Stausberg/Engler, THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE STUDY OR RELIGION

CHAPTER 11

MARXISM
MATTHEW DAY

Chapter Summary

Several of the most prominent approaches to the contemporary study of religion

are barely imaginable without Marx.
Instead of treating Marxs corpus as a uniform whole, it is more productive to dis
tinguish between an early and a late constellation of theoretical positions regarding
religion.
For much of the twentieth century, intellectuals were often more interested in
determining whether Marxism itself was a religion than strategically drawing upon
the Marxist vocabulary to explain specific religious discourses and practices.
Successful Marxist strategies for analyzing religion as something more than an opi
ate of the people include: (a) a mode of anti-capitalist protest; (b) a form of non-elite
reflection on capital; (c) a mythologizing ideological discourse.

Much as the ghostly, bloodied dagger troubles Macbeth, Karl Marx discomfits the aca
demic study of religion. By this I mean that many of the contemporary fields domi
nant approachesfrom postcolonialism and feminism to poststructuralism and
critical theoryhave assumed their privileged position only by struggling to depose
him. Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water, Michel Foucault
hissed in The Order of Things, that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else (1973,262).
Yet, regardless of how diligently they scrub, the mandarins of post-Marxist theoriz
ing cannot fully erase the signs of their own dependence upon Marx (WolfF/Cullenberg
1986). As a case in point, despite his best efforts to distinguish a postmodern incredu
lity toward meta-narratives from the vaulting ambition of Marxist historiography, Jean-
Fran^ois Lyotards critique of the commodification of knowledge makes little sense
without Marxs analysis of commodity production in the background (Lyotard 1984).
In what follows, rather than treating Marx as a prelude to the contemporary study
of religionas a sort of conceptual ladder that serious theorists may safely throw away
162 MATTHEW DAY

after climbingI want to demonstrate how Marx and Marxism have been central to
theorizing religion for more than a century. The first section offers a brief overview of
Marxs writings on the topic. The second section surveys the initial waves of Marxist
reflections on religion in the twentieth century and their latter-day descendants. The
third section highlights the best work from three different genres of contemporary
Marxist scholarship on religion.

A Tale of Two Marxes

Louis Althusser argued that Marx passed through a decisive epistemological rupture in
1845, separating the early humanist texts from the mature anti-humanist work (1965).
Although one can obviously make heavy weather of this sort of thingfretting about
the devious machinations of the author-function, for examplethe suggestion that
we avoid treating the Marxist corpus as a single homogeneous mass makes good sense
(Foucault 1977). After all, the pre-eminent theorist of contradiction is sure to harbor one
or two of his own. Thus, rather than trying to isolate the Marxist stance on the subject,
I will distinguish between a fairly stable early set of positions and a later, less stable but
more intriguing suite of attitudes.

Marx on Religion: 1843-1850

The young Marx was a dissatisfied Hegelian, a restless philosopher cum journal
ist committed to extending the materialist inversion of Hegel initiated by Ludwig
Feuerbach (Van Harvey 1995). Feuerbach rejected Hegels elaborate cosmic opera
whereby the abstract potentiality of pure Being (Sein) converts itself into the actual,
but limited particularity of existing beings (Dasein) along the way to becoming fully
self-conscious of itself as Being (Bei-sich-selbst-seiti)for its upside-down priorities.
His response was to outline a new philosophical project that viewed the gods as inven
tions through which human beings achieved self-consciousness. The personality of
God is thus the means by which man converts the qualities of his own nature into the
qualities of another beingof a being, external to himself, Feuerbach argued. The
personality of God is nothing else than the projected personality of man (Feuerbach
1989 [1841], 226).
A Feuerbach-inflected version of materialism provided the necessary conceptual
scaffolding for Marxs earliest analyses of religion. It is there in On the Jewish Question
(1843) when he observes: As long as man is imprisoned within religion, he only knows
how to objectify his essence by making it into an alien imaginary being (Marx 2000,
69). So, too, it shoulders a good deal of the weight behind his well-known assertion in
Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844):
 MARXISM 163

Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic
in popular form, its spiritual point dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its
solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fan
tastic realization of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no true
reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly a struggle against that world of
which religion is the spiritual aroma. (Marx 1994,57)

For the early Marx, there are genuine empirical facts to be gleaned from these spirit-
haunted discoursesso long as one knows how to decode theological reflection as both
an echo of and answer to the specific, material conditions of human misery. The wretch
edness of religion is at once an expression o/and a protest against real wretchedness, he
continues: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world
and the soul of soulless conditions (Marx 1994, 57). Religious assertions about the
nature of human existence are not true, of coursebut neither do they lie. In this way,
religion is the symptom of a disordered social existence (cf. Zizek 1989).

