No Bosses, No Gods: Marx, Engels, and the Twenty-first Century Study of Religion 9783111065540, 9783111065090

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Matthew Day No Bosses, No Gods

Religion and Reason

Founded by Jacques Waardenburg (†) Edited by Gustavo Benavides, Michael Stausberg, and Ann Taves

Volume 68

Matthew Day

No Bosses, No Gods Marx, Engels, and the Twenty-first Century Study of Religion

ISBN 978-3-11-106509-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-106554-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-106589-2 ISSN 0080-0848 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951984 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements In early September 2009, my career was balled up and casually tossed in the trash. John Kelsay, Amanda Porterfield, and Bruce Lincoln—each in their own way— cared enough to reach down and retrieve it. If they had not, I would no longer earn a living as an academic. It would mean a great deal to me to know I’ve done them proud. So, too, the book would not be an actual thing without my good friend and colleague Drew Durdin. There were several years when I thought the project was beyond pointless. After all, as another colleague once asked with a mix of incredulity and crushing disappointment: “Does anyone still read Marx?” Drew was about the only person beyond my family circle who suggested I might have something worth saying. The afternoons we’ve spent talking shop over beers—in the midst of the COVID pandemic, no less—make an appearance throughout. Talk of finishing raises the specter of beginning. Shortly after I’d submitted my contribution to the Oxford Handbook to the Study of Religion, Steven Engler suggested I might “write a little book on Marx for the study of religion.” That was probably sometime during the Spring of 2012. A decade later, I now recognize how this off-the-cuff observation was a sailor’s monkey-rope. Without his encouragement, I would not have started this; nor would I have published it. Along these same lines, I must thank Gustavo Benavides, Michael Stausberg, and Ann Taves. I am humbled by the erudition, care, and rigor they generously offered when it came to transforming a half-baked manuscript—which too often resembled a tinfoil hat manifesto—into a book that might, from a certain angle, represent a scholarly contribution to the field. The remaining flaws should be tacked to my hide alone. I have leaned on my family in more ways than I can begin to enumerate. My deep, abiding gratitude and love goes out to Aaron Day-Williams, Audrey Day-Williams, and Randy Friedman. The fact that I’m genetically related to only one of them defines what family means to me. Finally, this book is a by-product of the life I’ve made with Nicole Kelley—best friend, wife, mother to our boys, and First Mate of Flora Mae. Since 18 October 1996, we’ve been to Hell and back more than twice. I’d do it all again. One of our sons will never be able to read this. The other may, eventually, give it a shot. I wrote it for them both. MCD August 2022 Pembroke, Maine https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-001

Common Abbreviations MECW MEGA2 MEW

Marx-Engels Collected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974 – 2004. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1975 –. Marx/Engels Werke. Berlin: Dietz, 1956 – 1990.

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Note on Translations Wolfgang Haug argues a new translation of Das Kapital is more necessary than ever “in the face of the emergence of English as the global lingua franca and in the interest of the international theoretical culture affiliated with Marx” (Haug 2017, 60). This lesson could be expanded to include nearly everything Marx left behind, in part because translating his writings inevitably means negotiating the history of Marxism. To see what I mean, here is (1) the German-language original, (2) the received English-language translation, and (3) my translations of a seemingly trivial sentence from The Class Struggles in France: 1. Ihre Republik hatte nur ein Verdienst, das Treibhaus der Revolution zu sein (MEW 7: 94; emphasis added); 2. Their republic had only one merit, that of being the forcing-house of the revolution (MECW 10: 131; emphasis added). 3a. Their republic had only one merit: to be the greenhouse of the revolution (my translation; emphasis added). 3b. Their republic had only one merit: to be the revolution’s greenhouse (my translation; emphasis added). The superficial changes stick out. To be is more efficient and less stuffy than that of being—even though it unfortunately requires the artificial introduction of a semi-colon for the sentence to be grammatically correct. Greenhouse is more familiar than forcing-house and the most common translation of Treibhaus (e. g., “greenhouse gas” is typically rendered Treibhausgas). More substantively, greenhouse is closer in spirit to the gestational metaphors Marx typically used to describe the past and present as prelude. In February 1866, for instance, he wrote Engels with an update on Das Kapital’s progress. “The manuscript, although finished, is enormous in its present form and unpublishable for anyone but me—not even for you,” he judges: “I started the transcription and stylization promptly on the first of January; everything went very quickly because it is fun to lick the child smooth after lots of labor pains [Geburtswehn]” (MECW 42: 227– 228/MEW 31: 178 – 179; my translation). The trope appears throughout Capital itself, perhaps most famously as a revolutionary conviction: “Violence [Gewalt] is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” (MECW 25: 739/MEW 23: 779; my translation). Nearly a decade later, in his private criticisms of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ 1875 “Gotha” platform, he cautioned: “shortcomings are inevitable in the first phase of communist society, just as it emerges from capitalist society after a long and difficult labor [Geburtswehen]” (MECW 24: 85/MEW 19: 21; my translation). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-003

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More still, the coercive resonance of “forcing-house” brings to mind the lamentable Bolshevik fondness for converting political struggles into techno-scientific challenges. Thus, in Spring 1918, Lenin proposed that the state-supervised transition from capitalism to socialism, just like “large-scale machine industry—which is precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism—calls for absolute and strict unity of will, which directs the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people” (Lenin 1960 f 27: 519). If anything deserves to be called a forcing-house, it is the “revolution from above” initiated by Lenin and ruthlessly meted out by Stalin. Select a random page from Marx’s oeuvre and one will likely bump into these sorts of complications and considerations. Because of this I concluded early on that, if I was going to address Marx and the study of religion, I really had no choice but to go back to the original texts and produce my own translations. Traduttori, traditori and all that. So, I dusted off my once pretty-good German—foolishly set aside to pursue what seemed like promising theoretical leads—and mustered the courage to break ground. Every ham-fisted, questionable, foolish, or justplain-dumb translation is my fault. When my rendering of the original text made no significant difference in terms of readability or meaning, I have used the widely available English translations. When I cite a text originally written in English—or where Marx himself is using an Anglophone expression—I merely reproduce what was published (e. g., “labouring poor”). When I have used my own translations in the name of improved readability, or what I take to be greater fidelity to the original, I indicate as much (i. e., my translation). When I treat a specific term or phrase in ways that deviate from the received translation in potentially notable ways, the “dictionary form” of the key German or French original is provided in brackets (e. g., initial [ursprünglich] accumulation). For anyone interested in triangulating my translations with the available English translations and non-English originals, I cite both sources throughout (e. g., MECW/MEW).

Note on Religion and “Religion” Linguists and analytic philosophers distinguish between use and mention. To a first approximation, the use-mention distinction highlights the difference between deploying a category and drawing attention to a category as a category. Compare these two sentences: Maine contains one syllable and five letters. “Maine” contains one syllable and five letters.

The first is false in the sense that—in addition to the lupines and conifers and porcupines—the state of Maine either includes no syllables and letters or an astronomically vast number of them. This is use; or, I suppose, misuse. The second is true in the sense that the quotation marks draw attention to the word Maine, which does indeed contain exactly one syllable and five letters—but not a single lupine or conifer or porcupine. A modified version of this distinction is used throughout in the interests of conceptual clarity. Consider the differences between these two sentences: There is no religion. There is no “religion.”

The first sentence may be true or false in the sense that the category does or does not identify some observable pattern of human behavior. The second sentence is patently false because the term or category exists—even if its actual denotative meanings are contested and fuzzy. So, in what follows: Religion (without scare quotes) gestures toward the messy first-order, colloquial uses of the term or category as one might find in the New York Times or Washington Post; “Religion” (with scare quotes) gestures toward second-order, meta-level debates regarding the legitimacy of the term or category as a term or category in an academically rigorous analytic vocabulary.

Think of it this way. An earnest atheist might be forgiven for dreaming of a world without religion. Only a peculiar kind of twenty-first century academic bothers imagining a world without “religion.”

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Contents Acknowledgements

V

Common Abbreviations Note on Translations

VII IX

Note on Religion and “Religion” Overture Left Out in the Cold War

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Part One Putting Marx in His Place Chapter One Carbuncles and All: The Difficult Life of a Difficult Man 25 The Miseducation of a Prussian Gentleman: 1835 – 1842 Slings and Arrows: 1843 – 1845 27 Panic and Poverty: 1845 – 1847 30 32 Sleeping on a Volcano: 1847 – 1849 In the Midst of Debt: 1849 – 1852 36 Toil and Trouble: 1853 – 1859 39 44 Signs of Life: 1860 – 1867 The Red Doctor: 1868 – 1871 47 49 Pax Britannica: 1872 – 1883

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Postscript Unreading Marx in the Twenty-First Century 52 The Political Economy of Wages: The Bourgeois View from above The Political Economy of Wages: The Socialist View from below Conclusion 59

52 55

Chapter Two Age of the Living Dead: Marx and the Political Economy of an Upside-Down 61 World The Allure of an Archival Mirage 61 Gods, Dreams, and Other Cognitive Puzzles 64

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No Feet, No Eyes, No Minds 68 71 Intuition Pumps and Other Party Tricks Political Economy or Capitalist Theology? 73 The Political Economy of an Upside-down World On Second Thought 81 85 Conclusion

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Postscript Marx and the End of Marxist “Ideology” 88 Marx, Politics, and “Ideology” 91 92 Marx, Economics, and “Ideology” On the Political Economy of Windbags 95 Conclusion 98 Chapter Three False Friends and True Comrades: Engels on the Limits of Christian 100 Socialism The View from Above: Religion, Revolution, and the Past 103 The View from Below: Religion, Revolution, and the Future 107 Local Gods and International Struggles 114 121 Proletarian Politics and the Limits of Christian Charity Conclusion 122 Postscript Marx and Engels? Marx or Engels? Marx vs. Engels? A Star Is Born 127 The Fine Art of Muddling Through 130

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Chapter Four Vanguard of the Revolution: Plekhanov, Russian Marxism, and the Peasant Question 133 Anarchism, Marxism, and Revolutionary Ambition 136 Revolutionary Hope and Marxist Discipline 142 Marx, Marxism, and a Sack of Potatoes 145 Are the Peasants Revolting? 149 155 Russian Gods and the Modes of Production Conclusion 158

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Postscript 161 How Heavy is a Nightmare? Power without Control: 1917 – 1922 162 Distant Early Warning: 1922 – 1928 166 No Place to Hide: 1929 – 1941 167 Interlude Capital Red in Tooth and Claw

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Part Two Taking Marx to Work Chapter Five Which Side Are You On? Religion as Contentious Cosmopolitics 177 Draft Records, Buddhist Monks, and Other Fiery Things 179 The Shirts and Skins of Geopolitics 183 188 Mundane Stakes and Cosmic Frames Conclusion 193 Postscript Interwar Fascists, Post-War Boomers, and the Study of Religion Anti-Communism and the Ding an sich 198 Conclusion 200

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Chapter Six Real Enough to Count: Critical Criticism and the Genealogy of 203 “Religion” From Something to Nothing: The Early-modern Politics of Notpolitics 204 Puzzles of Production: Wage Labor, Slavery, and the Economy Is There a Class in This Text? 219 Capitalist Logic and the Razor-sharp Edge of Class 224 Conclusion 226 Postscript Class, Contention, and Capital in Eighteenth-Century England All Things Must Past 231 Competitive Constraint and Existential Demand 234 Conclusion 238

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Coda A World of Trouble Bibliography Index

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255

241

Overture Left Out in the Cold War Marx occupied a peculiar space in the academic study of religion right from the start. There has long been a modest consensus that everyone, in principle, should know something about him. After all, what C. Wright Mills (1959) called the “sociological imagination”—the recognition that individuals are simultaneously constituted through and constrained by collective practices and impersonal social structures—is itself almost unimaginable without some reference to the “Holy Trinity” of Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. Thanks to the work of figures like Mary Douglas and Clifford Geertz, it is relatively easy to see how Durkheim and Weber have shaped what could be generously called the field’s “classics” (Alexander 1987). That is, scholars of religion have used Purity and Danger as well as Interpretation of Cultures to establish the basic contours of the modern academic enterprise. It is far more difficult to take a measure of Marx’s impact. A sense for Marx’s traditional non-presence in the field can be gathered from Jacques Waardenburg’s much read and rightly esteemed Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion—where he is mentioned, in passing, once. A book like The Devil and Commodity Fetishism belongs next to those from Douglas and Geertz in my estimation. Yet, Michael Taussig’s (1980) study of the proletarianization of rural laborers in South America remains inexcusably under-read. Ask around and the typical “method and theory” seminar which fails to include Durkheim-Douglas or Weber-Geertz is exceedingly rare; one that snubs Marx-Taussig appears to be par for the course. Paradoxically, Marx is both important and irrelevant for the academic study of religion. There are exceptions, of course. Bruce Lincoln’s enduring scholarship on religious cosmologies and the reproduction of socio-political asymmetries is among the very best work the field has ever produced—and emerges from a perspective deeply informed by his reading of Marx (e. g., Lincoln 1989). Burton Mack’s still-fertile work on mythmaking and social formations deserves to be mentioned in this context as well (e. g., Mack 2014). At the same time, though, Lincoln and Mack are the exceptions validating the rule. Sure, Marx has been one of the seven, eight, nine, or ten figures featured in Daniel Pals’s widely used Theories of Religion textbook—but when compared to the rest of the humanities and social sciences, it is noteworthy that the field has never had a noteworthy “Marxist” contingent.¹ “In

 A friendly argument worth having over drinks: Who replaced Marx in the field’s provincial version of the Holy Trinity? My money is on Durkheim-Weber-Freud—at least until the arrangement https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-005

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the contemporary study of religion,” Alberto Toscano observes: “Marx is treated as a marginal reference at best, a ‘dead dog’ at worst” (Toscano 2010, 3). I suppose part of the problem is that Marx never bothered to clarify what he was talking about when talking about religion (Saxton 2006). He never even stalled for time by suggesting à la Weber that definitions can only be ventured after one has thoroughly examined the phenomena—as if one could study something without already knowing how to identify it in a line-up.² He sometimes used the adjectival form as a synonym for meretricious. “The German bourgeois is religious even when he is an industrialist,” he suggested in 1845: “He shies away from talking about poor exchange values, over which he lingers, and speaks of productive forces; he shies away from speaking of competition and talks instead about a national confederation of national productive forces; he shies away from addressing his private interest and so speaks about the national interest” (MECW 4: 266/ Marx 1945; my translation; emphasis added). Other times he deployed the term as a stand-in for conceptual myopia, as when he criticized David Ricardo for treating capitalist production as production per se: “much like a guy [Kerl] who believes in a particular religion and sees it as religion per se, while all the rest are only false religions” (MECW 32: 158/MEW 26.2: 529; my translation). More often than not, he usually meant something rather pedestrian: Human beings trafficking with morethan-human intentional agents or “metapersons.”³ Many scholars now reject this way of doing business because it lacks the requisite amount of theoretical “nuance” (Healey 2017). Yet, if this clumsiness explains why Marx is on the periphery, it fails to explain why Weber has been at the field’s

was made passé by Derrida & Co. As evidence for Freud’s impact on the field’s “classics,” consider the once ubiquitous Violence and the Sacred by René Girard (1979).  Russell McCutcheon’s response to the clichéd “What about Buddhism?” question says everything that needs to be said on this front: “How they already knew Buddhism to be a religion and thus a counter example—i. e., that it necessarily ought to constitute a member of the class, a constitution denied by what they perceive to be an excessively narrow definition – is, of course, left unexplored” (McCutcheon 2018, 11; McCutcheon 2018, 67). With that said, however, these sorts of taxonomic puzzles crop up for just about every imaginable token-type relationship. Are hot dogs sandwiches? Is ice dancing a sport? Neither religion nor “religion” is uniquely fuzzy. Lean too hard on the category’s complicated boundaries and the ghost of a sui generis something sneaks in through the backdoor.  David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins proposed that most forms of mundane, political power which become hegemonic are “deemed so by ancestors, gods, or other external metapersons who are the sources of human vitality and morality” (Graeber and Sahlins 2017, 3). Metaperson(s) as a noun is too clunky for my taste, but the adjective metapersonal (e. g., metapersonal authority, metapersonal powers) helpfully isolates what it is that ancestors, gods, and spirits are thought to offer their merely human complements.

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center. Two questions present themselves at this point: Why has Marx been a dead dog in the academic study of religion? And should something be done about it? *** The simplest explanation for Marx’s irrelevant significance is that scholars of religion never found a reliable anchor point in his work, mostly because he wasn’t all that interested in the subject. Legends of his “militant atheism” simply get him wrong (Blankholm 2020, Devellennes 2016, Lobkowicz 1964, Megill and Park 2017). Yes, as a young man, Marx observed that “criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (MECW 3: 175/MEGA2 I.2: 170). By this he meant it is somewhat liberating to discover that there are no ontologically necessary, cosmically enforced rules for organizing individual lives or collective orders. Human beings mostly live in worlds of our own making—a point which is, perhaps, easier for us to grasp from our perilous Anthropocene perch than before. At the same time, Marx did not see how there was much more that needed to be—or even could be—said beyond this. The memorable line about religion as “the opium of the people” was written when he was only twenty-five years old. He never once returned to the trope. Honestly, how essential could that aperçu be for understanding Marx? More generally, he concluded quite early on that what previous generations treated as religious concerns regarding order, purpose, and meaning were better understood as aspects of political and social contests. “One can no longer talk about religious interests as such,” he writes in The Holy Family: “Only the theologian can still believe in religion as religion” (MECW 4: 108/MEW 2: 115; my translation). Because of this, both he and Engels concluded that the critique of religion begun in the eighteenth century was, by the mid-nineteenth, “flogged to the point of exhaustion” (MECW 5: 235/MEGA2 I.5: 214– 215). For Marx, religion was a bit like a lover’s regrettable taste in music—the sort of thing one tries to politely ignore, all the while hoping it gets better with time or just goes away. He thus advised that until ancestors, gods, and spirits are only a cultural memory, everyone should be free enough to ignore opaque metaphysical demands about how the world must be arranged—while those who cannot walk away from these sorts of metapersonal agents should be able to satisfy their idiosyncratic religious needs “without the police sticking their noses in” (MECW 24: 98/MEGA2 I.25: 24). Given this indifference to the spooky beings and fantastic powers which harass collective life, Marx left behind very little source material for scholars narrowly focused on religion per se. This not only helps to explain why so many in the field have ignored him; it also sheds some light on why those who do wish to engage him end up talking about the need to reconstruct “Marx’s theory of religion” (e. g., Siebert 1979). But here’s the issue: there is no theory of religion written in his own hand for anyone to retrieve, rehabilitate, resurrect, or re-construct (Bertrand

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1979). The closest Marx ever came to articulating something like a theoretical first principle is stuffed away in a raucous footnote from Capital. “Darwin has directed our attention to the history of natural technology, i. e., to the formation of plant and animal organs as tools for producing the lives of plants and animals,” he begins: Doesn’t the history of the formation of the productive organs of social agents [Gesellschaftsmenschen], the material basis for each particular organization of society [Gesellschaftsorganisation], deserve equal attention? Technology reveals the active attitude or demeanor [Verhalten] of human beings toward nature, the direct process by which they produce their life and thus also the conditions of social life and the mental representations and concepts that spring from them. Every history of religion which abstracts from this material basis is uncritical. Indeed, it is much easier to locate the earthly core of nebulous religious formations [Nebelbildungen] by analysis than it is, conversely, to develop these glorified [verhimmeln] forms out of the actual conditions of life. The latter is the only materialistic, and therefore scientific, method (MECW 35: 376/MEGA2 II.6: 364; my translation).

Translated into a more contemporary idiom, Marx’s point is that top-down, ethnographic thick descriptions are useful inasmuch as they make human appeals to metapersonal agents and forces a bit less puzzling. They allow us to see more clearly, for example, why those who expect to be fêted and obeyed are especially fond of invoking the ultimate, non-negotiable authority of the Cosmos. Nevertheless, if a genuine explanation is the goal—if we want to know why only one of the three surviving chimpanzee species engages in this sort of behavior—our only hope is a “bottom-up” strategy which isolates the various evolutionary, neurocognitive, and social factors which establish the warp and woof of these other-worldly intuitions. Whether the biological and brain sciences will ever be up to that enormous task is, of course, a different question.⁴ ***

 I once thought they were up it, or at least nearly there. These days, I am mostly pessimistic about the short-term prospects. Even if I’m wrong, though, it raises something critically important for what might be construed as the “cognitive turn” in the academic study of religion. Unless one is a practicing neurocognitive scientist, it is next to impossible to do serious, basic research or keep up with the germane literature. Claude Lévi-Strauss observed in the mid-twentieth century that the diminishing prospects for a scientific study of religion owe something to “the fact that the anthropological study of religion was started by men like Tylor, Frazer, and Durkheim who were psychologically oriented, although not in a position to keep up with the progress of psychological research and theory. Therefore, their interpretations soon became vitiated by the outmoded psychological approach which they used as their backing” (Lévi-Strauss 1963b, 206). The epistemic consequences which follow from the basic fact that scholars in les sciences humane et sociales are not professionally trained or practicing neurocognitive scientists—leaving them vulnerable to aca-

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And yet, despite all of this, I have a sneaking suspicion that Marx’s peculiar irrelevance for the academic study of religion has something to do with the fact that he was barbed, irreverent, and delightfully coarse when writing about the gods—a practice which violates the principles of humanistic appreciation and cultural deference that virtually define the field.⁵ “Who can believe in Testaments, Old or New,” Marx once playfully asked, “ever since the Mormon religion was invented?” (MECW 11: 421/MEW 8: 432; my translation). This lack of pious deference was informed by something more than adolescent petulance, however. In Marx’s estimation, the gods are typically marshalled to consecrate individual rulers and collective orders which are sanctimonious, hypocritical, predatory, and dumb. Borrowing a slashing line from Thomas Carlyle, he once chuckled how the gods have a long track record of choosing the stupidest people possible to advance their most ambitious projects (MECW 44: 39/MEGA2 III.4: 358). A bit more specifically, he thought the moral sensibilities and religious impulses of the bourgeoisie—the dominant and dominating factions of the capitalist order—begged to be ridiculed. And so, he did, at every opportunity. “The social principles of Christianity explain all the iniquities of the oppressors against the oppressed as either just punishment for Original Sin and other transgressions, or tests which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, imposes upon the redeemed,” he explained to readers of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung in 1847: The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-loathing, degradation, subservience, and humility, in short, all the qualities of the rabble; the proletariat, which will not allow itself to be treated like riff-raff, finds that its courage, self-confidence, pride, and sense of independence is even more necessary than its daily bread. The social principles of Christianity are cowardly; the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity (MECW 6: 231/MEW 4: 200; my translation).

So much, indeed. A few years later, Marx reached for a telling comparison to describe the “lackey nature” of German academics who groveled before the Prussian monarch to keep their jobs: “The pious Buddhist, who faithfully swallows the Dalai Lama’s excrement, is amazed to hear the legend of those in Berlin and Halle whose

demic fads, popularizing trends, and so on—have only grown more pronounced and more chastening with time.  Bruce Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” is more than twenty years old and has achieved the status of a major text despite its humble origins and terse, epigrammatic style. Nevertheless, I believe it remains the case that: “Many who would not think of insulating their own or their parents’ religion against critical inquiry still afford such protection to other people’s faiths, via a stance of cultural relativism” (Lincoln 1996, 226). It strikes me that academic demands to recognize the “alterity” of the Other as Other have refortified suspect notions of native authenticity (e. g., Birla 2010).

