Karl Marx - Dialogue Australasia



Karl Marx

Background:

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the German city of Trier. His family was Jewish, but later converted to Protestantism in 1824 in order to avoid persecution. For this reason among others, Marx rejected religion early on in his youth and made it absolutely clear that he was an atheist.

Marx studied philosophy at Bonn and then later Berlin, where he came under the sway of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von Hegel. Hegel's philosophy had an important influence upon Marx's own thinking and later theories.

Hegel was what is known as an "idealist" - according to him, mental things (ideas, concepts) are fundamental to the world, not matter. Material things are merely expressions of ideas - in particular, of an underlying "Universal Spirit" or "Absolute Idea."

Marx joined the "Young Hegelians" who were not simply disciples, but also critics of Hegel. Although they agreed that the division between mind and matter was the fundamental philosophical issue, they argued that it was matter which was fundamental and that ideas were simply expressions of material necessity. This idea that what is fundamentally real about the world is not ideas and concepts but material forces is the basic anchor upon which all of Marx's later ideas depend.

Through most of his life, Marx did not work alone - he had the help of Friedrich Engels who had, on his own, developed a very similar theory of economic determinism. Although the ideas later acquired the term "Marxism," Marx did not come up with them entirely on his own. Engels was also important to Marx in a financial sense - poverty weighed heavily on Marx and his family; had it not been for Engels' constant financial aid, Marx would not have been unable to complete most of his major works.

Marx wrote and studied constantly, but ill-health prevented him from completing the last two volumes of Capital. On March 14, 1883, Marx passed away at his home.

Economic Theories:

For Karl Marx, the basic determining factor of human history is economics. According to him, humans - even from their earliest beginnings - are not motivated by grand ideas but instead by material concerns, like the need to eat and survive. This is the basic premise of a materialist view of history. At the beginning, people worked together in unity and it wasn't so bad.

But eventually, humans developed agriculture and the concept of private property. These two facts created a division of labor and a separation of classes based upon power and wealth. This, in turn, created the social conflict which drives society.

All of this is made worse by capitalism which only increases the inequality between the wealthy classes and the labour classes. Confrontation between them is unavoidable because those classes are driven by historical forces beyond anyone's control. Capitalism also creates one new misery: exploitation of surplus value.

For Marx, an ideal economic system would involve exchanges of equal value for equal value, where value is determined simply by the amount of work put into whatever is being produced. Capitalism interrupts this ideal by introducing a profit motive - a desire to produce an uneven exchange of lesser value for greater value. Profit is ultimately derived from the surplus value produced by workers in factories.

A laborer might produce enough value to feed his family in two hours of work, but he keeps at the job for a full day - in Marx's time, that might be 12 or 14 hours. Those extra hours represent the surplus value produced by the worker. The owner of the factory did nothing to earn this, but exploits it nevertheless and keeps the difference as profit.

In this context, Communism thus has two goals: First it is supposed to explain these realities to people unaware of them and second it is supposed to call people in the labor classes to prepare for the confrontation and revolution. This emphasis on action rather than mere philosophical musings is a crucial point in Marx's program. As he wrote in his famous Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Economics, then, are what make up the base of all of human life and history - generating division of labor, class struggle, and all the social institutions which are supposed to maintain the status quo. Those social institutions are a superstructure built upon the base of economics, totally dependent upon material and economic realities but nothing else. All of the institutions which are prominent in our daily lives - marriage, church, government, arts, etc. - can only be truly understood when examined in relation to economic forces.

Marx had a special word for all of the work that goes into developing those institutions: ideology. The people working in those systems - developing art, theology, philosophy, etc. - imagine that their ideas come from a desire to achieve truth or beauty, but that is not ultimately true. In reality, they are expressions of class interest and class conflict. They are reflections of an underlying need to maintain the status quo and preserve current economic realities.

View on Religion:

According to Karl Marx, religion is one of those social institutions which are dependent upon the material and economic realities in a given society. It has no independent history but is instead the creature of productive forces. As Marx wrote, "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world."

This, very simply stated, is Marx's contribution to the study and understanding of religion: religion can only be understood in relation to other social systems and the economic premises of the society in which it occurs. But Marx goes further and asserts that religion is only dependent upon economics, nothing else - so much so that the actual doctrines of the religions are almost irrelevant. This is a functionalist interpretation of religion - understanding religion is not dependent upon the content of beliefs, but what social purpose religion itself serves.

