See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/258130790

Marxism and religion

Article · April 2013

DOI: 10.1177/2050303213476107

CITATIONS READS

0 73

1 author:

Kenneth James Surin

Duke University
120 PUBLICATIONS   221 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Kenneth James Surin on 21 December 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Article
1(1) 9–14
Marxism and religion ! The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2050303213476107
crr.sagepub.com
Kenneth Surin
Duke University, USA

Abstract
A brief overview of Marx’s account of religion is followed by a consideration of a conception
of liberation—a notion shared by marxists and adherents of religious traditions alike—that is
substantive enough to overcome the marginalization and exploitation of countless numbers of
human beings. The final section deals with the possibility of a rapprochement between the marxist
and the adherent of a religious tradition.

Keywords
liberation, marxism, religion

This article has the following sections: (i) a very brief overview of Marx’s own positions on
the subject of ‘‘religion’’;1 (ii) a conceptualization of the principles underlying these positions
as a possible prolegomenon to a philosophy of liberation; and (iii) a consideration of the
possibility of practical alliances between marxists and ‘‘religionists’’ in projects that have
liberation as their aim.
Marx’s approach to ‘‘religion’’ can be delineated in terms of three somewhat overlapping
and mutually supportive elements: (i) a view of religion as the source of alienation; (ii) an
analysis of religion in terms of ‘‘false consciousness’’; and (iii) a depiction of religion as a
compensatory mechanism par excellence, whose rationale is to bring solace or hope to those
who find it difficult or impossible to come to terms with life on this earth.2
Marx’s thesis that religion is a manifestation of human alienation has its antecedents in
Hegel and Feuerbach (in Feuerbach’s words: ‘‘To enrich God, man must become poor; that
God may be all, man must be nothing’’3). This Feuerbachian motif is carried through by
Marx in his The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844):
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. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state,

Corresponding author:
Kenneth Surin, Duke University, Box 90670, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Email: ksurin@duke.edu

Downloaded from crr.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on October 30, 2015

10 Critical Research on Religion 1(1)

society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the
world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its
encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusi-
asm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and
justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has
not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle
against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.4

The notion that human religiosity is the disavowed exteriorization of a world that the
human being is alienated from is complemented by Marx’s proposition that religion is a
form of false consciousness—in a world of corruption and suffering the function of religion
is to join the state in inducing in us a form of consciousness that transmutes the world of
suffering and misery into the (chimerical) promise of its blissful opposite.
Religion therefore serves to provide compensation (albeit one based on fantasy) for those
who dwell in a heartless world: ‘‘Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expres-
sion 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’’.5 It is clear from this passage that Marx believed it futile to pursue the outright
suppression of religion or to seek a promulgation of atheism by decree: as long as humans
continue to live in a heartless world, the ideological formation that is the core of religion
would be inexpungible. The crucial need, therefore, is not the abolition of religion by fiat,
but the abolition of the heartless world that is the fount and origin of the religious impulse.
Whatever happens to this impulse, primacy has to be ceded to the task of emancipation: only
an emancipated world will be in a position potentially to dispense with religion.
What, in a form involving some kind of expansion or theoretical efflorescence, can be
taken from these Marxian propositions regarding the nature and function of religion? The
crux of any attempt at such an amplification has to be the project of emancipation—without
this focus on emancipation there can be no real connection with the thought of Marx and his
intellectual heirs where religion is concerned. If Marx is centrally concerned with a ‘‘gram-
mar’’ of liberation, then, clearly, so are many religious traditions. Is this seeming affinity
merely fortuitous, or can something more be made of it?
Marx (like Max Weber) clearly believes that the fundamental aspiration of the various
doctrines and practices associated with religion is to provide a solution (albeit one that is
false and ultimately unworkable in the case of religion) to the ‘‘problem’’ of the world, it
being the goal of the seeker of salvation or liberation to find a way of resolving the problem
of a basic recalcitrance of the world. (Liberation or salvation here being understood typically
as liberation from some unacceptable state of the world or condition attendant upon one’s
being in the world. Marx, of course, went much further than this, because it is clear that for
him any liberation from this unacceptable state of the world is inextricably bound up with
the liberation of the world, a liberation which has the overcoming of the capitalist system of
production and accumulation at its heart.)
Liberation, in whatever way it is expressed or embodied, is more than anything else the
name of a desire, in this case the desire to overcome, circumvent, or ameliorate an unaccept-
able condition of living in the world, whether individual or transindividual or both. It can
also be the name of the extinction of that desire—the desire to end desire is also ‘‘simply’’
that—a desire—albeit one of a peculiar kind, as we know from certain schools of Buddhist
philosophy. Liberation is thus a concept internally related to that desire (including the desire
for the cessation of desire itself), and as such has to be approached through an analysis of the