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prostitution before a monarchy established ‘by the grace of God’ seems like a fable” (MECW 8: 106/MEW 6: 81; my translation).⁶ The Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg once proposed that only religion can motivate good people to do evil things. I’m not sure Marx would agree. I do, however, think he’d likely offer a biting addendum: it probably takes the extra-ordinary demands of witches, gods, and spirits to convince one human being to eat another’s turds. Marx’s unwavering commitment to the French Revolution’s universalizing virtues of liberté, égalité, fraternité meant that he was no complacent, multi-cultural relativist. Writing for an American audience in 1853, for instance, he contemplated the mixed blessings of British rule in India. Although the process of colonizing the subcontinent was ham-fisted and cruel: we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnant, and vegetative life—that this passive sort of existence—evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction. Murder itself became a religious rite in Hindostan [sic]. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman [sic], the monkey, and Sabbala [sic], the cow (MECW 12: 132/MEW 9: 132– 133).⁷

These days, an academic would jeopardize her career by writing something so “disrespectful” or “offensive” about the things held sacred by a community. Nevertheless, when the gods do appear in Marx’s writings, they are either treated as insults

 I reproduce this allegation without affirming or denying its veracity. I will, however, point out that such scandalous tales were accepted as common knowledge among a certain kind of learned, nineteenth-century audience. As a case in point, see John Gregory Bourke (1891).  Despite his begrudging respect for James Mill as a political economist, Marx’s portrait of India is arguably no less “Orientalizing” than Mill’s notorious conclusion that “by a system of priestcraft, built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind, their minds were enchained more intolerably than their bodies; in short, that despotism and priestcraft taken together, the Hindus, in mind and body, were the most enslaved portion of the human race” (Mill 1817, 452; e. g., Anderson 2010).

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to basic human dignity or implacable obstacles to political and social progress.⁸ Religious figures, practices, or texts weren’t granted any special status or moral authority just because they presumptuously claimed it for themselves. It was during the 1848 journées de Juin (23 – 26 June), we are told: when every class and party joined the Parti de l’Ordre over and against [gegenüber] the proletarian class—the Party of Anarchy, Socialism, Communism. They “saved” society from the “enemies of society.” They shouted out [zugerufen] catchphrases from the old society: “Property, Family, Religion, Order” to their own troops and “In hoc signo vinces!” to their fellow counter-revolutionary crusaders. From that moment on, whenever a coalition-member— one of the parties that trooped together, under these signs, against the June insurgents—begins to claim the revolutionary battlefield in pursuit of its own class interests, they all too quickly succumb to the cry: “Property, Family, Religion, Order.” Society is saved every time the orbit of rulers shrinks, as one more exclusive interest is asserted against the general interests. Every demand for even the simplest bourgeois finance reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most technical republicanism, for the most uninspired democracy, is immediately attacked as “an assassination attempt on society” and branded as “socialism.” That is, until the day comes when even the high priests are knocked off their Pythian stools, snatched from their beds in night and fog, thrown into a paddy wagon [Zellenwagen], tossed into dungeons or exiled, their temple razed to the ground, their mouths sealed, their pens broken, the law shredded, in the name of “Religion, Property, Family, Order.” The Order-fanatics shot by a bunch of piss-drunk [besoffen] soldiers, who also enjoy bombing houses when they’re bored—all in the name of “Property, Family, Religion, Order” (MECW 11: 111– 112/MEW 8: 123; my translation).⁹

Notice here how Marx exposes the depths of bourgeois venality just by repeating the Party of Order’s puffed-up slogans regarding basic human needs. Whenever the powerful start talking in aspirational terms about the common good, he warns us, look out—they’re likely up to no good. Thus, he predicted that the capital classes would eagerly cede juridico-political power to almost anyone so long as a reliable and robust return on investment was secured—a gamble the German bourgeoisie were willing to take with Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s (e. g., de Jong 2022).

 In the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, Bruce Lincoln and Anthony Yu judged that it was one thing for the magazine “to mock the Pope, and quite another to mock Muhammad. To poke fun at the icons revered by the powerful is a courageous act of iconoclasm; to ridicule those of the weak is cheap bullying, as it subjects people who already suffer abuse of multiple sorts to public humiliation, making sport of their (perceived) inability to defend the things they hold sacred” (Lincoln and Yu 2015). I suspect that Marx would sharply disagree.  By Pythiastühlen, Marx means the “holy tripods” from which the high priestess of the Apollonian Temple at Delphi—an office more familiarly known as “the Oracle of Delphi”—revealed her prophetic wisdom. I have introduced an artificial break for the ease of reading.

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In fact, Marx insisted that a dead indifference to human flourishing is baked into the logic of capital accumulation itself. “The practical movement of capital— which has ‘good reasons’ for denying the sufferings of the generation of workers [Arbeitergeneration] surrounding it—is moved by the prospect of humanity’s future degradation [Verfaulung] and inexorable [unaufhaltsame] depopulation [Entvölkerung] just as much, and as little, as the earth’s eventual fall the into the sun,” he snarls: Thus, capital is reckless with the health and life of workers where society does not force it to be considerate. Lamentations regarding mental and physical degeneration, premature death, the torture of overwork is greeted with: Why should this anguish torment us since it increases our pleasure (profit)? Generally speaking, though, none of this depends upon the individual capitalist’s good or evil intent. The immanent laws of capitalist production become an external, coercive law for the individual capitalist through free competition (MECW 35: 275 – 276/ MEW 23: 285 – 286; my translation; emphasis added).

Marriages of convenience typically only last as long as they remain convenient. Because of this, industrialists, financiers, and rentiers have often grasped the scale of their miscalculation only when the local generalissimo shows up to change the terms of the agreement. *** The fact that Marx was never diplomatic when writing about ancestors, gods, and spirits should surprise no one. He was a socialist organizer and political journalist rather than a professional academic. Marx did not write for an audience of scholars; nor did he write with scholarly intent. When he announced his plans to publish Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung: Politisch-ökonomische Revue—a monthly periodical meant to be a successor of sorts to the daily he edited in Köln during the German Revolution (1848 – 1849)—Marx observed: The greatest interest in a newspaper—its daily intervention in the movement and its ability to speak out on behalf of it; the way it can reflect everyday history in all of its fullness; the continuous, passionate interaction between the people and its daily press; all of this is inevitably lost in a revue. A revue, on the other hand, has the advantage of grasping events in broad outlines and lingering only on that which is most essential. This allows for a comprehensive, scientific examination of the economic conditions which form the basis of the whole political movement. A time of apparent standstill, such as the present, must be used to get clear about the period of revolution that we have just lived through—about the character of the struggling parties, the social conditions which give rise to the existence and struggle of these parties (MECW 10: 5/MEW 7: 5; my translation).

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This tiny advertisement for a journalistic venture which barely existed is an invaluable historical artifact. No explicit biographical facts are given, but it still manages to reveal something about what meant most to Marx the scrivener: the intimate relationship between a “radical” political newspaper and its readership; the need to track the day-to-day skirmishes between the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless; the desire to piece together an understanding of the past and present that might offer some wisdom and hope about the future. This was the kind of writing that mattered.¹⁰ It is not merely that Marx scraped together a precarious existence writing for newspapers and quarterlies. He wrote like a journalist. Even in especially heated disputes, scholars are expected to adhere to the principle of charity. As Simon Blackburn summarizes the idea, this regulating principle “constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth or rationality” of one’s opponent (Blackburn 2016, 79). A bit less formally, scholars are supposed to play fair: no personal insults; no foul language; no misrepresentations. Think of it as the difference between an Olympic boxing match and a drunken street-fight. In one situation, some moves —like hitting below the belt—are formally prohibited; in the other, almost anything goes. Marx’s literary style is that of a street fighter, an agent provocateur who “aimed to stir up trouble and cause controversy at the moment—‘grab the headlines’ if you will—rather than to write ‘theory’ for philosophers and historians” (Carver 2010, 105). This usually took the form of deriding the eminent and powerful. In an 1856 article rehearsing a parliamentary debate on relocating the Duke of York’s monument from Waterloo Place, Marx catalogued the seedier aspects of Prince Frederick’s military career—including his 1809 resignation as the British Commander-in-Chief after his concubine was accused of selling army commissions on his behalf. “It would be tedious to wade through the whole proceedings of the Commons, with all its sordid incidents,” so he cut to the chase: This Duke of York, then, whose monument would grace a dung-hill, is the Marquis of Clanricarde’s “eminent commander-in-chief,” Lord Lansdowne’s “illustrious and all-respected indi-

 James Scott suspects that a newspaper “creates a decidedly one-sided relationship. The organ is a splendid way to diffuse instructions, explain the party line, and rally the troops. Like its successor, the radio, the newspaper is a medium better suited to sending messages than to receiving them” (Scott 1998, 155). There is something undeniably true about this, of course: readers are the addressed and writers the addressors. At the same time, it too quickly presupposes a measure of social distance between addressors and addressees which doesn’t quite apply to the sorts of limited circulation, quasi-underground publications for which Marx typically wrote. With Vorwärts, for example, the modest bi-weekly circulation of around 1,000 copies meant that he was probably only two or three degrees of separation away from many, if not most, of his readers.

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vidual;” and the very same personage represented by the Earl of Aberdeen’s “sanctified monument”—in one word the guardian angel of the House of Lords. The worshippers are worthy of the saint (MECW 14: 671).

As far as Marx was concerned, King George III’s second son was barely noble enough to add some dignity to a pile of barnyard Kacke. My point is that when we imagine Marx as an academic theorist, we too often ignore the skill with which he could publicly humiliate his targets with one or two lacerating details. For instance, in The Civil War in France he goes after Jules Favre —Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice-President to General Louis-Jules Trochu— with knuckle dusters. Not long after the 1871 Treaty of Versailles ended the Franco-Prussian War, we learn: one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard, resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession which made him a rich man, and that, in a law-suit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure through the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. Since those dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any horsepower of rhetorics, Jules Favre, in the same heroism of self-abasement, remained for once tongue-tied until the turmoil of the civil war allowed him to brand the Paris people in the Versailles assembly as a band of “escaped convicts” in utter revolt against family, religion, order and property (MECW 22: 517).

Marx was a master of what Bruce Lincoln fittingly calls corrosive discourse, restoring “to the level of the human those frail and fallible individuals who would prefer to represent themselves as the embodiment of some incontestable office or some transcendent ideal” (Lincoln 1994, 79). Or, to use a boxing expression, he was always willing to punch above his weight class. If nothing else, the heroism of self-abasement is a taunt too good to forget in a world overfull with gameshow politicians. At still other times, Marx’s lack of academic charity meant playing fast and loose with bits of an opponent’s position to get the upper hand. This happens regularly enough, in fact, that Alan Megill concludes: “Marx cannot be trusted to give a fair and accurate account of the positions of those he attacks” (Megill 2002, 156). The tactical, combative nature of Marx’s “critiques” should be kept in mind because most of the people he dressed down in print are now hardly remembered and seldom read. All too often, Marx’s idiosyncratic “take” has become the final word. Take Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who described Marx’s withering case against him in Poverty of Philosophy as “a tissue of crudities, slanders, falsifications, and plagiarism.” After comparing what Proudhon writes in System of Economic Contradictions with what Marx claims Proudhon writes, Iain McKay has decided that Pov-

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erty “is not a work of serious scholarship but rather a hatchet job which does not bother with accuracy or honesty to discredit and mock someone Marx wished to replace in terms of influence in the socialist movement” (McKay 2017, 32, 61). Perhaps. Another way of understanding his takedowns of Favre and Proudhon is that Marx knew what many academics forget: political struggles aren’t university seminars and “moral victories” typically euphemize actual defeats. ¹¹ Only tenderhearted liberals are shocked to learn that political campaigns aren’t exercises in truthtelling. *** At first blush it may seem like a serious misjudgment, perhaps even an affront, to treat Marx as a “mere” journalistic provocateur. Yet, despite his eventual twentiethcentury significance, Marx mostly led a life of disappointment, poverty, and anonymity. Even after achieving a small measure of international recognition for his impassioned defense of the Paris Commune, he lived and died on the jagged edges of the radical—which is to say, revolutionary—European Left. Simply put, he was always less interested in joining bourgeois institutions than in pulling them down. Marx once confessed to Engels that it would be nice to have a rigorous socialist periodical, if only because it could provide a platform for publicly exposing the crushing ignorance of half-wit professors and semi-educated literati (MECW 45: 242/MEW 34: 48). It wasn’t until the mid- to late-1960s that Marx secured his place alongside Durkheim and Weber as a member of the “Holy Trinity” (Outhwaite 2009). Prior to that, he was sometimes complimented for “anticipating” the modern social sciences—but then promptly dismissed (Parsons 1937). At the same time, however, he was the academic bête noire when it came to religion well before his trinitarian status. “Those of us who study the sociological implications of religion will err,” Joachim Wach advised, “if we imagine that our work will reveal the nature and essence of religion itself. This injunction is directed particularly at those theorists who apply the philosophy of Marx” (Wach 1947, 5). Mircea Eliade doubled down on this point roughly a decade later: “To think like a materialist or Marxist means giving up the primordial vocation of man” (Eliade 1977, 86). Why were Durkheim and Weber so much more palatable than Marx? The answer is relatively clear. “Each could be read as creator of a systematic conception of

 “Left intellectuals, like most intellectuals, are not good at politics,” the art historian T.J. Clark laments: “Intellectuals get the fingering wrong. Up on stage they play the wrong notes” (Clark 2012, 53).

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sociology,” R.W. Connell submits: “More, each as founder could do ideological work for sociology in the Cold War context: Durkheim as theorist of social solidarity, Weber as refuter of Marx” (Connell 1997, 1541; e. g., Burawoy and Wright 2002). It took the anti-colonial struggles of the Global South, and the concomitant radicalization of university students in the Global North—from Berkeley to Berlin as Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (1968) put it at the time—for Marx to enter the canon of academic social theory. However, Marx was transformed as he cleared the walls of the Cold War campus. Perhaps the most unsurprising and least productive result was that a relatively obscure political journalist and polemicist from the nineteenth century was remade into an academic “theorist,” a thinker thinking thoughts out of time. This scholastic metamorphosis continues to hamstring our understanding of him today—as when J. Lorand Matory claims, for reasons which still escape me, that Marx began his adult life as “a mid-nineteenth century lawyer” (Matory 2018, 45). Marx’s father might have died a somewhat less troubled man if that were even remotely close to the truth. To see how treating Marx as a political journalist shifts our perspective on why he was writing in the first place, consider the now taken-for-granted claim that Marx developed a “theory of history” (e. g., van Ree 2019). “For we may attribute to Marx, as we cannot to Hegel, not only a philosophy of history, but also what deserves to be called a theory of history,” Gerald Cohen argued in the era-defining Marx’s Theory of History: Hegel’s reading of history as a whole and of particular societies is just that, a reading, an interpretation which we may find more or less attractive. But Marx offers not only a reading but also the beginnings of something more rigorous. The concepts of productive power and economic structure (unlike those of consciousness and culture) do not serve only to express a vision. They also assert their candidacy as the leading concepts in a theory of history, a theory to the extent that history admits of theoretical treatment, which is neither entirely nor not at all (Cohen 1978, 27).

The locus classicus for this understanding of Marx as a grand theorist of history is drawn from the well-thumbed “Preface” to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. There is no single piece of his writing that has been more used or abused: In the social production of their lives, people enter into specific, necessary, independent relations, relations of production that correlate to a certain stage of development in their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the actual basis upon which a legal and political superstructure rises, and to which correspond certain social forms of consciousness. The mode by which this material life is produced conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process in general. It is not the consciousness of human beings which causes or

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defines [bestimmen] their existence but rather, their social existence which causes or defines [bestimmen] their consciousness.¹² At a certain point, the development of the material productive forces of society comes into conflict with the existing conditions of production; or—in what is really just a legal expression of the same process—with the conditions of ownership within which they had previously operated. These relations go from being forms that once developed the productive forces to being their shackles. This is when an era of social revolution begins. With a change of the economic foundation, the whole enormous superstructure rolls over [wälzen] more or less quickly. When considering such upheavals, one must always distinguish between the material revolutions in the conditions of economic production—which can be stated with the rigor of a natural science—and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical—in short, the ideological—forms in which people become aware of this conflict and then fight it out (MECW 29: 263 – 264/MEW 13: 8 – 9; my translation).

Whole shelves of university libraries now groan under the laconic weight of books written to prove, disprove, revisit, or revamp Marx’s “materialist theory of history.” Does the passage merit such obsessive attention? That really depends on how much Marx you’ve read.¹³ As a point of contrast, compare the flow of ideas from Zur Kritik with Marx’s less often consulted self-defense from his 1849 criminal trial on charges of insulting Köln’s chief public prosecutor: The claim [Behauptung] of laws which belong to bygone social eras, made by representatives of vanished or vanishing social interests, only serves to elevate those interests—which stand in contradiction to public needs—to the status of law. But society is not based on law. That is a

 The original reads: “Die Produktionsweise des materiellen Lebens bedingt den sozialen, politischen und geistigen Lebensprozeß überhaupt. Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt” (MEW 13: 8). For me, these sentences exemplify how the caricature of Marx as mechanistic or deterministic was always an interpretive choice. For example, bestimmen can mean: to cause, control, define, determine, establish. As an adjective, bestimmt suggests: determined, certain, particular, or resolute. As an adverb, bestimmt nods toward: certainly, definitely, for certain. Thus, instead of Marx claiming that material life determines human consciousness—the received translation—he might also be understood as claiming nothing more exaggerated than: the way we live our lives establishes a certain way of thinking. One could even emphasize his “dialectical” tendencies and say Marx means to emphasize how our historical, socio-political embeddedness is both a precondition of and a limiting constraint upon human cognition. Thus, Marx can be—and really should be—read as a robust but recognizable kind of nineteenth-century historicist. I have introduced two artificial breaks for the sake of readability.  It is worth remembering that while this passage is a touchstone for Marxist historiography, there is nothing uniquely Marxian about the base-superstructure metaphor per se. In Rights of Man, Thomas Paine observes that if nothing changes with a change of state ministers: “The defect lies in the system. The foundation and the superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks into court government, and ever will” (Paine 2000, 252; emphasis added).

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fantasy [Einbildung]. Rather, the law must be based on society, it must be the expression of common interests and needs which arise from the material mode of production of each period, and against the individual’s arbitrary wishes. The Code Napoleon, which I have here in my hand, did not produce modern bourgeois society. The bourgeois society which emerged in the 18th century and continued to develop in the 19th merely finds its legal expression in the Code. As soon as it fails to match the social conditions, it is nothing more than a pad [Ballen] of paper. You cannot make the old laws the foundation for new social development any more than the old laws created the old social order [Zustände]. They emerged from the old order and must perish with them. They necessarily change with the changing conditions of life. The assertion of old laws against the new needs and demands of social development is really nothing more than the hypocritical assertion of antiquated [unzeitgemäß] special interests against contemporary [daszeitgemäß] public needs. The application of this legal foundation is an attempt to preserve the particular interests of the once dominant after they no longer rule; the desire is to impose laws on a society whose living conditions—its trade, its material production, the way people earn a living [Erwerbsweise]—make them obsolete; the hope is to keep legislators in office who will only pursue their special interests; the goal is to use the state’s power to subjugate, by force, the interests of the majority to those of the minority. Thus, at each moment, this legal foundation contradicts the existing needs; it stunts trade and industry; it sets up [bereiten] social crises which will erupt in political revolutions (MECW 8: 327– 328/MEW 6: 244– 245; my translation).

The parallels between these texts are, I hope, too apparent to require much unpacking. So, the issue worth considering is this: Did Marx mistake the courtroom for an academic lecture hall? Or, have professional academics too often mistaken the words of an actively engaged, revolutionary socialist for those of a cap-andgowned scholar? By my reckoning, the notion that Marx was trying to assemble an empirically adequate, explanatory, and predictive “theory of history” only makes sense if we assume that he was a professional academic. After all, this is the sort of thing that ambitious scholars in the humanities and social sciences often spend their whole careers trying to accomplish. However, the terrain looks very different if we pause long enough to ask: Why would a mudslinging polemicist and committed socialist need a “theory” of history? Why wouldn’t a general sense of the past and present as prelude be enough for a talented muckraker? Just to be clear: Marx was not constitutionally opposed to theorizing per se. After the publication of Capital, for example, he often complained that critics mangled his “theory of value” [Werttheorie].¹⁴ But it doesn’t seem to me that he viewed history as the sort of thing  Writing to Ferdinand Nieuwenhuis about a proposed Dutch resumé of Capital, for example, Marx concludes that he’s the right man for the job—especially since C.A. Schramm had recently “misunderstood my theory of value” [meine Werttheorie] in the pages of Jahrbuch der Sozialwissenschaft (MECW 46: 16/MEW 34: 447; my translation).

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about which one might construct a meaningful or even useful “theory.” In fact, he explicitly ridiculed the idea during the revolutionary unrest of 1848. “While the professors were forging a theory of history,” Marx observed at the time, “history ran its stormy course and cared not a whit for the histories of gentlemen professors” (MECW 8: 51/MEW 6: 43; my translation). It may seem like an overly technical point, but it still deserves to be mentioned. Marx typically described his own understanding of the past in terms of a “guideline” or “guiding principle” [Leitfaden], a “conception” [Auffasung] rather than a “theory” [Theorie]. Simply put, he judged history from a strategic, unapologetically partisan perspective. It is on this basis that Gareth Stedman Jones concludes: while the centrality of history in Marx’s work is not to be doubted, it is a misleading half-truth to write as if the elaboration of a “materialist conception of history” were Marx’s principal aim. Marx’s prime ambition was not to construct a theory of history, but to discover man’s path to communism. His interest in history was instrumental. History furnished the means by which that path would be uncovered (Stedman Jones 2007, 148).

The past mattered to Marx because it presented real possibilities in, and imposed practical limitations upon, the present. “Human beings build a new world for themselves, not from ‘earthly treasures’ as crude [grobianisch] superstition imagines, but from the historical achievements of a sinking world,” he advised in his 1848 polemic against Karl Heinzen: “In the course of their development they must first produce the material conditions of a new society themselves, and no exertion of attitude or will can free them from this fate” (MECW 6: 319 – 320/MEW 4: 339; my translation). This unmistakably instrumental, partisan interest in the past leads Bernard Moss to argue that professional scholars commit a well-meaning but fatal mistake when they read Marx as a would-be colleague. As Moss makes the point, “for all the subtlety and complexity of Marx’s histories, they remain works of a political activist and journalist attempting to define the Communist position and interpretation of events” (Moss 1985, 539 – 540). Whatever else Marx tried to accomplish with his writing, the goals were never tenure, promotion, and the trivial-to-middling perks of academic celebrity. *** The decision to treat Marx as a political journalist not only has far-reaching implications for how we read him—it also forces us to reconsider what we read. The long-standing academic practice has been to grant a handful of texts the elite status of major works and argue that they—and they alone—hold the key to deciphering something called Marx’s thought. Louis Althusser is probably the most celebrated case of someone who preferred taking “core samples” from just a few of Marx’s

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writings, but he is hardly alone (Althusser 1993, 167). The strategy is seductive, productive, and deeply problematic. One obvious snag is that all the newspaper articles, editorials, speeches, and occasional essays that Marx wrote tend to be classified as “minor works” and unceremoniously shoved aside. “Although the journalism is sparsely examined in most biographies,” Jonathan Sperber advises: “the extent of the newspaper articles between 1853 and 1862 was greater than everything else he published in his lifetime put together” (Sperber 2013, 296; emphasis added). Another issue is that this practice invites readers to imagine Marx spending his days ruminating about things like the nature of history rather than responding to salient current events. For a very long time, the learned consensus was that Marx had a theoretical “breakthrough” sometime during the mid-1840s. He then spent the next forty years struggling to accumulate enough evidence to make his case in public. “By 1848 his basic standpoint as a political and economic thinker was fully formed. With prodigious thoroughness he had constructed a complete theory of society and its evolution, which indicated with precision where and how the answers to all such questions must be sought and found,” Isaiah Berlin once judged: His later years are occupied almost exclusively with the task of gathering evidence for, and disseminating, the truths which he had discovered, until they filled the entire horizon of his followers, and became consciously woven into the texture of their every thought and word and act. For a quarter of a century he concentrated his entire being upon the attainment of this purpose, and, towards the end of his life, achieved it (Berlin 1960, 12, 18).

