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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The critique of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.… The foundation of this critique is the following: man makes religion, religion does not make man.
–Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (opening lines)The critique of competitive capitalism, in Marx, is motivated by a root concern with the topic of alienation, or, rather more abstractly, with the relation between human activity and human accomplishment. Human activity creates a range of “objects” including not only trucks and trains but social systems, values, technologies. Though these “objects” are originally fabricated for the gratification of man, within the historical process, these “objects” become independent of their original function. That is, more concretely, the state or the exchange system evolves from the role of service institution for the needs of man to autonomous entities whose needs must be served by man. Within the historical context, the state comes to presuppose war or the possibility of war as a basic justification of its existence. Hence, conscription. Dialectically, the need of the state has come to supersede the needs of man. The products of human activity come to enslave human activity.
For Marx, this process of inversion, alienation, is paradigmatically represented by religion. For religion is a product of man. Yet, it dominates man not only as a social institution; it inverts the relation of man and god cosmologically. Man made god; yet religion posits that god makes man.
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