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Karl Marx’s view on religion
Relevance of karl marx on the theory of alienation
Relevance of karl marx on the theory of alienation
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Recommended: Karl Marx’s view on religion
1. Why does Marx argue that religion acts as a drug (“opium”)? What drug-like qualities does it contain? What are the effects of this drug? Marx argues religion acts as a drug to be more exact like opium. People who usually do drugs do it typically because it is an escape from their problems. Likewise, people typically follow a religion because it help’s them escape from their problems. Following a religion helps them to numb the pain of reality. Some people born in society have it better than others and for those who do not religion turn into a great hope for them. Additionally, Marx goes onto say religion is man made and we do not need it to survive. Furthermore, the more people have the less they tend to care about religion. For example, …show more content…
According to Tocqueville in aristocratic times the purpose of creating the arts was to produce the best artwork spending a great amount of time on it perfecting it and selling it for a high price. However, in today’s society the way to get rich is to sell your artwork for a cheaper price by manufacturing more quantity but with cheaper materials less in value, reproducing the artwork quicker and cheaper. Today all ranks of people can afford to buy a replicated artwork, which can easily be mistaken for the real thing. They are so highly perfected it is hard to tell apart what is original and what is not. They are many artistes today however; the quality of the production has …show more content…
According, to Marx they are four types of alienation species being (the most important, products of labor, work process and coworkers/ other people. Marx theory on alienation is that work destroys us when we having nothing to sell but our labor. Marx believes that work is supposed to spark creativity and self-expression however, in capitalist society this clearly does not happen. To the factory owners the workers are not identified as individuals just as people. They worked very long hours for a disgusting wage because their stomachs needed to be filled. Their work alienates them .The items that the workers made were things they could not afford. The items were shipped off to far places to make money for people who paid them almost nothing. They workers worked extremely long hours. The only time that the workers were able to actually live their lives were the few hours they had at home to sleep and eat. The rest of the time they had were spent working because of this they were alienated from each
I argue that the way Marx looks at alienation should open the worlds eyes to the negative effects that alienation has on people. Marx’s idea that, alienation is just another form of inequality because its to stand apart of or as stranger to something. And we see a lot of alienation and inequality in regards to the work place, race, class and life itself. Both of the words alienation and inequality are negative and a question that I believe is important to ask is , “ why does alienation occur so often?” Marx believes that “ working for money and not for the creativity of labor is akin to selling your soul” (lecture 4).
First, I want to identify who Marx and Nietzsche are and their critiques on religion. Karl
This was against the teaching of the Orthodox Church which was not tolerated by the Bolshevik party as it had been deeply involved in the Tsarist system and the belief propagated by it that the Tsar was God's representative on Earth was the basis of its power. Religion in general was considered the "opium of the masses" as it was described my Marx the founding father of communism. The church's physical resources were taken from it and its ability to spread its message was damaged by the outlawing of religious education outside of the home and by the activities of the League of the Militant Godless a Bolshevik sponsored organisation intended to spread anti-religious propaganda. Bolshevik success in this area was varied as it did succeed in destroying the church as organisation but surveys of the peasantry in the 1920s found that 55% of peasants were still practicing Christians. The survival of religion is probably due to the often more lenient policy practiced locally which would often permit religious people to join the party in contravention of central policy.
Karl Marx sums up the basics of his thoughts on alienated labour well in the first paragraph in the last section of the first Manuscript. “On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.” This is how our society today really does work, and it is much more evident then in 1844 when karl marx was writing about this.
According to Marx, religion comes from the imagination of the mind, “Man makes religion.” (H/R,p.11) Marx believes in Atheism and that religion is simply justification to our actions and behaviors as “followers.”
Marx, discusses a certain concept of alienated labor as an unavoidable result of a capitalist system. The framework that he tries to draw in the book is that capitalist system should be blamed for class strafication and alienated labor in the society. In a capitalist society, people suffer from class conflict and property ownership of bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie owns the big factories and businesses, so then, small manufacturers have to shut down and basically have to join the labors in the big businesses. Workers in the capitalist system are obligated to work for long hours under unhealthy conditions for really low salaries.
Religion is a difficult thing to define – although the word implies a deep, spiritual connection with an entity, that is where the concrete label of religion ends. A person can possess religious feelings towards nearly anything, whether it is in the form of a bond with an omnipotent creator, an intense connection with music, or even an unbreakable addiction to a drug. This was a point of emphasis for Karl Marx in “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right;” specifically, the critical presence of religion in our lives. Marx states that religion is “the opium of the people” – he classifies it as a lifeline to the oppressed, a human creation that offers indispensable hope and meaning. In “Sonny's Blues,” the titular character's
Because of the conditions that the wage-workers worked in, Marx described it as exploitation. Marx felt that the wage workers were being exploited. The capitalist, also known as the bourgeoisie, were exploiting the wage workers, the proletariats, because of their cheap labor. They were essentially using them to create and increase their own profit. This in turn brought up alienation. Basically, alienation, also known as estrangement, is when a person is separated from their work, what they produce, themselves, and their environment. Marx’s theory of alienation was used to describe workers laboring under the capitalist society. The workers, also known as wage laborers, were commodities—things that are bought, sold, or exchanged in the market. They were selling their labor which means that they were being alienated from what they were doing.