This portrait of Marx as a uniquely gifted theorist who possessed a complete theory of society and its evolution by the crucible year of 1848—at the mostly grown-up, but still precocious age of 30—is wonderfully appealing. Unfortunately, it is also well wide of the mark. When the “economic” manuscripts are read in sequence, for instance, we discover that Marx’s critique of political economy never finds a resting point. He stops time and again to fuss over the meaning of basic analytic categories like abstract labor, value, money, and even capital itself. Michael Heinrich argues that, in light of the material which MEGA2 makes available, we are now able to “distinguish two different projects: a ‘Critique of Political Economy’ in six books and ‘Capital’ in four. After a preparatory period in the 1850s, there are five different periods of the emergence and attempted realization of these projects, resulting in five different bodies of texts (including drafts and published texts), two drafts for the first project and three drafts for the second” (Heinrich 2009, 85; emphasis added; see also Heinrich 1989, 2013). Regardless of how deeply we drill, we will never hit the stable bed-

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rock upon which all of Marx’s “mature” economic thought sits because it does not —and never did—exist. Even if we accept the premise that Marx was pursuing something like a comprehensive, socialist “theory of capital” after the late 1850s or so—and, just for the record, I think there is a compelling case to be made on that front—the writings he left behind reveal that this project remained essentially incomplete. In fact, it seems he quietly abandoned that project in the 1870s without admitting as much to the people who loved him most—and who made the effort possible in the first place. Yet, most twentieth-century readers had a difficult time grasping the experimental, seriously incomplete nature of Marx’s undertaking because his writings were typically read backwards—in part because they were mostly published in reverse order (Heinrich 2013a). Since Capital eventually made all the other stuff worth reading, it also became the template for deciphering what Marx was, allegedly, always trying to say regarding the nature of capital. Thus, the 1857– 1858 manuscripts widely known as “Grundrisse” since their initial publication (c. 1939 – 1941) have been conventionally, and misleadingly, described as the “first draft” of Capital (e. g., Dussell 2010). Still another problem with the major-texts approach is that the manuscripts which count as major share a suspicious constellation of traits. One, they tend to be largely programmatic and thus amenable to the sorts of “obsessive methodologism” that preoccupy professional academics (Anderson 1976, 53). Two, they tend to be relatively timeless in that following Marx’s argument does not presume some working knowledge about nineteenth-century geopolitics or the rogue’s gallery of European socialists. Three, they tend to be serious and therefore ideal candidates for the sort of heartfelt discussions that emerge around seminar tables. Considered in this light, the Manifesto—or, more specifically, the first two sections—is unsurprisingly viewed as major despite its humble purpose and slight build. Compare this to the two-hundred-plus page Herr Vogt, one of the few books that Marx published in his lifetime. This fact alone would seem to merit its inclusion among the major works. Yet, because it is so deeply attached to the post-1848 political context and a punishing response to a defamation campaign by Karl Vogt —a now-forgotten German zoologist and politician—the book is either disparaged for its caustic tone or totally ignored (McLellan 1973, 311).¹⁵ How caustic could it be?

 Andrew Kliman regrets that most intellectuals have “a shockingly hardhearted and dismissive attitude toward Herr Vogt and Marx’s struggle against defamation” (Kliman 2010). I’d put things differently: Herr Vogt would probably be read more often, and more sympathetically, if it weren’t so difficult to extract the book from its generative context. Since the book frustrates academic desires to transform Marx into a theorist, it doesn’t “count” as a major work.

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Here’s a taste. Herr Vogt, Marx begins, has been publicly accused of some pretty shady backroom deals: and true to form he defends his hide [Haut] with his tongue. After an hour and a half of nonsense [Strohdreschen], he remembers Demosthenes’ admonition: “action, action, and action once again, is the soul of eloquence.” But what is action? In America there is a little beast called a skunk which, when threatened, has only one defense—its offensive odor. When attacked, it sprays from certain body parts a liquid substance so foul that you must burn your clothes if it touches them; if it gets on your skin, you are banished from all human society for a time. The odor is so horribly offensive that hunters, whenever their dogs accidentally startle a “skunk,” turn and run with greater panic than if a wolf or tiger was chasing them. Gunpowder and lead can protect against wolf and tiger, but there is no cure for the a posteriori—what comes from the behind—of a “skunk.” According to our esteemed orator, a naturalized member of the “Animal Kingdom,” this is true action and so sprays his alleged persecutors with a skunk-like substance (MECW 17: 68 – 69/MEW 14: 428 – 429; my translation).

Rephrased in a crassly poetic, twentieth-century expression that Marx probably would have appreciated: Karl Vogt is so full of shit his breath stinks. Not the sort of thing that typically survives peer-review. “Rare amongst Marx’s works of any length,” Terrell Carver observes, “Herr Vogt was never re-published in a separate edition, appearing in a complete English translation only in 1981” (Carver 2010, 105). By focusing attention on the “right” kind of writing—the kind that most closely resembles what professional academics produce—the distinction between major and minor texts is one of the ways that scholars made and remade Marx in their own cloistered image. However, the single greatest flaw in the major works approach is that many of the allegedly canonical “works” are, for lack of a better word, archival inventions. Take “German Ideology” as a case in point. The source material was written sometime between the fall of 1845 and the summer of 1846 (Taubert 1997a – b). Marx and Engels—along with the rarely-discussed Moses Hess and Joseph Weydemeyer—imagined a multi-authored, quarterly journal highlighting the strategically ineffective or “idealizing” tendencies among the German Left (Golowina 1980). Financial backing was difficult to secure and by early 1847 the venture was abandoned. An ostensibly “complete,” German-language edition of “German Ideology” was published in 1932. It quickly became a major work after the Second World War. Sadly, those who praise this “book” have been seduced by a chimera. In 1847, Marx wrote the Editors of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung and the Trier’sche Zeitung to deny authorship of a piece wrongly attributed to him. The relevant bit from the German original reads:

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Die Rezension bildet ein Anhängsel zu der von Fr. Engels und mir gemeinschaftlich verfaßten Schrift über “Die deutsche Ideologie” (Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten, Feuerbach, B Bauer und Stirner, und des deutschen Sozialismus in seinen verschiedenen Propheten) (MEW 4: 38; emphasis added).

The standard English translation renders this as: The review forms an appendix to the book written jointly by Fr. Engels and me on “the German ideology” (critique of modern German philosophy as expounded by its representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German socialism as expounded by its various prophets) (MECW 6: 73; emphasis added).

This passage—especially the received translation—provides the key textual warrant for both the title and status of this alleged “book.” Yet, the decision to treat Schrift as a synonym for Buch or Heft is a subtle but significant misrepresentation of what these manuscripts really are: some co-authored odds and ends left over from an ill-fated journalistic pursuit. Consider the influential first “chapter” on Feuerbach. David McLellan speaks for countless twentieth-century readers when he writes: “The section of The German Ideology [sic] on Feuerbach was one of the most central of Marx’s works. Marx never subsequently stated his materialist conception of history at such length and in detail. It remains a masterpiece today for the cogency and clarity of its presentation” (McLellan 1973, 151). The not-so-little problem here is that this memorable “chapter” is a Frankenstein’s monster created by stitching together material extracted from three discontinuous printer’s sheets (Carver 2010b). In fact, the text of this “chapter” on Feuerbach was excised from manuscript pages where Marx and Engels were too busy sparring with Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner to pay much attention to Feuerbach. When Engels was drafting Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy in the late 1880s, he dug up this material—kept by Marx, who seems to have been a compulsive hoarder. He hoped something could be pressed into service but was shocked to discover how raw the writings were. “The section on Feuerbach is not finished,” Engels reports: “so it was useless for the present purpose” (MECW 26: 520/MEW 21: 264; my translation). This is a buzzing, fluorescent example of how something co-written by Marx and Engels in the mid-1840s—and later deemed useless by Engels—was reborn as a theoretical masterpiece from Marx alone in the mid-twentieth century. If we set aside all the confounding text-critical problems with “German Ideology”—and there are a lot of them—the traditional understanding of this material as an unpublished book rather than fragments of an unsuccessful quarterly journal or magazine [Vierteljahrsschrift] obscures why Marx and Engels were writing in

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the first place (Carver and Blank 2014a–b). One theme which unites these disparate texts is the accusation that German democratic activists too often confuse “radical” theorizing with concrete political action. So, rather than a “book” which contains the core of Marx’s theory of history, the “German Ideology” manuscripts mostly consist of Marx and Engels criticizing other folks for being too theoretical! Or, as they succinctly put it with respect to Bauer and Stirner’s philosophical attacks on socialism: “Philosophy and the study of the real world are as different from one another as masturbation [Onanie] is from sexual intercourse [Geschlechtsliebe]” (MECW 5: 236/MEW 3: 218; my translation). Thus, we are told that “for the practical materialist, i. e., the communist, it is about revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking [anzugreifen] and changing the things we find” (MECW 5: 38/MEGA2 I.5: 32; my translation). It is telling, I think, that practical and communist were Marx’s handwritten additions. “The nub of the matter was not so much that these ‘idealist’ (and therefore ineffectually ‘critical’) philosophers were thinking the wrong things because they were thinking the wrong way,” Terrell Carver explains: “they were doing politics the wrong way (hence thinking the wrong way) and were thus merely encouraging others to be as wrong-headed” (Carver 2015, 715). *** Daniel Dennett often says that his philosophical motto is: X is real, but it’s not what you think. “Consciousness exists, but just isn’t what some folks think it is,” he judges: “free will exists, but it is also not what many people think it must be” (Dennett 2018, 223). The basic rationale behind this stance is that our routine, intuitively plausible understanding of the world at a macroscopic level—what Wilfred Sellars called the “manifest image”—never quite aligns with the rigorous scientific image of a universe which consists of nothing but bosons and fermions (Sellars 2007). Dennett’s intended lesson is that even though elementary particles are neither conscious nor free, it does not follow that consciousness or free will aren’t real. It just means that we must stretch our imaginations in unanticipated ways to grasp how there is still some elbow room left in a world where physics fixes all the facts. Think of it this way: up close, a silent movie is just white, grey, and black blobs on a screen; back up far enough and the story comes into view. My stance towards Marx is roughly analogous to Dennett’s on consciousness or free will. I’m convinced that Marx is still worth reading in the twenty-first century, but he wasn’t who most folks think he was. Because of this, we must fundamentally reconsider why we turn to Marx in the first place, and what we expect to learn from him when we do. I am no longer persuaded, for example, that there is a gen-

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eral “method” or “theory” to be found in his work.¹⁶ Rather, he typically offered his nineteenth-century audience a diagnostic mood. That is, Marx’s writing—published or unpublished, public or private—hangs together by virtue of a characteristic attitude which tends to be angry, earthy, impatient, and smart. Consider how someone eager to identify the “core theory” from Capital is likely to skip over how contemptuous, even uncharitable Marx could be about classical political economy. “All rational representatives of political economy admit that the new introduction of machinery has a pestilential effect on workers in the traditional crafts and manufactures,” he begins: Nearly all of them bemoan the slavery of the factory worker. And what is the great trump card they all play? That machinery, after the horrors of its introduction and developmental stage, actually increases the number of labor slaves instead of decreasing them! Yes, political economy rejoices in the abominable theorem—abominable to every “philanthropist” who believes in the eternal, natural necessity of the capitalist mode of production—that even those factories already based on machinery will, after a certain period of growth, after a longer or shorter “transitional period,” cast off even more workers than they originally tossed onto the pavement (MECW 35: 450/MEW 23: 470 – 471; my translation).

Marx’s “critique” of political economy is more than a bloodless, Kantian exercise meant to probe the limits of economic reason. It is sarcastic, contemptuous, and belligerent. Critical insight and scorn tumble out of him like an over-stuffed backpack. When his punches land, they bruise. “In the course of this investigation, it has become clear that capital is not a fixed quantity, that it is an elastic component of social wealth,” he observes a bit further on in Capital: Classical economics has always been fond of conceiving capital as a fixed quantity with a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice only became a dogma with the original philistine [Urphilister], Jeremy Bentham—that sober, pedantic, chin-wagging [schwatzledern] oracle of the sordid, nineteenth-century bourgeois mind [Bürgerverstand]. Bentham is to philosophy what Martin Tupper is to poetry. Only England could produce both (MECW 35: 605/MEW 23: 636 – 637; my translation).¹⁷

 The claim that Marx established a specific method of analysis which yields a particular kind of theory goes to the heart of something like the “Miliband-Poulantzas Debate.” See Barrow (2002) and Jessop (2007) for insightful accounts of the actors, stakes, and implications of this now mostly forgotten dispute.  Martin Tupper was a nineteenth-century English writer whose literary style is graceless enough to make Nabokov weep. He first came to prominence with Proverbial Philosophy, a collection of relentlessly plodding, moralizing poetry. These days, Tupper is mostly remembered for the lugubrious ballad “The Anglo-Saxon Race,” which urges Englishmen to “Break forth and spread over every place/The world is a world for the Saxon Race!” (Tupper 1863, 101).

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If twentieth-century literary critics taught us anything, it is that style is substance. So, when we disregard his contempt for the likes of Bentham and Vogt as mere “rhetoric” we inevitably—and needlessly—leave an enormous amount of his work on the cutting room floor (McNally 2012, Roberts 2016). *** The takeaway point from all of this is that treating Marx as a grand theorist means disregarding who he was and the bulk of what he wrote. Terrell Carver argues that, by treating individual sentences and paragraphs from a handful of texts as the premises of a grand unified theory, twentieth-century scholars introduced “a narrative shift from activism to academics” (Carver 2018, 48). I prefer to put things a bit more sharply. As long as we continue to treat Marx as a historian, lawyer, philosopher, scholar or theorist, we will never grasp why a virtually penniless, nineteenth-century German émigré—down and out in Paris, then Brussels, then Köln, and then London—bothered to write anything at all.

Part One Putting Marx in His Place

Chapter One Carbuncles and All: The Difficult Life of a Difficult Man Karl Heinrich Marx, the third of Heinrich and Henrietta’s nine children, was born in Trier on 5 May 1818. This part of the Rhine Valley had been upended by Napoleonic conquest and annexation in the decades just prior (c. 1795 – 1814). The wave of far-reaching political and social reforms which followed in the French army’s wake provided Marx père—the son and brother of rabbis—with previously impossible opportunities. Heinrich saw his opening and earned a “certificate of capacity” in the Code Napoléon from the Koblenz law school (c. 1811– 1812). The Marx family was among the most eminent in this corner of the German-speaking world by the time baby Karl arrived. This background of financial security and social distinction is worth remembering because it helps to explain two enduring features of Marx’s adult life. The first is his relationship with Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a minor Prussian aristocrat who moved in the same elevated social scene as Heinrich. Jenny was four years older than Karl; at some point in his adolescence, Marx fell in love. After years of doggedly courting her, Jenny relented during the summer of 1836—at which point they were officially engaged. The second is the sort of education Marx received: first at the classical gymnasium in Trier (1830 – 1835) and then at the universities of Bonn (1835 – 1836) and Berlin (1836 – 1840). As the eldest son of a successful jurist, Marx was expected to buttress his family’s good name and more-than-modest fortunes. Things, as they say, did not go according to plan (e. g., Liedman 2019, Sperber 2013, Stedman Jones 2016, Wheen 1999).

The Miseducation of a Prussian Gentleman: 1835 – 1842 Marx studied too little, drank too much, and burned through his father’s money while at the University of Bonn. He fantasized about becoming the next Goethe. At the end of a profligate first year, Heinrich transferred his recalcitrant son to the University of Berlin. Near the end of the Fall 1836 term, the father reached out to his aimless and still-engaged son. “I repeat,” Heinrich counseled: “you have taken on great responsibilities, dear Karl, and—at the risk of irritating your sensitivity—I must express my opinion in my own prosaic way; you cannot secure the tranquility of the one to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-006

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whom you are totally devoted with a poetic mind’s exaggerations and exultations of love; on the contrary, you run the risk of destroying it” (MECW 1: 662, 666/MEGA2 III.1: 301; my translation). Paternal anxiety fell on deaf ears. In his reply, Marx boasted that he had recently “got to know Hegel from beginning to end, along with most of his students. Through several meetings with friends in Stralow I got into a Doctor’s Club, which includes several Privatdozenten and my most intimate of Berlin friends, Dr. Rutenberg” (MECW 1: 19/MEW 40: 10; my translation). Anyone who has read Hegel at all carefully knows that Marx was exaggerating— whether to distract, hoodwink, or impress his father is an open question. The Berlin Doktorklub was a social center of gravity for minor scholars and aspiring intellectuals like Adolf Rutenberg and Bruno Bauer. When its members weren’t heckling each other over beers, they obsessed over the details of Hegel’s philosophical vision, denounced the Prussian monarchy’s authoritarianism, and chipped away at the thin edges of Christian orthodoxy. Instead of Goethe, Marx began wondering whether he might become the next Hegel. It was all more than his old man could stomach. “Alas, your conduct has consisted of nothing but disorder, meandering in all the fields of knowledge, musty traditions in somber lamplight,” Heinrich snapped in frustration: degeneration in a learned dressing gown with uncombed hair has replaced degeneration with a beer glass. And a shirking unsociability and refusal of all conventions and even all for your father. Your intercourse with the world is limited to your sordid room, where perhaps lie abandoned in the classical disorder the love-letters of one Jenny and the tear-stained counsels of your father (As quoted in McLellan 1973, 33).

It was time for Marx to choose. He could have a legal career, social standing, a comfortable home with a wife and children; or he could have Romantic poetry, Hegelian philosophy, bacheloric solitude, and probable destitution. Heinrich would pay for one but not the other. The family struggle over Marx’s education came to a sudden end when his father died on 10 May 1838. Heinrich’s absence virtually guaranteed that his son would continue drifting away from the intended path. Yet, as the curtain was falling on his potential future as a lawyer, Bruno Bauer— one of Hegel’s most clever students and an early source-critic of the New Testament—indicated that an academic career might be in the cards. In 1839 Bauer published a pointed, personal attack on his senior colleague Ernst Hengstenberg. At this distance, all that one really needs to know about Hengstenberg is that he was everything Bauer was not: a reliable apologist for the Prussian royal court; a dignified Doktor of theology; a resolute defender of Lutheran orthodoxy (Bigler 1972). When the faculty snubbed Bauer for his impertinence, he was finished at the University of Berlin. Karl von Altenstein, the reform-minded Prussian Minister of Culture, intervened on Bauer’s behalf and created a post for

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him at the University of Bonn. Bauer was confident that, given his relationship with Altenstein, Marx might also join the Bonn faculty after completing a doctoral dissertation. With the prospect of a university post on the horizon, Marx started writing. A year and half later, a philosophical study of ancient Greek atomism was complete—but his academic career was over before the printer’s ink dried. The problem was that the faculty at Bonn were never thrilled by Bauer’s imposed presence. When Altenstein died in May 1840, Bauer lost his patron and protector. He was dismissed from the University of Bonn in March 1842. Marx’s only chance of ever securing a university position went with him. Never a lawyer, he would also never become an academic.

Slings and Arrows: 1843 – 1845 By the summer of 1842, Karl and Jenny had been engaged for six years. They were no closer to getting married. For two children of the haute-ish bourgeoisie, it was out-of-the-question until Marx had some sort of reliable income. He was not alone in being over-educated and under-employed. The post-Napoleonic Prussian state enticed too many sons from middling families to earn degrees in hopes of becoming jurists, professors, or civil servants. The supply of qualified candidates for available posts was already outpacing demand by the mid-1830s. In this way, Marx belonged to a generation of young Prussian gentlemen who had no choice but to negotiate the structural mismatch between social aspirations, intellectual skills, and professional opportunities. With the traditional avenues to a respectable bourgeois life blocked, Marx—like many of his peers—turned to print journalism. His first position was with Rheinische Zeitung. Most of the newspaper’s startup capital was provided by chamber-of-commerce types in Köln: businessmen who desired a reliable platform to advance the classic, liberal causes of a free press, free trade, and a constitutionally constrained monarch. The first editor was sacked in a matter of weeks. Adolf Rutenberg was hired on as the new Editor and immediately reached out to his old friends from the Berlin Doktorklub for contributions. Marx’s pieces were soon regular features. He was so dependable, in fact, that he was offered a salaried position on the editorial board. The wheels started to come off the endeavor in October 1842. It seems the newspaper published one too many snarky articles regarding the Prussian state’s malicious, bureaucratic incompetence. The paper’s fate was sealed when it ran an editorial on 4 January 1843 complaining about Russian interference in Prussian affairs. Tsar Nicholas I was the most important geopolitical ally of the Prussian monarchy, so when King Friedrich Wilhelm IV received the Tsar’s request

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to quash the paper, he happily obliged. On 21 January, Prussian authorities announced that Rheinische Zeitung’s license to publish would expire in March. Around the same time, the Prussian government also persuaded the King of Saxony to shutter Hallische Jahrbücher—another broadly liberal, reform-oriented publication. Arnold Ruge, the editor, had been requesting contributions from Marx as early as January 1842. Four days after receiving his own paper’s death sentence, Marx sat down and wrote Ruge a resigned and bitter letter. “I have grown tired of the hypocrisy, the stupidity, the raw authority, not to mention our bowing and scraping,” he laments: “I can’t start anything new in Germany. To stay here is to be untrue to myself. So, if you would like to offer some advice regarding this matter, I would be grateful” (MECW 1: 399/MEW 27: 415; my translation). Marx didn’t know that Ruge was already planning a new enterprise—a publication that would exist beyond the territorial control of Prussian censors and thereby enjoy a measure of intellectual freedom. Once the financing was in place, Ruge invited Marx to become co-Editor of the Paris-based Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The most attractive part of the offer for Marx was a yearly salary plus honoraria for his own contributions. He eagerly accepted. On 13 March 1843, Marx wrote Ruge to explain that the first order of business was to “travel to Kreuznach, marry, and spend a month or more there with my wife’s mother” (MECW 1: 399/MEW 27: 416; my translation). After a seven-year-long engagement, Jenny and Karl were married on 19 June 1843. Jenny was pregnant before summer’s end. By mid-October the young family was settling into a fashionable townhouse in the upscale, seventh arrondissement. Things went wrong almost immediately. One of the editorial goals was introducing a German-language audience to contemporary French political thought. Marx and Ruge were gutted to discover that no noteworthy French figures were interested in participating. The planned publication of Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher limped on, nevertheless. Heinrich Heine, a fellow Prussian ex-pat, penned a derisive “hymn of praise” to Ludwig I, the doddering king of Bavaria. Friedrich Engels—who, at this point, was not much more to Marx than a peripheral member of the Berlin Doctorklub—contributed a review of Thomas Carlyle’s Past & Present as well as an essay that treated British political economy as a worrying symptom of industrial capitalism.¹⁸ For his part, Marx wrote two essays grumbling about the shortcomings of the German democratic movement and its played-out reliance on Hegel. An expansive double issue arrived with a dull  Tristam Hunt (2009) estimates that Marx got more out his friendship with Engels than Engels did from Marx. After spending a decade with these two, I sadly agree. There’s no way of knowing what might have happened if their paths never crossed, of course. With that said, I don’t see how Karl becomes MARX without Fred.

