Shang Yu: On the Dual Dimensions of Marx's Critique of Religion
[Abstract] According to traditional views, a rupture or relationship of mutual exclusion exists between the Marxist intellectual system and religious consciousness, wherein the spirit of the Gospel constitutes a weakening and containment of the movement for human liberation. This is an ahistorical and abstract dogmatic judgment. Religion is an indispensable nutrient-substrate of Western civilization; on the scale of ultimate value, a hidden logical connection exists between the vision of the "realm of freedom" and the Messianic idea, both of which represent the high ground of the human demand for freedom. However, Marx's theory of human liberation is not a literal translation of the religious concept of redemption. On the scale of economic science, Marx criticized the illusory, inverted, and conservative nature of the religious mode of reflection. By restoring the ontological truth hidden, suppressed, and distorted by religion, he opened the path to a secular heaven and completed the displacement of the Christian history of redemption with the history of the liberation of labor.
[Keywords] Religion; Critique; Economic science; Ultimate value; Scale
Engels pointed out: "Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach coming deliverance from slavery and misery; Christianity seeks this deliverance in a life beyond after death, in heaven; socialism would seek it in this world, in a transformation of society." [1] From the perspective of the non-identity [1] between religion and existence, religion possesses transcendence and negativity. The "beyond" for which theologians pray is precisely the most ethereal realm of the ultimate concern of metaphysics, constituting the primordial ground of the theory of human liberation. Amidst his radical logical analysis of the structures of material production and exchange, Marx issued a dazzling discourse of redemption, thereby translating the Messianic idea into the ideal of the realm of freedom. From the perspective of the identity between religion and existence, religion is an ideology that maintains the ruling order; it obscures and avoids the pathologies of contradictions, fissures, and disharmonies within the social organism. Using economic science as his coordinate, Marx carried out a historical-phenomenological reduction of the parasitic ontology of religion within the spatio-temporal structure of economic activity. He unfolded a critique and transcendence of religious ideology from the dual scales of ultimate value and economic science.
I. From the "Messiah" to the "Realm of Freedom"
The 16th to the 19th centuries constituted a New Era fundamentally different from the Middle Ages. The most prominent characteristic of this era was that "men believed almost without reservation that the next step in history would lead us to the goals we were destined to reach. From Kant’s belief that he had launched a 'Copernican Revolution,' to Hegel’s dialectical schema of God writing his autobiography in history and nature, to Comte and Spencer’s use of evolutionary theory to explain the structure of human society, and finally to Marx’s dream of a socialist utopia, the intellectual world reached a near-unanimous consensus on an optimistic view of the future." [2] Amidst the triumphal songs of historical-evolutionary optimism, various liberation theories that placed great hope in posterity replaced Christian eschatology. The logic of liberation theory underwent a trajectory of intellectual evolution from a theological concept of salvation to a modern rationalist concept of salvation, and finally to the Marxist historical materialist concept of salvation through labor.
To clarify the path of Marx’s thought as it shifted from the abstract demands of religious faith to the objective logic of the liberation of labor, it is necessary to trace back through the long and solemn history of Western religious redemption. In the eyes of ancient Greek historians, history consisted only of regression and cycles; "there was no sense of development. When they spoke of primitive times, they rarely felt those times were primitive, but rather beautified them poetically." [3] Christianity, as a universalist and redemptionist integral value system, focused its vision in Augustine's City of God. The Christian theological view of history—colored by the global colonial rule of the Roman Empire and the Stoic consciousness of "citizens of the world"—broke through the closed and narrow nationalist fetters of Judaism, allowing history to move from homogeneous repetition toward heterogeneous evolution and accumulation. Although the basis for demonstrating the legitimacy and authority of medieval state systems and political orders derived from God rather than being discovered within history itself, the significance of the theological worldview in framing historical logic was, as W. Thompson stated: "Christianity began to be conscious in history." [4] At the end of the Middle Ages, as the commodity-exchange society replaced the agricultural economy, religious faith—once sacred and eternal—became caricatured, purely intellectualized, and secularized. These new qualitative forces, distinct from tradition, forced the Middle Ages to transcend itself.
