’s capacity to act, but nature can be understood scientifically and manipulated rationally, via technology, potentially for the benefit of man-kind.

However, through religion, humans project personal characteristics onto nature: they invent gods which they believe have control over nature, and come to believe that the way to manipulate nature is to appeal to these gods through ritual or sacrifice.

Religion as the ‘Opium of the People’

In Marx’s own words:

‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. it is the opium of the people’.

According to Marx, one of the main ‘functions’ of religion is to prevent people making demands for social change by dulling pain of oppression, as follows:

• The promise of an afterlife gives people something to look forwards to. It is easier to put up with misery now if you believe you have a life of ‘eternal bliss’ to look forward to after death.
• Religion makes a virtue out of suffering – making it appear as if the poor are more ‘Godly’ than the rich. One of the best illustrations of this is the line in the bible: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven.
• Religion can offer hope of supernatural intervention to solve problems on earth: this makes it pointless for humans to try to do anything significant to help improve their current conditions.
• Religion can justify the social order and people’s position within that order, as in the line in the Victorian hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:
• The rich man in his castle
• The poor man at his gate
• God made them high and lowly
• And ordered their estate.

Such lines make social inequalities seem as if they are ‘God’s will’ an thus unchangeable.

From the Marxist Perspective, religion does not only ameliorate the sufferings of life, it also effectively creates false consciousness.

Marx believed that the ‘objective’ truth was that the proletariat (i.e. most people) suffer deprivations because of their exploitation by the Bourgeois (namely the extraction of surplus value empowers the minority Bourgeois class and leaves the majority of the proletariat with insufficient money to lead a decent quality of life), however, people fail to realise this because religion teaches them that all of the misery in life is God’s will.

Or in Marx’s own words:

‘In religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only conceived, imagined, that confronts them as something foreign’.

Religion and Social Control

Religion also acts as a tool of social control in a more direct sense: according to Marx and Engels:

‘The parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord’.

This was especially true in feudal England when the landed classes’ decisions were frequently legitimated be religious decree: as Marx and Engels saw it, the bourgeois and the church supported one another: the former generously funded the later, and church legitimated social inequality, thus maintaining the established social order.

The non-necessity of religion under communism

Religion is only necessary under exploitative systems where the majority of men do not control the conditions under which they labour, under systems where men work for someone else rather than for themselves: in such systems, religious doctrines which teach that ‘you are insignificant in the eyes of gods/ the supernatural’ make sense, and serve a useful function for those who are in control of and who benefit from said exploitation.

Under communism, where man controls the conditions of his labour, he is essentially ‘for himself’, and thus will have no need of religion. Under communism, where reality is ‘fair’ religion will not be required, and so will simply whither away.

Evidence to support Marxism

There is a considerable body of historical evidence which supports the Marxist view of the role of religion in society: for example the traditional caste system in India was supported by Hindu religious believes (in reincarnation for example); and in Medieval Europe Kings ruled by the ‘divine right of God’. Possibly the most ‘extreme’ example, however, is in ancient the ancient Egyptian belief which held that Pharaohs were both men and gods at the same time.

A more recent example, drawn from the USA, lies in the support that Republican politicians have enjoyed from the ‘New Christian Right’ who, according to Steve Bruce (1988), support ‘a more aggressive anti-communist foreign policy, more military spending, less welfare spending and fewer restraints on enterprise’.

The new Christian right have persistently supported more right wing (neo) liberal candidates – such as Ronald Regan in 1984 and George Bush in 2004 – when the later was elected, an exit poll found that two thirds of voters who attended church more than once a week had voted for him.

While it might be debatable how successful the religious right in the USA are in getting their candidates elected to political power, what does seem clear is that they do tend to support more economically powerful sectors of the political elite, suggesting support for the Marxist view of religion.

Criticisms of the Marxist perspective on religion

Firstly , it is clear that religion does not always prevent social change by creating false class consciousness. There are plenty of examples of where oppressed groups have used religion to attempt (whether successful or not is moot here) to bring about social change, as we will see in the neo-Marxist perspective on religion.