Marx on Religion: 1850-1883

Althusser located the decisive epistemic break in Thesis Six of Theses on Feuerbach
(1845), where Marx recommends that all portraits of a transhistorical, essential human
nature should be reduced to a contingent ensemble of social relations (Marx 2000,
172). Although I find it more illuminating to think of the crucial shift in Marxs corpus
emerging in response to the messy and unsuccessful revolutionary uprisings that spread
across Europe in 1848, the fact remains that his interest in religion had shifted gears by
the early 1850s.
To be sure, there are moments when the mature Marx can sound like his much
younger self. The religious world is but the reflex of the real world, he judges in Capital
(1867): The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish,
when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligi
ble and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow-men and to Nature (Marx 1976,
91). Nevertheless, what we find after 1850 is a move away from philosophy and toward
critical political economy. One indicator of this new orientation is that his 1853 reading
notes on Thomas Stamford Raffless The History of Java (1817)a book which informed
his understanding of precolonial Indias socio-economic structuresindicate that Marx
skipped the chapters on religion (cf. Anderson 2010,24-28).
Marx was convinced that capitalisms historical distinctiveness could not be under
stood apart from the commodity-form. He was not foolish enough to argue that com
modities only exist within the capitalist mode of production. Rather, his hunch was
that we must wrestle with commodities because capitalisms most fundamental and
historically distinct social relationbetween those who sell their labor-power in
order to secure the means of subsistence (i.e. wage-laborers) and those who buy labor-
power in the pursuit of surplus-value (i.e. capitalists)is structured by and for their
164 MATTHEW DAY

creation: The fact that it produces commodities does not in itself distinguish it from
other modes of production, but that the dominant and determining character of its
product is that it is a commodity certainly does so (1981 [1883], 1019).
This observation does not exhaust the issue for Marx, however. Among other things,
it cannot explain how the commodity-form is able to present itself as both an object of
subjective utility (i.e. a thing with use-value) and a bearer of objective value (i.e. a thing
with exchange-value). The first trait is dealt with easily enough: use-value is a func
tion of some particular things ability to satisfy a perceived human need. To drive nails,
a hammer must be hard. To skin hides, a knife must be sharp. In this way, he writes:
usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of
the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter (Marx 1976,126). Yet, Marx
thinks it is more difficult to account for the second trait since it is not a natural property
of matter that one thing is equivalent to a certain amount of another thing. Five hun
dred and thirty pounds of coffee beans do not resemble an ounce of gold any more than
an ounce of gold looks or behaves like eighteen barrels of crude oil. Yet, when we con
sider these three commodities from the standpoint of exchange, each is equivalent to
the others.1 Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values,
he observes: in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of com
modities as physical objects (Marx 1976,138). Exchange-values seem to exist as sensibly
supra-sensible spirits, shape-shifting beings that call out to us in the language of price.
According to Marx, the only possible source for the limitlessly convertible values pre
served and conveyed by the commodity-form is human labor itself.2 That is to say, the
relationships that seem to obtain between thingsthat one ounce of gold can be con
verted into five hundred and thirty pounds of coffee beans without loss or remainder
are actually bundles of labor-mediated relationships between human beings. If this tale
of woeful misrecognition sounds vaguely familiar, it is because a minimalist rendition of
the old, Feuerbach-inflected portrait of religion is lurking just beneath the surface:

the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the
products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connec
tion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom.
There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the
fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy,
we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that
world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed
with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So
it is in the world of commodities with the products of mens hands. (Marx 1976,165)

1 When this essay was composed, the market prices for these commodities were: (a) $2.2o/lb (coffee

beans); (b) $1166/oz (gold); and (c) $66/barrel (crude oil).