Downloaded from crr.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on October 30, 2015

Surin 11

conditions and functions of that primordial desire—its names, its situations, its outcomes,
and its productions.
The production of our world as world, indeed any world, begins with a primordial desire,
as indicated by a remark from Spinoza’s Ethics that is central to this account of liberation as
a concept: ‘‘we neither strive for, nor will, nor want, nor desire anything because we judge it
to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it,
want it, and desire it.’’6 If this is the case, an ethics of liberation depends on a conceptually
prior ontology of human constitutive power, because it is this ontology that charts the
various trajectories and configurations of our desire, and thus allows an ethics to emerge
as a kind of reflection based on this (prior) knowledge of desire (this in a nutshell being
Spinoza’s own program). This ontology of human constitutive power will delineate what it is
that the ensembles of desire that go by the name ‘‘human’’ are capable of, what their
antipathies and attractions are, including those that, however troublingly, point to some-
thing that seems to be beyond what is now taken to constitute ‘‘the human.’’
All this is in accordance, at least in principle, with Marx’s notion of ‘‘species being’’
(Gattungswesen), a concept preferred by him to the more usual ‘‘human nature’’ (Marx
found ‘‘human nature’’ to possess too many residues of a bygone idealist philosophy with
its problematic stress on the universality and invariability of the being, the essential being, of
humanhood, and maintained that even Feuerbach, from whom he takes the term ‘‘species
being’’, succumbed to this idealism in his account of the term).7 ‘‘Species being’’ for Marx
designates the manifestation or realization of our being in an always specific and contingent
social and historical milieu, even though there is, of course, a biological underpinning to all
manifestations of the human. In the Grundrisse, Marx defines our nature as a ‘‘totality of
needs and drives, which exerts a force upon me,’’ clearly indicating that for him, as with
Spinoza, the human species is a highly complex amalgam of plasticity and invariance (the
latter owing primarily to our constitution as biological beings).8
It is not, however, being claimed here that it is possible to chart a progression that moves
from this (Spinozist-Marxian) ontology to some kind of culminating-point in ‘‘religion,’’
with something like an ethics somehow mediating between the ontology and ‘‘religion.’’ On
the contrary, it is inevitably in the nature of the religious traditions to provide for their
adherents something very much like this ontology, that is, the framing of a vision of who or
what we are, whether in the form of a cosmography (as in a doctrine of creation) or an
anthropology, whether descriptive or normative. However, in reflecting on liberation as a
concept, this ontology has to be accorded priority, if only because a religious tradition is a
system of truth effects, and any truth effect (or blend of truth effects) can, depending on
historical and social circumstances (these, of course, always being political), be prevented
from displaying itself (or themselves). A truth effect does not produce automatically, and
hence cannot guarantee, its own mode of actualization; it cannot of itself banish the histor-
ical conditions, whatever they may be, that could in principle obviate its realization as a
truth effect. (This, of course, is true of any system of thought, including the ontology of
constitutive power being canvassed here: as a regime of truth effects it too cannot institute its
own modes of existence, and it too can be prevented from realizing its truth effects.)9
A truth effect, on this account, is the product of desire, often having the force and char-
acter of a ‘‘project,’’ in this case a ‘‘project’’ motivated by a particular arrangement of this
constitutive desire or striving. For instance, Martin Luther King Jr desiring the freedom of
black Americans (and thus the abolition of racially discriminatory laws in the southern
United States) is a truth effect because this desire functions as an enabling (though, of

Downloaded from crr.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on October 30, 2015