Secondly , religion still exists where there is (arguably) no oppression: the USSR communist state placed limits on the practice of religion, including banning religious instruction to children, however, religious belief remained stronger in the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe than it did in the capitalist west.

Thirdly , and building on the previous point: just because religion can be used as a tool of manipulation and oppression, this does not explain its existence: religion seems to be more or less universal in all societies, so it is likely that it fulfills other individual and social needs, possibly in a more positive way as suggested by Functionalist theorists such as Durkheim , Malinowski , and Parsons .

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This material is primarily relevant to students taking the beliefs in society option as part their second year of A-level Sociology.

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Adapted from Haralmabos and Holborn (2008) Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 7th Edition, Collins.

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Marxism and Religion

by Alasdair MacIntyre January 25, 2019

A ccording to Marx, religion has a dual role to play. Throughout the history of class society religion performs two essential functions: it buttresses the established order by sanctifying it and by suggesting that the political order is somehow ordained by divine authority, and it consoles the oppressed and exploited by offering them in heaven what they are denied upon earth. At the same time, by holding before them a vision of what they are denied, religion plays at least partly a progressive role in that it gives the common people some idea of what a better order would be. But when it becomes possible to realize that better order upon earth in the form of communism, then religion becomes wholly reactionary, for it distracts men from establishing a now possible good society on earth by still turning their eyes toward heaven. Its sanctification of the existing social order makes it a counter-revolutionary force. Thus in the course of building a communist society, the Marxist must fight religion because it will inevitably stand in his path. But in a communist society there will be no need to persecute religion, for its essential functions will have disappeared. There will no longer be an exploiting class, nor will the common people stand in need of religious consolations. Religion itself will disappear of its own accord without persecution. (This is an interesting example of the functionalism embodied in Marxism; the state, too, according to Marx and Lenin, will wither away when it becomes function­less.)

In origin, nevertheless, religion may be genuinely revolutionary, a real attempt to abolish exploitation. It only becomes other-worldly when its attempts to transform this world fail. Then its hope of the good society is transferred to another world, and in ideal form compensates for man's powerlessness to realize his ideal. Engels saw Christianity as having undergone this change.

The history of early Christianity has many characteristic points of contact with the present labor movement. Like the latter, Christianity was at first a movement of the oppressed; it began as a religion of the slaves and the freed, the poor and out­lawed, of the peoples defeated and crushed by the force of Rome. Both Christianity and Proletarian So­cialism preached the coming deliverance from slavery and poverty ( On the History of Early Chris­tianity , I).

Engels goes on to say that whereas socialism puts this deliverance on earth, Christianity puts it in heaven. Kautsky, however, in The Foundations of Christianity , was prepared to go further. "The liberation from poverty which Christianity declared was at first thought of quite realistically. It was to take place in the world and not in Heaven." The transference of liberation to heaven only took place later.

Thus the essential mark of latter-day religion [according to Marxism] is its other-worldliness. It places far off the salvation that socialism brings near. It has its origin in man's sense of his powerlessness in this world. Engels continually emphasizes man's feeling of powerlessness before nature in speaking of the origins of primitive religion. But it is not only before nature that man is powerless; he is also overwhelmed by society, so that the processes of society appear to man as strange and terrible divinities. Thus in ancient Greek religion the power of necessity,  ananke, was personified. The Marxist scholar George Thomson writes in Aeschy­lus and Athens that:

Throughout Greek literature, from Homer onwards, the ideas of ananke , "necessity," and douleia , "slavery," are intimately connected, the former being habitually employed to denote both the state of slavery as such and the hard labors and tortures to which slaves are subjected. . . . During the maturity of the city-state the idea of ananke was developed and extended. Not only was the slave under the absolute control of his master and denied all share in the surplus product of his labor, but the master himself, in the conditions of a monetary economy, was at the mercy of forces which he was unable to control; and so the freeman, too, was enslaved to the blind force of necessity, which frustrated his desires and defeated his efforts. But if necessity is supreme, and her action incalculable, all change appears subjectively as chance; and so by the side of ananke there arose the figure of tyche— opposite poles of the same conception. The belief that the world is ruled by tyche can be traced through Euripides to Pindar, who declared that she was one of the moirai and the strongest of them all; and during the next two centuries, the cult of tyche became one of the most widespread and popular in Greece.

