“Religion is the sign of the oppressed . . . it is the opium of the people.” Karl Marx (1818–1883)

THE philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is, for good or ill, the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the nineteenth century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified by the forces of history and his theories adapted to a great variety of political circumstances, for the most part detrimental to those upon whom they have been enforced. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that it has been only recently that scholars have had the opportunity to appreciate Marx’s intellectual stature.

Marx, and his associate Friedrich Engels, developed a philosophy known as dialectical materialism. This essentially is the merger of the ideas of dialectics and materialism, which surmise that all things in the universe are material, that evolution is constantly taking place at all levels of existence and in all systems, that defined boundaries are manmade concepts that do not actually exist in nature, and that the universe is an interconnected unified entity in which all elements are connected to, and dependent upon, each other. The philosophy holds that science is the only means by which truth can be determined.

TO understand Marxism, you must understand the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Marx was part of a larger movement in German Enlightenment philosophy; his ideas didn’t come out of nowhere, they were an extension of the theories that had been developing in Europe throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Marx was a member of the Young Hegelians, which had formed after the famous German philosopher Hegel’s death. Hegel’s philosophy was based on the dialectic.

After Hagel’s death, his philosophy continued to be taught in Berlin and an ideological split occurred among the students of Hegel’s teachings. Eventually a right, centre and left branch of the ideology emerged, the Young Hegelians taking up the leftist branch of Hegelian thought. They began using Hegel’s dialectical method to openly criticise Hegel’s own work, attempting to prove that Hegel’s own philosophy, when fully extended, supported atheistic materialism. The Young Hegelians criticised religious institutions and, as a result of this, many of them were denied professorship at institutions around what was to become Germany and further afield. Thus began Marx’s period of disassociation from his relatively wealthy origins and his move towards the austerity that was to last the rest of his life. He ended up living and writing his greatest work, Das Kapital, in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Marx’s own contribution to Hegelian debate was to write the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which contained in its introduction the oft-paraphrased paragraph: “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.”

MARX viewed religion as a consequence of man’s relationship to the means of production. It was a result of man’s unhappiness with life and man’s lack of understanding of social and economic forces. Therefore, the Marxist position on religion is: 1) that criticism of religion and the advance of science are important weapons for combating religious views; and 2) that religion will never be fully eliminated until man has control over the economy and man is no longer alienated from productive forces.

It is a misconception to believe that Marx was saying that religion was a metaphorical drug, created, maintained and tolerated by the ruling class to keep the masses happy. Marx was actually concerned with far more weighty problems. Among other things, he was describing the basic human conditions under which an abstract human being could exist. “Man is the world of man, state, society,” he concluded, and the concept of God was a necessary invention in an “inverted world”. Once the world was right side up, the idea would not be needed. In other words, religion was a requirement of the proletariat to deal with their living conditions. Once the revolution had created a just and purposeful society, the need to believe in anything other than that which “is” or that which has material existence would be gone.