Vanessa Wills

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Lehman Brothers, if the Anglophone academy could be said to have arrived at any consensus about the value of Marxist theory, it would be that Marxism was a quaint historical curio at best and a world-historically hubristic folly at worst. Today, however, well on our way through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we live in a moment of greatly renewed interest in Marxist ideas. This curiosity is stoked by, among other factors, the worldwide economic shocks of 2008 and, in more recent times, by impending climate catastrophe, incipient fascisticization, and the still-ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Any of these on its own would stand out as a rebuke to the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s, famously crystallized in Francis Fukayama's assertion that humanity had arrived at "the end of history," there to find permanently expanding capitalist prosperity. Taken together, they present at least strong prima facie evidence for what Karl Marx identified as the inherently and ineluctably crisis-ridden nature of capital and, therefore, good reason to encounter his writings anew.

As unstintingly irreligious as he was, Karl Marx was not an atheist. He was a staunch opponent of supernatural belief, yet neither did he embrace agnosticism as the position of claiming no answer to the question whether or not God exists. Rather, Marx argued that it was incoherent and pointless even to pose that very question. His irreligion is best understood not primarily as an ontological stance on the existence or nonexistence of God, but rather as part and parcel of a philosophical worldview radically committed to sweeping such questions aside, to centering the human perspective ontologically and epistemologically, to overthrowing “all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being,” and to taking as its core principle that “man is the highest being for man.” A “religious worldview” for Marx includes not only the plainly divine, but any perspective that subordinates the value of human beings to a superior entity, operating externally to human beings and imperviously to their influence. I begin by explaining the relationship between Marx's historical materialism and his position on the existence of God. It may seem obvious how irreligion would follow from a philosophical materialist stance. I show that Marx's historical materialist irreligion, however, warrants a closer and more nuanced assessment than we might at first realize. I go on to discuss why Marx's historical materialism leads him to regard questions about the existence of God as fundamentally misguided. I then unpack the meanings of Marx's infamous statement that religion is “the opium of the people.” I conclude with a discussion of Marx's pronouncement that “the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man,” a teaching that separates mere atheism from radical irreligion.

Marxism is a materialist theory that centers economic life in its analysis of the human social world. This materialist orientation manifests in explanations that take economic class to play a fundamental causal role in determining the emergence, character, and development of race-and sex-based oppression—indeed, of all forms of identity-based oppression within class societies. To say that labor is mediated by class in a class-based society is to say that, in such societies, the class-based division of that activity which produces and reproduces the human species is the definite form in which labor appears, and that the human life which is the product of that self-making activity bears its stamp. Marxism’s emphasis on economic factors as central in the constitution and development of human life has been seized upon as evidence of its alleged “class reductionism”—its supposed tendency to think of all aspects of human life as direct and simple expressions of a class relation. No such thing follows; quite the opposite, a correct understanding of the relationships among capitalism, racism, and sexism only further highlights how central the struggle against each is to the struggles against any of the others.