2 Whether this commitment to the labor theory of value is an essential feature of Marxian

economicsor even makes sensehas occasionally been a matter of rigorous debate. For a sense of the
basic issues at stake, see: Sraffa 1960; Robinson 1962; Howard/King 1992.
 MARXISM 165

With a knowing anthropological wink, Marx christened this misrecognition the fet
ishism of commodities.
Marx had flirted with a version of this approach a quarter century before, but his alle
giance to the post-Hegelian philosophical vocabulary left him ill equipped to do much
more. As in religion the human imaginations own activity, the activity of mans head
and heart, reacts independently on the individual as an alien activity of gods or devils,
he ventured in 1844, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity.
It belongs to another and is the loss of himself (Marx 2000,89). Back then, the best he
could do to advance this line of thought was to protest that when human beings must
sell their labor-power to secure the means of their subsistence they are reduced to mere
animals. With the turn toward critical political economy, however, the old theological
examination of commodity fetishism productively fans out to confront the metaphysical
strangeness of things like interest-bearing capital and the gold standard. By the end of his
life, Marx was no longer interested in explaining religion per se. Rather, he strategically
drew upon analogies from the religious world in order to demythologize the metaphysi
cally spooky forces of capital accumulation that haunted the marketplace. These were the
only gods that mattered for a world that lives under the thumb of capital apotheosizeda
mode of production that had become an Anselmian limit of the human imagination.

Religion after Marx:

Is Communism a Religion?

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, materialist accounts of religion
were more or less content to remain on the paths Marx blazed. Consider The Peasant
War in Germany (1850), written by Marxs loyal friend, partner, and patron Friedrich
Engels while the disappointments about 1848 still ached. The organizing thesis is that
one could see the classes and fractions of traitors which everywhere betrayed 1848
and 1849 in the role of traitors, though on a lower level of development, already in 1525
(Engels 2006 [1850], xvi). Engels insisted that the sixteenth-century theological con
troversies that erupted between, say, the church and the Reformers, or between Luther
and Mntzer, reveal and reflect the class struggles of the day. The key was adopting a
Marxist stance and reading early modern religious thought as thinly veiled political
discourses advancing or combating real, material interests. Even the so-called religious
wars of the sixteenth century mainly concerned very positive material class interest, he
advised: Although the class struggles of those days were clothed in religious shibbo
leths, and though the interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were
concealed behind a religious screen, this changed nothing at all and is easily explained
by the conditions of the times (Engels 2006 [1850], 13).
The same lesson even applies for many of Marxs left-wing rivals. While Marx
and Mikhail Bakunin crossed swords over the need of a revolutionary vanguard, for
166 MATTHEW DAY

example, they arrived at very similar conclusions when it came to religion. Thus, in
God and State (c.1871) Bakunin writes that religion is an essential weapon in the bour
geoisies war against the proletariat: That is the eternal mirage; which leads away the
masses in a search for divine treasures, while much more reserved, the governing class
contents itself with dividing among all its membersvery unequally, moreover and
always giving most to him who possesses mostthe miserable goods of earth and the
plunder taken from the people, including their political and social liberty (Bakunin
1970 [c.1871], 70)*
Things began to change after the October Revolution of 1917. In the wake of events
such as the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion (1921) and the Moscow show
trials of the 1930s, intellectuals sympathetic to Marxs analyses of capital accumulation
and its cultures of exploitation were forced to reckon with Soviet brutality. Bakunin
had noted this potential early on, condemning Sergei Nechayevs lethal blend of moral
idealism and strategic violence as an essentially Jesuitical system (Jensen 2014,14).
What many observers found particularly worrying was the way that the Revolution had
acquired an absolute value, resulting in a Marxist version of Kierkegaards teleological
suspension of the ethical: in the name of class struggle, it appeared as though all things
were permitted. The socialist revolution, an exiled but resolute Trotsky wrote in Their
Morals and Ours (1938), must be completely free from the fictions of religion, democ
racy and transcendental moralitythe spiritual chains forged by the enemy to tame
and enslave it. Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist
bestiality is moral, and nothing else. The welfare of the revolution, that is the supreme
law! (Trotsky 1969,72).
By the mid-i930S, many left-leaning intellectuals found themselves agreeing with
Bakunins initial assessment. Soviet-style communism had, somehow, morphed into a
religion. Although this charge emerged from various theoretical camps, there were two
basic versions of the claim.