12 Critical Research on Religion 1(1)

course, not a sufficient) condition for launching a project seeking the removal of all that
stands in the way of the realization of that desire. We could call this a ‘‘truism’’ of the logic
of desire, inasmuch as to desire x is to be disposed, no matter how weakly or unevenly, to
make true (at least in the mind of the one who harbors this desire) all that conduces to the
attainment of x.
A question remains with regard to this putatively marxian ontology of our constitutive
power: although it may succeed in furnishing the conceptual lineaments for a project of
liberation, it can surely be asked whether it does enough to provide a viable foundation for
practical alliances between marxists and ‘‘religionists’’ in projects that have liberation as
their aim? One thorny issue for such a rapprochement at the conceptual level is, of course,
Marx’s characterization of religion as a merely ideological formation. Another is the undeni-
able primacy accorded by marxism to class and class antagonism in any emancipatory
struggle.
The characterization of religion as a merely ideological formation is not an insurmount-
able barrier for those seeking a rapprochement between marxists and the followers of a
religious tradition. Althusser was right when he maintained that ideology is
inexpungible—ideology being for him a ‘‘representation of the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence’’—and none of us (the most erudite and
astute marxists included!) is able entirely to transcend the condition of having to depend on
forms of the imaginary we are never in a position to acknowledge.10 The project of liber-
ation, regardless of whether it is pursued by the marxist or the religious adherent, will
therefore always be infused with these irremovable and inevitable ideological elements. It
is precisely for this reason that Althusser deemed ideology to be ‘‘eternal’’ and ‘‘without a
history’’—it is the ‘‘unthought’’ which makes or thinking possible.
The question posed by the centrality for marxism of class in anti-capitalist struggles, and
the equally fundamental position of anti-capitalist struggle in marxist conceptualizations of
the project of liberation—whereas neither of these may even figure in the liberation sought
by the religious person—is rather more difficult to resolve. However, a resolution becomes
available if one acknowledges the absolute primacy of struggle per se for any version of the
marxist paradigm.
In the beginning was struggle. If there is something like a ‘‘postulate of reason’’ for the
fusion of theory and practice that is marxism, it is perhaps this one, however commonplace it
may appear. The struggles of countless women, children, and men for a better world have
taken place over the ages in hugely diverse settings of theory and practice. This diversity is of
such breadth and complexity that it cannot be embraced within a single movement—even
one as commanding and comprehensive as marxism. Uncountable numbers have engaged in
different and not always necessarily compatible ways in such struggles. These struggles have
never owed their ‘‘relevance’’ to marxism. Rather, it is marxism, in whatever form, that has
owed its ‘‘relevance’’ to them. As long as someone, somewhere and somehow, struggles for
liberation it will be possible for marxism to be, or to continue to be, ‘‘relevant,’’ and, equally,
for other forms of struggle having nothing to do with class or capitalism to possess their own
rationales and forms of plausibility and legitimation.
Moreover, capitalism exercises its dominance in many modes and at many levels, not all
of which give the appearance of being directed by the forces and agents of capitalism, and
this in turn makes credible the proposition that specifically anti-capitalist struggles are not
the only ones germane for those seeking radical and permanent changes in their ways of life.
The marxist paradigm has always possessed two primary strands: an account of the bases of

Downloaded from crr.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on October 30, 2015

Surin 13

(economic) exploitation, but also an account of the modes of domination, the latter having to
operate in tandem with the mechanisms of exploitation if these are to be effective. As such,
struggles for gender and racial equality and campaigns against discrimination based on
sexual orientation, which constitute struggles against the modes of domination par excel-
lence, have to be seen as potentially reinforcing and decisive fronts, certainly more than mere
adjuncts to class and anti-capitalist struggle which are to be exploited tactically when the
time is ‘‘ripe’’ by the right-thinking marxist, when it comes to the pursuit of liberation. When
it comes to remembering the forgotten of the earth, common cause can be made.11.