This passage is characteristic of the Marxist contention that the gods are personifications of the powers that dominate human life. When such powers no longer dominate man, there will no longer be gods.

This is how Marxism hopes to abolish religion. But there remains the initial assumption that religion needs to be accounted for. Marxism seems to assume from the outset that religion is palpably false. How is it able to do so?

The answer to this lies in Marx's materialism. Since matter is the primary reality, the possibility of the existence of a god or of gods is excluded. This leads to two questions: What is involved in Marx's materialism? And in what sort of a god is belief excluded by materialism? Marx inherited his materialism from Feuerbach; but all Feuerbach had said was that being precedes consciousness, not consciousness being. This assertion is one that could be made by many religious believers. The question is always one of the nature of being, not of its priority. By "being" Marx and Feuerbach both mean "all that is" and the assertion of the primacy of being becomes materialism only because of the additional belief that everything that is, is a more or less complicated organization of atoms. Engels uses the formula "matter in motion" to cover this. Since everything is explicable ultimately in terms of matter in motion, religious explanations of any event are excluded. This at once brings us to the answer to our second question. Religion is conceived by the Marxist as offering explanations of phenomena which are alternatives to scientific explanation. Science explains in terms of a this-worldly causation, religion in terms of an other-worldly causation. Thus religion is only disposed of by the Marxist critique if it is true that the essential character of religion is other­-worldliness, its essential claim to explain phenomena, and its essential function to compensate for human powerlessness and to mask human exploitation. This thesis we must now examine.

It must be granted that the Marxist critique holds true for a great deal of religion, and in particular for a great deal of nineteenth-century religion. The doctrine of the Tractarians, for example, helps to illustrate the critique. Suspiciously enough, the doctrines of priesthood and of apostolic succession were rediscovered by Anglicans just at the time when the state was beginning to deny in its practice any real difference between nonconformity and the Church of England. High churchmanship replaced social eminence as the mark of the staunch Anglican. The as­cetic disciplines which the Tractarians commended were of a kind possible only to a leisured class; their sacramental doctrines were irrelevant in an industrial society. F. D. Maurice wrote of their view of baptism in 1838:

Where is the minister of Christ in London, Birmingham or Manchester, whom such a doctrine, heartily and inwardly entertained, would not drive to madness? He is sent to preach the Gospel. What Gospel? Of all the thousands whom he addresses, he cannot venture to believe that there are ten who, in Dr. Pusey's sense, retain their baptismal purity. All he can do, therefore, is to tell wretched creatures, who spend eighteen hours out of the twenty-four in close factories and bitter toil, corrupting and being corrupted, that if they spend the remaining six in prayer—he need not add fasting—they may possibly be saved. How can we insult God and torment man with such mockery?

There was another side to the doctrine of the Tractarians; but of a great deal of what they and churchmen of every persuasion taught the Marxist critique was and remains true.

Yet if it is this side of the Marxist critique that has dominated Marxist attitudes to religion in practice at most times and places, there has also persisted within Marxism a quite different emphasis upon religion as not merely "the opiate of the people" and "the sigh of the oppressed creature," but also "the heart of a heartless world" ( Contribution to The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ). Nor is this surprising when one recalls yet another aspect of the predictive failures of Marxism. Marx viewed religion as having in the present and future—as contrasted to the past—a wholly reactionary role, because he assumed that a completely secular world-view could not but be adopted by the working class, let alone by progressive intellectuals. Both Marx and Engels took it for granted that the intellectual case against religion had been made by the materialists and the skeptics of the eighteenth century. Insofar as their arguments still failed to convince, it was because religion was not a matter of the intellect, but of social needs. If the social factors which produced these needs were removed by transforming the structure of society, then religion would become functionless and would wither away. Indeed, Marx and Engels believed this to be already happening. They regarded the English as peculiarly backward, but Engels, who chided the English for their insular attachment to religion, believed that by the I85o's continental influences of a skeptical and atheistic kind were moving even the respectable middle classes. Skepticism, a he put it, had come in with salad oil. The English working class Engels regarded as much further along the road toward complete secularization. Already in 1844 he had envisaged the victory of unbelief as all but accomplished. Yet in two important respects he was mistaken.