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thud in February 1844. Poor to non-existent sales followed and the entire enterprise was over by April. In lieu of his promised salary and honoraria, Marx received a stack of unsold copies. He and Jenny scratched out a bare-bones Parisian existence for the rest of the year with financial assistance from friends and family. Marx began writing barbed articles for Vorwärts, a German-language paper with a fiercely democratic, even anti-monarchical reputation. In the meantime, two significant milestones were passed. Jenny and Karl’s first daughter (Jenny Caroline) was born on 1 May 1844. In late August, Marx and Engels were properly re-introduced. It seems they had met briefly sometime in the fall of 1842 while Marx was at Rheinische Zeitung. Marx had looked past or through him; Engels had taken the hint. This time was different. Marx had been rightfully impressed by the “Outline for a Critique of Political Economy” Engels wrote for the ill-fated Jahrbücher. Engels, for his part, was returning from a year-long apprenticeship at his father’s textile mill in Manchester, England and in no rush to return to the family home in Barmen. Serendipitously, Jenny and the baby were away visiting her family. This left Marx and Engels free to talk shop for a week-and-a-half, usually while drinking late into the night at louche cafés along the Quai Voltaire. At some point during that ten-day stretch, they agreed to co-author a pamphlet needling Bruno Bauer and his inconsequential, merely philosophical criticisms of commercial society. Engels quickly wrote a dozen pages or so. “Critique does nothing but ‘construct formulae out of the categories of existence,’ namely, out of the existing Hegelian philosophy and existing social aspirations,” he sighed, “formulae, nothing but formulae” (MECW 4: 20/MEW 2: 20; my translation). He left for Barmen and expected Marx to quickly add his two cents. The slender pamphlet they first envisioned soon metastasized into a sprawling, unforgiving assault on Bruno Bauer’s political irrelevance and social condescension. “On one side stand the masses, the passive and mindless material element of history,” Marx writes: “On the other side stand spirit and criticism; Herr Bruno & Co. as the active element from which all history proceeds. The act of reconstructing or reorganizing [Umgestaltungsakt] society is reduced to the cerebration [Hirntätigkeit] of critical criticism” (MECW 4: 86/MEW 2: 91; my translation). Even if we accept that thinking is a kind of doing, it remains the case that thinking—taken on its own—rarely amounts to doing much. Once one knows something about the conditions of its creation, it is difficult to shake the sense that Marx was settling a personal score with The Holy Family. When he wasn’t finding new ways to belittle Herr Bruno & Co., Marx was preparing for something totally new: a book project that would extend the critique of political economy initially outlined by Engels. He was somehow confident enough to sign a contract with the Darmstadt-based publisher C.W. Leske in February

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1845. Marx promised a complete draft of the book— provisionally called Critique of Politics and Economics—by the fall. A much-needed cash advance of 1500 francs arrived shortly thereafter. At last, the future was settling into place; or so it seemed. Marx did not know that on 7 January 1845, King Louis-Philippe granted a Prussian diplomatic request to shut down Vorwärts. A few days later, François Guizot— French Minister of the Interior—issued a conditional expulsion order for everyone connected with the paper. Sign a binding pledge to abandon all forms of political activism and critical journalism, and you could stay in France; refuse, and you had a month to leave, risking arrest, imprisonment, or deportation. Marx refused. This is how he found himself on a horse-drawn coach headed for Brussels on 3 February 1845. Jenny and their eight-month-old daughter were permitted to stay behind, selling what could be sold to pay family debts and pull together something for their new life in Belgium. The two eventually left Paris on a cold, late-February morning. Jenny was three months pregnant.

Panic and Poverty: 1845 – 1847 The beginning of the Marx family’s life in Brussels was not particularly auspicious. Upon her arrival, Jenny discovered that Karl had secured nothing more than a bed at a boarding house. This turned into brief stays at local hotels and the borrowed home of a passing acquaintance. They eventually pawned enough of their possessions to move into to a plain, three-story townhouse in a working-class neighborhood. It was a painful step down from what Jenny was accustomed to, but she did her best to graciously embrace the new reality. “The little house should do,” she stoically noted: “One needs little space in winter anyhow” (MEGA2 III.1: 480; my translation). Helene Demuth—a long-serving domestic servant in the Westphalen household, known by confidantes as Lenchen, Nim, or Nimmy—joined the family in mid-April to help prepare for the second baby’s arrival. Marx’s publisher was still expecting a complete draft of his manuscript by the end of August. In between setting up house and welcoming Jenny Laura into the world (26 September 1845), Marx joined Engels on a tour of rapidly industrializing northern England. It was his turn to witness the novel cruelties of industrial production. The two men spent their days grinding through the classics of political economy at Manchester’s Chetham Library.¹⁹ At night, they downed pints at Mancunian pubs

 For a certain kind of twentieth-century Marxist, Manchester’s Chetham Library became a pilgrimage site. In fact, the table where the two worked and the books they likely held have been set apart in a properly Durkheimian fashion.

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and learned about the living hell of factory life from the workers themselves. Mary Burns—an Irish, working-class activist who would remain Engels’ lover until her death in 1863—provided access to working-class spaces otherwise inaccessible for a couple of Prussian gentlemen (Gabriel 2011, 612).²⁰ The time spent together in England seems to have permanently set the bond that Marx and Engels initially forged in Paris. When they returned to Brussels, Engels decided to rent the flat next door. Instead of finishing Critique of Politics and Economics, Marx threw himself into political organizing. He had become an impassioned socialist by this time and spearheaded an attempt to establish “communist correspondence committees” throughout metropolitan Europe. As he explained in a May 1846 letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the goal was: “to establish a link between the German socialists and French and English socialists; to keep foreigners informed of the socialist movements developing in Germany; and to inform the Germans in Germany about the progress of socialism in France and England” (MECW 38: 39/MEW 27: 442; my translation). Proudhon declined. Marx and Engels pressed on. Leske wrote that summer to ask about the now-overdue manuscript; Marx dissembled. The book was mostly finished, he crowed. Yet, considering how long it had been sitting around, he needed to reanimate the prose and update some of the facts. “Since the almost completed manuscript of the first volume of my work has been lying here for so long,” he pretended in August, “I will not let it be published without reworking it factually and stylistically. It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of 6 months, publish exactly what he wrote 6 months earlier” (MECW 38: 51/MEW 27: 449; my translation). Marx reassured the publisher that a fully revised manuscript would be in his hands no later than December 1846. On 2 February 1847, Leske wrote again; this time to inform Marx that his book contract was terminated—and the advance should be returned at once. “If you were, in November of the last year, unable to deliver the promised part of the manuscript, you owed me a notification and at the same time a definite date of delivery,” Leske complained: “Instead of that I have heard nothing from you since 1 August of last year” (As quoted in Tribe 2015: 224). Marx apparently never replied because Leske wrote yet again in September, this time pleading with him to reimburse some of the advance. This letter, too, seems to have gone

 George Boyer (1998) argues that both Condition of the Working Class and the Manifesto are reliable indicators of how nasty life could be for the mid-nineteenth century working classes. However, he concludes that Engels and Marx were too quick to generalize from the fresh hell of the “Hungry Forties” to the nature of capitalism per se.

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unanswered. Critique of Politics and Economics was never written. The advance, it appears, was never returned. Marx’s dithering had consequences. His desire to be the greatest left-wing critic of “bourgeois” political economy was upended when Proudhon published System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty in October 1846. The heart of Proudhon’s argument was that, thus far, the new “science” of political economy did little more than justify the systemic exploitation of the working classes. That is, if political economists really did understand how the modern economy works, they should be engineering an order where everyone collectively prospers. Rubbing salt in an already raw wound, Leske Verlag—Marx’s former, wouldbe publisher—produced a German translation of Proudhon’s treatise the following year. Marx, it seemed, had been eclipsed. The immediate result was Poverty of Philosophy, a snarling riposte in which he implausibly fashions himself as an economist. The book is noteworthy in part because his fondness for denouncing the irrelevance of post-Hegelian German philosophy is largely absent. Bruno Bauer isn’t even mentioned. It is almost as if a page has been turned in Marx’s mind. Not even the birth of his son Charles (3 February 1847)—known simply and lovingly as Musch—slowed his progress. The manuscript was complete by June 1847 and published in July, on Marx’s own very slender dime. Although its immediate goal was shoving Proudhon off the stage, Poverty of Philosophy reveals how Marx was trying to describe commercial society in terms that synthesized: German philosophy’s appreciation for historical development; the French socialists’ interest in class relations; and the analytic categories of English political economy. In fact, the treatise contains so many elements of what we’ve come to think of as Marx’s point of view that it is tempting to read it as a mature statement of purpose. However, drawing a straight line from Poverty to Capital is a well-meaning mistake.

Sleeping on a Volcano: 1847 – 1849 While Marx was busy adopting the role of a radical economist in print, he and Engels remained focused on what really mattered to them: laying the groundwork for a pan-European, radical democratic or socialist movement. Towards this end, they facilitated the merger of the London-based “League of the Just”—a motley crew of German émigré laborers and political radicals founded in the late 1830s —with their own Brussels-based network of communist societies. The polyglot “Communist League” entered the world in June 1847. Its mission was nothing less than “the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foun-

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dation of a new society without classes and without private property” (As quoted in Day and Gaido 2009, 4– 5). Marx’s unyielding desire to be the commanding figure of the European socialist movement often resulted in Machiavellian scheming which, in hindsight, is occasionally comical but mostly disappointing.²¹ Nevertheless, these battles were fueled by the sense that a singular moment in European history was approaching. Owing to a decade of bad weather, diseased crops, poor harvests, and high prices, the 1840s are frequently described as Europe’s “Hungry Forties.” As populations confronted the double-edged scourge of food shortages and price inflation, food riots erupted from the British Isles to black-soil Russia. “The old year ended in scarcity, the new one opens with starvation,” one Prussian official observed in January 1848: “Misery, spiritual and physical, traverses Europe in ghastly shapes—the one without God, the other without bread. Woe if they join hands!” (As quoted in Rappaport 2008, 37). Things were no better in France. “I am told that because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand,” Alexis de Tocqueville warned the French Chamber of Deputies in January 1848: “Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are deceived” (Tocqueville 1896, 14).²² A month later, revolutionary brigades were barricading the streets of Paris and King Louis-Philippe was abdicating the French throne. Marx’s feel for the revolutionary potential of this period is part of what makes The Manifesto of the Communist Party such an effective piece of in-house propaganda—even though, truth be told, there really was no such party to address at the time (McAdams 2018). Engels initially drafted a no-frills catechism of principles for the Communist League during the fall of 1847 (MECW 6: 96 – 103/MEW 4: 361– 380). Marx then breathed life into the assignment by presenting European history since the fourteenth century as the slow rise and fast-approaching fall of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary potential of 1848 also shaped his territorial comings and goings. King Leopold I, worried that he might be the next deposed monarch, started expelling potential troublemakers from Belgium in late-February. The end of Marx’s time in Brussels came quickly: King Leopold signed a deportation order on 2 March; Karl and Jenny were arrested and interrogated on 3 March; the entire Marx clan was on a train heading towards Paris on 4 March.

 Far too often, the bitter struggle between the IWA factions loyal to Marx and those to Bakunin has been used to argue that Stalin’s brutality was the poisoned fruit of a malignant tree. Nevertheless, I suspect that Bakunin wasn’t far off the mark when he observed that Marx—in person— could be “vain, perfidious, and cunning” (Bakunin 1971, 25; e. g., Thomas 1990).  He famously goes on to observe: “This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano” (Tocqueville 1896, 14).

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The family’s ability to return to Paris was a direct consequence of the successful “February” Revolution. Old left-wing allies were now members of the Provisional Government, and they invited Marx to rejoin the militant republican struggle. More importantly, his comrades could also vouchsafe his family’s security. However, shortly after Marx arrived, promising news began filtering into Paris from central and eastern Europe. In Budapest, Prague, and Venice, popular uprisings hacked away at the Hapsburg Empire’s foundations. Republican movements toppled the hereditary monarchs in Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Bavaria. Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, resigned on 13 March 1848 after a botched attempt to break up a pro-democracy rally left fifteen dead. The Academic Legion, a paramilitary group of mostly middle-class university students, effectively controlled the streets in Vienna. Emperor Ferdinand I calmed the waters for a while by promising a liberal democratic constitution which guaranteed universal male suffrage and freedom of the press. The final autocratic levee appeared to break when the Prussian army killed hundreds at a demonstration in Berlin on 18 March. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV recognized his vulnerability and followed Ferdinand’s lead by also promising a liberal constitutional order in hopes of securing the peace—and his rule. A general amnesty for all political prisoners and exiled enemies of the state was proclaimed in the meantime. Marx saw his opportunity. On 6 April 1848—barely a month after arriving in Paris—the Marx family packed their things and left for the German territories. Jenny, Lenchen, and the children encamped at Trier. Marx traveled on to Köln with hopes of producing an heir to Rheinische Zeitung. After a frenetic month of raising capital from his old sponsors and organizing a barebones staff, Neue Rheinische Zeitung came to life on 1 June 1848. The goal was to keep the German public informed about political developments throughout Europe, thereby energizing them for their own revolutionary struggles. In a matter of months, the paper was one of the most widely read publications in the German-speaking states— thanks in part to articles with eye-catching titles like “An Admission of Incompetence by the Assemblies of Frankfurt and Berlin” (MECW 7: 72/MEW 5: 63). The paper was hemorrhaging money, but its readership enhanced Marx’s modest public reputation. As a result, he also became a subject of official concern. His first skirmish with the authorities was over an anonymous article published on 4 July 1848 which detailed a recent case of police brutality and prosecutorial malfeasance. Public prosecutors announced the following day that the paper was under investigation for defamation and libel. Marx was called before the examining magistrate on 7 July and interrogated about the article’s provenance. He refused to cooperate. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial staff subsequently became targets of judicial and extra-judicial harassment.

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The local garrison of Prussian troops spent most of that summer conspicuously refortifying its positions throughout the city. After one too many dustups between soldiers and civilians, Marx mustered a few thousand to the city center to witness the creation of a distinctly Jacobin-sounding “Committee of Public Safety” on 13 September. Rural peasants, urban laborers, and sympathetic members of the lesser bourgeoisie gathered a few days later in the pastoral village of Worringen. This assembly was even larger; the paper estimated between 6000 – 8000 attendees. It also poked fun at Köln’s Chief Public Prosecutor for hounding the attendees in search of a crime and even offered a pointed dose of prosecutorial advice. Perhaps, Engels suggested, Herr Hecker would have better luck interviewing: the gang of disguised policemen and note-taking [stenographirender] mouchards who were roaming around the meadow. But, of course, if some of these pillars of the state know nothing, few should be surprised. One of them, in particular, was already so drunk at noon that he moved teary-eyed from one bar table to the next, gratefully accepting each drink offered and telling everyone “in confidence” that he was there as a spy, but was still a decent fellow (MECW 7: 451/MEGA2 I.7: 744; my translation).

Martial law was declared the next day. Arrest warrants were issued for Engels and other members of the editorial staff. Publication of Neue Rheinische Zeitung was forbidden until further notice. That joke wasn’t funny anymore. When the paper resumed publication on 12 October 1848, its revolutionary bona fides were polished but its finances were wrecked. Shareholders were reluctant to supply more operating capital; few readers were willing to advance the publication money by renewing their subscriptions early. It was only a matter of time before the whole enterprise bled to death. In November and December 1848, Marx was again called before Köln’s examining magistrate. This time, the charges were treason and libel. On 7– 8 February 1849, he successfully defended himself against all criminal charges. It was a pyrrhic victory. By the end of the month the Prussian Minister of the Interior had approved a request for Marx’s expulsion. The only condition was that, given Marx’s local prominence, the authorities should wait until he wrote or did something actionable. To the authorities’ frustration, Marx toned down his rhetoric—even as violent, working-class insurrections erupted throughout the industrializing Rhine Valley. The powers-that-be eventually grew tired of waiting for a misstep. On 16 May 1849, police arrived at the family’s door. They were no longer welcome in Prussia. Jenny scurried to sell whatever she could to engineer another forced migration. Marx diligently prepared the final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, symbolically printed in revolutionary and—one should add—debtor’s red ink. They were heading back to Paris.

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In the Midst of Debt: 1849 – 1852 Marx was in dire straits at this point. He and Jenny were expecting their fourth child. They were moving house for the fifth time in six years. They were flat broke. Worse still, they were no longer welcome in Paris. With the December 1848 election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (aka Napoleon III) as President of the Second French Republic, France had grown increasingly counter-revolutionary. French officials presented Marx with a stark choice shortly after his arrival in Paris on 9 June 1849. He could remain in France but would have to move his family to the Morbihan district of Brittany—a region Marx regarded as a malarial swamp.²³ The other option was a one-way ticket to England. Thus, in late August 1849, Marx crossed the Channel to find a place in London for his private army of misfits. Two weeks later Jenny, Lenchen, and the children followed in his wake. They first settled into an unaffordable flat in the Chelsea district of London. Desperate for any kind of income, Marx hustled among the German émigré community to raise enough capital for a resurrected version of Neue Rheinische Zeitung. This time the paper would be published in the independent city-state of Hamburg and carry the telling sub-title Politisch-ökonomische Revue. On Guy Fawkes Day (5 November 1849), a sickly baby boy was born. Everything in London was more expensive than anticipated, so they could not afford a wet nurse. Jenny tried breastfeeding frail Heinrich Guido Marx (aka “Fawksey”) but it did not go well. He cried constantly and slept poorly; she did not produce enough milk and soon developed sores on her breasts. They were unable to pay the rent; or their tabs at the baker’s and butcher’s shops; or the doctor’s bill from Fawksey’s birth; or for a physician to check on their frail infant. Engels arrived in London shortly after Fawksey’s birth and offered whatever short-term financial assistance he could. It wasn’t enough. The family was evicted from their flat for unpaid rent in April 1850. The scene Jenny describes is devastating: two bailiffs entered the house and placed under distraint what little I possessed—beds, linen, clothes, everything, even my poor infant’s cradle, and the best of the toys belonging to the girls, who burst into tears. They threatened to take everything away within 2 hours—leaving me lying on the bare boards with my shivering children and my sore breast (As quoted in Gabriel 2011, 185).

 With more than a touch of teenage melodrama, Marx viewed this option as a thinly disguised murder plot [Mordversuch] (MECW 38: 212/MEW 27: 142).

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With four children and no income, the best Marx could do was a cramped pair of rooms in London’s then-unsavory Soho district. Their lives continued to spiral out of control. Jenny was pregnant again; there were rumors that the British government intended to expel the most recent wave of German political refugees, including Marx. Fawksey died on 19 November 1850, barely a year old. The Revue failed to catch on and sputtered to an end. Despite the annus horribilis of 1850, there were a few reasons for Karl and Jenny to be encouraged on New Year’s Day 1851. Engels had recently negotiated an arrangement with his father to serve as an internal auditor at the Ermen & Engels Mill in Manchester. The position paid Engels a generous salary, which meant there was enough money—given Fred’s unending generosity—to both run his household and subsidize the Marx family’s survival. That is, until Marx could finish the political economy book and—they hoped—help change the world. The family was now living in a slightly larger, slightly nicer flat than before. More importantly, it was free from any association with Fawksey’s short, painful life. The Reading Room at the British Museum was a short walk away and Marx now spent most days filling notebooks with extracts, glosses, and fragmentary insights about the global economy.²⁴ More than intellectual ambition seems to have been hurrying Marx to the Reading Room. On 31 March 1851, he wrote Engels about the birth of his daughter Jenny Eveline Frances (aka Franziska) and his ever-present debts. Although the birth appears to have been relatively easy, Marx reported that his wife “is now very ill, more for domestic than physical reasons” (MECW 38: 322/MEW 27: 227; my translation). Many biographers believe the “domestic” cause confining Jenny to her bed was that Lenchen was pregnant and unwed. It is possible that Marx was the father; the evidence is suggestive, but very circumstantial (Carver 2005). Either way, the newborn baby, bed-ridden mother, and pregnant, unwed domestic were apparently getting in the way. “The worst of it,” Marx wrote on 2 April 1851: is that I now suddenly find myself slowed down in my work at the library. I am far enough along that I will have finished with all the economic shit [Scheiße] in five weeks’ time. Et cela fait, I will finish the political economy material at home and then throw myself at another science at the Museum. Ça commence de m’ennuyer [I’m getting bored]. Au fond, this science has made no progress since A. Smith and D. Ricardo, in spite of the many individual studies which are often extremely precise (MECW 38: 325/MEW 27: 228; my translation).

There is no existing manuscript evidence to indicate that Marx was producing anything more than another batch of reading notes. So, unless he was bluffing—which

 For sympathetically attentive accounts of these “London notebooks,” see Fricke and Jahn (1979).

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is always a possibility—this letter merely indicates that one stretch of reading was coming to an end and another one was about to begin. On 3 April 1851, Engels sat down to encourage his friend. It was time to stop reading and start writing: “The thing has really been dragging on too long, and so long as there is an unread book in front of you which you believe to be important, you will not get around to writing it” (MECW 38: 330/MEW 27: 233 – 234; my translation). On 23 June 1851, Lenchen gave birth to Henry Frederick Demuth.²⁵ Four days later, Marx was recalibrating his work schedule. “I am usually at the British Museum from 9 in the morning until 7 in the evening,” he explained: The material I am working on has so many branches that, even with my best effort, I won’t be able to finish for another 6 – 8 weeks. Additionally, there are always practical disruptions that get in the way—inevitable given the wretched circumstances in which we vegetate here. Despite all of this, the thing is quickly coming to an end (MECW 38: 377/MEW 27: 559; my translation).

The precise nature of these constant, “practical” interruptions remains unclear. One contributing factor was almost certainly Franziska’s poor and failing health. Marx, too, was beginning to find himself suffering from the indignities of hemorrhoids and rotting teeth. A letter to Engels written on 31 July 1851 suggests a man and a family coming apart at the seams: I should already be done at the library. But the interruptions and disturbances are too much; and of course, there’s not much I can do at home when everything’s always in a state of siege and tears are running down my face all night. I feel sorry for my wife. The main burden falls on her and, au fond, she is right. Il faut que l’industrie soit plus productive que le mariage [Work should be more productive than marriage]. For all that, you must remember that by nature I am trés peu endurant [impatient] and even quelque peu dur [a little rough], so that from time to time I lose my equanimity (MECW 38: 398/MEW 27: 293; my translation).

After two months of work, he apparently needed two more months to finish. Marx pressed on but acknowledged that Jenny was “suffering and caught up in the most unpleasant bourgeois jam from morning till night” (MECW 38: 403/MEGA2 III.4: 565; my translation). The family narrowly avoided eviction in August for unpaid rent. This same discouraging pattern continued for months until, on 14 April 1852, Franziska died. There wasn’t enough money to pay an undertaker, so the infant’s body was kept in the flat’s back room until they could pull together the cash. The scene Jenny paints is, once again, shattering: “For three days the poor child

 He was subsequently placed with a foster family in East London. Marx’s daughters would eventually befriend Freddy and express regret for how he’d been treated.

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fought for her life, suffering very much. Her poor, lifeless body rested in the little garret room, everyone else moved into the front room; when night came we made our beds on the floor and our three living children lay next to us and we wept for the little angel who was resting cold and dead near us” (As quoted in Marx-Aveling 1896, vii). With some financial assistance, the Marx family was eventually able to bury their little girl—not far from Fawksey’s grave.