The Enlightenment fused scientific principles with religious faith, stripping away all irrational elements and accidental components from the religious system. It replaced divine grace with intellect, striving to establish a system of faith as irreproachable as mathematical deductive reasoning; intellect was injected into the reconstruction of religious belief as a supreme, ontological force. Thus, the Enlightenment reshaped religion into a new form: the religion of reason. However, the Enlightenment adopted a method of "understanding-metaphysics" [2] (知性形而上学) toward religion, rejecting the rich connotations of humanity within the concept of God. This caused man and God to exist in a state of alienation and mutual exclusion, failing to complete the transformation from God to man. The Enlightenment undoubtedly faced a logical dilemma it could not transcend: the coexistence of secular liberation and spiritual enslavement. On one hand, the Enlightenment provided a secular version of the Christian doctrines of the Fall and Redemption, causing the religious ideal of salvation to descend from the illusions of the world beyond to the empirical vision of this world; accordingly, the history of heavenly redemption was transformed into the history of political liberation. On the other hand, the Enlightenment used knowledge to exclude the human content contained within divine existence, reducing the Absolute to a mechanical, abstract entity. This dissipated the soul of the religious spirit and stripped human existence of meaning. Reason once played the role of the savior, yet it dwindled into a chain for a displaced soul. As Rousseau said: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they." [5]
German classical philosophy took up the redemptive mission of the Enlightenment, reconstructing a rational faith in God and thereby shifting the center of gravity of the Enlightenment movement. German classical philosophy transformed the intellect into an ontological, abstract rational spirit; those rich connotations of humanity that had been filtered out by the Enlightenment’s "religion of reason" were resurrected in speculative and obscure forms. Kant’s philosophy of religion acted as a faint check on the 18th-century worship of science and the supremacy of intellect. Within the limits of pure reason, Kant erected a clear boundary between scientific reason and practical reason, blocking the channel connecting religion to empirical experience. By denying the speculative metaphysical method of proving God's existence through pure reason, he weakened the over-intellectualized tendency of Enlightenment religion, marking a new direction for German classical religious philosophy: "The traditional Christian view of revelation—that God reveals himself through historical events and His Word in history and individual experience—was replaced by reason." [6] However, Kant grounded reason in the finite and non-authentic realm of phenomena [3]; beyond experience, reason could not grasp anything sacred or clarify the existence of God. Ultimately, he could not escape the net of empiricism. By "assigning a place to faith," Kant caused reason to undergo a self-fission between the heavenly and earthly realms. This fragmentation of reason itself deconstructed the rationalist basis of religion, causing the construction of a rational religion to vanish like soap bubbles.
Hegel both reclaimed and rescued religion; he used Absolute Reason to absorb the essence of Christianity, saving it from the dismemberment it suffered at the hands of Enlightenment thinkers. In Hegel, love and faith in Christ were no longer the basis for the restoration of humanity, nor was the sublimity and perfection of the City of God a mere representation of divine will. Instead, these were realized by the world-creating Absolute Reason in its self-sufficient and for-itself [4] process of deduction. On one hand, Hegel corrected the "moral impotence" of the Enlightenment, emphasizing that religion is an element "indispensable for the cultivation of great and sublime virtues," [7] expanding all intellectual, moral, and emotional forces into the concept of God. In the incessant rotation of Absolute Reason, he achieved the unity of the absolute "Man" and the absolute "God." On the other hand, he repaired Kant’s fragmented reason, subsuming both scientific and practical reason under the dialectical evolution of the same Absolute Reason. In the interaction between faith and reason, he completed the movement from God toward Absolute Spirit. At the apex of the logical deduction of Absolute Spirit, Hegelian philosophy reached the absolute reconciliation of all antagonisms and conflicts in the realms of thought, history, and religion. As Taylor put it: "In Hegel's speculative system, the theological contradiction between salvation through God's grace and salvation through human freedom was resolved." [8]
The convictions of reason, humanity, and progress in German classical philosophy both originated from theology and constituted a deviation from and transcendence of it. The transcendence and idealism of the Christian view of redemption formed a non-identical polar contrast with the existing world. This allowed German classical philosophers to use speculative methods within the logical map of reason to sublate [5] and overcome the defects of the secular world, transforming divine redemption into the fulfillment and harmony of humanity within the Absolute Spirit. However, like the Enlightenment, German classical philosophy contained an irreconcilable paradox: it launched the most intimidating critique of religion yet never stepped a foot outside the bounds of religion. Instead, it became confined within an even more thorough religious form, etherealizing into a true "theodicy" [6] (神正论) cloaked in the garb of reason. This is undoubtedly where the "ruse of dialectical reason" [7] lies. What German classical philosophy engaged in was merely a pure philosophical redemption; its staggering abstraction and speculativeness pushed the necessity of liberation into an unreachable world beyond.
The religious worldview, and even the redemptive model of German classical religious philosophy, possessed a soul-stirring allure. However, in terms of practical application, they possessed only utopian significance. Feuerbach reduced the religious world to its secular basis, noting: "The absolute essence of man, the God of man, is man's own essence." [9] Feuerbach reduced the essence of religion to the essence of man, emphasizing the necessity of the alienation and return of human nature, striving to achieve salvation at the level of humanity. However, he was content merely to excavate the epistemological roots and psychological mechanisms of religious phenomena. The true ontology upon which religion is parasitic remained something mysterious and unfathomable to him, ultimately causing his critique of religion to regress to its starting point—the "religion of love."