The first and less important concerns the actual history of secularization; it has been slower and less effective in England than Engels predicted. The Catholic Church, for example, in England as elsewhere, has retained the allegiance of some sections of the industrial working class. But more important is a second and quite different type of error. For secularization has not resulted in the working classes—or indeed any other social group as a group—acquiring a new and more rational set of beliefs about the nature of man and the world. Rather, men have been deprived of any over-all view and to this extent have been deprived of one possible source of understanding and of action. Thus, at least so far as advanced industrial societies are concerned, outside those societies where Marxism is propagated by the state, the conditions which are inimical to religion seem to be inimical to Marxism too. Apparent exceptions to this seem indeed to be only apparent. The nominal Marxist allegiance of a large section of the French working class, for example, is only the attenuated content of the old radical secularism in a new dress; and as French society develops technologically and technocratically, it too is eroded. In such a situation the adherents and sympathizers of Marxism have not unnaturally been more apt to note resemblances between Marxism and Christian­ity of just the kind with which I have been concerned . Insensitivity to them has on the whole been exhibited only by the hostile critics of Marxism. Marx and Engels long ago proclaimed Thomas Muntzer as a spiritual ancestor; and modern Marxists have written several sympathetic studies of millenarian religion. How odd, then, that the resemblances between revolutionary Marxism and such religions have been noted by some critics as a necessarily discrediting fact. The unsatisfactory character of such discussions is in part due to the unexamined liberal, secular assumptions of the critics. It is also, however, due in part to a failure to distinguish different features of the analogy between Marxism and Christianity.

Both Marxism and Christianity rescue individual lives from the insignificance of finitude (to use an Hegelian expression) by showing the individual that he has or can have some role in a world-historical drama. The dramatic metaphor is not unimportant here. Marx, in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , saw the function of ideology in past revolutions as providing a dramatic framework which events themselves would otherwise have lacked. But the revolution of the nineteenth century was, in his words, to "draw its poetry from the future." No dramaturge, but history itself, is now needed. Christianity cannot dispense with the notion of men having parts in a cosmic drama . The liturgy is the reenactment of this notion. But if religion is able to create an identity that transcends the identity which the existing social order confers upon individuals and within which it would like to confine them (so that it is the message of reactionary religion that it is God himself who wishes to confine us "in that station" to which he has been pleased to call us), it is also true that the sacrifice of individuals for eternal purposes is inherent in religion, and both sides of this phenomenon are carried over into Marxism.

The process by which they are carried over cannot be understood apart from that whole regression of Marxism which I discussed earlier and which originated in the deification of the Party or of history or of both. This reemergence of ideal entities in the history of Marxism renders intelligible those surface phenomena of Marxism which are so obviously religious that it has become trite to remark upon them. The cultic preservation of Lenin's body is an outstanding example. Still obvious but of far greater significance is the treatment of deviations of belief. Clearly someone who has been a Marxist may alter his beliefs on some point in such a way that common action with his former comrades becomes impossible; but it has often been the case in Marxist movements that common assent is required to beliefs which do not involve immediate action or action in the foreseeable future, and as far as rival predictions are concerned, there has been little attempt by Marxists to agree on a way in which their differences might be settled and the outcome awaited. Creedal uniformity, as in religion, often seems to be valued by Marxists for its own sake. The disciplining of the Soviet economist Varga for his view of postwar Europe is the kind of case I have in mind. This example also underlines the fact that the failure of Marxism to free itself from its religious heritage has made it easier for Marxists to elaborate a concept of science quite other than that of Marx and Engels. Both of them had the kind of interest in the progress of science not uncharacteristic of their age. Engels' own writings on science are of extremely dubious value. But it is fair to say that he accepted natural science as a continuing activity with its own standards and methods. The notion that there could be a peculiarly Marxist science as opposed to "bourgeois science" is alien to his thought. The roots of this Stalinist notion lie in the religious concept of beliefs about the world not having to derive their validity from the observed facts. Lysenko's fraudulent experiments are the counterpart to those fraudulent cases of miraculous weeping or bleeding statues which the Bolsheviks at one time so delighted in exposing in their anti-God exhibitions.

