Marx, Karl (1818–1883)

Marx's theory of power has its origins in his initial understanding of the problems of alienation and reification. In his early writings, and most notably in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), On the Jewish Question (1843), and the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx begins to think about the political and socioeconomic implications of Ludwig Feuerbach's ideas on Hegel, alienation, and religion. Marx suggests that it is to Feuerbach's great merit to have demonstrated that God can be understood anthropologically as a creation of humanity. To use language more reminiscent of Hegel and Marx, in Marx's estimation it is to Feuerbach's credit that he shows why God is the alienated essence of humanity that has been projected onto an alien being. Marx adds that what is particularly interesting in the process of projecting human qualities upon nonhuman entities is that what begins as a human affair in the world of people comes back to humans in a form they no longer recognize as being the product of their own actions and imaginations. To the extent that God is attributed with the ability to love, create, share, forgive, make peace, know and understand all aspects of life, that is, is attributed with humanity's best qualities, humanity in its turn becomes incapable of realizing those qualities in the actual lives of its concrete, individual members. Humanity thus becomes hateful, stupid, craven, passive, violent, and, of particular interest from Marx's point of view, property-mad and acquisitive. In the writings of early modern philosophers and social scientists avant la lettre, these negative attributes then become elevated to ahistorical traits of humanity as it supposedly always has been and always will be. Marx notes that once these decidedly antagonistic premises are accepted as being anthropologically and scientifically valid, it is relatively easy for bourgeois economists and legal theorists to construct their ideological justifications of capitalism and parliamentary democracy as necessary and inevitable, that is, as somehow natural.

It is not simply that in giving our best qualities to God we forfeit the chance to realize them ourselves in practice. In the pageantry, rites, rituals, secret codes, and ordered hierarchies of organized religion we lose sight of the fact that behind the phenomenological appearance of otherworldliness in these rites there is a human essence that has become obscured beyond recognition. That essence, distorted and transformed in religious ceremony, comes back to the very people who created it in an otherworldly form. When this happens, Marx suggests, people become the playthings of forces that they do not understand, and that they subsequently misrepresent in thought and culture as totem and fetish. Form, essence, and force are emphasized here in order to show that Marx is interested in the relation between our modes of knowledge, suggested by the terms form and [Page 403]essence, and our social relations. Like Hegel, Marx thinks that in the course of history knowledge is progressing to such an extent that at some point absolute knowledge and freedom becomes a real, objective possibility. Marx and Hegel, of course, have different explanations for this optimism. For the moment, the point is simply that power comes into play when faulty modes of knowledge become effective means of perpetuating relations of domination such as those obtaining between the upper echelons of the clergy and ordinary individuals. To the extent that the relationship is legitimized as something ordained by God, it attains a quality of unassailability, inevitability, and indeed of regal glory. On this account, the fear and awe inspired by the church hierarchy and its cults is held to be something beautiful and heroic, when in fact, Marx says, it enslaves people to illusions and forlorn hopes of salvation in a world that does not exist. This is going to prompt the young Marx to argue that to be radical is to tackle things at the root: one must eliminate the earthly causes that give rise to religious thinking rather than criticizing religion according to its own flawed logic and mystified claims. This anticipates his mature view that the analysis of power in capitalist society should never uncritically accept the premises of capitalist society itself, that is, that humanity is naturally acquisitive and aggressive, that competition is by definition efficient, that resources are inevitably scarce, that value is realized in exchange, and so on.

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