The magnificent redemptive goals of the modern Enlightenment and German classical religious philosophy once influenced Marx; it was precisely the martyr-like momentum of religion that constituted the aim of Marx’s human liberation. Marx stripped, distilled, and absorbed the German rationalist view of redemption. Upon the logic of material production, he purged the utopian nature of all redemptive goals, forming a theory of human liberation that combined the principle of dialectical negation with the principle of objective sensuousness [8]. Ultimately, he transcended all discourses of liberation, including those of German classical religious philosophy.
Marx pointed out: mankind’s "first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." [18] (P79) The structure of material production contains two aspects—a critical logic and an objective logic—which mutually support and validate one another. The latter provides the basis of economic science for the former, avoiding the utopian defects of religious ideals; the former endows the latter with a radical, negative force, evading the conservativism of religious ideology. Specifically, the logic of production—that is, the "logic of critique" [19] (P13)—originates from the dialectic of the actual movement of production and exchange. It maintains a non-identical, subversive force against the existing order and, in an ultimate sense, possesses a spontaneous, occult point of terminal contact with the Judaic Messianic idea. The logic of production is also the objective logic; it is the fundamental mode of human existence and the primary engine of history. It lays bare the true ontic reality hidden behind all ideologies (including religion), forming a sharp confrontation with mirrored, inverted religious representations. This allows Marx’s theory of human liberation to differ essentially from religious views of salvation.
In short, Marx rooted the tragic spirit of martyrdom found in Western religious and cultural traditions within the vivid, sensuous activities of production and exchange. It is precisely within this dual logic of the production structure that the double criteria of religious critique emerge.
II. The Ultimate Value Criterion of Marx’s Religious Critique
In a symbolic sense, Marx’s ideal of human liberation and religious eschatology share commonalities and affinities in their logical premises, driving forces, and dialectical patterns. However, Marx’s doctrine of human liberation is not a literal translation of the religious view of salvation. Marx shifted the basis of liberation from divine providence to the necessary laws of production and exchange relations, subduing utopian religious illusions and endowing the theory of human liberation with a scientific, radical new form.
Undoubtedly, during the early formation of his worldview, Marx was steeped in religious conviction. Although from a durational perspective the influence of religion was fleeting—soon fragmented into the logic of his later radical critique of religion—the "thin voice" of the Jewish prophets exerted an invisible and lasting influence on Marx’s values. Regarding this, Martin Jay pointed out: "the messianic ideas prevalent in Judaism were given a secular form by Marxism." [20] (P230) The praise that "Prometheus is the grandest saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar" [18] (P12) marks Marx’s image of a world-redeeming Christ.
1. The similarity in logical premises between human liberation and religious salvation. Crisis constitutes the logical premise for both human liberation and religious salvation. Although religious salvation refers to a transhistorical, abstract crisis of the cleavage of human nature, human liberation refers to the pathological crisis of economic operation. Religion applies the crisis of human nature to a salvific process of the struggle between good and evil, deriving the rationality of the eternal existence of the heavenly kingdom from the necessity of saving human nature. In the religious-theological view of history, the world is bifurcated: one pole is the sinful, suffering, and filthy "City of Man," while the other is the blessed, glorious, and pure "City of God." The secular world is decadent and fallen, structured by evil forces such as material desire, hypocrisy, and cunning, where man exists in an alienated state of being "debased, enslaved, abandoned and despised" [21] (P10). The crisis of the cleavage of human nature constitutes the necessity of salvation, for "man’s salvation depends entirely on the grace of faith in God" [22] (P220). Love for and faith in Christ are the effective paths to escaping the crisis: "Let faith come among them, and then sin, death, and hell are attributed to Christ; while grace, life, and salvation are attributed to the believer" [23] (P162). Because of Christ, human nature can raise a torch of light from the dark foundation of the Fall. Marx’s path from crisis to revolution shares a similar background with religion. Engels wrote: "While the storm of the revolution was sweeping over the whole of France... homeless people were crowded into the slums of the large cities; all traditional blood ties, patriarchal subordination, and family relations were dissolved; labor time, especially for women and children, was extended to a frightful degree; the working class, suddenly thrown into entirely new conditions (from the country to the town, from agriculture to industry, from stable conditions of existence to daily changing, insecure ones), became demoralized in en masse" [24] (P728-729). Regarding this soil that spawned religious-like salvific convictions, Louis J. Halle identified: "Marxism met the need of the city-dweller for a new form of faith. It met the need for a religion of the industrial age." [25] (P387)
Starting from the history of the origins of capital, Marx extended the roots of the spreading crisis to "original sin"—the primitive accumulation of capital—launching a prophetic indictment against inhuman social phenomena. Marx pointed out sharply that "primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology" [26] (P820). Primitive accumulation is the site of origin and the progenitor of all evils; it historically caused the separation of producers from the means of production, which led to the ruthless expropriation of labor by capital. Capital accumulation and the accumulation of misery increase in the same proportion, the result of which is inevitable: "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital" [26] (P743-744). Marx performed a "Last Judgment" on capitalist society, predicting apocalyptically: "The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" [26] (P874).