Revolutionary Politics, Dangerous Religion

One faction argued that, by virtue of its eschatological, prophetic, soteriological, and
even mythical characteristics, Marxist theorizing shared a common architectural
structure with religious thought. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942),
his now-classic work on the creative instability of capital accumulation, Joseph
Schumpeter noted:

In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a sys
tem of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by
which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies
a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen
section of mankind, is to be saved. (1942,5)
 MARXISM 167

Yet, as far as this group was concerned, this was not a point in Marxs favor. Reinhold
Niebuhr consistently argued that communism represented a dangerously flawed form of
religion because its mix of political romanticism and moral certainty resulted in fanati
cism (Niebuhr 1935, 465). Marxism was dangerous for Niebuhr becauseas Trotsky
illustratedit permitted the demonic to enter into human life through the religious
sanctification of partial and relative values (Niebuhr 1934, 379). Again and again, we
find intellectuals troubled by the creeping absolutism that distinguished the Bolshevik
school of Marxism. Marxism is eschatology without God, Frederick Augustus Voigt
announced in Unto Caesar (1938): It demands unquestioning faith in the coming of the
Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and imposes a dogmatic atheism. The Marxist is not even
allowed to be an agnostic (1938,42).
Over time, this line of thought eventually made its way into the religious studies
curriculum through widely used textbooks like Ninian Smarts The Worlds Religions
(1989), James Livingstons Anatomy of the Sacred (1993), and Richard Charles Zaehners
Encyclopedia of World Religions (1997) (cf. Fitzgerald 1999 for a critique of this trend).

Marxist Hope and Religious Faith

The other bloc argued that the homologies between Marxism and religion created a
unique opportunity for a rapprochement between progressive politics and religious
commitment. Prior to his exile from Nazi Germany, for example, Paul Tillich spent con
siderable effort fashioning a brand of religious socialism that drew equally upon the
work of Marx and the Christian New Testament. As he explained in the Introduction
to The Protestant Era (1948):

Religious socialism was always interested in human life as a whole and never in its
economic basis exclusively. In this it was sharply distinguished from economic mate
rialism, as well as from all forms of economism. It did not consider the economic
factor as an independent one on which all social reality is dependent. It recognized
the dependence of economy itself on all other social, intellectual, and spiritual fac
tors, and it created a picture of the total, interdependent structure of our present
existence. We understood socialism as a problem not of wages but of a new theon-
omy in which the question of wages, of social security, is treated in unity with the
question of truth, of spiritual security. (Tillich 1992,293)

By the 1960s, this sort of thing had become a staple of high cultural theorizing. There
is only one political problem in our world today, Norman O. Brown decreed in Loves
Body: the unification of mankind. The Internationale shall be the human race. That
they should be oneut unum sint. This was Christs last prayer before the Crucifixion
(1966,81). While figures like Tillich and Brown were primarily interested in closing the
gap between The Communist Manifesto and The Sermon on the Mount, others stressed
the correlations between Marxism and the Hebrew Bible. It is hardly possible to talk
168 MATTHEW DAY

about Marxs attitude toward religion without mentioning the connection between his
philosophy of history, and of socialism, with the Messianic hope of the Old Testament
prophets, Erich Fromm advised in Marxs Concept of Man (1961): They show man a
vision of how he ought to be, and confront him with the alternatives between which
he must choose. Most of the Old Testament prophets share the idea that history has a
meaning, that man perfects himself in the process of history, and that he will eventu
ally create a social order of peace and justice (2003,52). For the first time, Marxs own
Jewishness was an asset rather than a liability.
This sort of grand meta-historical enterprise began to look bloated and lifeless when
the poststructuralist moment arrived. It belonged to a bygone era of philosophical gran
deur in which, as Foucault put it dismissively, a philosophical text, a theoretical text,
finally had to tell you what life, death, and sexually really were, if God existed or not,
what liberty consisted of, what one had to do in a political life, how to behave in regard
to others, and so forth (1989, 51). As a result, these projects were quickly swept out to
sea with the changing tide. Yet, the desire to synthesize Marxist hope and religious faith
managed to hang around for a little while longer, eventually finding a home in the hot
house of liberation theology throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Both of the Marxism as religion camps should now seem hopelessly antiquated. One
reason for this is that each side treats religion as a natural kind rather than a contingent
feature of a particular socio-taxonomic order. By safeguarding the category itself from
critical scrutiny, the debate eventually dissolved into a series of uninspiring exchanges
regarding the apparent metaphysical foundations of modern democratic life (e.g. lib
eralism vs. communitarianism). Nevertheless, their trajectories through the academy
underscore something absolutely decisive about Marxs place in the study of religion.
Some scholars now insist that pouvoir/savoir relationships are more complicated than
Marx could have imagined. Others argue that meta-narratives of transnational proletar
ian revolution are forms of tyranny that eventually end in the national horrors of Stalins
gulags or Pol Pots killing fields. Still others maintain that Marx is fatally Eurocentric,
surreptitiously naturalizing the Wests domination of the rest. However, it is worth
pointing out that each one of these anti-Marxist claims would be barely conceivable
apart from the Marxist strategy of treating our intellectual and moral lives as inextri
cable aspects of economic and political structures. In other words, unless one is willing
to talk about human beings as solitary brains in vatsa challenge that some cognitive
theorists often seem eager to acceptthere is no avoiding Marx.

