[Marxism] RE religion and opium

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

LT wrote:
>When Karl Marx said, "Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the
feeling of a heartless world,
just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the
people." <

I don't know where this translation came from but it lacks the force of the
translation in "Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society," ed
Easton and Guddat (1966). Easton and Guddat's trranslation is the same as Erich
Fromm's, a native German speaker who used T.B. Bottomore's translation of the
early Manuscripts in "Marx's Concept of Man." The Bottomore and Easton-Guddat
translations agree as follows from the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of law: 
An
Introduction'". Starting at the top:

"The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not
make man...This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted
consciousness of the world...Religion is the generalized theory of this
world...It is the fantastic realization of the human essence inasmuch as the 
human
essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore
indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time
the protest against real suffering. RELIGION IS THE SIGH OF THE OPPRESSED
CREATURE, THE HEART OF A HEARTLESS WORLD , AS IT IS THE SPIRIT OF SPIRITLESS
CONDITIONS. IT IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE."

This is all very much of a piece with the concept of alienation which Marx
used to break free of  vestiges of the Feuerbachian mediation of Hegel. Marx
uses Feuerbach's concept of "inversion" against him, and by extension, Hegel. In
"The Essence of Christianity," Feuerbach criticized Christianity for
projecting all the powers that belong to human beings-- to create, produce, 
love etc--
onto an external deity. And then worshipping a being which is, in reality,
nothing other than a projection of itself (shades of Freud!!). If Feuerbach's
resolution of this alienation of human powers was to simply call for humans to
wakeup and reclaim their own sensuous essence, Marx insists that the call for,
"The abolition of religion as people's illusory happiness is the demand for
their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a
demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of
religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is
religion."

The rest of the passage rewards reading but I've quoted enough. The main
point is that religion is not merely a crutch that performs a function. It's a
protest against inhuman conditions, and protests like "sighs," are expressions 
of
human agency. Marx insists, contra Feuerbach and Hegel, that it's not enough
for people to reinternalize their essence. In the next paragraph Marx
introduces the word chains (as in the  "nothing to lose but your chains" of the
Manifesto): "Criticism has plucked imaginary flowers from the chain, not so 
that man
will wear the chain that is without fantasy or consolation but so that he
will pluck it off and pluck the living flower within."
Of course all this is open to interpretation but my reading has always been
that Marx, though himself an atheist to the bone, is insisting that simply
shouting out the truth of atheism is inadequate to the complex reality of 
religion
and the sentiments that drive humans to religious expression. The proof of
atheism lies in the future society where the conditions which require illusions
(in 1844) have been abolished and replaced by conditions which empower human
beings to realize the powers they've always possessed in producing their lives,
but which have been alienated and stolen from them in the epoch of class
society. (BTW: Opium in 1844 was laudanum the all purpose anaesthetic. It both
took people to another world in consciousness and soothed very real pain).
Ilyenkova


"
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