"Communism" and the "Messiah" are both high points in the pursuit of ultimate human value; they sing synchronized variations on the theme of a Great Harmony (datong [9]) world. However, because the sources of their crises differ, the paths to their resolution are distinct. Religion evades existing ills with promises, intoxicating people with non-substantial illusions; it can at most be considered a "revolutionary utopia." In Marx’s view, God is not the redeemer of the crisis; social misfortune and suffering do not stem from defects or cleavages in human nature, but are caused by objectified, alien social relations. For this reason, he erected a ladder to a secular heaven: "The point is to change the world" [21] (P57).
2. The correlation in the driving force of realization between human liberation and religious salvation. The elimination of crisis and the realization of the goals of human liberation and religious salvation both possess an internal driving force. The former originates in production as a mode of human existence, while the latter is a mystified, masochistic activity of labor triggered by self-consciousness.
In Christianity, the progressive pattern of the unity—division—recombination of human nature originates from the dialectical evolutionary process of the servitude and freedom of self-consciousness. To the theologian, God "is eternal self-consciousness" [27] (P17), while man is finite self-consciousness; the event of the Forbidden Fruit itself contains the dual effects of fall and salvation. In its implication of the Fall, the Forbidden Fruit event signifies that "the day man understands good and evil is the very day he moves toward the Fall" [16] (P324). In its implication of salvation, self-consciousness—exchanged at the cost of exile from Eden—is both the basis for rejecting the ignorance of human chaos and clarifying the boundary between good and evil, and the driving force for emerging from the paradox of good and evil to obtain salvation. This is a contradictory process full of suffering and twists. Man was expelled from Paradise and lost his self-contained, self-sufficient state of existence; however, due to self-consciousness, man was elevated to a spiritual life, making labor possible. "God created man in His own image, and at the same time created the nature that mankind utilizes" [19] (P47). From then on, labor became man’s self-determined mode of life. The process of material transformation between man and nature for the sake of survival symbolizes both the punishment for the ancestors' betrayal of God and mankind’s process of self-salvation. It is through labor that man is sublimated into the subject of history and becomes a self-redeemer; it is also through labor—the externalizing activity of self-consciousness—that man glimpses the necessity of moving toward God, achieving the ultimate unity between the salvation of human nature through God's grace and self-salvation through labor.
The dual attributes of fall and salvation contained in religious-penal labor are merely the projection into the realm of faith of the inherent characteristics of human production in the process of natural history. Marx stripped away the illusory cloak of symbolic religious labor and replaced theological moral labor with the real mode of human existence in an ontological sense. By endowing labor with the dual attributes of servitude and liberation, he guided religious salvation toward a non-sacred direction.
The mutually repellent attributes of labor are manifested in the massive production organism of capital as the organic combination of objectified labor and alienated labor; the two coexist within the same labor process. The objectification of labor is the realistic basis for the existence and development of human society, and in itself nurtures the power of human liberation. Marx voiced a cry for salvation within his objective narration of the logic of capital operation. For this reason, Western scholars have called Marx a "secular theologian," identifying his political-economic theory as a secularized salvific "Apocalypse" [25] (P386). Alienated labor causes man's essential powers to mutate into an external force that is uncontrollable and insurmountable, driving human history along a spontaneous trajectory. Thus, "even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement... it can neither overleap the natural phases of evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees" [26] (P9-10). These two countervailing forces structure the wings of servitude and freedom; within the production structure controlled by capital, any freedom simultaneously implies servitude. Within the rational limits of history, the inseparable and unavoidable power of servitude contained in labor "proves the legitimacy of the painful nature of labor" [19] (P17). Various forms of human labor accumulate the irresistible material force necessary for the ultimate reconciliation of social contradictions. In this sense, labor in Marx's vision simultaneously possesses the flavor of a theological Gospel.
In short, for Marx, labor is not an abstract speculative mental activity, nor is it mystified or moralized penal labor; rather, it is man's ontological mode of existence. It is precisely the dialectic of labor that allows human society to transcend itself and move continuously toward an ideal picture of perfection.
3. The commonality in dialectical patterns between human liberation and religious salvation. Human liberation and religious salvation both unfold according to the dialectical law of the negation of the negation, though the former belongs to the dialectic of labor while the latter is a theological dialectic.
