In the preface to his doctoral thesis The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, the young Marx in 1841 proclaims Prometheus’ profession of faith, quoting Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (475 B.C.): «In simple words, I hate the pack of gods; they are obliged to me, and from them I suffer unequal treatment». This is «its own confession, its own aphorism against all Heavenly and Earthly Gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity». He then quotes what Prometheus replies to Hermes, the servant of the gods: «Be sure of this, I would not change my state / Of evil fortune for your servitude. / Better to be the servant of this rock / Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus». And Marx: «Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar».

In 1844, Marx writes in The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: «[T]he criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism (…) The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion (…) Religion is the sigh of exploited man, his opium to chemically banish suffering, his artificial paradise! Once man’s self-estrangement in its holy form has been denounced, man will be able to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms, and thus the criticism of Heaven will be transformed into criticism of Earth!»

In the history of modern thought, the critique of religion began with mechanistic materialist theory, which first appeared in 17th century Britain with Bacon, Hobbes, John Locke, then in 18th century France with Condillac (a disciple of Locke), Helvétius, D’Holbach, Diderot. In The Holy Family, written in 1844, Marx declares: «The French imparted to English materialism wit, flesh and blood, and eloquence. They gave it the temperament and grace that it lacked. They civilised it».

In the Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, Marx lays the foundations of scientific materialism, of the ‘new materialism’ to come, defining the ‘old materialism’ as follows: «The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity (…) The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated». Thus: «Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it». Marxism is not a ‘philosophy’, but an interpretation of the world ‘in the service of history’, which provides the key to changing it.

For Marx and Engels it is a matter, in Germany in this first part of the 19th century, of fighting the idealist vestiges.

What presses upon the philosophy of the time and increasingly fills the idealist systems with a materialist content was the impetuous progress of the natural sciences and industry. The idealist dialectic of the philosopher Hegel at the turn of the century, a milestone in the history of modern thought, gave rise to various currents, including that of Bruno Bauer, who wrote a widely copied history of early Christianity, later that of Ludwig Feuerbach, who approached Marxism, and finally Marxist materialism, which develops the materialist conception of history. Marx and Engels highlight the shortcomings of this critique, still too marked by Hegelian idealism, without denying the immense merits of Bauer and Feuerbach in numerous writings. Suffice it to recall that Marx’s famous expression: «Religion is the opium of the people» is taken from Bauer!

Engels declares in 1886 in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy that the bulk of the struggle against religion in Germany was carried forward by the rising radical bourgeoisie. The journal ‘The Rhenish Gazette’ was an expression of a left wing of the Young Hegelian school that emerged out of the 1830-40 split. The first impetus was provided by Strauss’s 1835 book The Life of Jesus where Christ is presented not as a God but as a remarkable historical figure. Feuerbach constitutes the intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and the materialist conception, which considers not the idea but nature the only reality: in his work The Essence of Christianity he fully embraces materialism. Engels writes: «Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence».

Let us reread a few passages from the Introduction to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written by Marx in 1844 where the premise of all critique is affirmed: man makes religion, religion does not make man!

«Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality. The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

«Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

«Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

«It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics».

Marx responds in a series of articles that appeared in July 1842 in the ‘Rhenish Gazette’ to a Catholic reactionary, an agent of the Prussian government, who took issue with the anti-religious positions of Marx’s newspaper. For the idealist, the apogee of nations that have attained a higher historical importance coincides with the greatest flowering of their religious sense, and their decadence with the decline of their religious culture. Let us listen to Marx: «To arrive at the truth, the author’s assertion must be directly reversed; he has stood history on its head. Among the peoples of the ancient world, Greece and Rome are certainly countries of the highest “historical culture”. Greece flourished at its best internally in the time of Pericles, externally in the time of Alexander. In the age of Pericles the Sophists, and Socrates, who could be called the embodiment of philosophy, art, and rhetoric supplanted religion. The age of Alexander was the age of Aristotle, who rejected the eternity of the “individual” spirit and the God of positive religions. And as for Rome! Read Cicero! The Epicurean, Stoic, or Sceptic philosophies were the religions of cultured Romans when Rome had reached the zenith of its development.

«That with the downfall of the ancient states their religions also disappeared requires no further explanation, for the “true religion” of the ancients was the cult of “their nationality”, of their “state”. It was not the downfall of the old religions that caused the downfall of the ancient states, but the downfall of the ancient states that caused the downfall of the old religions (…) At the very time when the downfall of the ancient world was approaching, there arose the Alexandrine school, which strove to prove by force the “eternal truth” of Greek mythology and its complete agreement “with the results of scientific research”».

The Alexandrine school represented philosophy in the agonising moment of slave society. In the following decades of our era, in Alexandria, which had become the centre of intellectual life at the time, philosophers strove to combine Greek idealist philosophy with Eastern mysticism. One of its main representatives was Philo (20 B.C.E.–54 C.E.), the true father of Christianity according to Engels, and later Plotinus.

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848,, Chapter II, Marx and Engels remind us that ideas are transformed along with production, and that these are nothing other than the ideas of the ruling class. «What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge».

To struggle against religion, one must therefore be able to explain materialistically the source of faith and religion in the masses. Firstly, «religion (…) owes its being not to Heaven but to the Earth», as Marx wrote to Ruge in 1842. Religion is thus not the fruit of an abstract human spirit and we must go beyond the critique of religion in itself, in order to apply ourselves to a critique of the conditions of life from which the need for religion arises.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels in 1845 clearly explain where ideas come from and what the means is to change them: «The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. (…) Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life (…) This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself (…) [One] does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions”, “spectres”, “fancies”, etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug». Not Criticism but Revolution is the driving force of history, religion, philosophy, and every other theory.