But too much attention to these relatively surface phenomena may be misleading; they belong to the corruption of Marxism, and if Marxism is corruptible, this is, as Marxists themselves should have well understood, a possible fate of any doctrine that functions as the expression of social forces. Christians who make use of this kind of point in order to criticize Marxism as a whole ought to remember that it is precisely what Marxism has in common with Christianity that has rendered it so particularly vulnerable. Liberals who produce this kind of critique all too often wish to ignore the Marxist critique of liberalism. Both liberals and Christians are too apt to forget that Marxism is the only systematic doctrine in the modern world that has been able to translate to any important degree the hopes men once expressed, and could not but express in religious terms, into the secular project of understanding societies and expressions of human possibility and history as a means of liberating the present from the burdens of the past, and so constructing the future. Liberalism, by contrast, simply abandons the virtue of hope. For liberals the future has become the present enlarged. Christianity remains irremediably tied to a social content it ought to disown. Marxism as historically embodied phenomenon may have been deformed in a large variety of ways. But the Marxist project remains the only one we have for reestablishing hope as a social virtue.

Editorial Statement: This excerpt of Chapter 7 from Alasdair MacIntyre's early book (originally published in 1968, many years before he converted to Catholicism),  Marxism and Christianity , is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press .

Featured Image:  Dreamy Soviet painting in Pripyat, Ukraine, showing the Sun, stars, and four people: one in a cosmonaut's helmet; another releasing a dove (presumably a peace dove), a third sketching with a brush, and the fourth harvesting wheat , Date: 25 September 2010, Photographer:  Simon Smith ; Source Wikimedia Commons,  CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre is a Permanent Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame  de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture . He is the author of classics such as  After Virtue ,  Marxism and Christianity ,  Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry .

Read more by Alasdair MacIntyre

The Fractured Metaphysics of Protests

January 20, 2021 | Alasdair MacIntyre

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Karl Marx on Religion: Ideas & Quotes

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Karl Marx discussed some of his ideas about religion in his writings. He understood that religion served a purpose in society but disagreed with the basis of that function.

Marx had difficulty believing in unseen truths such as those that religions offer. Since he was young, he refused religion and expressed himself as an atheist (Latief, 2011).

The basis of his argument on religion is that humans should be led by reason and that religion masks truth and misguides followers.

Marx’s Key Ideas on Religion

Religion is the ‘opium of the people’.

In his 1844 essay ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ Marx stated that ‘religion is the opium of the people.’

While opium is now known to be an addictive narcotic drug, it is essential to remember that opium was mostly legal during the period in which Marx wrote and was primarily thought of as having medicinal properties.

What can be inferred from Marx’s claim is that if religion is opium, then it provides temporary relief from the oppression that the working class (or proletariat) experiences from capitalism. It protects the workers from the misery of exploitation in a capitalist society.

3 ways that religion is like opium

• Dulls the pain of exploitation rather than dealing with the cause of the exploitation just like opium dulls the pain of an injury rather than healing the injury itself.
• Religion gives a distorted world view, it can offer no solutions to earthly misery but can offer the promise of an afterlife. Just as Opium can create hallucinations and distort the taker’s perspectives.
• The temporary high that the followers feeling whilst taking part in the rituals mimics the temporary high achieved by taking opium.

Religion justifies an unequal social order

Marx suggested there were two structures in society. Firstly, there is the infrastructure which is the economic base of society, meaning the unequal relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat .

Secondly is the superstructure, which maintains the inequalities by spreading the ideology of the bourgeoisie. He believed these ideas spread through social institutions such as religion (Yue, 2002).

Thus, he believed that religion justifies the unequal social order in society. The unequal hierarchy in society is believed to be god’s will. The poor are poor because they are sinners, whereas the wealthy are righteous.