The Book of Genesis in the Old Testament records that, at the beginning, human nature maintained a simple and innocent identity, "ignorant of the self like an animal, and therefore in a state of innocence that distinguished not between good and evil" [16] (P324). From the event of the Forbidden Fruit, human nature began its "fall and division" [27] (P8). The Forbidden Fruit event was the earliest "Enlightenment" in human history; it metaphorically represents a crisis of faith in God and marks the awakening of human self-consciousness. Through self-consciousness, man identified the difference between the finite and the infinite, and between evil and good. Discerning the original unity of the finite self and the infinite ontic reality, man actively moved toward a self-determined reconciliation with God. This is a two-way interactive process between man and God: "God strives to unify with man, and man strives to overcome their particularity to unify with God" [16] (P324). Thus, the highest good is realized, and the cleavage of human nature is healed. This is a negation of the negation dialectical pattern of human nature: unity—division—recombination, containing the theological necessity of God’s creation. The theological dialectic of the opposition between evil and good is the mysterious expression of the dialectic of existence in the realm of faith. It provided Marx with an ultimate key to opening the door from theological dialectic to historical dialectic. Marx replaced the theological dialectical pattern of the self-cleavage of human nature with a subversion of the "eternity" and "naturalness" of the market exchange structure—which is ideological in nature—extracting the necessary laws of the replacement of old social forms by new ones from the self-negating mechanism of economic operation.
Faced with the massive material aggregates of an exchange-based society, Marx transcended the ethical, abstract, and compassionate salvific convictions of theologians. He made clear that the lack of coordination—even antagonism and conflict—caused by the tension between the socialization of production and private appropriation within the capitalist organism, and between the orderliness of social production and the irrationality of private production, was "working with iron necessity" 27. This is the internal source of the self-negation of capitalist society. Taking economic laws as his yardstick, Marx passed judgment on history and looked toward the future, inserting capitalist society into the organic sequence of human history. He was convinced that human society undergoes a process of development from primitive communal ownership to private property and finally to a stage of the "realm of freedom" based on individual ownership—a spiral process achieved through dialectical negation. Marx's pathological diagnosis of the capitalist social organism and his description of the roadmap for the dialectical upward trajectory of the negation of the negation in social formations can be seen as the "Messianic precursor of the new religion of the industrial age" 26. In ultimate terms, without a theological source of transcendence, idealism, and finality, there would be no negative dialectic capable of subverting the existing order; as Fetscher pointed out, categories such as commodity fetishism and the negation of the negation "all originate from Marx's own pre-history" 29.
- The Theoretical Affinity between Human Liberation and Theological Redemption Classical Christian eschatology characterizes the richness of the future direction of human history, a quality that constitutes the theological source of all liberation theories.
Horkheimer wrote: "Religion should not be regarded as mere false consciousness, as it also helps to preserve the hope for future justice" 21. Otherwise, one could not find a transcendent path to negate the "what is" and reach the "what is possible."
Religion possesses dimensions of transcendence and negativity; it maintains a non-identical critical tension with the status quo. As a manifesto for a world of suffering, religion was originally the unyielding psychological expression of the oppressed, manifesting despair and protest against existing moral concepts and the social order on Earth. Through the promise of a world beyond, it dilutes the disappointment and suffering of the earthly realm. In the sharp contrast between the Kingdom of Heaven and the mundane world, it reflects a transcendent pursuit of freedom, dignity, and happiness. It builds a hallucinatory imagination for the "opposition" to and "disintegration" of the earthly world, acting as a silent negative force.
The revolutionary logic of religion wove the cradle of human liberation, nurturing a value orientation that seeks to surpass the existing order and cross its boundaries. Horkheimer noted: "Religion records the hopes, desires, and accusations of generations" 30. In the history of human social transformation, people once demanded "the restoration of the egalitarian relations of primitive Christianity and that these relations be recognized as the norm for civil life. From ‘the equality of the children of God,’ they drew conclusions regarding civil equality, and even partially regarding the equality of property... and these were described as necessary conclusions of primitive Christian doctrine" 31. These standards of freedom and equality derived from the Bible became the direct basis for indicting and negating the irrational existing system. Because this arose from undeveloped and immature social relations, it was an unachievable utopia; nonetheless, it remained a path of redemption leading to the Kingdom of Heaven. Historically, Thomas Müntzer was a social reformer who wrote: "We, the earthly flesh and blood, should become God through Christ becoming man, and thus become God's disciples with Him, obeying God's teachings, preaching God's spirit, thereby becoming holy and completely transformed into God, while earthly life should become Heaven" 32. Therefore, "modern socialism often traces its origins back to the era of the Anabaptists, which partly proves that the movement led by Thomas Müntzer should be seen as a step toward modern revolutionary movements" 32. If this subversive tendency is brought down from the heavens to the earth, it becomes the political practice of the modern Enlightenment. From Thomas More’s "utopian description of an ideal social system" 25 to the "theories of direct communism" of Morelly and Mably 25, and then to the social reforms of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen—which possessed an "illusory and utopian character" 33—these constituted the internal impetus for the disintegration of the old social order. They were real-world movements attempting to replace the Messianic Kingdom of Heaven with political blueprints. Modern socialism, "in its theoretical form, initially appeared as a further, seemingly more thorough development of the various principles proposed by the great French Enlightenment scholars of the 18th century" 25. Without acknowledging the "revolution" that originated in the minds of clerics, the scientific form of socialist theory could never have been born.