Toil and Trouble: 1853 – 1859 Drowning in domestic chaos, bruising sadness, and debt, Marx still managed to write. He wrote about things close to his heart like the prosecution of Communist League comrades for their part in the spoiled German Revolution. He also revisited his understanding of the unfinished 1848 French Revolution by writing a pamphlet about Napoléon III. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is, by general agreement, a masterpiece of political journalism. The knowing opening line about Hegel, tragedy, and farce was yet another timely gift from Engels (MECW 38: 505/MEGA2 III.4: 260). It was a commercial flop. Marx began teaching himself English. Sometime during the late spring or early summer of 1851, the American journalist Charles Anderson Dana asked him to write a series of articles covering the European democratic movement for the New York Tribune. The essays were well-received and Marx was invited to become a regular, paid contributor. There was only one problem: Engels wrote the initial, successful pieces. The Tribune is the most widely read paper in North America, Marx informed Engels on 8 August 1851: “If you are able to provide me with an article in English on the German situation by Friday morning (15 August), that would be a great start” (MECW 38: 409/MEGA2 III.4: 170; my translation). Engels, as usual, proved his mettle. After a year-and-a-half of this charade, Marx was able to contribute some of his own pieces to the Tribune. For each published article he was paid £2. So long as he—or he and Engels—produced two articles a week, this was just about enough to cover the family’s expenses. The money from the Tribune articles was further buttressed by Engels faithfully sending pound notes down to London. One result of this newfound stability is that the sharp awfulness of 1850 – 1852 appears to have diminished by the mid-1850s. On the surface, at least, the Marx family was happy or, at the very least, happier. A healthy baby girl—Jenny Julia Eleanor— was born on 16 January 1855. More ghosts from the past were put away when there was enough money to hire a wet nurse. Marx settled into a steady pattern of reading economic periodicals at the Reading Room, writing articles for the Tribune or a handful of German-language newspapers, and speculating about the

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next revolutionary opportunity. In March 1855, for example, he discerned a potentially catastrophic economic crisis that seemed to grow more ominous with each day. He predicted it was only a matter of months before the antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Europe reached a tipping point and “the political movement—which has been more or less asleep among these classes over the past six years, leaving behind only the cadres for a new agitation—will spring up again” (MECW 14: 55/MEW 11: 99; my translation). The early signs of an economic collapse amounted to nothing. Then, another tragedy. Early on the morning of 6 April 1855, Marx’s eight-year-old son “Musch” died. A week later, the still-staggering father sat down to write his old friend: Needless to say, the house has been very desolate and deserted since the death of the dear child who was its energizing spirit. It is indescribable; we feel his absence everywhere. I’ve had all kinds of bad luck, but only now do I know what real misfortune is. I feel broken down. Luckily, I’ve had such a headache since the day of the funeral that I am unable to think or see or hear. Amid all the terrible anguish I have gone through these past days, the thought of you and your friendship has kept me upright; as well as the hope that we still have something meaningful to do in the world together (MECW 39: 533/MEGA2 III.7: 189; my translation).

The grieving parents soon boarded a train to Manchester and spent the next three weeks with Engels. The trip solved nothing, but Engels lovingly nursed them both through the fresh muck of despair. “Bacon says that really important people have so many relations to nature and the world, so many objects of interest, that they easily get over any loss,” Marx wrote to his sometimes ally, sometimes foe, Ferdinand Lassalle on 28 July 1855: “I am not one of those important people. The death of my child has deeply shaken my heart and brain, and I feel the loss as fresh as the first day. My poor wife is completely broken down, too” (MECW 39: 544/MEW 28: 617; my translation). The Marx family spent the rest of 1855 running from debt collectors and grief. When news arrived in 1856 that Jenny’s mother and uncle were dead—each leaving her a considerable inheritance—the family moved into an eight room, four-story townhouse just outside London. It was a palatial estate compared to the cramped, funereal rooms on Dean Street. In the midst of death there was life and, perhaps, hope. The domestic turmoil did not end with their move to Grafton Terrace. Marx was soon complaining to Engels that “the house is always so disordered that I find it difficult to write” (MECW 40: 85/MEGA2 III.8: 63; my translation). Then, of course, there were the debts which—a bit like capital itself— only seemed to accumulate. This was a problem because the Tribune money was beginning to dry up. American readers were shifting their attention away from European politics and towards the mounting tensions over the future of slavery in the United States. Marx’s pieces were now routinely going unpublished. “So here I sit, strand-

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ed in a house that has already taken what little cash I had,” Marx wrote to Engels on 20 January 1857: “I have no idea what to do and am, in fact, in a more desperate situation than five years ago. I thought I had already swallowed more than my fair share of crap [Dreck]. Mais non. The worst thing is that this is no temporary crisis. I do not see how I can work my way out of this” (MECW 40: 94/MEGA2 III.8: 72; my translation). There was, however, room to think and a reason to write. As he worked through the global economy’s actuarial details in 1856, Marx thought the conditions were once again right for a financial disaster. “There is now a movement in the European money markets analogous to the panic of 1847,” he judged in October 1856: “The whole period of time from the middle of 1849 down to the present was nothing more than a brief respite granted by history to old European society” (MECW 15: 113, 115/MEW 12: 54– 55). From his perspective, the heart of the issue was the alchemical power of fractional-reserve lending or, in today’s terms, financial leverage. The upside of leverage was that it could dramatically increase the available investment capital. In the right hands, $60,000 could become $600,000 overnight. The capital expenditure which resulted yielded more construction, more manufacturing, more farming, more consumption, and— perhaps—more employment. The downside of leverage was that “fictitiously” multiplied capital encouraged unsustainable rates of economic expansion, industrial overproduction, shrinking profit margins, and “stock-jobbing” speculation.²⁶ At the same time that credit was busy fueling capital accumulation on one side of the ledger, debt was feverishly destroying it on the other. Marx wasn’t wrong, but neither was he right (e. g., Calomiris and Schweikart 1991, Ó Gráda and White 2003, Kelly and Ó Gráda 2000). By late June, worries about mortgage-backed securities and railroad stocks could be spotted on both the London and New York exchanges—but as an asset class, they carried no more risk than at the start of the year. Anxious about insufficient gold reserves, banks on each side of the Atlantic raised interest rates. Genuine financial panic kicked in when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company—on the hook for millions in credit to various railroad ventures—declared insolvency in late August. The situation grew more precarious when the SS Central America, carrying approximately $1.6 million in gold—a potential “backstop” for the growing banking crisis

 That is, leverage has the potential to transform the entire economy into an enormous pyramid scheme: the only way to avoid a debt-driven financial catastrophe is for capital to keep accumulating forever. “In pursuing the enormous operations in which, by the very nature of its organization, it finds itself involved, it must rely on the progressive execution of new plans on a still more enlarged scale,” Marx noted: “With such an institution, any stagnation, and still more any regress, is a symptom of fatal decay” (MECW 15: 270). Radically oversimplified, Marx is thinking here about the core dynamics responsible for both an “everything bubble” and “too big to fail.”

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—sank off the coast of South Carolina in September. Banks up and down the eastern seaboard suspended the convertibility of their notes into specie. The New York Stock Market crashed. Margin calls went unanswered. Brokerage houses closed. By October 1857, the first waves of transatlantic financial disorder were arriving in England. Charged with confidence and flush with anticipation, Marx turned his attention to the political economy book once again. On 8 December 1857, he wrote to inform Engels: “I am working like mad all through the nights on the summary of my economic studies, that way I at least have the outlines clear before the deluge” (MECW 40: 217/MEW 29: 225; my translation). The Panic of 1857 is sometimes described as the first global financial crisis, but it was not as cataclysmic as Marx had predicted or desired. On 6 January 1858, Engels tried to reassure Marx that “the crisis, now at a standstill, is about to take a new turn of events, at least as far as Manchester and the cotton industry are concerned” (MECW 40: 239/MEW 29: 249; my translation). He, too, was mistaken. The economic apocalypse never arrived; the revolutionary turn to a post-capitalist future was postponed, yet again. By August 1858, Marx was glumly noting that the economy now appeared to be firing on all cylinders.²⁷ A year of writing yielded mixed results. On the upside, there were two shaggy but identifiable chapters. The one on capital was more lucid than the one on money, but both were patently incomplete. On the downside, most of the material amounted to a cacophonous stack of false starts, critical asides, and conceptual throat clearing. The 1857– 1858 manuscripts—cleaned up and published as “Grundrisse” in late 1930s and early 1940s—suggest that Marx either had no clear agenda in mind or was changing it as he went along.²⁸ “Some commentators see in this work important insights and arguments, but after the striking clarity of Misère de la philosophie,” Keith Tribe advises: “this looks more like a throwback to the language of 1844, to no good purpose. Only if we detach this writing from what went before, and read it in terms of what comes after, can one claim any significance”

 It is unclear what Marx writes, actually. In MEW, we find: “Die Welt hat seit den letzten Wochen überhaupt sich wieder verdammt optimisiert” (MEW 29: 353; emphasis added). In MEGA2, however, it is: “Die Welt hat seit den lezten Wochen überhaupt sich wieder verdammt optimisirt” (MEGA2 III.9: 205; emphasis added). The received English translation is: “Indeed, over the past few weeks the world has grown damned optimistic again” (MECW 40: 339). If Marx writes or meant to write optimistisch, that rendering makes sense. However, the verb optimieren means to enhance or optimize, while the modifier optimisiert is commonly translated as optimized or streamlined. Something doesn’t add up. My sincere thanks to Michael Stausberg for drawing my attention to this ambiguity.  An English translation of this material did not appear until the early 1970s. On the twenty-first century significance of these writings, see Bellofiore et al. (2013).

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(Tribe 2014, 237).²⁹ Disappointed by capitalism’s ability to evade its gravediggers— and his own lack of conceptual clarity—Marx shoved aside the 800 pages or so of what we know as “Grundrisse” and started over. More than a decade had passed since his first attempt to write the definitive socialist critique of bourgeois political economy. During that time Marx had accumulated a vast catalogue of economic details and new ideas. As a result, the ambition and scope of the political economy project now swelled beyond recognition. “Now let me tell you how my political economy is getting on. I have in fact been at work on the final draft for several months” Marx boasted to Ferdinand Lassalle on 22 February 1858: The whole thing is divided into 6 books: 1. On capital (contains a few introductory chapters). 2. On landed property. 3. On wage labor. 4. On the state. 5. International trade. 6. World market. I cannot, of course, avoid all critical consideration of other economists; in particular, a polemic against Ricardo in as much as even he, qua bourgeois, is forced to commit blunders from a strictly economic perspective (MECW 40: 270 – 271/MEGA2 III.9: 72– 73; my translation).

This letter suggests that Marx may have had an explicit plan, at last. Perhaps he was bluffing. Either way, not only was this project never finished—it hardly even began as he was already veering off course by mid-March. The first book should have been dedicated to examining “capital in general” (Heinrich 1985, Mosely 1995). However, that first volume had now become two: one on value and money; the other on capital in general. In April, he sent Engels a long précis that preserved the six-volume format but added new details to the first installment’s design: “(a) Capital en général (This is the substance of the first booklet); (b) Competition, or the interaction of many capitals; (c) Credit, where capital appears as the general element in relation to individual capitals; and (d) Share capital as the most perfect form (turning into communism) together with all its contradictions” (MECW 40: 298/MEGA2 III.9: 122; my translation). Engels may have sensed that Marx was losing focus and confessed that he was concerned by the “very abstract abstract” he’d been sent (MECW 40: 304/MEGA2 III.9: 126). Marx did not take the hint. In mid-November 1858, he declared that the two-volume set on capital was only four weeks away from completion. By January 1859 he was confessing the truth—and begging Engels not to be flattened by the fact that “although its title is Capital in General, these booklets contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital: only the two chapters on (1) commodities and (2) money, or simple circulation” (MECW 40: 368/MEGA2 III.9: 275; my translation). By his own reckoning, Marx’s sec-

 See Musto (2010) for a rather more forgiving account of the 1857– 1858 manuscripts.

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ond published treatise on political economy—Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie —barely resembled what he had originally intended to write.³⁰ The book sold poorly.

Signs of Life: 1860 – 1867 In many ways, the 1860s represent a less tragic but no less frustrating reprise of the 1850s. There was a public feud over Marx’s honor, which generated a raucous book (Herr Vogt) that few know about and fewer still have read. Jenny was so depressed that her one wish was that she and the surviving children were dead; Marx couldn’t blame her (MECW 41: 380/MEGA2 III.12: 136). ³¹ There were debts to pay and maladies to endure. There was an inherited windfall and yet another move to yet another house the family could not afford. A portrait from this period shows a dashing, determined man in his early forties. He is clearly graying around

 As Stedman Jones observes: “Today the only thing remembered about Critique is the preface, five pages introducing a strange book lacking a last chapter and without a conclusion” (Stedman Jones 2016, 407). I prefer to leave this title untranslated because the book’s received English translation (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) strikes me as an unwarranted editorial move which downplays the book’s significance. Describing Zur Kritik as a “Contribution to a Critique” implies provisional or in progress or not as good as Capital and Marx knew it, too! Marx sounds rather more confident about or invested in the volume if we just translate what he wrote: On the Critique of Political Economy. There is just a whiff of misjudged grandeur on display there—a useful reminder that when Marx was scrambling to thread together Zur Kritik he could not and did not know he would publish Capital nearly a decade later.  Mary Burns died sometime overnight on 6 – 7 January 1863. Engels shared the news with Marx in a short but poignant letter written that morning. On 8 January, Marx writes a callous, narcissistic, and self-pitying reply that reads like a crass demand for a lot more money. Engels replied five days later and calls his comrade Marx rather than the more customary, and more intimate, Moor: Dear Marx, You will find it appropriate that, in the wake of my bad luck [Pech], your frosty view of things made it absolutely impossible for me to reply to you sooner. All of my friends, including my philistine acquaintances, have shown me more sympathy and friendship on this occasion than I could have expected. You thought it was the right time to talk about the superiority of your cool perspective [kühlen Denkungsart]. So be it! [Soit!] You know the state of my finances; you also know that I am acting rather nobly to pull you out of your own bad luck [Pech]. But I cannot raise the huge sum that you mention at the moment—as you must already know (MECW 41: 443/MEW 30: 312; my translation). Engels deserved much, much better than Marx was prepared to give. We should all be lucky enough to have a friend like Fred—which is how my family’s Newfoundland pup got her name.

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the edges, but still appears to be in fighting shape and spirit (See Image One). Two accomplishments stand out.

Image One: Richard Beard, Karl Marx (London, 1861).

The first is Marx’s role in forming the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) or First International. After being chased out of Köln and then Paris in 1849, Marx’s political activism was mostly limited to giving occasional lectures to workers’ educational associations. Some of this has to do with the recognition that, if the British government grew tired of his presence, there were few other places to go. Fleeing to America like his comrade August Willich was one initial op-

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tion—but, ultimately, not a live-option. In the meantime, European laborers and socialist reformers had largely abandoned revolutionary ambition in favor of establishing various kinds of local institutions meant to address the day-to-day needs of the working classes. At a now-famous meeting on 28 September 1864, representatives from England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Poland assembled in St. Martin’s Hall, London to establish an international labor association. Marx was little more than “a relatively obscure refugee journalist” at the time, but he was appointed to the sub-committee charged with writing the organization’s charter (Padover 1973, xiii). Marx drafted the First International’s constitution and gave the inaugural address; Isaiah Berlin ranked it as second only to the Manifesto in the history of socialist thought (Berlin 2013, 209). The other noteworthy achievement was the publication of Capital. It did not come easily. Marx began writing what he initially considered to be the companion to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie in August 1861. A year later, Marx claimed he needed only two more months to finish (MECW 41: 356/MEGA2 III.12: 78). In truth, progress was so sluggish, and the family finances so dire, that Marx applied for a job as a railway clerk—only to be rejected because no one could read his handwriting. Still, at year’s end, Marx was assuring others that the new book “is now finally finished” (MECW 41: 435/MEGA2 III.12: 296; my translation). The “manuscript,” in truth, consisted of more than a thousand meandering notebook pages. During the summer of 1863, Marx marshaled the herculean courage to wipe the slate clean and start over, again. After three years of stop-and-go writing, the attempt to produce a book loosely tethered to the original six-volume plan had morphed into something altogether different: a three- or four-volume project dedicated to analyzing the “internal structure” of the capitalist mode of production. As he explained in October 1866, the “whole work is thus divided into the following parts: Book I. The Production Process of Capital; Book II. The Circulation Process of Capital; Book III. Structure of the Whole Process; Book IV. The History of the Theory. The first volume will include the first 2 books. The 3rd book will, I believe, fill the second volume; the 4th book the 3rd” (MECW 42: 328/MEW 31: 534; my translation). By the end of March 1867, Marx’s publisher in Hamburg had the complete manuscript of Capital, Volume One in hand. Marx spent that summer agonizing over page proofs and recuperating from an apparently vicious batch of carbuncles. “I promised myself I wouldn’t write you until I could announce the book’s completion,” Marx wrote to Engels: “Nor did I wish to bore you with the causes of the repeated delay, namely carbuncles on my ass and near the penis, the last remnants of which are now fading” (MECW 42: 350/MEGA2 III.3: 378; my translation). The book that would help define the twentieth century was published in September 1867. Hardly anyone noticed.

The Red Doctor: 1868 – 1871

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The Red Doctor: 1868 – 1871 Marx was flattened by the indifference with which Capital was received. He should have been preparing the second volume for publication, but his mind and body refused to cooperate. “Dear Fred,” Marx wrote to Engels on 2 November 1867: “Although I haven’t had any fully developed carbuncles lately, new ones are forever appearing; they always disappear, but fret me. Then there’s the old insomnia. But it has been better for about 3 days. The silence about my book makes me fidgety. I have seen or heard nothing” (MECW 42: 458/MEGA2 III.3: 440; my translation). Things only grew worse from there. “Cut, lanced, etc., in short, treated in every respect,” Marx reported on 30 January 1868: Nevertheless, the stuff keeps breaking out again and again, so that—with the exception of 2– 3 days—I have been lying idle for 8 weeks. Last Saturday I went out for the first time; Monday, a relapse. I hope that it will come to an end this week, but who can provide me a guarantee against new craters? It is dreadful (MECW 42: 528/MEW 32: 535; my translation).

Another vicious “monster” erupted below his left shoulder blade in February (MECW 42: 538/MEGA2 III.4: 22). He was in even worse shape by the end of March. Bleeding shingles, biting headaches, blurry vision, and chest pains now joined the list. He also indicated—for the first, but not last time—that Capital, Volume Two would “probably never appear if my condition does not change” (MECW 42: 544/MEW 32: 539). Marx resumed work on the manuscript in April 1868 but had “to limit the working time because after about 3 hours my head starts buzzing and stinging” (MECW 43: 16/MEGA2 III.4: 41; my translation). That October, Engels urged him to finish the book as soon as possible. Marx signaled that its completion would “be delayed by maybe another 6 months” (MECW 43: 119/MEW 32: 563; my translation). In mid-January 1870 Engels advised his friend that, for the sake of his health and “in the interests of your 2nd volume, you need a change in your way of life. If there is a constant repetition of such stoppages, you will never be finished” (MECW 43: 408/MEGA2 III.4: 267; my translation). Marx had trouble responding to that letter as a surgical procedure on an abscess near his left armpit meant that he was buried “under bandages and poultices” (MECW 43: 410/MEGA2 III.4: 269). More than two years had passed since the publication of Capital. Hopes for its successor were now mostly, quietly abandoned. The start of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 interrupted this parade of human frailty. The First International asked Marx to draft a response to the conflict on behalf of the European working classes. He seized the opportunity to highlight the war’s historical foundations and revolutionary implications. “While offi-

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cial France and official Germany are engaged in a fratricidal feud, the workers of France and Germany are sending each other messages of peace and friendship. This one great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the prospect for a brighter future,” he concluded: “It proves that, unlike the old society, with its economical miseries and political folly, a new society is springing up” (MECW 22: 7/ MEW 17: 7). The Quaker Peace Society in London was so impressed that they arranged for 30,000 copies of the Address to be printed in French and German translations. Written in only a handful of days, it was the most widely read piece that Marx had yet published. When compared to the twentieth-century carnage that was to come, the Franco-Prussian War was a brief and almost trivial episode of European geopolitics. However, a few days after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s surrender at the Battle of Sedan on 2 September 1870, French radicals discerned a revolutionary opportunity to seize control of the nascent Third Republic. Marx counseled against it. “Any attempt to overthrow the new government, when the enemy is almost knocking at the gates of Paris, would be a desperate folly,” he writes: The French workers must do their duty as citizens, but they must not allow themselves to be dominated by the national recollections of 1792, just as the French peasants were deceived by the national recollections of the First Empire. May they calmly and resolutely use the opportunities that republican liberty provides them to complete the organization of their own class. It will grant them new, Herculean strength for the regeneration of France and our common task – the emancipation of the proletariat. On their strength and wisdom, the fate of the Republic depends (MECW 22: 269/MEW 17: 277– 278; my translation).

Despite Marx’s warnings, several members of the First International played small but pivotal roles in establishing the Paris Commune on 18 March 1871. The next day a right-wing French newspaper reported on the contents of an allegedly “intercepted,” top-secret communique from England. The article asserted that Marx—sensationally described as the malevolent “Red Doctor” of European revolution—was the insurrection’s grand architect. It was all untrue. In fact, the two primary factions within the Commune’s leadership were distinguished by their appeals to either Proudhon or Auguste Blanqui. Few of the Communards had any idea who Marx was. Nevertheless, Marx stormed to the Commune’s defense on the heels of the “Bloody Week” of 21– 28 May 1871—during which the National Army reestablished federal control over the city, slaughtering somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Parisians along the way (Merriman 2014). The Civil War in France was a British publishing sensation, selling through three editions in a matter of months. The pamphlet was quickly translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Dutch, and continued to sell briskly well into the Fall of 1871. Although he

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had nothing to do with this brief experiment in direct democracy, the false accusations made Marx unexpectedly famous; a little notorious, even.

Pax Britannica: 1872 – 1883 Marx’s post-Commune notoriety created a smallish demand for his criticisms of bourgeois political economy. By the end of 1871, the first German edition of Capital finally sold out. His Hamburg publisher, anxious to take advantage of a client’s unexpected fame, wanted to print a second edition. True to form, Marx itched for enough time to rethink, revise, and rearrange the whole thing. The Russian translation, first started in 1869, finally appeared in 1872; all 3000 copies were sold by the time the revised second German edition appeared in 1873 (Resis 1970). An early sign of things to come, in hindsight. Between 1872 – 1875, the French translation of the revised Capital appeared in serialized form and posted robust sales; a few years before his death, Marx figured that the French translation of his own German was probably the best available version for interested readers (MECW 24: 584; Anderson 1983). As both cause and effect of this interest in Capital, increasing numbers of selfidentified “Marxists” began appearing on the socialist scenes in London, Paris, Zurich, and Berlin. Marx invariably disapproved. However, after decades of poverty, tragedy, and ill health, he lacked the desire to duel in print. In February 1881, a Dutch publication offered him as much space as he desired to go after whomever he wished. He declined. “I do not respond to these bug-bites,” he explained: “Any other course would mean wasting the better part of my time correcting people from California to Moscow. Back when I was younger, I would hit back hard sometimes, but with age comes wisdom—at least when it comes to a useless dissipation of force” (MECW 45: 66/MEW 35: 160; my translation). Before the end arrived, there was more sadness to endure. On 2 December 1881, Jenny died. Marx, battling bronchitis and pleurisy, was too ill to attend his wife’s burial. “There is only one effective antidote for mental anguish—physical pain,” he sighed to his eldest daughter (MECW 46: 156/MEW 35: 240; my translation). Marx now had plenty of both. In February 1882 he traveled to Algiers in search of dry air and warm days. It was uncharacteristically chilly and wet; he couldn’t stop thinking about Jenny. “My head feels so dense, as if a millwheel were going around inside,” he confessed to his loyal comrade (MECW 46: 110/MEGA2 III.4: 505; my translation). Marx sat for one final portrait before his leonine beard and mane were shaved off in April. “I have done away with my prophet’s beard and full head of hair [Kopfperücke],” he wrote to Engels: “but (in deference to my daughters) had myself photographed before sacrificing my hair on an

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Image Two: E. Dutertre, Karl Marx (Algiers, 1882).

