Bonus Sample: Marx’s “Atheism” vs. the Capitalist Religion of Everyday Life
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Matthew explores Marx’s “opium of the people” passage by placing it back into the philosophical and political project it came from. Marx was not attacking religion in some essential way, but criticizing the conditions that make religion necessary as a consolation. The problem is not faith itself, but the suffering — inequality, exploitation, alienation — that gives rise to the instinct for spiritual escape.
Marx’s atheism was not a New Atheist-type negation but a theological critique — a way of revealing how capitalism itself can displace Christianity as a religion of profit, rent, and wages. According to liberation theologian Enrique Dussel, Marx frames money as a jealous god, capital as the Antichrist, and private property as original sin. No wonder he is eternally hated.
Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx
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Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
It's likely you've heard that before.
But here's the rest of it.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
The criticism of religion is therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that veil of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses so that he will move around himself as his own true son.
It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world.
It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked.
Thus, the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
So that's Karl Marx in 1843 from the introduction to a book he never completed.
It was called, or it was supposed to be called, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
In this book, Marx's plan was to challenge Hegel's notion that the state was a concrete realization of ethical life.
Hegel had argued that the state is not just a legal structure or administrative system.
It was really the highest expression of human ethical life.
So to Hegel, individuals become truly free not in isolation, but through participation in institutions like family, civil society, and ultimately the state.
And the state synthesizes personal interests and universal moral principles and turns private desires into a shared ethical order.
So for Hegel, the state reconciles individual freedom with a common good and embodies rationality, justice, and collective moral will.
It is where freedom becomes real, lived, and socially organized, not merely abstract or personal.
Now, Marx treasured Hegel's dialectical method, but he thought that Hegel's idealism here was upside down.
So he proposed in this book to invert Hegel's hierarchy by arguing that the state is not the highest realization of ethical life, but rather a product of material conditions already present in society.
Instead of ideas shaping institutional formation and decisions, Marx claimed that the eternal struggle of economic life, including labor, property ownership, class relations, and everyday social interactions, all continually transforming through rapid innovations in production, is what gives rise to political and also religious institutions.
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