More than an Opiate: Marxism

and Religion Today

While Marxists have spent the last quarter-century or so beating against the winds of
academic fashion, they nevertheless managed to find several paths forward. In the space
 MARXISM 169

remaining I would like to identify three genres of Marxist scholarship that illustrate its
continuing analytic potential.

Religion as the Protest against Wretchedness

The first genre views religion as a latent form of popular protest against wretchedness.
Looking back on the ruined promise of 1848, Marx had isolated Englands lack of a revo
lutionary uprising as a key ingredient in the continental bourgeoisies ascent England,
the country that turns whole nations into her proletarians, that spans the whole world
with her enormous arms, he sighed: England seems to be the rock which breaks the
revolutionary waves, the country where the new society is stifled before it is born
(2000,299). It is thus a mark of historys cunning that the most productive uses of Marx
to analyze the revolutionary potential of god-talk emerged from England. Taking on
the canonical Marxist imperative to write history as the history of class struggle, a small
band of scholarsincluding Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.
P. Thompsonbegan to regard the kaleidoscopic variety of non-conforming Christian
communities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England as anti-capitalist pro
vocateurs. Arguably, the greatest scholarly achievement from this genre is Christopher
Hills The World Turned Upside Down (1972).
The books organizing principle is that the English Civil Wars were shadowed by a
revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might
have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal insti
tutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the Protestant ethic
(1972, 15). The agitators for this would-be revolution were groups like the Diggers,
Levelers, Quakers, and Ranters, Christian radicals who drew upon the unprecedented
accessibility of the English Bible to resist the legal and extra-legal means through which
the landed gentry was creating a new social order after its own interests. What catches
Hills eye in particular about these groups is that their theologically-informed resistance
to the privatization of common lands through enclosure and the concomitant sanc
tification of private property in law was, in hindsight, a struggle against the coercive
forces that would oblige the rural peasantry to either submit to the degradations of wage
labor or starve to death. When read in this way, for example, the writings of the Digger
Gerrard Winstanley begin to resemble a Marxist critique of capital avant la lettre. In the
beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury,
to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for
Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word
was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another,
Winstanley proclaims in The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649). Yet, human sin
fulness upended this righteous order:

And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for
all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers,
170 MATTHEW DAY

and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this
Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the
hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a
respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoyc-
ing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. (Quoted in Hill 1972,132)

Instead of religion merely providing the moral sanction for the exploitation of labor
by capital, Hill presents Christian radicalism as a revolutionary movement struggling
against the injustices of early modern capitalism (cf. Corfield 2004). Centuries before
Lenin and Trotsky, there were men like Winstanley and Edward Sexby who responded
to the crucible of capitalism by dreaming of smashing social hierarchies and ending
oppression.