Although human liberation and the theological view of redemption share a common origin in their theoretical genesis, they differ significantly in their modes of reflection. The logic of the religious view of redemption belongs to the theological-humanist paradigm of the dichotomy between "what ought to be" (Sollen) and "what is" (Sein)—an a priori model that stands "on its head." Marx inverted the mindset of religious theology. Using "what is" as his coordinate, and through the self-division and contradictions of "what is," he revealed its transient and historical nature, pointing directly to "what is possible." This is a mode of thinking that stands "on its feet," a mode of reflection that achieved the transformation of socialism from utopia to science.
In short, there is a logical connection between the theory of human liberation and the religious view of redemption that cannot be ignored. However, because Marx grafted the basis of salvation onto the objective laws governing the operation of the production system, he avoided a belief in historical progress based on divine promise, replacing the temptation of otherworldly redemption with this-worldly social transformation, thereby giving religious criticism an actual logical force.
III. The Economic-Scientific Yardstick of Marx’s Critique of Religion
Marx focused his critique of the ideological implications of religion and his exposure of its dependent ontology on decoding the mysterious phenomenon of fetishism. He demonstrated that the domination and control of people by objects in economic relations unfolds according to the same logical progression as the human worship of God in the world of faith. In doing so, he laid bare the economic-scientific mechanisms through which religious consciousness is generated, demonstrating the immense subversiveness and critical power of his method.
- Critique of the Ideological Implication of Religion Religion is the ideological phantom of the capitalist production system. Marx asserted: "Religion is the opium of the people" 22. Opium is a metaphorical expression of the ideological nature of religion, containing the two-dimensional functions of "solace and justification" 22. Religion possesses a function of spiritual solace, sharing the same analgesic efficacy as opium. Religion originates from a state of despair and helplessness; it is the ultimate solution in a hallucination to the paradox of human existence. Through the prospect of happiness in the hereafter, it carves out a poetic dwelling place corresponding to the secular world. In this sense, Marx compared religion to "imaginary flowers" and an "illusory sun" 22. Religion also has a justificatory function. The temptation of the beauty of the hereafter makes people ignore the evils under their noses, turning worldly pain and misfortune into an absolute nothingness, thereby weakening the force of the negation of existing things. Thus, religion is a tool for maintaining identity with the status quo; it "prepares us for future rewards by appealing to predestination or original sin and by encouraging suffering" 11, making people indulge in religious hallucinations, "preferring the long-lasting happiness of the afterlife to the fleeting happiness of this world" 34. In Marx's radical critical vision, solace is merely a deceptive magic; it veils or hides the backwardness and conservatism of religious consciousness, eroding the longing for "what is possible" through the defense of "what is." The critique of religion is precisely intended to lay bare the decaying world that is being spiritually comforted and guarded.
The social efficacy toward which religious ideology is directed is manifested in its justification of economic dominance and political control from the depths of the soul and the metaphysical heights of the clouds. Religious conviction played a non-negligible role in shaping the temperament of modern capitalism. Max Weber, from a value-neutral positivist standpoint, argued for the inseparable connection between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, writing: "The capitalist system urgently needs dedication to the calling of making money; it is an attitude toward material wealth that fits the capitalist system perfectly" 35. The Protestant Reformation adapted to secular needs, granting ethical and sacred value to the economic system and bureaucratic organizations, regarding diligent labor and honest enrichment as the "calling" (Beruf) bestowed upon humans by God. Rationalized, calculative principles of capitalist production and exchange are merely the secularization of the Christian rational spirit; the rebranding of religious concepts cannot hide their true ideological nature. Marx wrote: "Protestantism, by changing almost all the traditional holidays into workdays, plays an important part in the genesis of capital" 27.
Baudrillard also perceived the deep enslavement caused by the Reformation, pointing out incisively: "The transition from asceticism to the mode of production, from morality to labor, from the purposiveness of wealth to the purposiveness of secularized needs, did not change the principles of separation and sublimation, of repression and the exercise of violence" 20. In the march where political power and economic movement join hands, religion has always played a role in pushing the waves further.
In short, the ideological function of religion is merely the external manifestation of its internal essence; its ontology is rooted outside of itself, within civil society.