"Karl Marx on Religion: The Opiate of the Masses?" About.com Agnosticism / Atheism. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2014.
Marx’s theory of alienation is the process by which social organized productive powers are experienced as external or alien forces that dominate the humans that create them. He believes that production is man’s act on nature and on himself. Man’s relationship with nature is his relationship with his tools, or means of production. Man’s relationship with himself is fundamentally his relationship to others. Since production is a social concept to Marx, man’s relationship with other men is the relations of production. Marx’s theory of alienation specifically identifies the problems that he observed within a capitalist society. He noted that workers lost determination by losing the right to be sovereign over their own lives. In a capitalist society, the workers, or Proletariats, do not have control over their productions, their relationship with other producers, or the value or ownership of their production. Even though he identifies the workers as autonomous and self-realizing, the Bourgeoisie dictates their goals and actions to them. Since the bourgeoisie privately owns the means of production, the workers’ product accumulates surplus only for the interest of profit, or capital. Marx is unhappy with this system because he believes that the means of production should be communally owned and that production should be social. Marx believes that under capitalism, man is alienated in four different ways. First, he says that man, as producers, is alienated from the goods that he produces, or the object. Second, man is alienated from the activity of labor to where...
A century and a half ago, Karl Marx established a theory that today is known as the backbone to modern socialism and communism. Marx viewed the early capitalism of his own day as inherently exploitive. At the core of capitalist production is what is considered surplus value, the value left over after the producer (in Marx’s case, factory owner) had paid the fixed costs of production such as raw materials, machinery, overhead and wages. The left over amount was kept as profit, a profit that Marx saw that was earned from the sweat of the labor. Derived from his idea of surplus value was that of alienation. Marx gave an economic interpretation to alienation. People were alienated from their own labor; their work was appropriated by someone else and the work itself was compulsory, not creative; the cause was capitalism, and the cure was socialism. Marx believed that modern labor is an evolution of something that began centuries ago and encompassing everything from slave states to European feudalism right on up to today’s version of commercial capitalism; which, completed or perfected the capitalist technique of worker alienation. Marx is correct in saying that capitalism exploits the working class, and that working under capitalism is in fact “alienating”.
Marx’s theory of alienation describes the separation of things that naturally belong together. For Marx, alienation is experienced in four forms. These include alienation from ones self, alienation from the work process, alienation from the product and alienation from other people. Workers are alienated from themselves because they are forced to sell their labor for a wage. Workers are alienated from the process because they don’t own the means of production. Workers are alienated from the product because the product of labor belongs to the capitalists. Workers do not own what they produce. Workers are alienated from other people because in a capitalist economy workers see each other as competition for jobs. Thus for Marx, labor is simply a means to an end.
In discussing the similarities between Marx, Weber and Durkheim, it is important to understand what social order and social change are. Social order is the systems of social structures (relations, values and practice etc.) that maintain and enforce certain patterns of behaviour. Whereas, social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society, examples of such alterations can be changes in nature, social institutions, behaviours and/or social relations. (Bratton and Denham 2014) Throughout time, religion has always been a hot topic of controversy, whether it is based on being a part of the same religion, to having different religious views on life and how to live life. This is due in large to the ever changing views on religion and the way it can be practised. Religion can be viewed in both aspects of social order and social change because it is part of a system, however, alterations are frequently made. The three sociologists Marx, Weber and Durkheim have all expressed their views on religion with respect to society. Webers’ views show the effects
Marx saw religion as an evil that existed in society and that it brought down all the people that believed in that religion. Marx said that, ?It [religion] is the opium of the people,?[1] and in saying this, Marx meant that religion was contagious on society. Once the society had a taste for the religion, they became totally engulfed it in, and then they do not want to get out of that way of live because they see it as a good way to live. Then even if people wanted to get out of the religion it was hard to get out because the whole society had already been infected by the ?opium.?
In the first paragraph of the article, he lists various forms of people and philosophy, and their views of the relationship between religion and deviance. Functionalists and Marxists support the theory that religion deters deviance. Functionalism is a philosophy which states that what makes something a characteristic of a mental state is dependent on its function to the cognitive mind. Marxism is the view and critique which is applied to capitalism and class struggle as the systemic economy changed during the 19th century. (Merton 1968, p.98).