Religion as Popular Logic

The second genre of Marxist analysis treats religious discourses on gods, ghosts, and
spirits as modes of popular logic, non-elite discourses that fight to make sense of capi
talisms metaphysical spookiness. Although his theoretical debt to Marx remains insuf
ficiently acknowledged, Marshall Sahlins helpfully explains the basic anthropological
premise of this stance when he observes: Western capitalism has loosed on the world
enormous forces of production, coercion and destruction. Yet precisely because they
cannot be resisted, the relations and goods of the larger system also take on meaningful
places in local schemes of things (1988,4; cf. Comaroff/ Comaroff 2000). In other words,
the kinds of agents and forces that typically appear in religious ontologies become the
terms through which a homegrown understanding of capital accumulation is assem
bled. In my judgment, the finest example of a distinctly Marxist approach to these topics
is Michael Taussigs The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980).3
Painted in broad strokes, Taussigs ambition is to document how the introduction of
capitalist modes of production in Columbia and Bolivia triggered far-reaching social
disruptions that were conceptualized, by those living through the tumult, as the work
of the devil. In two widely separated areas of rural South America, as peasant culti
vators became landless wage laborers, they invoke the devil as part of the process of
maintaining or increasing production, we learn: However, as peasants working their
own land according to their own customs they do not do this. It is only when they are
proletarianized that the devil assumes such importance (1980,13). His specific focus
is on the stories these newly proletarianized laborers tell of short-sighted companeros
whoin a bid to game the system of piece-rate compensationmake pacts with the
devil to increase their productivity and thus maximize their wages. What these workers
soon discover is that the existential costs of the contracts, paid to the devil in the form

3 Other noteworthy examples indude Carlo Ginzburgs The Cheese and the Worms (1980) and
Sumanta Banerjees Logic in Popular Form (2002).
 MARXISM 171

of blood, sweat, and tears, always outstrip their marginal fiscal benefits. In Taussigs
estimation:

the fabled devil contract is an indictment of an economic system which forces men
to barter their souls for the destructive powers of commodities. Of its plethora of
interconnected and often contradictory meanings, the devil contract is outstanding
in this regard: mans soul cannot be bought or sold, yet under certain historical con
ditions mankind is threatened by this mode of exchange as a way of making a liveli
hood. In recounting this fable of the devil, the righteous man confronts the struggle
of good and evil in terms that symbolize some of the most acute contradictions of
market economies. (Taussig 1980, xvi)

That is to say, although the legends of un pacto con el Diablo represent an unmistak
ably non-elite discourse, they nevertheless manage to articulate the Marxist portrait
of commodity production as an inexorably exploitative social relationship between
labor and capital in the pursuit of profit (cf. Marx 1981, 232). Considered in this light,
these diabolical tales represent what might be calledwith a tip of the cap to Claude
L^vi-Straussa critical political economy of the concrete.

Religion as Ideological Discourse

The third genre regards religion as a type of ideological discourse. In many ways, this
approach represents the most obvious articulation of an orthodox Marxist attitude
toward religion. It is also one of the most difficult exercises to pull off given the mud
dled nature of what Marx had to say about ideology. The enduring problem, Raymond
Williams observed, is that in Marxs writings ideology hovers between 'a system of
beliefs characteristic of a specific class and a system of illusory beliefsfalse ideas or
false consciousnesswhich can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge. This
uncertainty was never really resolved (Williams 1977, 66). Throw in the fact that it is
always the other guys who suffer from ideological misconceptions, and soon ideology
begins to look like a useful polemical weapon but a useless analytic device.
In the academic study of religion, no one has done a better job of saving standard
Marxist Ideologiekritik from its own shortcomings than Bruce Lincoln. By selec
tively incorporating the work of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Roland Barthes,
and Pierre Bourdieu, Lincoln has charted a fruitful course forward by a twofold sub
stitution. First, rather than viewing ideology as false ideas, Lincoln prefers to speak of
socio-taxonomic naturalization to describe the process whereby socially constructed dif
ferences come to be taken for granted as neither constructed nor arbitrary. As Lincoln
makes the point, a socio-taxonomic system renders its operations invisible, since one
is so consistently immersed in and bombarded by its products that one comes to mis
take them (and the apparatus through which they are produced and disseminated) for
nothing other than nature (Lincoln 2012, 2). Thus, what makes the manufactured
catalogue of distinctions between men and women (e.g. active vs. passive, violent vs.
172 MATTHEW DAY

nurturing, promiscuous vs. chaste) so difficult to perceive as socially constructed is that