Notes
1. It is now customary to acknowledge the irreducibly factitious nature of the term ‘‘religion,’’ that
religion is very much a post-Enlightenment invention of an Orientalist kind, and that it is therefore
an invention with a historically and geographically specific character. A great many societies,
including the not so distant predecessors of our so-called ‘‘western’’ culture, have organized and
conceived of forms of truly adequate relations between their members, and created overarching
systems of meaning, without employing anything approximating to our notion of religion. Thus,
the Buddhist, say, does not necessarily understand what she or he adheres to as amounting to
something that constitutes ‘‘religion’’ or ‘‘religiosity,’’ in the way that, say, Durkheim or Hume
employ this term in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life or Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion. Nevertheless, ‘‘religion’’ will be used in this essay as a term of art to be understood
nominalistically—that is, as religio, the Latin term designating the disposition towards reverence
and the practices accordant with that reverence, however these are contextualized or embodied.
2. For a short but helpful overview of these elements, to which I am indebted, see Achcar (2005).
Religion for Marx is a response to alienation, although by virtue of being an inherently flawed
response to alienation it also generates its own specific forms of alienation. In any event, the key
for Marx is the removal of the source of alienation. The definitive work on marxism and religion to
date is, of course, Boer (2009, 2011, 2012). I am grateful to Professor Boer for several suggestions
that have helped in the writing of this essay.
3. Feuerbach (1989: 26).
4. Marx (1970), emphases as in original.
5. Marx (1970).
6. See Spinoza (2000: Part III P9S). For some of the following I am borrowing from Surin (1998).
7. For Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s idealism, see Marx (1969); see especially Thesis 6.
8. Marx (1973: 245). What Marx and Spinoza have in common can perhaps been placed under the
umbrella of a ‘‘drive theory’’ of the human organism—a theory associated most prominently with
Freud’s account of the unconscious.
9. On truth effects, see Balibar (1995).
10. Althusser (1971: 109). Ideology is transcended only when the conditions underlying this relation
between the imaginary representation and our real conditions of existence are laid bare, but this
process of ideological demystification will in turn depend on other representations that are per-
force unable to transcend the realm of the imaginary, and so on, ad infinitum.
11. A fairly obvious example of such an entente between marxism and the religious adherent is
provided by liberation theology, however fraught the terms of this engagement between them
may be. The persecution of liberation theologians by the Vatican is typified by the condemnation
made by the current pope in 1983, when he was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, of the theology of Gustavo Gutierrez. Ratzinger accused Gutierrez of
emphasizing ‘‘orthopraxis’’ over orthodoxy, and trying to reinterpret Christian teaching
in terms of ‘‘the marxist myth’’ (see Ratzinger, 2007). Another problem for contemporary
marxism is posed by the fact that religion has clearly survived the occurrence of several

Downloaded from crr.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on October 30, 2015

14 Critical Research on Religion 1(1)

communist revolutions. Responses here have been twofold: (i) it can be argued that the sources of
alienation have not yet been overcome, so more work needs to be done to bring about the decisive
overcoming of alienation; (ii) it can argued that emphasis has to be placed on education, given our
propensity to cling to outmoded ideas. However, neither (i) nor (ii) has really worked, hence the
willingness of many marxists to acknowledge the liberating elements of religion, or at least those
that give expression to the desire for liberation (this being the main point of this essay). Obviously,
much more work needs to be done on this issue, which is not possible in a relatively short article.

References
Achcar G (2005) Marxists and religion: Yesterday and today. ZNet, Monday 21 March 2005.
Available at: http://www.zcommunications.org/marxists-and-religion-yesterday-and-today-by-gil-
bert-achcar (accessed 25 November 2012).
Althusser L (1971) Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In: Althusser L (ed.) Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Brewster B. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 85–126.
Balibar E (1995) The infinite contradiction. Trans. Poisson J-M with Lezra J-M. Yale French Studies
88: 142–164.
Boer R (2009) Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Boer R (2011) Criticism of Religion: On Marxism and Theology II. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Boer R (2012) Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology III. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Feuerbach L (1989) The Essence of Christianity. Trans. Eliot G. New York: Prometheus Books.
Marx K (1969) Theses on Feuerbach. In: Marx-Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress
Publishers, pp. 13–15.
Marx K (1970) Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. O’Malley J (ed.), trans. Jolin A and
O’Malley J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx K (1973) Grundrisse. Trans. Nicolaus M. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Ratzinger F-J (2007) Liberation theology: Preliminary notes. In: The Ratzinger Report. Reprinted in:
Thornton JF and Varenne SB (eds) The Essential Pope Benedict XV. New York: Harper.
Spinoza B (2000) Ethics. Trans. Parkinson GHR. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Surin K (1998) Liberation. In: Taylor M (ed.) Critical Terms for the Study of Religion. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 173–185.

Author biography
Kenneth Surin (PhD, Birmingham, UK, 1977) is Professor of Literature and Professor of
Religion and Critical Theory at Duke University. He trained initially as an analytical phil-
osopher. His teaching areas include anglophone literatures outside England, philosophy
(both analytical and continental), critical theory, marxism, state theory, and international
political economy. His most recent book is Freedom not Yet: Liberation and the Next World
Order (Duke University Press, 2009).

Downloaded from crr.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on October 30, 2015

View publication stats