- Interpretation of the Basis of Religious Consciousness in Civil Society Marx pointed out: "Religion itself is without content; its roots are not in heaven, but on earth" [10]; (p.528). Marx extended his exposure of the dependent ontology of religion to an analysis of the relationship between religion and civil society, though this connection is often inverted, distorted, or even disconnected. The mysterious and supersensible qualities of religion are generated through an intermediary medium. Marx illustrated the relationship between humans and religion as a simulated relationship similar to that between the state and religion. He wrote: "Just as Christ is the mediator to whom man transfers all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the mediator to which he transfers all his un-divinity and all his human unconstraint" 36. Both mediators and mirrors are entities with similar functions; what is shown through the medium's mirror is not the real ontology, but a mirrored image or mental representation. Mirrored images and mental representations imply indirectness, narrowness, and illusoriness; they are the alienation of the authentic 20 and possess no reality. Through the mediation of Christ, man alienates his essence from himself, "objectifying his own secret essence in religion" 37, making it sacred and absolute, and creating a divine existence. The existence of the mediator shows that the divine presence is nothing more than a false, aesthetic, and mystified image of the world beyond; it veils the truth and is a copy of the real ontology in an alienated form.
The relationship between the state and religion unfolds along the same logic. In a democratic state, the state, by declaring the abolition of the state religion, rids itself of religious narrowness and constraint, "expelling religion from the sphere of public law into that of private law" 36. Nevertheless, man remains subject to religion. Because man assigns all his secularity, empirical nature, and freedom through the mediation of the state, all the rights to freedom—including religious equality—reflected through the prism of the state are, compared to the real existence of civil society, an illusory spectrum or, more accurately, a distorted form of enslavement and control.
The aforementioned predicament stems from the self-fission and profound deviation within secular society itself. Accompanied by the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, the state has become an abstract community erected above civil society. The secular cleavage between the political state and civil society has brought about the doubling of man: "Man lives a double life, not only in thought and consciousness, but in reality and in life—a heavenly life and an earthly life" [46]. This inverted, binary fission between the state and civil society corresponds to the distorted and paradoxical relationship between the world beyond and the world here-below: the metaphysical realm "flowing with honey" and "streaming with milk" [20] remains lodged in a far-off heaven, while the world within reach is filled with sin and deficiency. The relationship between the state and civil society takes on the significance of a religious appearance; this is precisely the secular basis for the illusory, head-over-heels religious worldview. On this point, Marx noted: members of the political state "are religious by virtue of the fact that they treat the life of the state, which is beyond their real individuality, as their true life; they are religious insofar as religion here is the spirit of civil society, the expression of the separation and estrangement of man from man" [46].
Marx extended the exposure of the secular roots of religion deep into the spheres of production and exchange. Civil society, aggregated from social relations, is a reified world saturated with greed and desire; it is this which constitutes the foundation of the state and the ontological substance of religion. Marx wrote: "Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society" [46]. In a reified society, isolated and mutually destructive adversarial relations exist between private individuals. Regarding this, Adam Smith wrote: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" [48]. Religion cannot be uncoupled from its adhesion to egoism; the principle of civil society is precisely the spirit of religion. Marx wrote: "Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of whom no other god may exist" [46].
It is evident that the series of head-over-heels relations—between private individual and citizen, civil society and the political state, and means and ends—are merely the empirical forms of the phantom between the "here-below" and the "beyond," between the secular and the heavenly. In short, Marx extended the ultimate explanation of religion’s parasitic ontology from civil society to the logic of production. However, he was not satisfied with hollow generalizations regarding "production in general"; rather, he delved into the operational processes of actual commodity production and exchange to perform an economic-scientific decoding of the generative mechanism of religious consciousness.
3. The Economic-Scientific Decoding of Religious Consciousness
Marx’s analysis of fetishism allowed for a consistent path to analyze various types of religious appearances, providing a model for opening up the real ontology behind religious consciousness. Marx linked the hidden ontology of religion to the structure of commodity production and exchange, asserting that religious consciousness is neither a "web of lies" consciously woven by rulers or priests, nor a subjective delusion or misrecognition by the people. Instead, it is a semblance [21] derived from a reified society, with its objective basis being a society of exchange constituted by material aggregates.
The capitalist social organism is spontaneously generated by "economic men" pursuing the maximization of their own interests within commercial activities. Adam Smith pointed out: in a commodity society, "every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society" [48]. However, the objective mechanism of these daily and constant exchange activities remains alien and unknown to the people; their destiny is manipulated by a spontaneous, inexplicable heteronomy. The "invisible hand" is a consummate metaphor for this. The law of value operates like a physical law external to man; the mode of human existence manifests as a quasi-natural operational mechanism. All this causes social rule and class control to take on the spectral form of "subjectless" appearances. People cannot escape the domination of this reified world’s heteronomy, and consequently, an idolatrous worship of these unidentifiable, irresistible, and aggregated social forces arises. This is the social soil in which fetishism is rooted. This quasi-natural law deconstructs the direct relations of "master and servant" found in pre-capitalist societies—that is, direct rule and servitude—and constitutes a new ideological form of anonymous rule.