this set of differences makes constant reference to another set of anatomical differences
that are virtually non-negotiable (cf. Bourdieu 2001).
In this way, the work of naturalization is abetted by misrecognitionthe second
Lincolnian substitution. Where Marx endowed ideology with the power to mystify or
distort reality, Lincoln chooses instead to stress how a socio-taxonomic orders apparent
naturalness encourages actors to misrecognize or overlook its strategic role in establish
ing and reproducing asymmetries (cf. Bourdieu 1989). Symbolic systems of classifica
tion are expressions of both the will to knowledge and the will to power. Taxonomy is
thus not only a means of organizing information, he explains, but alsoas it comes
to organize the organizersan instrument for the classification and manipulation of
society, something that is facilitated by the fashion in which taxonomic trees and binary
oppositions can conveniently recode social hierarchies (Lincoln 1989,137). Taxonomic
practices and the social register of distinctions they exploit, like politics itself, represent
the continuation of war by different means.
With these two substitutions in hand, Lincoln is able to treat religion as a more or
less distinct ensemble of ideological discourses, practices, and institutions. On the one
hand, religion is ideological inasmuch as it tends to naturalize a socially constructed
and thus arbitrary order of things by anchoring it in the eternal structure of the cosmos
or the transcendent will of the gods. On the other hand, religion is intrinsically ideo
logical insofar as it expects us to misrecognize a merely human discourse as more than
merely human. Considered in this light, the academic study of religions mandate is to
insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and mate
rial dimensions of those discourses, practices, and institutions that characteristically
represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine (Lincoln 2012,1).
Whether one is prepared to self-identify as a Marxist or not, it is difficult to imagine a
better agenda for this particular corner of the academy.

Conclusion

Bourdieu argued that the key to academic success was charting a middling trajectory
that was neither too innovative nor too traditional. On the one hand, genuine inno
vation threatens the material and symbolic capital of those who have conscientiously
climbed their way up the established institutional hierarchy. On the other hand, explicit
conservatism jeopardizes the illusion of scholarly progress which both organizes and
legitimates these institutionalized relationships of authority and dependency. The dis
positions which constitute this tepid ideal of academica mediocritas, Bourdieu insisted,
which implies the refusal of all kinds of excesses, even in questions of intelligence and
originality, are no doubt inherent in the intermediate position, of double negation,
which the academic holds between the artist and the bourgeois (Bourdieu 1989, 224).
 MARXISM 173

In other words, academics want the existential freedom of bohemia and the cozy com
forts of suburbia. The antinomies that exist between creativity and inertia, between
bohemia and suburbia, are crucial for understanding why Marx should never stop being
an essential theorist for the academic study of religion.
For the past quarter-century or so, generations of ambitious scholars have judged that
Marx was too traditional, too old-fashioned, too crude to take seriously. It was only
the Marx left standing after someone like Deleuze or Derrida roughed him up a bit
that deserved our attention. The world had changed. The sort of industrial capitalism
that preoccupied Marx was a thing of the past. We now lived in a postmodern, post
industrial, postcolonial, and perhaps even post-capitalist epoch. It was time to move
on. All the while, as academics were busying themselves with this expanding catalogue
of posts, the dynamics of capital accumulation pressed on in the relentless pursuit of a
solid return on investment. This indifference toward material interests is understand
able. How could one not believe that capitalism has dissolved in a flux of signifiers
detached from their signifieds, Bourdieu observes, when one lives in a little social
and electronic paradise from which all trace of work and exploitation has been effaced?
(Bourdieu 2000, 41). It was only when their own economic contingency became pain
fully obviousincluding, among other things, the rise of adjunct professors, the demise
of tenure, and a financial crisis that destroyed home equity and retirement portfolios
that many academics rediscovered Marx.
Marx continues to be relevant to the study of religion because, on some absolutely
key points, he was right. As Engels complained in The Peasant War, when scholars
begin to talk about religion they all too often become naive ideologists so gullible
that they accept unquestioningly all the illusions that an epoch makes about itself or
that ideologists of an epoch make about an epoch (Engels 2006 [1850], 12). In my
estimation, the Marxist refusal to treat religion as an independent or irreducible cul
tural sphere, combined with its commitment to finding what is materially at stake in
theological discourses, are the only things that might make the study of religion an
academically relevant enterprise. Here again, Bruce Lincoln reliably points the way
forward.