With religion, the human species gave a fantastical answer to its inability to master or defend itself against the external forces on which its survival depends. In Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies, which knew neither classes nor the exploitation of man by man, natural phenomena; rain, sun, thunder, storm, and the elements necessary for their subsistence; plants, animals, became religious elements in the form of the Totem, the generator of the clan, and with which the clan imagines bonds of kinship, of dependence, but not of domination.

With the end of the Neolithic period and the appearance of class societies, of slavery, the mysterious external, ‘celestial’ forces on which the survival of the oppressed class depended, came to be represented in fantastical characters bearing the attributes and appearance of the earthly ruling class. Greek mythology is a perfect illustration of this!

At a more advanced stage, with monotheism, culminating in Christianity, the set of attributes of the Gods is represented by a single God, a reflection of abstract Man.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, from 1892, Engels will write that, when Europe was emerging from the Middle Ages, the emerging bourgeoisie of the cities constituted the revolutionary element within them. It had conquered, within the feudal organisation, a position that had become too narrow for its force of expansion. Feudalism therefore had to be destroyed. But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. The long struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism was marked by three decisive battles: the Protestant Reformation in Germany, with Luther’s war cry and two great uprisings in 1523 and 1525; the Calvinist movement in England in 1648; and the great French Revolution of 1789-93.

The relentless development of the productive forces creates among men economic relations that evolve by qualitative leaps with changes in the modes of production: primitive communism – slavery – feudalism or the Asiatic mode of production – capitalism.

Men are dominated by economic relations as an extraneous force which they do not understand and which alters their relationships, their way of existing and thinking. Only a ‘social act’, the revolution of the proletariat, can enable them to take the relations of production into their own hands and master the external forces.

Only then will religion, the mirror of these forces, be able to disappear. As early as 1874 Engels mocked the Blanquists who demanded in the Paris Commune of 1871 to turn believers into atheists by decree ‘by order of the mufti’! In 1878 he replied in his Anti-Dühring to the petty-bourgeois socialist Eugène Dühring, ‘more Bismarckian than Bismarck’, who thought religions and priests could be gotten rid of by law: «Religion dies the natural death that is prescribed for it», and there is no need for us to help it ‘rise to martyrdom’, thus prolonging its life.

«All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces. In the beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were first so reflected, and which in the course of further evolution underwent the most manifold and varied personifications among the various peoples. This early process has been traced back by comparative mythology, at least in the case of the Indo-European peoples, to its origin in the Indian Vedas, and in its further evolution it has been demonstrated in detail among the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans and, so far as material is available, also among the Celts, Lithuanians and Slavs.

«But it is not long before, side by side with the forces of nature, social forces begin to be active – forces which confront man as equally alien and at first equally inexplicable, dominating him with the same apparent natural necessity as the forces of nature themselves. The fantastic figures, which at first only reflected the mysterious forces of nature, at this point acquire social attributes, become representatives of the forces of history.

«At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god, who is but a reflection of the abstract man. Such was the origin of monotheism, which was historically the last product of the vulgarised philosophy of the later Greeks and found its incarnation in the exclusively national god of the Jews, Jehovah. In this convenient, handy and universally adaptable form, religion can continue to exist as the immediate, that is, the sentimental form of men’s relation to the alien, natural and social, forces which dominate them, so long as men remain under the control of these forces.

«However, we have seen repeatedly that in existing bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois political economy has given a certain insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, this makes no essential difference. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in general, nor protect the individual capitalists from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual workers against unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production) disposes.

«Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the domination of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force, when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes – only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect».

Engels concludes: «Only the real knowledge of the forces of nature drives the gods or the God from one position after another (…) This process is now so advanced that it can theoretically be regarded as finished».

Theoretically… but the need for religion can only disappear with the transformation of the relations of production: the ruling classes use religion for the purpose of defending their earthly interests.

Lenin already clearly explains in 1905 that «[u]nity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth» is far more important than «unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven» (Socialism and Religion, December 1905). Marxist communists, that is to say, irreligious from birth and necessarily so, do not have in their programme the interclass and confusing watchword, typical of 18th century bourgeois rationalism and of today’s petty bourgeois, of the ‘suppression’ of religions, but that of the material suppression of the exploitation of man by man, the abolition of wage labour and private property!

In Capital, Marx explains that men will be free of religion in a society in which they freely associate when they dominate their own social dynamics: «And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, & c., is the most fitting form of religion.

«In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection (…)

«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 reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development».

In The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx had stated: «The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion.

«The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: “Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!”

«Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation (…) [Luther] shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith (…) On the eve of the Reformation, official Germany was the most unconditional slave of Rome. On the eve of its revolution, it is the unconditional slave of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country junkers and philistines. Meanwhile, a major difficulty seems to stand in the way of a radical German revolution. For revolutions require a passive element, a material basis. Theory is fulfilled in a people only insofar as it is the fulfilment of the needs of that people (…) It is not enough for thought to strive for realisation, reality must itself strive towards thought».

Speaking of the German situation, in which the proletariat is not yet sufficiently established due to weak industrial development, Marx states that the role of emancipator can only be assumed by a class of civil society driven by its immediate situation, by material necessity, by its own radical chains: «a class of civil society (…) which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it (…) which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat».

We, still, with Marx, await the uprising of this class of barbarians!