Algerian barber’s altar” (MECW 46: 249/MEGA2 III.4: 538; my translation). In that photo the hard edges of a once unbendable man appear unexpectedly soft and sanded at the edges (see Image Two). He looks every bit the doting grandfather he could be. Marx returned to England better, but not well. The bronchitis and pleurisy reappeared. He spent the summer of 1882 visiting his oldest daughter (Jenny Caroline) in Paris, playing with his grandchildren, and receiving medical treatments —as well as being annoyed by his growing Continental celebrity. At the end of his vacation, a worn-down Marx complained to Engels that both the Marxistes and the Anti-Marxistes “did their very best to spoil my stay in France” (MECW 46: 339/MEGA2 III.4: 563; my translation). From Paris he decamped to the beach resort of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, again in search of clean air. Owing to his poor

Pax Britannica: 1872 – 1883

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health and steadfast grief over Jenny’s absence, he found himself hemmed in by a “long period of intellectual twilight” (MECW 46: 365/MEW 35: 105). On 11 January 1883, Jenny Caroline died. Marx—who had now endured the death of his wife and four of their children—staggered back to the once-chaotic, but now mostly empty, house outside London. He spent his waking hours reading French novels; both he and his comrade had long admired the work of Honoré de Balzac.³² Two months later, Lenchen found Marx dead in his upstairs study. He was buried next to his wife on 17 March 1883. A dozen or so people attended the funeral.³³

 On 13 December 1883, Engels wrote the now-orphaned Laura Lafargue (née Marx). Bed-ridden by a physical condition that he only describes as chronic and tedious, Engels reports that he’s been reading Balzac exclusively for the past eight weeks: “There is the history of France from 1815 to 1848, so much better than the Vaulabelles, Capefigues, Louis Blancs and tutti quanti. And what audacity [Kühnheit]! Such revolutionary dialectics in his poetic justice!” (MECW 47: 71/MEW 36: 77; my translation). Achille de Vaulabelle, Jean-Baptiste Capefigue, and Louis Blanc were all prominent French public figures, each of whom published narrative histories of those years.  Engels brought Lenchen on board as his own housekeeper, and valued editorial assistant, until her death on 4 November 1890.

Postscript Unreading Marx in the Twenty-First Century This chapter was designed to cut through more than a century of mostly wellmeaning mythmaking. The immediate goal was to illustrate why it makes far more sense to describe Marx as a political journalist or socialist organizer than as a theorist, lawyer, philosopher, historian, or scholar. However, I’m convinced this bit of biographical housekeeping does more than just “contextualize” Marx. It also forces us to reconsider what we read from him and how we read it. Consider, as a case in point, Marx’s long-standing interest in the classical political economy of wages.

The Political Economy of Wages: The Bourgeois View from above By the mid-nineteenth century—thanks to the foundational work of Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834), and David Ricardo (1772– 1823)—British political economists were confident they understood what “wages” were and how they behaved. Stripped down to the fewest moving parts, the standard account was that wages measure the relative value of the labor inputs necessary to produce a market-good or commodity. In Ricardo’s estimation: “The real price of a commodity is here properly stated to be the greater or less quantity of labour and capital (that is, accumulated labour) which must be employed to produce it” (Ricardo 1951, 410). As such, wage rates exist within a dynamic range of possibilities. On the low end of the scale, capitalists must pay enough for laborers to secure the basic “necessaries of life.” Although what counts as necessary will vary with time and place—workers in warmer climates require less heating fuel, for example—the crucial point is that workers must be kept alive and healthy enough to continue working. This rate was usually described as the subsistence or “natural” price of labor. On the high end, there is a point at which the price of labor is so expensive that capitalists are no longer able to reliably extract a surplus. It is not technically inconceivable to imagine a few kind souls employing workers out of Christian charity, Robert Torrens counseled, but “there will be a moral impossibility that wages should exceed that which remains after the capitalist’s other advances have been replaced, with the lowest rate of increase, for the sake of which he will carry on his business” (Torrens 1844, 2). The working thesis was that, somewhere between the subsistence minimum and the moral maximum, the actual or “market” price of labor is determined by the general dynamics of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-007

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supply and demand. Too many laborers relative to what capital requires, wages go down; too few laborers, wages go up.³⁴ “The principle of demand and supply determines the wages of labor,” Malthus decides in Principles of Political Economy, “not only temporarily but permanently” (Malthus 1986a, 240 – 241). One consequence of this explanation is that all working-class demands for higher wages are, by definition, unreasonable or ill-informed. The mechanism of supply and demand determines the actual market value of labor inputs and thus the real market price which capital must pay. Political economists further argued that it is in the workers’ own best interests to allow the law of supply and demand to fix the wage rate. “Artificially” high wages will increase the costs of production, eat into profits and—sooner or later, and frequently sooner—capitalists will offset these loses by increasing the market-price of goods and services. Before long, laborers are right back where they started—something macroeconomists call the wage-price spiral.³⁵ “The poor complained to the justices that their wages would not enable them to supply their families in the single article of bread,” Malthus observes in The High Price of Provisions: The justices very humanely, and I am far from saying improperly, listened to their complaints, inquired what was the smallest sum on which they could support their families, at the then price of wheat, and gave an order of relief on the parish accordingly. The poor were now enabled, for a short time, to purchase nearly their usual quantity of flour; but the stock in the country was not sufficient, even with the prospect of importation, to allow of the usual distribution to all its members. The crop was consuming too fast. Every market day the demand exceeded the supply; and those whose business it was to judge on these subjects, felt convinced, that in a month or two the scarcity would be greater than it was at that time. Those who were able, therefore, kept back their corn. In so doing, they undoubtedly consulted their own interest; but they, as undoubtedly, whether with the intention or not is of no consequence, consulted the true interest of the state: for, if they had not kept it back, too much would have been consumed, and there would have been a famine instead of a scarcity at the end of the year. The corn, therefore, naturally rose. The poor were again distressed. Fresh complaints were made to the justices, and a further relief granted; but, like the water from the mouth of Tantalus, the corn still slipped from the grasp of the poor; and rose again so as to disable

 In “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” (1795), Edmund Burke makes himself plain on this fundamental point: “The labouring people are only poor, because they are numerous. Numbers in their nature imply poverty” (Burke 1823b, 328; e. g., Collins 2020).  Some contemporary economists—including notable non-Marxists like James Tobin, the 1981 Sveriges Riksbank Prize winner (aka the “Nobel” in Economics)—thus view inflation as the symptom of a stalemate in the struggle between labor and capital over wages, working conditions, etc. (Burdekin and Burkett 1996).

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them from purchasing a sufficiency to keep their families in health. The alarm now became still greater, and more general (Malthus 1986b, 9).³⁶

A nominal increase in wages is not a real increase if workers are unable to purchase more of the “necessaries and enjoyments of life” than before. The road to economic hell was apparently paved with good intentions. It was on this basis that the classical political economists concluded the only way for laborers to secure higher wages is by acquiring the habits of chastity. Less formally, working-class families needed to have fewer children if they wished to be less poor. “It is only when the market price is above the natural price, that the condition of the laborer is flourishing and happy,” Ricardo explains: “he has it in his power to command a greater proportion of the necessaries and enjoyments of life, and therefore to rear a healthy and numerous family” (Ricardo 1951, 94). The fly in the ointment is that when wages are high, working-class families are motivated to have more children in hopes of maximizing household income—or, perhaps, are merely able to secure enough of the “necessaries of life” to keep their children healthy and alive. Either way, the result is a surplus population of laborers relative to capital’s effective demand. High wages paradoxically create the conditions for low wages. This ironic outcome explains why political economists viewed all forms of welfare assistance as intrinsically self-defeating. Redistributing the financial surplus of a moral minority to the immoral majority perversely penalizes the chaste and subsidizes the profligate (Hirschman 1991). John Stuart Mill took this perspective to one of its logically devastating conclusions. By his lights, public education should never exist because state-spending on universal childhood education will tend to produce two sub-optimal outcomes. First, it cheapens the value of schooling by making it available to everyone and anyone—learning is valuable, in part, because the supply is squeezed. Second, it encourages the poor to have more children since the state will now absorb the costs associated with raising them. Whenever progressives and reformers tell you that free public education is a good thing, he cautioned, let it be remembered: “to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent” (Mill 1991, 102).

 By “corn,” Malthus is referring to cereal grains (esp. wheat, oats, barley, malt).

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Thus, in a world before medically effective and reliable birth control, the only path for laboring families to raise their standard of living was to stop having sex. As Ricardo observes: It is a truth which admits not a doubt, that the comforts and well-being of the poor cannot be permanently secured without some regard on their part, or some effort on the part of the legislature, to regulate the increase of their numbers, and to render less frequent among them early and improvident marriages. The operation of the system of poor laws has been directly contrary to this. They have rendered restraint superfluous, and have invited imprudence, by offering it a portion of the wages of prudence and industry (Ricardo 1951, 106 – 107).

Unionization or legislative struggles over labor-conditions could not help the working class; their wretched plight was not an exploitation problem, but rather a demographic problem rooted in their own inability to keep their pants on. “If we be really serious in what appears to be the object of such general research, the mode of essentially and permanently bettering the condition of the poor,” Malthus explains in Essay on the Principle of Population, “we must explain to them the true nature of their situation, and show them, that the withholding of the supplies of labor is the only possible way of really raising its price, and that they themselves, being the possessors of this commodity, have alone the power to do this” (Malthus 1992, 230).³⁷

The Political Economy of Wages: The Socialist View from below Marx spent nearly thirty years teasing apart the classical case for the inevitability of bare-subsistence wages. Like so many aspects of his thinking, his position moves around from decade to decade. In the 1840s, for example, he seems to have accepted the supply-and-demand account but emphasized how capitalists will always need fewer laborers thanks to capital-labor substitution (i. e., replacing human beings with machines).³⁸ “In England, strikes are routinely the cause for the inven-

 Do not lament the poor and working sorts, Edmund Burke advised: “It is no relief to their miserable circumstances; it is only an insult to their miserable understandings. It arises from a total want of charity, or a total want of thought. Want of one kind was never relieved by want of any other kind. Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality, and religion, should be recommended to them; all the rest is downright fraud” (Burke 1823b, 329 – 330).  Over time, this intuition morphed into a claim regarding the historical, structural tendency for the “organic composition” or “organic ratio” of capital investment to shift (i. e., increasing constant capital or means of production and decreasing variable capital or wage labor). The allegedly canon-

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tion and application of new machines. Machines were, one might say, the weapon used by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor,” he notes in Poverty of Philosophy: “The self-acting mule, the greatest invention of modern industry, beat the rebellious spinners out of the field. Even if unions and strikes had no other effect but to provoke mechanical inventions, this alone would have exerted a tremendous influence on the development of industry” (MECW 6: 207/MEW 4: 176; my translation). Mechanized production thus solves several key problems for the capitalist at once: productive capacity is increased; production costs per unit are reduced; and wages are squeezed by expanding the available supply of labor relative to capital demand (i. e., the creation of an unemployed “reserve army”). Industrialized production, rather than demographic profligacy, was behind proletariat precarity.³⁹ A couple of years later, Marx published a series of articles on wage labor in the soon-to-be shuttered Neue Rheinische Zeitung. They were revised versions of lectures that he’d given to the German Workers’ Society [Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein] in Brussels a couple years before. In these pieces he emphasizes how the nature of capital accumulation itself tends to produce unemployment—which, in turn, applies downward pressure on wages. “The greater division of labor enables a worker to do the work of 5, 10, 20: it thus increases the competition among the workers by 5, 10, and 20 times. The workers do not only compete with each other, in that one sells himself more cheaply than the other; they compete with each other in that one does the work of 5, 10, 20,” he explains: Machinery produces the same effects on a much larger scale, by displacing skilled workers by unskilled ones, men by women, adults by children. Wherever machinery is newly introduced, it throws manual laborers en masse on to the pavement; and where it has been developed, improved, or replaced by more fertile [fruchtbar] machines, workers are cast off in smaller bunches. We have described above in a brief outline the industrial warfare of the capitalists among themselves; this war is peculiar in that battles are won less by recruiting an army of labor than by dismissing it. The generals, the capitalists, compete amongst themselves to see who can discharge the most industrial soldiers (MECW 9: 225 – 226/MEW 6: 420 – 421; my translation).

ical account of this dynamic appears in “Volume Three” of Capital, but there are less text-critically complicated discussions to be found throughout the 1861– 1863 manuscripts.  The generally deflationary environment of the long nineteenth century “did not do businessmen much harm, because they made and sold so much vaster quantities,” Eric Hobsbawm estimates; but “it did not do the workers much good, because either the cost of living did not fall to the same extent or their income was too meagre to allow them to benefit” (Hobsbawm 1975, 50).

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One paradox of capital accumulation is that economic expansion—rather than increasing the demand for labor, and thus the wages workers receive—makes it easier for bosses to squeeze more and more work out of fewer and fewer workers for less and less money. In the upside-down world of capitalist logic, gravity makes objects fall up. Marx began revisiting all of this in the 1850s. The long-standing temptation has been to meticulously read the various “drafts” of Capital in hopes of identifying a final, comprehensive theory of wages (Ábalos 1997, Hollander 2008, Levrero 2013, Mandel 2015, Ramirez 2007). However, here is where I think twenty-first century readers are better served by pausing long enough to ask a pedestrian question: Would a political journalist and socialist organizer have much use for a novel, empirically adequate theory of wages? I think the answer to this question is: probably not. Yet, when we turn our attention away from the “major” texts and towards the “minor” works—to the addresses, lectures, and articles that Marx produced as a member of the post-1848 labor movement—we can more easily imagine how a socialist critique of classical political economy might be instrumentally useful. From his vantage point, it was enough for everyone involved to know that a surplus for capitalists was equal to a deficit for workers—and it would always be so. In a pair of 1865 addresses to the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), for example, Marx publicly picked apart the orthodox account of wages. The immediate goal was highlighting where and why workers might successfully resist some aspects of capitalist exploitation. His first point was that—with respect to the wage rate at least—appeals to the impersonal law of supply-and-demand are nonsense. Rather than representing either a natural or market equilibrium between labor’s supply and capital’s demand, the wage rate is more accurately described as the contingent outcome of a social struggle between these constituencies. He notes that both Malthus and Ricardo assume a priori that capitalists must be rewarded with a “minimum” profit margin to enter the market: But as to profits, there exists no law which determines their minimum. We cannot say which is the ultimate limit of their decrease. And why can we not fix that limit? Because, although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum. We can only say, that the limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day, as is compatible with the physical forces of the labourer. The maximum of profit is therefore limited by the physical minimum of wages and the physical maximum of the working day. It is evident that between the two limits of this maximum rate of profit, an immense scale of variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour; the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the workingman constantly presses in the opposite direction.

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The question resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants (MECW 20: 145 – 146/MEGA2 I.20: 183).

Wages are thus a measure of labor’s ability to extract concessions from capital rather than the outcome of some autonomous, gravity-like law.⁴⁰ Capitalists do not want to pay labor any more than they must, of course—but that isn’t the relevant issue.⁴¹ What matters is that commodities cannot be made, nor services rendered—nor, therefore, can non-financial capital accumulate—without labor. This fact alone suggests that an organized, militant working class should be able to use capital’s dependency on it as leverage.⁴² If, he advises, “the given limit of the amount of wages, is founded on the mere will of the capitalist, or the limits of his avarice, it is an arbitrary limit. There is nothing necessary in it. It may be changed by the will of the capitalist, and may, therefore, be changed against his will” (MECW 20: 106/MEGA2 I.20: 147– 148). Considered in this light, the wage rate is less an economic fact than it is a measure of class strength. His second point was that given the historical tendency for the rate of profit to fall—a still much-debated assertion which Marx took on board from Smith and Ricardo—there will also be a general historical tendency for wages to gravitate towards the subsistence minimum (Moseley 1991, Heinrich 2013b, Yu 2016). Even with labor unions and the credible threat of strikes, the working classes are always swimming against a waxing capitalist tide. This did not imply that the non-revolutionary labor movement was pointless, nor that “the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement” (MECW 20: 148/MEGA2 I.20: 185). Every concession over the length of the working day, labor conditions, or the wage rate is a victory worth the battle. Yet, because trade unions work within the capitalist order of things, union-led campaigns for piecemeal reforms cannot overcome the fundamental antagonism

 Contemporary heterodox economists think Marx was on to something: the classical dynamics of supply and demand do not, in fact, “naturally” determine the wage rate. Although this is a heterodox conclusion, it is not a fringe position. David Card has concluded as much and was awarded the 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize for his work in labor economics (Card and Krueger 1994).  Adam Smith makes this point sharp and clear in Wealth of Nations: “What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour” (Smith 1994, 75).  Unfortunately, this also suggests that the working classes are increasingly powerless where capital accumulation does not depend on traditional commodity production (e. g., Lapavitsas 2013).

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which results from the private ownership of the means of production. In Marx’s judgment: At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of those every days’ struggles [sic]. They ought not to forget, that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in those unavoidable guerilla fights, incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work!”, they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages’ System!” (MECW 20: 148 – 149/MEGA2 I.20: 186).

Improving the existential conditions of the working classes is one thing; emancipating the proletariat from the gears of capitalist exploitation is something else altogether (e. g., MECW 10: 626/MEGA2 I.10: 578). Inasmuch as trade unions demonstrate how working-class solidarity translates into political power and social leadership, Marx typically viewed them as a necessary pre-condition for the proletarian revolution—a kind of revolutionary classroom, if you will. Nevertheless, he also warned: “They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing System, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system” (MECW 20: 149/MEGA2 I.20: 186). After all, an upgrade from steerage to second-class is little consolation when trapped on a sinking ship.

Conclusion This postscript has tried to briefly illustrate how it is possible to reverse the “narrative shift from activism to academics” that characterizes so many accounts of Marx (Carver 2018, 48). It is an inelegant way of making the point, but I believe we must learn to un-read the Marx we inherited from the twentieth century. “The worker’s envy of the middle-class man is not a desire to be that man, but to have the same kind of possessions,” Raymond Williams cautioned in Culture and Society: “it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned” (Williams 1960, 343). My unreading is meant be analogous

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to Williams’ sense of unlearning—including the implication that we are dealing with a set of class-dependent perspectives. The 1865 addresses weren’t conference papers or peer-reviewed articles; they were attempts to show a mixed audience of socialists, workers, and democratic activists how laborers could do more than lead somber lives of monastic celibacy. Among other things, they could strike. Or, as Marx made the point a decade earlier in the New York Tribune, workers could harness their own, hard-won understanding of political economy they’d acquired from below. “Wherever a strike occurs, the whole of the masters and their organs in pulpit, platform and press, break out into immoderate vituperation of the ‘impudence and stupidity,’” Marx writes: Now, what did the strikes prove, if not that the workmen preferred applying a mode of their own of testing the proportion of the supply to the demand rather than to trust to the interested assurances of their employers? Under certain circumstances, there is for the workman no other means of ascertaining whether he is or not paid to the actual market value of his labor, but to strike or to threaten to do so (MECW 12: 332– 333).

A good critique provided ammunition for the class struggle; otherwise, it was a relatively useless—one might even say, academic—exercise.

Chapter Two Age of the Living Dead: Marx and the Political Economy of an Upside-Down World The previous chapter was a bid to illustrate how it is possible, and why it is necessary, for twenty-first century readers to distance themselves from the inherited, twentieth-century portrait of Marx. The goal of this chapter is to examine Marx on religion in ways that mirror the approach adopted to make sense of Marx on wages. The question worth posing right from the start is: Would a muckraking polemicist and socialist organizer have much use for a novel, empirically adequate theory of religion? Even if I’m ignominiously wrong about Marx not having a “theory” of wages, I’m convinced the answer is an unambiguous NO when it comes to religion. With that said, in what follows I want to show how Marx adapted Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical rhetoric of inversion to assemble his own distinctive, socialist critique of classical or “bourgeois” political economy. This is a bit trickier than it sounds, though. Marx would never again write as much about the gods as he did in the so-called “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” In fact, it is nearly impossible to write about Marx on religion without discussing these texts. Nevertheless, the “Paris manuscripts” are much less—and, awkwardly, much more—than meets the eye.

The Allure of an Archival Mirage Herbert Marcuse was certain that the 1932 German-language publication of the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” revealed the foundations for all of Marx’s later work. In his estimation, “all the familiar categories of the subsequent critique of political economy are already found together in this work. But in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts [sic] the original meaning of the basic categories is clearer than ever before, and it could become necessary to revise the current interpretation of the later and more elaborate critique in the light of its origins” (Marcuse 1972, 3). Why were these writings so exciting to Marcuse and subsequent readers? The short answer is that they appeared to demonstrate how Marx’s “scientific” critique of political economy presupposed a more encompassing philosophical project. Since philosophy sits at the heart of Marx’s work, Marcuse wrote at the time, “his examination of political economy is itself a continuous confrontation https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-008

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with Hegel” (Marcuse 1972, 48). That is, these texts appeared to demonstrate that it was more important to read and understand Hegel than Ricardo if one really wanted to understand Marx (e. g., Lukács 1971). Praise for these “Paris manuscripts” as a major text became increasingly commonplace soon thereafter—helped in part by the fact it allowed transatlantic Marxists to distance themselves from the Soviet Union’s Stalintine sadism. In Dialectical Materialism and The Critique of Everyday Life, for example, Henri Lefebvre—who, along with Norbert Guterman, published the first French translations of some passages (c. 1933 – 1934)—positioned Hegel, the 1844 notebooks, and a quasi-Romantic conception of “alienation” at the heart of an anti-Stalinist but still revolutionary brand of European Marxism. “The creation of man by himself is a process; the human passes through and transcends moments that are inhuman, historical phases that are the ‘other’ of the human. But it is practical man who creates himself in this way,” Lefebvre explains: “Historical materialism, clearly expressed in the German Ideology [sic], achieves that unity of idealism and materialism foreshadowed and foretold in the 1844 Manuscript” (Lefebvre 2009, 60). The hopes surrounding these texts were largely misplaced. First, their book-like appearance is an archival illusion. For example, the quite reasonable conclusion that the Paris manuscripts constitute something like the rough draft of a book is facilitated by an editorial sleight-of-hand: the splinter of a “Preface” from the late third notebook was moved to the front of the published collection. Rather than an introduction to the manuscripts themselves, however, this fragment was written for a possible book-length publication on “the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc.” (MECW 3: 231/MEGA2 I.2: 314). That book was never written. Second, these manuscripts emerge from a tangle of Notizbücher (books to read, sketches of ideas, notes to self, etc.) and Exzerpthefte (i. e., extensive extracts drawn from other texts). That is, these pages represent one aspect of Marx’s initial attempt to get his arms around classical political economy. Marcello Musto properly warns us that these writings: are not a work that develops in a systematic or prearranged manner. All the attributions to it of a settled direction—both those that detect the full completeness of Marx’s thought and those that see a definite conception opposed to his scientific maturity—are refuted by a careful philological examination. Not homogeneous or even closely interconnected between their parts, the manuscripts are an evident expression of a position in movement. Scrutiny of the nine notebooks that have come down to us, with more than 200 pages of excerpts and comments, shows us Marx’s way of assimilating and using the reading material that fueled them (Musto 2009, 392).