Marx's opinion of religion is simple: it is an illusion whose chief purpose is to provide reasons and excuses to keep society functioning just as it is. Just as capitalism takes our productive labour and alienates us from its value, religion also takes our qualities - our highest ideals and aspirations - and alienates us from them, projecting them onto an alien and unknowable being called a god.

Marx has three primary reasons for disliking religion. First, he regards it as fundamentally irrational - it is a delusion and a worship of appearances that avoids recognising underlying realities.

Second, he regards it is a complete contradiction of all that is dignified in a human being. In the preface to his later doctoral thesis, he adopted as his motto the words of the Greek hero Prometheus who defied the gods to bring fire to humanity: "I hate all gods," he said, with addition that they "do not recognise man's self-consciousness as the highest divinity." Religion renders people servile and more open to to accepting the status quo.

Third, he sees religion as fundamentally hypocritical. Although it might profess valuable principles, it ends up siding with the economic oppressors. Jesus preached helping the poor, but the Christian Church merged with the oppressive Roman state, taking part in the enslavement of people for centuries. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church preached about heaven and spirit, but strove to acquire as much property and earthly power as possible.

Now to Marx's most famous statement about religion, from his contribution to a critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. His statement is misunderstood more often than not:

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The elimination of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”

One of the reasons that the quote is probably so often misunderstood is that the full passage is often not quoted.

As stated, religion is meant to create illusory fantasies for the poor. Economic realities prevent them from finding true happiness in this life, so religion tells them that this is okay because they will find that true happiness in the next life. But it should be noted that Marx is not entirely without sympathy: people are in distress and religion does provide solace, just as people who are physically injured receive relief from opiate-based drugs. The quote is not, then, quite as negative as most people would portray.

For Marx, the problem lies in the obvious fact that an opiate drug fails to fix a physical injury - it merely helps you forget your pain and suffering. This may be fine up to a point, but only as long as you are also actively trying to solve the underlying problems causing the pain in the first place. Similarly, religion also does not fix the underlying causes of people's pain and suffering - instead, it helps them forget why they are suffering and get them to look forward to an imaginary future when the pain will cease instead of working to change circumstances now.

Problems in Analysis of Religion:

As interesting and insightful as Marx's analyses are, they are not without their problems. The first problem is that Marx doesn't really spend much time looking at religion in general but instead the religion with which he is most familiar: Christianity. Although his comments also hold for other religions with similar doctrines of a powerful god and happy afterlife, they do not really apply to radically different religions, of which there are many, for example Theravadan Buddhism.

Perhaps he was influenced in this matter by Hegel, who thought that Christianity was the highest form of religion and that whatever was said about that also automatically applied to "lesser" religions.

A second problem is with his assessment that religion is wholly determined by material and economic realities. Not only is nothing else fundamental enough to influence religion, but influence can also not run in the other direction, from religion to material and economic realities. This is not obviously and totally true. If Marx were right, then for example capitalism would appear in countries prior to Protestantism since Protestantism is the religious system created by capitalism and this is not the case.

A final problem is more economic in nature than religious - but since Marx made economics the basis for all his other critiques of society, any problems with his economic analysis will immediately affect his other comments. As stated, Marx places his emphasis on the concept of value, which can only be created by human labour, not machines. This has two flaws.

First, if Marx is correct, than a labour-intensive industry will produce more profit than an industry relying more upon machines. But reality is just the opposite. Quite often, machines allow for more profit than humans.

Second, common experience is that normally, the value of a produced object lies not with the labor put into it but in the subjective estimation of a potential purchaser. A worker could, in theory, take a beautiful piece of raw wood and, after many hours, produce a terribly ugly sculpture.

If Marx is correct that all value comes from labor, then the sculpture should have more value than the raw wood. But that is not necessarily true. Objects have only the value of whatever people are ultimately willing to pay - some might be willing to pay more for the raw wood, some might be willing to pay more for the ugly sculpture.

Marx's labour theory of value and concept of surplus value as the driving exploitation of capitalism is the fundamental foundation upon which all of the rest of his ideas are based. Without them, his moral complaint against capitalism falters and the rest of his philosophy begins to crumble. Because of this problem, his analysis of religion becomes difficult to defend or apply, at least in the simplistic form he describes, because it is totally dependent upon the validity of his analysis of economics.

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