Marx’s concept of fetishism aims to unveil the mirror-image of reified ideology. Unlike the national economists who focused only on the use-value of objects as carriers of social wealth, Marx wrote: "A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in fact, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" [37]. It is not the physical body of the commodity, but precisely the form of the commodity that is the most dangerous force; it is this form that generates a seductive charm. Thus, what must be laid bare is the mystery of the commodity-form itself. Marx wrote: "It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things" [37].
In Marx’s view, the relationship through which people exchange their labor and products of labor is masked by the exchange-relation between things, mediated by money. This masking causes a confusion and misrecognition regarding the qualitative distinction between economic laws and natural laws. The laws of exchange thus acquire a "subjectless" self-sufficiency and "in-itself-ness" akin to natural necessity. The quasi-natural attribute of the mechanism of historical laws makes rule appear self-evident, naturally justified, and universally significant, creating an ideological defense for the eternity and rationality of the existing order of rule. "The old economists did not understand the nature of economic laws; they compared them to the laws of physics and chemistry" [37]; here lies the origin of various "fetishistic" economic theories based on value-positing. On the surface, commodity production and exchange activities allow individuals to obtain unprecedented independence and autonomy, and social ties take the form of equal and voluntary contracts. Regarding this, Žižek wrote: "Once bourgeois society is established, the relations of domination and servitude are repressed: we officially deal with free subjects whose interpersonal relations are already free of all fetishistic forms" [49]. However, peering through the illusion of reified society, what truly exists are deep relations of exploitation and control. The fact that labor-power is sold as a special commodity in the market and that the surplus labor of others is appropriated without compensation creates a massive inequality and imbalance between rights and duties within economic relations. This primordial injustice demonstrates the falsity of the principle of free and fair trade, pushing the hidden truth to the fore and leading to the collapse of the capitalist organism and the entire ideological system that justifies its legitimacy. Restoring the truth of the obscured logic of rule is the methodological essence of Marx’s critique of fetishism.
Marx’s method for decoding fetishism deciphers how various spectral and ghostly illusions in the reified sphere enslave both nature and man. Religion exists in a social form where the relations between things dominate man, rather than man dominating the relations between things. It is the awe and worship of alien social forces aggregated by the forced division of labor—essentially a faint echo of the distorted "voice" of obscure social relations within a reified world. In a certain sense, capitalist commodity society can be viewed as the secular manifestation of the religious world. Marx noted: "This fetishism of the world of commodities arises, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, from the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them" [37]. The reified external form assumed by social relations in commodity exchange easily induces religious fantasies in people. On this, Marx used a metaphor: "For such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion" [37]. Narrow, alien, and reified social relations are always the hidden background of religion; "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" [37].
In sum, the generative mechanism of the dual dimensions of Marx’s critique of religion demonstrates that, in the history of human thought, the contest and dispute between different systems of thought is by no means a "to-the-death" duel. Rather, through intersection, collision, acceptance, and absorption, different systems flow together into the great river of the history of human knowledge. Marx’s theory of history is no exception. The immortal value of Marx’s critique of religion lies in the fact that he replaced the Christian history of redemption with the history of the emancipation of labor, thereby granting the world the real power of freedom and liberation even as the spirit of the religious gospel recedes.
To clarify the relationship between religious liberation and political liberation, we must return to the Marxist premise: "the critique of religion is the prerequisite of all critique." This does not imply a simple chronological order, but rather an ontological priority in the unmasking of alienation. In the New Era, as we promote Chinese-path modernization, the task of the critique of religion undergoes a dialectical transformation. It is no longer merely about the "abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people," but about the constructive sublimation of cultural identity within the framework of "upholding the fundamentals and breaking new ground."
By adhering to the methodology of dialectical materialism, we see that the persistence of religious sentiments in a socialist society is not merely a "survival" [24] of the old superstructure, but is intimately linked to the developmental stage of the productive forces and the remaining contradictions within the relations of production. Therefore, comprehensively and strictly governing the Party must include the fortification of the "ideological Party building" to ensure that the "original aspiration and founding mission" is not eroded by the "Four Winds" or religious heterodoxy.
The Two Establishments and the Two Upholds provide the political guarantee for maintaining this scientific world-view. In the process of high-quality development, we must persist over the long term in our efforts to guide religion to adapt to socialist society. This is not a passive coexistence but an active process of "Sinicization," ensuring that religious practice aligns with the Five-Sphere Integrated Plan and contributes to the realization of common prosperity. Only by "seeking truth from facts" can we navigate the complex "political ecosystem" of the modern world and move toward the ultimate goal of human emancipation, where the "mystical veil" of the social life-process is finally stripped away by the hand of free and conscious labor.
[53] [Slovenian] Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology [M]. Translated by Fang Jie. Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, 2002.
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