This idea can be traced back to a feudal society where many believed that monarchs were chosen by gods. According to Marx, religion is a way to spread values in society that maintains the position of the ruling class, which simultaneously justifies capitalism.

Marx posits that religion is a tool of the ruling class to maintain power and reproduce inequality. They justify the principles of capitalism and prevent the proletariat revolution.

Marxists argue that major scientific discoveries are motivated by generating mass profits and only fuels capitalism further.

Religion creates a false consciousness

Marx believed that religion created a false consciousness for the proletariat. It distorts the proletariat’s view of reality, so they do not realize their true exploitation.

He believed that the proletariat suffers because of their exploitation, but they fail to realize this because religion teaches them that their misery is God”s will.  Religion is thought to hide the bourgeoisie’s role in the proletariat’s exploitation.

Religion, according to Marx, makes a virtue out of suffering and offers a false hope that the afterlife is something to look forward to after death.

Religion also offers a false hope of some supernatural intervention that can be prayed to in order to fix problems or to comfort them. This belief is something that can prevent people from trying to do anything practical to improve their own living conditions. It can also increase the feeling of alienation from the self .

Religion maintains social control

Marx argued that religion was one of the ways in which the ruling class maintained control of society. He argued that religion is a form of ideology that controls the masses.

The rewards for the proletariat’s hard work would come in the afterlife, which will motivate the poor to continue working.

Religion, according to Marx, inhibits social change because if workers are promised rewards in the afterlife  believe that they cannot change their position because it is God’s will, they are not likely to try to change their conditions. Ultimately, religion prevents a revolution from the working class.

Karl Marx’s Quotes On Religion

The following quotes are from Marx’s writing, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844):

‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

‘The foundation of religious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again… This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.’

‘To sublate 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 which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.’

Strengths And Limitations Of Marx’s Analysis Of Religion

Some of Marx’s views on religion are supported by Lenin, who referred to religion as ‘spiritual booze.’ Lenin claimed that ‘religious fog’ is a diversion of the working class, offering futile hopes of life after death (Boer, 2013). These views are similar to those of Marx.

Religion justifying ideas about social hierarchies is supported by the views of those living in medieval Europe. The kings and the queens of the time were said to rule by divine right.

Likewise, the Egyptian pharaohs believed that both God and King were the same person. These historic views provide support to Marx’s view that unequal social order is justified by religion.

Despite Marx’s ideas about religion being present in capitalist societies, religion seems almost universal in all types of societies, not just in capitalistic ones. Because of this, religion likely serves other functions to individuals, some of which are positive.

In fact, many teachings of some religions appear to contradict the values of capitalism. Some even criticize the greedy and praise the frugal. Marx ignores many other positive aspects of religion, such as promoting a sense of belonging, kindness, self-fulfillment, and charity-giving.

Marx’s criticism of religion is focused on western societies and religions while ignoring the functions of other religions, such as those in eastern societies.

He also missed the spiritual elements of religion and how many religious aspects focus on the individual becoming a better person.

Finally, Marx assumed that all individuals in a society would be influenced by religion while ignoring one’s ability to reject this. Many individuals are not passive and can disregard structural influences and demonstrate their own agency.

What Is The Neo-Marxist View On Religion?

Neo-Marxists are Marxists who have revised traditional Marxist thinking. When it comes to religion, neo-Marxist thinkers tend to agree with Karl Marx most of the time.

For instance, they often agree that many religions act conservatively and that hierarchies of religions tend to support the interests of the bourgeoisie .

A significant difference with the neo-Marxists’ view on religion is that they believe religion can evolve, specifically into a source of resistance that can bring about social change.

Neo-Marxists also point out that religion can oftentimes take the side of the poor and oppressed against the powerful ruling class.

Friedrich Engels recognized that, in some circumstances, religion could bring about radical social change. He focused on how the early Christian sects opposed Roman rule. While Christianity may have been initially practiced to cope with exploitation, it became a force for social change.

Otto Maduro was a neo-Marxist who criticized Marx’s approach to religion as being reductionist. Instead, he argued for a more complex understanding of religion and social change (Sabet, 1996).