Once one recognizes that the Paris notebooks are better understood as glosses on other texts rather than independent discoveries, it becomes far more difficult to

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conclude they are reliable expressions of Marx’s “thought.” These are, for lack of a better description, the reading notes of a bright and diligent student rather than the precocious insights of a prodigy (Tribe 2015). Marx was learning the discourse in the 1840s, not inventing it. This goes some way towards explaining why—even though he had only just begun reading political economy with any serious intent—sophisticated readers like Marcuse and Lefebvre could think that all the categories of his “mature” critique of political economy were present in the “young” Marx. “If by ‘work’ we understand a coherent text in which the author, in a more or less premeditated, systematic way, unfolds his ideas,” Jürgen Rojahn concludes, “it is questionable whether the Manuscripts of 1844, as they have survived, can be regarded as a work at all” (Rojahn 2002, 33). The often-repeated assertion that these texts reveal the foundations of his “philosophical anthropology” is a hold-over from an era when every question’s answer had to be found in one of Marx’s coat pockets. At the same time, the relative rawness of these materials is also the source of their importance. They reveal how Marx’s initial engagement with Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo often involved translating a foreign, Anglophone discourse into a familiar, German philosophical idiom. So, even though the Paris notebooks do not themselves constitute a work, they do provide an invaluable portrait of Marx at work. Given Germany’s comparatively sluggish turn to capitalist production, he would later write, political economy “was imported as a finished product from England and France; its German professors remained students” (MECW 35: 13/ MEW 23: 19; my translation). Marx was no professor, but this lesson applied to him as well. To see what I’m driving at, consider his reading notes on James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy. In these pages, Marx appears to be puzzled by the commodity theory of money —the paradoxical idea that the value of money depends upon the monetary value of the stuff from which it is made (esp. gold and silver). According to Mill, the “true idea of a medium exchange” denotes nothing more mysterious than “some one commodity, which, in order to effect an exchange between two other commodities, is first received in exchange for the one, and then given in exchange for the other” (Mill 1821, 93). Marx, however, turns this humdrum account into an aching ontological riddle. In a passage that must be read in its entirety to fully appreciate, he observes: First of all, the essence of money is not that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement—the human, social act through which one person’s products mutually complement another’s—is alienated and becomes the property of money, a material thing rather than the human being. Since human beings empty themselves through this mediating activity, they are active here only as lost and dehumanized agents; the relationship is between things—the human use of them is the use of something other than and above humanity.

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Through this alien mediator—instead of one person acting as the mediator for another— human beings experience their will, their activity, and their relation to each other as a power independent of them. Their slavery reaches its peak. That this mediator now becomes the real God is clear because it is the real power over that which it mediates. Its cultus becomes an end in itself. The objects separated from this mediator lose their value. Objects only have value insofar as they represent him, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This inversion of the original relationship is inevitable. This mediator is therefore the lost, alienated essence of private property which has become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated species-activity of humanity: the externalized mediation between the production of one person and that of another. All the qualities which belong to this activity are, therefore, transferred to this intermediary. Hence the human being becomes poorer as a human being, i. e., disconnected from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes. Originally, Christ represents: 1) human beings before God; 2) God for human beings; 3) human beings to each other. Thus, the concept of money initially represents: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is emptied God and the emptied human being. God only has value inasmuch as he represents Christ; and the human being has value only inasmuch as he represents Christ. Likewise with money (MECW 3: 211– 212/MEGA2 IV.2: 447– 448; my translation).

This sort of philosophical brooding is nails on a chalkboard as far as I’m concerned. With that said, the thing worth noticing is that not a single word of this muddying god-talk appears in Mill. It is Marx who insists on bringing these ponderous metaphysical themes to political economy. So, the question is: where is this stuff coming from?

Gods, Dreams, and Other Cognitive Puzzles By the time Engels arrived in Manchester to learn the textile industry’s ropes, he had already embraced the principles of communism. However, as The Condition of the Working Class in England makes clear, the scale of human misery he found there re-fortified what were—until then at least—merely abstract commitments. His intuition was that the British industrial revolution would soon spread across Europe, bringing with it an unprecedented degree and type of human misery. As he later put it, the human costs of factory production would require something more robust than the “infamous charity of a Christian bourgeois” (MECW 4: 565/ MEW 2: 489; my translation). Engels thus began reading political economy to get a feel for how the new world of wage labor, industrial machinery, and capital investment was supposed to behave. The end-result was the genuinely precocious “Outlines for a Critique of Political Economy” [Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie]. In that essay, almost as a throwaway line, Engels observes that “ev-

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erything in economics stands on its head. Value—the primary factor, the source of price— is made dependent on price, its own product. As is well known, this inversion is the essence of abstraction; on which see Feuerbach” (MECW 3: 427/MEW 1: 508; my translation). The seed of an idea had been planted. Given his time with the Berlin Doktorklub, Marx was already well-acquainted with Feuerbach’s work. Yet, in the “Paris manuscripts,” we find Feuerbach moving toward center stage. In fact, Marx writes—in a sweetly promissory or outrageously premature move—that the “true foundation” of his approach to political economy is provided by Feuerbach’s Provisional Theses on the Reform of Philosophy and Principles for a Philosophy of the Future. The reason he gives for this is that they are “the only writings since Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic to contain a genuine theoretical revolution” (MECW 3: 232/MEGA2 I.2: 317; my translation). Why did Marx now rate these writings so highly? The short answer, I submit, is that Marx thought Engels was on to something. In Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach claimed that “the true meaning of theology is anthropology, there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature; consequently, there is no distinction between the divine and human subject” (Feuerbach 2006, 18; my translation). What he means by this evocative turn of phrase isn’t obvious—to me, at least. Visual metaphors abound in Essence. Thus, we are told that religion is “the reflection, the mirror-image of the human essence” and that “God is the mirror of humanity.” Given the ubiquity of this optical vocabulary, it is understandable that Feuerbach has often been described as developing a “projection” theory [Projektionstheorie] of religion. However, Feuerbach doesn’t actually write about the gods in terms of “projection.” I’ve obsessively combed through Essence and cannot find projizieren [to project] or Projektion [projection]. The closest he gets to something like “projection” is schleudern [to hurl or sling] or geschleudert [hurled, tossed, flung]: God is not there for his own sake, but for the sake of the world, as a first cause for the worldmachine [Weltmaschine]. Our limited human understanding is offended by the world’s original, independent existence because we only see it from the subjective, practical standpoint— only in its commonness or vulgarity [Gemeinheit], only as a work-machine [Werkmaschine], not in its majesty and glory, not as cosmos. So, we bump our heads against the world. The shock rattles our brains—we then objectify our own shock as the primordial shock which flings or hurls the world into existence. Now, like matter set in motion by this mathematical shock, the world exists forever, i. e., we think of its mechanical origin (Feuerbach 2006, 274; my translation).

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The widespread assumption that Feuerbach says more than this is largely an artifact of unreliable fin de siècle Anglophone translations.⁴³ Instead of a projection, he describes the gods as “nothing other than the emptied, objectified personality of humanity” and characterizes religion itself as “the immediate, involuntary, unconscious intuition of the human being as another being” (Feuerbach 2006, 377, 360; my translation). Only nineteenth-century German philosophers could get away with writing this sort of thing. The best way I know how to make sense of the befuddling claim that the gods represent “objectified” cognitive processes is by attending to what Feuerbach writes about dreaming elsewhere in Essence. A dream, he proposes, is nothing but the: inversion of waking consciousness. In the dream the active is passive, and the passive active; in the dream I take the spontaneous action of my own mind as an action upon me from without, my emotions for events, my conceptions and sensations for true existences apart from myself. It is the same me, the same I in the dream as in waking life; the only difference is that the ego determines itself while awake and is determined as if by another being in the dream. The thought of myself alone is heartless, rationalistic; the thought of myself as conceived by God is tender, religious. The soul is the dream with open eyes; religion is the dream of waking consciousness; the dream is the key to religion’s secrets (Feuerbach 2006, 248 – 249; my translation).

Dreams might be usefully compared to pre-test anxieties in that they feel like something imposed upon us. In reality, however, we are doing this to ourselves— which is why there are techniques by which we can steady our nerves and get on with the exam. What we do to ourselves can, in many instances, be undone by ourselves as well. Working from another direction, dreams might be treated as a corollary to addiction—where human physiology and cognition combine to drive otherwise conscious, self-directed agents to do things they don’t want to do. Or, pulling the analogy in another direction still, gods, ghosts, and spirits are part of a dream world—a relation to the real world turned inside-out or upside-down—inasmuch as human beings fail to recognize that they are the ultimate source of their own religious  “Man cannot get beyond his true nature,” we read in the 1881 Marian Evans translation: “the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature— qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself ” (Feuerbach 1881, 11; emphasis added). This is lovely, but the German original reads: “Bestimmungen, in denen er in Wahrheit nur sich selbst abbildet und vergegenständlicht” (Feuerbach 2006, 44). From my perspective, a more faithful rendering would be “determinations by which, in truth, human beings depict or exteriorize or objectify themselves” (my translation, emphasis added).

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imaginations. Whenever human beings appear to be contemplating the nature of the gods, they are only ever contemplating themselves and their pre-articulate relation to the world—but through a glass darkly. As he makes the point, “God’s essence is the explicit, objective or concretized essence of the imagination” (Feuerbach 2006, 361; my translation). We may appear to be trafficking with the gods, but in fact we are merely overwhelmed by the dizzying force of our own existence in a world which is, paradoxically, both far too small and far too big for us to really imagine: experiencing one’s being-in-the-world but as something other-than-oneself —like staring at a photograph of yourself as a baby. Feuerbach was irritated to discover that many readers took the central message of Essence to be little more than a minor-key variation on the Hegelian premise that God achieves self-consciousness through the human consciousness of God. Thus, in the publications that captured Marx’s attention, Feuerbach underscored his intended break with the past by suggesting that all previous theologians and philosophers get the world backwards—grasping the truth, but “in an indirect, inverted way” (Feuerbach 2013, 61; my translation). Here is where I think Marx detected the “theoretical revolution” that might pay dividends when applied to classical political economy. According to Feuerbach, the fundamental error of all previous philosophy is that it overplays the importance of what we think when compared to the way things are. “The course of speculative philosophy thus far has been inverted, moving from the abstract to the concrete and from the ideal to the real,” Feuerbach writes: “One never arrives at true, objective reality in this way—only the realization of one’s own abstractions” (Feuerbach 2013, 62; my translation). In other words, philosophy and theology get the relationship between the immaterial world of abstract ideas and the material world of concrete beings backwards. “Abstraction means locating the essence of Nature outside of Nature, the essence of Humanity outside of Humanity, the essence of Thinking outside the act of Thinking,” he objects: “Philosophy, which derives the finite from the infinite, the definite from the indefinite, never actually arrives at the finite and the definite” (Feuerbach 2013, 59; my translation).⁴⁴ This intuition regarding the backwardness of abstraction is the same one explicitly invoked by Engels in Umrisse.

 This stark distinction between a world of being and a world of ideas may be one of the critical sources for what some have condemned as Marx’s “utilitarianism” regarding production, exchange, and consumption. Even the most mundane physical acts entail symbolic structures, David Graeber counsels: “In other words we are never dealing with pure, abstract ideas, any more than we are ever dealing with purely mechanical production” (Graeber 2006, 72). Or, as Mary Douglas might remind us, there are lessons to be learned from the fact that modern kitchens don’t include toilets.

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One strategy for making sense of this claim regarding philosophical abstraction is to read Feuerbach as a kind of “German sensationalist” or “Romantic empiricist” (Richards 1987). Feeling—understood as our empirical, physiological, prearticulate presence-in-the-world—comes before thinking. ⁴⁵ Thus, Feuerbach submits: “The subjective origin and course of philosophy is also its objective course and origin. Before you think quality, you feel quality. Suffering comes before thought” (Feuerbach 2013, 61; my translation). Another option is to play up the suggestive parallels between Feuerbach’s emphasis on the “belated” appearance of conscious reflection in our lives—that we are always already there before we start thinking—with the Heideggerian distinction between the “present-at-hand” [Vorhandenheit] and the “ready-to-hand” [Zuhandenheit].⁴⁶ Still another way to make sense of this is by reflecting on the dream of artificial intelligence.

No Feet, No Eyes, No Minds For decades now, researchers have attempted to reproduce—or at least convincingly simulate—human intelligence. The working hypothesis has been that cognition is just another form of computation, a bit of software running on some hardware. Therefore, the argument goes, we should be able to create programs that allow digital computers to process information in ways that either exhibit or mimic fluid human intelligence. Artificial intelligence research has produced some genuinely intriguing results in speech recognition, chess-playing, and data mining; but it has not, to date, ever quite made good on all the hype (e. g., Mitchell 2019, Nilsson 2010). There are, of

 “I felt before thinking,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau observes in his own self-aggrandizing way: “this is the common fate of humanity, I experienced it more than others” (Rousseau 1995, 7).  There are all sorts of reasons for not making too much of the parallel, but in Being and Time Heidegger distinguished between two ways of moving through the world. When skilled carpenters drive a nail, for example, the hammer is “ready-to-hand” [Zuhandenheit] in that it feels like an extension of their arms. There is no self-reflective, second-order reflection required. When children, apprentices, and weekend warriors try to drive a nail, however, the hammer is “present-at-hand” [Vorhandenheit]—it feels like an alien object, a crude Thing in their hands. Where one mode of activity may be described as immediate and “pre-theoretical,” the other is self-conscious and theoretical. “If we look at Things just ‘theoretically,’ we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand,” Heidegger writes: “But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character” (Heidegger 1962, 98).

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course, many possible explanations for these shortcomings. Over time one thing has become clear: cognitive and computer scientists too casually discounted the importance of being embodied. In the early 1970s, Herbert Dreyfus—appealing to Heidegger, no less—pointed out: Adherents of the psychological and epistemological assumptions that human behavior must be formalizable in terms of a heuristic program for a digital computer are forced to develop a theory of intelligent behavior which makes no appeal to the fact that a man has a body, since at this stage at least the computer clearly hasn’t one. In thinking that the body can be dispensed with, these thinkers again follow the tradition, which from Plato to Descartes has thought of the body as getting in the way of intelligence and reason, rather than being in any way indispensable for it. If the body turns out to be indispensable for intelligent behavior, then we shall have to ask whether the body can be simulated on a heuristically programmed digital computer. If not, then the project of artificial intelligence is doomed from the start (Dreyfus 1972, 147).

Almost nothing important had changed a quarter-century later according to Andy Clark. The taken-for-granted assumption that thinking is an essentially disembodied activity, he laments: persists in the way we study brain and mind, excluding as ‘peripheral’ the roles of the rest of the body and the local environment. It persists in the tradition of modeling intelligence as the production of symbolically coded solutions to symbolically expressed puzzles. It persists in the lack of attention to the ways the body and local environment are literally built into the processing loops that result in intelligent action (Clark 1997, xii; Hutchins 1995).⁴⁷

It now seems likely that, as a general rule of thumb, natural organisms and artifactual agents probably need to first have a body like ours in order to have a mind like ours. From a Darwinian perspective, this makes sense: it is only because creatures have specific phenotypical forms and are embedded in particular ecological niches—landscapes filled with things to eat or avoid, creatures to court or kill, and so on—that “minds” evolved in the first place. As Dennett once observed with typical verve: “You don’t need eyes if you don’t have feet” (Kayzer 1997). I take Feuerbach to be gesturing towards something similar. At least, this is how I make sense of the following: “The true relationship between thinking and being is simply this: Being is subject, thinking is predicate. Thinking comes from being but being does not come from thinking” (Feuerbach 2013, 66 – 67; my translation). That is, how one thinks about the world—the data

 It is worth noting that embodied cognitive science includes both a computational and a noncomputational wing. Although I remain formally agnostic, my sympathies lie with the “radical,” anti-representationalist camp (e.g., Chemero 2009).

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that an agent uses or ignores to feed, fight, or fornicate—is inescapably tied to how one is physically present in the world. The perceptual apparatus that tells a dung beetle that food is close is responding to the same air-borne molecules that human beings perceive as a reliable sign of not-food. In this way, one might think of Feuerbach as inverting the conventional Cartesian equation. Fiddle with cogito ergo sum enough and it becomes sum ergo cogito: I exist in the world as a particular kind of organism; ergo, I must solve particular kinds of organism-typical problems. By treating thinking as a predicate of being, Feuerbach makes the material conditions of our existence the sine qua non of our conscious lives. More to the point, our bodies and the evolutionary trajectories which assembled them become the great “un-thought” or physiological pre-condition for human cognition. This implies that our bodies and the world around us—not to mention the ways in which we “fit” more easily into some corners of the planet than others—are always already inscribed in the contours of human thought. The human imagination presupposes and is thus structured by one fundamental reality: if it weren’t for the distinct sorts of bodies that natural selection assembled, we would not be thinking in the first place. This how I understand Feuerbach when he writes: The absolute or infinite of speculative philosophy is, psychologically speaking, nothing other than something not specific, the indeterminate―the abstraction from everything particular, set apart as an essence distinguished from this abstraction but at the same time re-identified with it. Historically considered, however, it is nothing other than the old theological-metaphysical entity or non-entity, which is not finite, not human, not material, not determined and not created―the pre-worldly nothing taken for an act (Feuerbach 2013, 58; my translation).

Whatever we imagine to be the case, our capacity to imagine anything at all implies a specific way of moving through the world as a physiologically-embodied and socially-embedded creature. Slightly rephrased, the human imagination is always a distinctly human view of possibilities. Thus, we read: The infinite of religion and philosophy is and was never anything other than something finite, something particular, yet mystified, i. e., a finite and specific something with the postulate of being not finite and not definite. Speculative philosophy has rendered itself guilty of the same mistake as did theology. The determinations of actuality or finitude are made determinations and predicates of the infinite only through the negation of the specificity in which they are what they are (Feuerbach 2013, 61; my translation).

It is only by reference to the world of conditioned, finite things—only by virtue of us existing in a physiologically and socially specific manner—that we can imagine something we take to be “unconditioned” or “infinite.” As a result, whatever

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theologians and philosophers have embraced as the extra-empirical Really Real can only ever be a misrecognized form of finite existence or mundane reality that has been abstracted to the point of empirical emptiness. This inability to recognize how the infinite imaginary is just an inverted version of finite reality goes by several names in Feuerbach: “self-delusion” [Selbstverblendung]; “self-objectification” [selbst Gegenstand]; and, perhaps most famously, a consciousness that is “estranged” from itself [entfremdet] or “exteriorized” [entäußert]. Terms for which Marx soon found another use.

Intuition Pumps and Other Party Tricks To a first approximation, I take the Paris manuscripts to reveal how Marx began using Feuerbach’s philosophical rhetoric of inversion to organize his embryonic understanding and nascent critique of classical political economy. Feuerbach’s account of religion as upside-down cognition became an “intuition pump” for formulating hypotheses, recognizing patterns, and identifying similarities between two different ways of talking about the world (Dennett 2013, 10). The conceptual center of gravity for this exercise was the suggestive analogy Engels recognized between religion and capitalism. The comparison goes something like this. Religion may be said to transform the fictional worlds generated by human cognition into an alien, hostile, or non-human realm which—like dreams, pretest anxieties, or addictions—takes hold of and subjugates its creators. When the gods tell us to wear this or don’t eat that, it is as if the marionettes are pulling the puppeteers’ strings. Capitalism, however, transforms the actual world into an alien, hostile, even anti-human realm which takes hold of and subjugates its creators.⁴⁸ For this reason, Marx judges: The more that workers exhaust themselves through work, the more powerful and alien the world that they create becomes, the less the world belongs to them; their inner world becomes poorer as well. It is the same in religion. The more humanity gives to God, the less it keeps for itself. Workers put their lives in objects; but their lives now belong to the object rather than themselves. The greater this activity, the more abstract the worker becomes. Whatever the product of the workers’ labor is, they are not. The greater this product, the less they are (MECW 3: 271– 272/MEGA2 I.2: 236; my translation).

One mode of “self-emptying” is being used here to illuminate or defamiliarize the other. However, what makes wage labor morally objectionable is that all human be-

 Sounds a lot like the “uninhabitable earth” that David Wallace-Wells (2020) describes.

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ings—regardless of rank or wealth or intelligence—must “metabolize” bits of their environment to survive. We are, in inexorable ways, producing, consuming, and transforming creatures. “Human beings are natural beings,” we are told: As a natural being—as a living, natural being—we are endowed with natural powers, vital forces; we are active natural beings. These powers exist within us as dispositions, abilities, drives. As natural, physical, sensuous, and concrete beings we are also suffering, conditioned and limited creatures, just like animals and plants; the objects of our drives exist outside of us as independent things; but these objects are indispensable, essential items required to activate and validate the powers of our being. That the human is an embodied, natural, living, real, sensuous, concrete being means that we have real, sensory things as the object [Gegenstand] of our being, our expression of life; or that we can only express our lives through real sensual things. To be objective, natural, sensuous, and to also have sensory objects, Nature, outside of oneself—or to be an objective, natural, sensuous being for another—is the same thing. Hunger is a natural necessity; it thus requires a nature outside itself, an object beyond itself, in order to be satisfied, to be quenched. Hunger is the explicit need of my body for an object that is outside of it, is essential for its integration and expression. The sun is the plant’s object, an essential object for it, affirming its life; the plant is also the sun’s object, an expression of its life-producing power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essence (MECW 3: 336/MEGA2 I.2: 408; my translation).

The endlessly recursive wordplay in this passage is typical of post-Hegelian German philosophy—and it makes me grind my teeth. The fact that these are reading notebooks rather than polished pieces further compounds the difficulty of understanding what Marx is really driving at here. The main idea appears to be that human beings can only realize our general, abstract capacity to become self-reflective, conscious agents with the assistance of other conscious agents and non-conscious things. We are not brains in a vat. Nor is our productive, social activity merely the instrumental means by which we satisfy physiological needs. We are more than flightless wasps or two-legged spiders; our houses are more than nests or webs thoughtlessly assembled. Home-building is also how we create distinctly human lives. In this sense, collective life may be said to humanize nature by appropriating and transforming the world according to a historically dynamic constellation of needs, wants, preferences, and ambitions. “It is precisely through our adaptation or processing [Bearbeitung] of the objective world that we prove to be a species-being. This production is our working specieslife. Through it, Nature appears as our work,” Marx writes: “The object [Gegenstand] of labor is, therefore, the objectification of humanity’s species-life” (MECW 3: 277/MEGA2 I.2: 370; my translation). Andrea Komlosy describes this portrait of value-producing activity as “the triangular constellation of man-tool-nature,” in part because it underplays the significance of caring and cleaning—labor that too often goes unnoticed or under-appre-

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ciated by men because it is largely performed by women (Komlosy 2018, 28; e. g., Barker and Kuiper 2003, Collins and Gimenez 1990). The recognition that some value-adding activities can be systematically devalued—for example, that, “women’s work” is often not treated as real work because it is not wage-earning—is particularly helpful in this context; it highlights Marx’s accusation that wage labor organizes collective life in ways that the human-built world presupposes but excludes the very people who build it, clean it, and care for it. “Socialized” nature provides nourishment, leisure, and fulfillment to the expropriating classes. For the expropriated classes it appears as an adversarial, inhuman, or anti-social realm. “Therefore, by stripping the objects of production from individuals, estranged labor dispossesses individuals of their species-life, their real objectivity as a member of a species,” we read: “our advantage over animals is transformed into a disadvantage as our inorganic body, Nature, is expropriated” (MECW 3: 276 – 277/MEGA2 I.2: 370; my translation). It is a little peculiar to describe the natural world as representing our inorganic bodies—but it seems less odd by viewing a couple’s anniversary dinner as the metabolization of nature (i. e., physically and symbolically transforming some-thing that isn’t their bodies into something which is). Fashioned in more strident terms, wage labor reduces human beings to organic machines: just another thing which is useful when working, but only when working. Marx suggests that this fact is reflected in the way that political economists exclusively address workers as sources of labor; they do not “consider him when he is not working, as a human being; but leaves such considerations to criminal justice, medicine, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beggar’s Beadle” (MECW 3: 241/MEGA2 I.2: 208; my translation).⁴⁹ Away from the job site or factory floor, the human subject as worker becomes a brutish object to manage.

