[lbo-talk] Marxism and religion

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Feb 28 22:47:09 PST 2007


"On the relative ranking of religions according to some criteria of progressivity, the later corpus is silent."

Not so, here it is, in Capital, Volume one, Chapter one, Section 4, that most important bit about fetishism of commodities, ('fetishism' being first and foremost a concept of critique brought to bear upon primitive religions by protestant missionaries). Marx finds a parallel between the development of christianity and the development of the commodity form, in which 'Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, deism &c. is the most fitting form of religion.' By contrast the 'narrowness' of the 'primitive tribal community' 'is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions' [and here I think he means Catholicism and Islam, by the way, but it is not clear]. And finally, the point we've all been making '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 reaonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to Nature.'

Yoshie says "Marx didn't live to comment on Gaia" but he did anticipate it in his bad tempered aside at 'Herr Daumer':

"We see here that the superficiality and ingnorance of the speculating founder of a new religion is transformed into very pronounced cowardice. Herr Daumer flees the historic tragedy that is threatening him too closely to alleged nature, ie to mere rustic idyll, and preaches the cult of the female to cloak his own effeminate resignation.

Herr Daumer's cult of nature, by the way, is a peculiar one. He has managed to be reactionary even in comparison with Christianity. "

Quoted in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of nature in Marx, p 131-3



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