Maduro argued about the complexities of religion: ‘Religion is not a mere passive effect of the social relations of production: it is an active element of social dynamics, both conditioning and conditioned by social processes.’ (Maduro, 1977).

Maduro sought a solution, not by abandoning religion, but through the revisions and changes arising from religious innovation. Such a position would allow for religion to act independently and not be subordinate to the ruling class (Sabet, 1996).

He further stated that religion might be the only institution through which people can organize for radical social change in some societies.

Boer, R. (2013). Spiritual Booze and Freedom: Lenin on Religion.  New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 6 (1-2), 100-113.

Latief, J . A. (2011). Karl Marx’s Criticism on Religion.  Al-Ulum, 11 (2), 257-266.

Maduro, O. (1977). New Marxist approaches to the relative autonomy of religion.  Sociological Analysis, 38 (4), 359-367.

Marx, K. (1844). Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.  Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 (10), 261-271.

Sabet, A. (1996). Religion, politics and social change: A theoretical framework.  Religion, State and Society: The Keston Journal, 24 (2-3), 241-268.

Yue, P. (2002). Marxist view of religion must keep up with the times.  China Study Journal, 18, 5-18.

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Traditional Marxist Views on the Role of Religions

Last updated 12 Jul 2018

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Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses . What he meant by this was that it acted like a drug, cushioning the workers from the true misery of being exploited in capitalist society.

Marx also described religion as the “heart in a heartless world” and understood the appeal of religion in a society than in other respects was dedicated to the buying and selling of commodities and the accumulation of profit by the minority and the increasing poverty of the majority. However, he saw this as a negative force. This was because Marx argued that the proletariat should rise up against the bourgeoisie in a revolution. Religion was one of the ways in which the bourgeoisie maintained control: part of the ideology.

Lenin echoed Marx’s argument by referring to religion as spiritual gin . He argued that the ruling class used religion cynically to create a mystical fog which obscured reality for the working class. This is a very similar concept of the idea of it being an opiate.

Louis Althusser argues that religion is a part of the ideological state apparatus . Along with education and the media, it transmits the dominant ideology and maintains false class consciousness .

Religious teachings encourage the proletariat to believe that the way society is organised is God’s will. For example the hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful, contains the verse:

The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate

God made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate.

While some Christian teachings, for example, focus on there being rewards for forbearance, hard work and meekness.

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

Some verses that seem to be on the side of the poor still function as an opium or a fog, according to Marxists, as they suggest that justice will be served in heaven, preventing action to be taken in this world.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (Mark 10:25)

Not all traditional Marxists agree with this perspective. Engels, for example, suggested that religion had a dual character , performing this conservative function but also having the potential to drive social change. This was developed by neo-Marxists and will be considered in the next section.

Evaluating Traditional Marxist Views on the Role of Religions

• Marxist and functionalist views are, as so often is the case, in one respect very similar. They observe religion performing a similar function, it is just that one sees that as a positive thing and the other as a negative thing.
• This means that some of the criticisms of the functionalist view are equally applicable to the Marxist view: this relates to a society where religion has a significant influence on most people. Where religious practice is a minority pursuit (as it is in many western democracies) religion does not have the power to act as an opium of the masses or as spiritual gin. Sport or celebrity gossip is more likely to perform that role today.
• Many of the teachings of various religions appear to contradict the values of capitalism. While the verses quoted above might have encouraged the workers to wait for divine justice rather than foment revolution, they contradict the idea that wealth is admirable and earned and the rich are people to feel deference towards. Other religions have similar teachings, criticising the greedy and ostentatious and praising the lowly and ascetic. While a rejection of materialism might have the impact that traditional Marxists suggest (dissuading believers from striving to improve their material position) it could also encourage people to see the ruling class and capitalists as ungodly. This is one reason why neo-Marxists consider the possibility that religion could have a dual character and could act as a conservative force or as a catalyst for change.
• Beliefs in Society
• Opium of the Masses
• False Class Consciousness (Beliefs)
• Ideological State Apparatus

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