File spoon-archives/marxism-intro.archive/marxism-intro_2004/marxism-intro.0410, message 137


From: bsw8-AT-pseud.pseud
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 12:48:00 -0600
Subject: M-INTRO: Marx & Religion


"his dominant emotion was hatred."
You were able to determine his dominant emotion by studying only what he had to
say about religion? 

"He was obviously opposed to Christianity and religion.  Why??"
I did some reading myself, this might help.


"The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society
based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general
enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as
commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to
the standard of homogeneous human labour-for such a society, Christianity with
its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments,
Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient
Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of
products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers
of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in
importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their
dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world
only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like
Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of
production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and
transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man
individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with
his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of
subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the
productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when,
therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man
and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This
narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other
elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can,
in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of
every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable
relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature." 

Karl Marx - Capital Volume One, Section 4 

This also might be helpful if you haven't looked here already.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/religion/index.htm



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