When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be
understood, suspends ones interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to dis
tinguish between truths, truth-claims, and regimes of truth, one has ceased to
function as historian or scholar. In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some
perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advocate), and some less
appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however, should be
confused with scholarship. (Lincoln 2012,2-3)

All I can add to this is: hear, hear! So, until human beings abandon the practice of
trafficking in extra-human authorityor capitalism finally surrenders to its own,
ever-shifting contradictionsthe best scholars of religion will continue to find an ally
in Marx.
174 MATTHEW DAY

Glossary

Capital denotes a particular mode of money rather than money per se. It is money invested in
commodity production (e.g. purchasing labor-power) or financial instruments (e.g. money
lending) in order to realize surplus value. In other words, capital is money used in the pro
cess of making more money.
Capitalism gestures toward the larger cultural, political, and social arrangements that facili
tate capital accumulation. Like near-kin terms such as market society, it implies a com
prehensive vision of individual and collective life that is organized around and imagined
through the associated practices of buying and selling.
Commodity something made in order to be sold. In this way, a commodity can be described as
representing both a temporary metamorphosis of capital (i.e. from the money-form into the
commodity-form) and a material crystallization of the labor required to produce it.
Fetishism a fundamental misperception about the nature of a given artifact. For Marx, it signi
fies a mistake about the nature of value by insisting that things have objective value the same
way they have objective weight. As a case in point, rather than recognizing the social constel
lation of needs and relationships in which commodities are produced and exchanged as the
ultimate source of their value, fetishism generates theories of a commoditys intrinsic value
(e.g. gold).
Ideology a central category in Marx and Marxism, but one that is notoriously difficult to pin
down. At bottom, the concept attempts to highlight how cognitive orders, webs of belief,
socio-taxonomic systems, etc. tend to actively misrepresent particularities as universals in
ways that benefit some and injure others.
Marxism the constellation of theorists and texts for which Marxs writingsmore than any
other figureprovide an intellectual center of gravity. It is far less complicated to identify
constituent figures and texts (e.g. Engels, Gramsci) rather than themes (e.g. revolutionary
proletariat, labor theory of value). To be considered a real or genuine Marxist is, like any
identity, the outcome of countless political and social challenges.
Materialism a fundamental methodological commitment in Marx and Marxism, but one that
comes in a variety of strengths (e.g. weak vs. strong) and types (e.g. inclusive vs. restrictive).
If there is one intuition around which all of these varieties gather, however, it is that human
intellectual activities must be understood as both products of and strategic responses to the
material conditions of existence within a historically particular social order.
Post-Marxism contemporary bundles of theorists and texts which, for countless reasons and
motivations, contend that Marxisms general orientation aroundand continuing engage
ment withMarxs corpus is mistaken.

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Further Reading

Blair, Jennifer, ed. 2009. Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press. [Any contemporary interest in what Marx called the theological niceties of
commodity fetishism must begin with an appreciation for the ways international production
networks have grown more complex and more distributed since the nineteenth century. A cru
cial point of entry for that work.]
Cohen, Gerald. 1978. Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defense. New York: Oxford University
Press. [A central text for the British school of analytical Marxism, which virtuously tried to
scrape away some of the philosophical excesses that are par for the course when discussing
Marx. Cohens bid to fashion an empirically useful notion of fetishism remains a model of preci
sion and clarity.]
McLellan, David. 1987. Marxism and Religion. New York: Harper & Row. [Despite its vintage
and relatively narrow purview, this remains the standard survey of Marx and Marxism on reli
gion. Early chapters on Marx and Engels are complemented by subsequent discussions of Karl
Kautsky, Antonio Gramsci, and the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School]
Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor and Domination. New York: Cambridge University Press.
[A robust attempt to reinterpret Marx after the collapse of Soviet-style communism. Its cen
terpiece is an exhaustive presentation of the critical social theory embedded in Grundrisse
and Capital, something Postone believes traditional Marxists have neglected or distorted.
A demanding book that rewards patience and stamina.]
Rediker, Marcus and Peter Linebaugh. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra. Boston: Beacon Press.
[A stirring look at the transatlantic and maritime cultures of capitalism from below. The focus
on capitalisms voracious demand for laborand its punishing brutalityis deftly organized
around the biblical mytheme of hewers of wood and drawers of water (Joshua 9:23),]
Thompson, E. P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage. [Essential
reading in every sense. Thompsons portrait of Methodism as a reactionary institution
advancing the bourgeoisies interests in a disciplined workforce while offering the proletariat a
space to express libidinal energies and ungovernable emotions in non-revolutionary waysstill
has the power to upset some and inspire others.]