> 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.'
This is a reiteration of claims made in On the Jewish Question. The key idea underpinning all such claims is the idea of human historical development as the development of mind. It's this that underpins the hierarchical ordering of systems of belief including systems of religious belief. The "materialist" aspect of this is the focus on "forces and relations of production" as both generating and expressing this development.
“The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.”
“Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”
“Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity — money — on them.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ index.htm
"sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village- communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
Ted