[lbo-talk] Marxism and religion

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, that's pretty thin. OK, the passage shows that
he later held a view consistent with the idea of OJQ,
although he doesn't mention Judaism, that
Christianity, especially protestantism and deism, is
most fitting for a market society, and one may infer
my indirection that Marx thought that this religion
was relatively more progressive because it was the
most fitting for the kind of society that he thought
was most progressive, although Marx doesn't say this
here. However even if the inference is allowed, that
doesn't give us a relative ranking of Christianity
versus Islam (which was the question at issue). I
don't see any basis for thinking that "the popular
religions" include Islam, and one can only guess about
Catholicism on the basis of the implied contrast with
Protestantism. But since Marx is discussing fetishism
in the section, maybe he means animism, who knows?

The reiteration of the Young Hegelian point that
religion will vanish only when it is no longer
produced by social circumstances is one that recurs
often in Marx's writings, of course, and his
consistent adherence to that view explains in part why
he does not engage in anti-religious polemics. What
would be the point?

--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
wrote:


> "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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> 

 
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