Political Economy or Capitalist Theology? In the Umrisse, Engels whimsically describes Adam Smith as “the economic Luther” (MECW 3: 422/MEW 1: 503). It is a fine comedic line with a modest point. Where Smith’s Wealth of Nations criticized the principles of early-modern mercantilism, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses criticized the principles of late-medieval Catholicism. Thus, the rise of laissez-faire capitalism is a bit like the rise of Protestantism.  Dem Bettelvogt or “beggar’s Beadle” refers to the church or parish official responsible for supervising the local poor and beggars. In England, the Beadle was also known as the “dog-whipper” because one of the assigned duties was clearing dogs from inside the church: “Samuel Lygoe shall have five shillings a year for the Whipping of the Dogs out of the Church on all Sundays & other Days upon which is Divine Service” (As quoted in Cox and Hope 1881, 45).

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“The mercantile system still had a certain uninhibited Catholic honesty and did not conceal the immoral nature of trade in the least,” Engels judges: The mutually hostile posture of the nations in the eighteenth century–the disgusting envy and commercial jealousy—were the logical consequences of trade as such. Public opinion was not yet humanized. So why hide the things that follow from the inhuman, hostile nature of trade itself? But when the economic Luther, Adam Smith, criticized the previous economy, things had already changed a lot. The century was humanized; reason had asserted itself, morality began to claim its eternal right. The extorted trade treaties, the commercial wars, the rugged isolation of the nations, were all too much for an advanced consciousness. In place of Catholic honesty stepped Protestant hypocrisy (MECW 3: 422– 423/MEW 1: 503 – 504; my translation).

Although Smith and Malthus are associated with the ascension of Protestant hypocrisy, Engels is not actually suggesting that Luther and Smith were doing the same thing. These names are useful markers, shorthand ways of drawing attention to sweeping historical transformations—a bit like calling Willie O’Ree, the first Black player in the NHL, “the Jackie Robinson of hockey.” However, in the Paris manuscripts, Marx uses Feuerbach’s rhetoric of inversion to either rephrase Engels’ comparison or reach for something far more ambitious. We read: Engels was right to call Adam Smith the Luther of political economy. Just as Luther identified faith as the essence of the external world of religion and confronted Catholic heathenism – just as he abolished external religiosity by making religiosity the inner essence of man, just as he eliminated the priest outside of the laity because he relocated the priest into the hearts of the laity—Adam Smith did with wealth; wealth as something outside humanity and independent of it—and, therefore, as something to be maintained and asserted only in an external fashion—is done away with; that is, its external, mindless objectivity is abolished, and private property is incorporated into the nature of human being. As a result, humanity now recognizes itself in the rule of private property, just as with Luther humanity recognizes itself in the rule of religion. Under the guise of recognizing the human being, political economy—whose fundamental principle is labor—actually only denies the human being in that humanity no longer has a tense, external relation to the external nature of private property, but rather becomes the anxious being of private property (MECW 3: 290 – 291/MEGA2 I.2: 257– 258; my translation).

This is another devilishly complicated passage to decipher, in part because Marx is stretching the parallels between Luther and Smith far beyond what Engels initially proposed. The point that he seems to be reaching for goes something like this. Prior to Luther, Christian piety was something tangible or observable. You went to confession, observed feast days, performed acts of penance, baptized babies, went on pilgrimage, and so on. After Luther, however, Christian piety becomes an abstract, intangible “faith.” Protestant salvation doesn’t depend on anything that can be seen, or touched, or tasted, or smelled. So, too, prior to Adam Smith

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wealth was tangible property that could be sold, or exchanged, or traded: the limited, legal meaning of “alienate.” Most human beings in medieval Europe had little or no material wealth that could be alienated in this way, but their social status as serfs and peasants meant that they were more than mere things. Serfs may have been bound to the feudal estate, but they were also socially connected to the feudal lord “by ties of respect, allegiance, and duty. His relation to them is therefore directly political and also has a human, cozy side” (MECW 3: 266/MEGA2 I.2: 230; my translation). The rise of wage labor meant that the “romantic glory” of feudal obligations—and the “silly mysticism” surrounding the feudal estate—were replaced by a terse, precisely enumerated transaction between employer and employee that uses money to measure time (MECW 3: 266, 268/MEGA2 I.2: 231– 232; my translation). Understood in this way, Luther and Smith are labels that point to the historical transposition of something exterior, social, and concrete with something interior, impersonal, and abstract. The demise of one order could even be said to be inversely proportional to the rise of the other. “According to political economy, in its own words, we have shown that the worker degenerates into a commodity,” Marx writes: “that the misery of the worker is inversely related to the power and size of production” (MECW 3: 270/MEGA2 I.2: 234; my translation). The rise of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism are, in this sense, roughly analogous in that each historical development involves a pitiless world of fungible things displacing a human world of baroque social complexity. Alienation, à la Feuerbach, once meant the misrecognition of the gods as something more-than or at least other-than human. For wage laborers, alienation now results in nothing more edifying than a few dollars, an aching body, and an all-toohuman boss. “Workers become poorer the more wealth they produce,” Marx contends: “As the world of things increases in value, the human world is devalued in equal proportion” (MECW 3: 272/MEGA2 I.2: 236; my translation). Pushing the analogy between capitalism and religion about as far as it can reasonably go, Marx experiments with pulling all of these various threads together at once. “We started out with a fact of political economy – the estrangement of workers and their production,” he begins: We have described this fact in conceptual terms as alienated [entfremdete], exteriorized [entäußerte] labor. We have analyzed this concept; that is, we have only analyzed a fact of political economy. Let us now see how the concept of estranged, alienated labor is expressed and represented in reality. If the product of labor is alien to me, appears as an alien power, to whom does it belong? If my own activity is not mine, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom does it belong? To a being other than me.

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Who is this being? The gods? In the ancient past, production mainly appears to be in the service of the gods and the product itself belongs to the gods (temple construction and so on in Egypt, India, and Mexico). However, the gods were never the only lords of labor [Arbeitsherrn]. Nor was Nature. What a contradiction it would be that the more human beings subject nature through labor— the more the miracles of the gods become superfluous through the miracles of industry—the more it surrenders the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product. The alien being, to whom both labor and labor’s product belongs, in whose service work is done and for whose pleasure labor’s product is offered, can only be another human being. If the product of work does not belong to the worker, is an alien power for him, this is because it belongs to another person besides the worker. If the workers’ activity is torture, it must provide pleasure and joie de vivre to someone else. Not the gods; not nature; only other human beings can be an alien power over us. One should also consider the principle already established: that our relationship to ourselves only becomes objective and actual through our relations to other human beings. If, therefore, workers relate to the product of their work—to their labor objectified—as an alien, hostile, powerful object that stands over-against them, then someone who stands over-against them must be the master of this item. If human beings relate to their own activity as something unfree, it is something done as a form of servitude, under the control, coercion, and yoke of another (MECW 3: 278 – 279/ MEGA2 I.2: 242– 243; my translation).

At one level, this stream of thought might be discounted as a minimally creative version of Feuerbach: religious and economic phenomena are only ever misrecognized human and, therefore, social phenomena. Yet, despite this apparent continuity, Marx has introduced a dynamic which is largely absent in Feuerbach: the domination of some human beings by others. The misrecognized gods that really matter are the mundane “lords of labor” [Arbeitsherrn], the mere mortals who coerce work and monopolize its products. To get right to the point: treating theology as upside-down anthropology means digging down to expose the class struggles buried underneath it all.

The Political Economy of an Upside-down World Despite the conceptual and programmatic discontinuities that distinguish one batch of “economic” writing from another, the intuition pump that compares capitalism to religion—or, if you prefer, bourgeois political economy to Christian theology—remained in Marx’s bag of tricks. Even as he struggled and failed to complete either the six-volume “critique of political economy” or the four-book “capital”

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project, Marx continued to employ the rhetoric of inversion he’d taken on loan from Feuerbach.⁵⁰ This pattern can be seen most clearly by returning to the question of wage labor.⁵¹ “It goes without saying,” we read in the Paris manuscripts, “that political economy views the proletarian only as a worker (i. e., one who, without capital or ground-rent, lives purely by labor—and by a one-sided, abstract labor)” (MECW 3: 241/MEGA2 I.2: 208; my translation). One-sided labor tends to be synonymous with machine-like labor in the 1844 notebooks: a form of productive activity that reduces artisanal skill to mere mechanical movement. This moralizing criticism of industrial labor’s dehumanizing nature is taken directly from Adam Smith himself. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,” we read in Wealth of Nations: He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigor and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His

 The specific provenance of Marx’s rhetorical inversion matters because the trope appears in countless other contexts. For example, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès posits: “During the long night of feudal barbarism, it was possible to destroy the true relations between men, to turn all concepts upside down, and to corrupt all justice; but, as day dawns, so gothic absurdities must fly and the remnants of ancient ferocity collapse and disappear” (Sieyès 2003, 120). On my reading, it is Feuerbach’s account of religion as the “fantastical” grasp of the real world—interacting with reality, but in an inverted manner—which provided the key point of departure for Marx’s grasp of political economy.  Anyone only familiar with the “academic” Marx of fetishism and ideology might be asking themselves by now: Why keep going on about wage labor? The short answer is that Marx thought it was impossible—or at least inexcusable—to analyze capital apart from wage labor. In a footnote from Capital, he even cites his own 1849 Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles to this end: “Capital presupposes wage labor; wage labor presupposes capital. They are mutually dependent; they produce each other. Do workers in a cotton factory only produce cotton cloth? No. They produce capital as well” (MECW 35: 577/MEW 23: 604; my translation). Since it is Marx’s critical grasp of capitalist logic which accounts for his continuing relevance, we must find ways to engage his understanding of wage labor as well.

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dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues (Smith 1994, 840; see MEGA2 I.2: 349 – 350).

The moral tragedy of Smith’s one-sided labor is that while it expands the productive powers of individuals, it comes at the cost of their humanity: the artisan’s accumulated skill has been broken down into so many gears and pulleys. Unfortunately, Marx does not indicate whether he takes abstract labor to be a nearsynonym of one-sided labor or a distinct quality of wage labor. He merely asks: “In the history of human evolution, what does it mean to reduce the greatest part of humanity to abstract labor?” (MECW 3: 241/MEGA2 I.2: 208; my translation). The once-barely-there category of “abstract labor” becomes something more substantial and more interesting in the 1857– 1858 manuscripts—thanks in part to Marx backing away from the idea that wage labor turns workers themselves into commodities. A decade earlier, he seems to have accepted the common socialist trope that with wage labor a worker’s “existence is reduced to the existence of every other commodity. Workers have become a commodity” (MECW 3: 235 – 236/ MEGA2 I.2: 191; my translation). In the so-called “Grundrisse” manuscripts, however, we find Marx flirting with something new: a sharpened version of the claim that a commodity’s value is ultimately a measure of labor time. In Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, for instance, Ricardo reminds his readers that while labor is the ultimate source of a commodity’s value, one should not: be inattentive to the different qualities of labour, and the difficulty of comparing an hour’s or a day’s labour, in one employment, with the same duration of labour in another. The estimation in which different qualities of labour are held, comes soon to be adjusted in the market with sufficient precision for all practical purposes, and depends much on the comparative skill of the labourer, and intensity of the labour performed. The scale, when once formed, is liable to little variation. If a day’s labour of a working jeweller be more valuable than a day’s labour of a common labourer, it has long ago been adjusted, and placed in its proper position in the scale of value. In comparing therefore the value of the same commodity, at different periods of time, the consideration of the comparative skill and intensity of labour, required for that particular commodity, needs scarcely to be attended to, as it operates equally at both periods. One description of labour at one time is compared with the same description of labour at another; if a tenth, a fifth, or a fourth, has been added or taken away, an effect proportioned to the cause will be produced on the relative value of the commodity (Ricardo 2004, 20 – 21).

Ricardo’s point is that if the same $200 will buy either a pair of leather boots or a wool coat, this means that two boots and one coat—or a given amount of leather and wool—are somehow equivalent. As far as the dollars are concerned, they are the same things. This means that the specific, qualitatively distinct kinds of labor required to produce shoes and coats are somehow quantitatively equivalent.

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Labor as a productive input thus becomes a kind of an all-purpose, interchangeable substance like protein or carbohydrates. If Ricardo is right, Marx reasons, then what capitalists purchase through wages is an amount of labor that is quantifiable precisely because it is qualitatively intangible. That is, instead of becoming a commodity, wage laborers sell the only commodity they possess: their abstract labor power. What capitalists buy with a wage is not: this or that labor, but labor itself, abstract labor; absolutely indifferent to the specific determination of labor, but capable of taking on any and all forms. The specific substance of labor in which a particular capital exists must, of course, correspond to the particular work; but since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of this substance—both the totality of all its particularities and the abstraction from all of them—labor also subjectively assumes this same totality and abstraction (MECW 28: 222– 223/MEGA2 II.1.1: 216 – 217; my translation).

The only way to buy a particular form of labor is to purchase the commodity which “embodies” the actual labor which produced it. So, by virtue of paying workers a wage, what employers are really buying is the right to impose a particular form on the generic capacity of the human body to do something. Cast in slightly more formal terms, capitalists enjoy a monopoly on the social circumstances in which potential, abstract labor is converted into actual, concrete labor. As a result, the objective conditions of work: are now separated from workers as capital and exist over-against them independently. Workers can relate themselves to this situation as working conditions only if their labor has already been appropriated by capital. From the standpoint of capital, it is not the objective working conditions in themselves that are essential; only that these conditions exist independently over-against them—that workers are separated from them, that the capitalist owns them, that this separation can only be overcome by workers surrendering their productive power to capital; whereas this sustains workers as an abstract labor capacity, i. e., as nothing more than the mere capacity to reproduce wealth (MECW 29: 202/MEW 42: 711– 712; my translation).

From this vantage point, what is distinctive about capitalist wage labor is that workers can only access the means of production—and thus secure the means of subsistence for themselves and those for whom they care—by selling their ability to do what they are told by the day, hour, or piece. Not so long ago, “production still assumed feudal forms and served as the immediate source of subsistence for the producers themselves. For the most part, products did not become commodities and therefore did not turn into money, or enter into the general social metabolism; therefore, they did not appear as an objectification of universal abstract labor or constitute bourgeois wealth” (MECW 29: 389/MEW 13: 133; my translation). In this way, the rise of abstract labor coincides with a life that is increasingly medi-

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ated by impersonal market forces and money. With capitalism, human existence itself can be said to acquire a numerically specific price. ⁵² Although this understanding of wage labor is distinct from that of the 1840s, Marx still deploys the rhetoric of inversion to describe its upside-down consequences. As a case in point, perhaps the most obvious outcome of this arrangement is that working people must spend their days selling commodities (i. e., abstract labor power) in order to buy commodities (i. e., the means of subsistence). This is how modern industrial production yields a world that—though built by human hands to satisfy subjective human needs—confronts its makers as an increasingly impersonal and hostile objective order. What the political economists call “free” wage labor looks more like a historically distinct form of economic exploitation and social domination better described as liberal unfreedom (Cohen 1983, Hindess 2001).⁵³ “The fact that, with the development of the productive forces of labor, the objectified conditions of labor must increase in relation to living labor—this is a tautological proposition,” Marx advises: what does the expansion of the productive power of labor mean other than less actual labor is required to create a greater product; thus, social wealth is increasingly expressed in the conditions of labor that are created by labor itself. From the standpoint of capital, it does not appear that one moment of social activity— objective labor—is becoming an ever more massive body than the moment of subjective, living labor; but that-and this is important for wage labor—the objective conditions of labor assume an increasingly colossal independence, as represented by the extent to which they stand over-against living labor and social wealth confronts labor as an alien and dominating power. The emphasis is not placed upon being objectified, but on being alienated, estranged, sold—it is given up, sold; the immense objectified power which social labor has created over against itself as the personified conditions of production—the not-the-worker [das Nicht-dem-Arbeiter]—belongs to capital. A past moment dominates the present. From the standpoint of both capital and wage labor, insofar as this objective body of activity stands over-against the immediate labor capacity – in fact, to the degree that this process of objectification appears as a process of alienation from the standpoint of labor, or as the appropriation of alienated labor from the standpoint of capital— this distortion and inversion is real; it is not merely fancied, something that only exists in the imagination of workers and capitalists (MECW 29: 209 – 210/MEW 42: 721– 722; my translation).

 With time, it has become much clearer that ownership of the means of production is only part of the dynamic. Another crucial subset of capital property-relations regards access to and ownership of housing (e. g., Arruza et al. 2019, Piketty 2022).  Or, as Walker C. Smith memorably makes the point in his pamphlet on industrial sabotage: “Not many wage workers have studied the deeper economists, but the ditch digger knows that when he has finished the ditch upon which he is at work he must hunt another master” (Smith 1913).

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Feuerbach’s name does not appear in this passage, but the Feuerbach–like suggestion that capitalism inverts the relation between activity and passivity—substituting dead labor in the form of machinery for the living labor of human beings—is a conceptual center of gravity in the 1857– 1858 manuscripts. In fact, almost every dynamic that Marx examines in “Grundrisse” seems to be inversely related to something else. Case in point: he judges that the wage-relation is just like every other commercial transaction between a buyer and seller, except that the capacity of a body to metabolize the world is converted “into its opposite, and the laws of private property—liberty, equality, property—the ownership of one’s own work and the ability to dispose of it freely—are turned into the worker’s propertyless-ness and the alienation of his labor, his relation to it as an alien property and vice versa” (MECW 29: 64– 65/MEW 42: 575; my translation). Capitalist logic invariably turns the world upside-down.

On Second Thought All of this raises an interpretive question, though: Why has Feuerbach himself been erased from the page? Did the “true foundation” of Marx’s developing grasp of political economy change during the 1850s? It is somewhere between difficult and impossible to trace this shift in Marx’s presentation to any single provocation. One proximate cause was almost certainly the publication of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Johann Caspar Schmidt had been a peripheral member of the same Hegelian Doctorklub which seduced Marx away from studying law at the University of Berlin. “Stirner” was both a pseudonym and a nickname he acquired thanks to a massive Teutonic forehead [Stirn]. The book takes direct aim at his former associates’ milquetoast “radicalism.” In his estimation the Junghegelianer were too liberal to be radicals, too abstract to be materialists, too pious to be irreligious, and too domesticated to be free. “The cry for ‘freedom’ rings loudly all around,” Stirner coldly observes: “Of what use is it to sheep that no one abridges their freedom of speech? They stick to bleating” (Stirner 1995, 51). From Stirner’s perspective, Feuerbach himself was guilty of the most conspicuous failure of post-Hegelian nerve. The primary thrust of his criticism was that the alleged reduction of theology to anthropology did little more than exchange one hectoring, abstract superintendent for another. The only goods or values that exist for truly autonomous individuals are those they have selected for themselves —an ethical stance he described as egoism. “Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of,” he judges: “To be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to present oneself, the individual. It is not how I realize

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the generally human that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself ” (Stirner 1995, 163). Once upon a time, human beings were hemmed in by moral obligations that invoked an invisible god’s judgment with fear and trembling. Now they are governed by the invisible essence of Man. In each case, individuals are expected to surrender their autonomy by allowing an abstract, external, and non-negotiable authority to dictate the ethical terms of their behavior. Same drink, different bottle. “It is a question of a supreme essence with both,” we read: “and whether this is a superhuman or a human one can make (since it is in any case an essence over me, a super-mine one, so to speak) but little difference to me. In the end the relation to the human essence, or to ‘Man,’ as soon as ever it has shed the snake-skin of the old religion, will yet wear a religious snake-skin again” (Stirner 1995, 46). When viewed in this light, Feuerbach was just another Christian theologian insisting he had something new to offer. More damning still, Stirner accused the supposedly “atheistic” Communists of compounding the sin of philosophical abstraction by transforming society itself into a thuggish god to be obeyed. “If community is once a need of man, and he finds himself furthered by it in his aims, then very soon, because it has become his principle, it prescribes to him its laws too, the laws of – society,” he contends: The principle of men exalts itself into a sovereign power over them, becomes their supreme essence, their God, and, as such―lawgiver. Communism gives this principle the strictest effect, and Christianity is the religion of society, for, as Feuerbach rightly says, although he does not mean it rightly, love is the essence of man; that is, the essence of society or of societary (Communistic) man. All religion is a cult of society, this principle by which societary (cultivated) man is dominated; neither is any god an ego’s exclusive god, but always a society’s or community’s, be it of the society, “family” (Lar, Penates) or of a “people” (“national god”) or of “all men” (“he is a Father of all men”). Consequently one has a prospect of extirpating religion down to the ground only when one antiquates society and everything that flows from this principle. But it is precisely in Communism that this principle seeks to culminate, as in it everything is to become common for the establishment of―“equality.” If this “equality” is won, “liberty” too is not lacking. But whose liberty? Society’s! Society is then all in all, and men are only “for each other” (Stirner 1995, 274).

Stirner was thus nauseated by the Christian-like sanctimony of those Communists who blathered on about the universal brotherhood of workers. Christianity and Communism were two sides of the same fatuous, despotic coin—and anti-Marxist anarchists would later claim him as an ally for this reason (Leopold 2007). “As the Communists first declare free activity to be man’s essence, they, like all work-day dispositions, need a Sunday; like all material endeavours, they need a God, an uplifting and edification alongside their witless ‘labour,’” he growls: “That the Communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side

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of Communism” (Stirner 1995, 110). A bit more to the point, the moral hazard of communism is that it universalizes the particular social identity of the worker. Once the irreplaceable existence of the concrete individual is surrendered to a single, abstract socio-economic status, all is lost. In Stirner’s estimation: the labourer, in his consciousness that the essential thing in him is “the labourer,” holds himself aloof from egoism and subjects himself to the supremacy of a society of labourers, as the commoner clung with self-abandonment to the competition-state. The beautiful dream of a “social duty” still continues to be dreamed. People think again that society gives what we need, and we are under obligations to it on that account, owe it everything. They are still at the point of wanting to serve a “supreme giver of all good.” That society is no ego at all, which could give, bestow, or grant, but an instrument or means, from which we may derive benefit; that we have no social duties, but solely interests for the pursuance of which society must serve us; that we owe society no sacrifice, but, if we sacrifice anything, sacrifice it to ourselves―of this the Socialists do not think, because they―as liberals―are imprisoned in the religious principle, and zealously aspire after―a sacred society, such as the state was hitherto. Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new “supreme being,” which “takes us into its service and allegiance!” (Stirner 1995, 111).

There is no salvation. There is no redemption. The sacred in any guise is a swindle. Supposedly “radical” communists weren’t liberating anyone. They were leading us back into the same silly trap. Whether or not any of this criticism is fair to Feuerbach or nineteenth-century communism, it got Marx’s attention. Engels initially thought Stirner might be a useful sparring partner. “This egoism is only the consciousness of the present society and present man, the final judgment that present society can make against us, the epitome of all theory within the prevailing stupidity. But that’s precisely why this thing is important,” he wrote to Marx in November 1844: We must not simply cast it aside but exploit it as the perfect expression of existing madness and, by reversing it, build on it. This egoism is so carried to the extreme, so insane and—at the same time—so self-confident that it cannot endure for even a minute in its one-sidedness, but must immediately turn into communism. First, it is a trifle to demonstrate to Stirner that his egoistic actors must become communists out of pure selfishness. This must be said to the guy. Secondly, he must also be told that the human heart is—right from the start—unselfish and self-sacrificing in its selfishness; and thus, he returns to the thing he is fighting against. With these few trivialities one can reject the one-sidedness (MECW 38: 11/MEW 27: 11; my translation).

Stirner’s egoism raised more intimate problems for Marx than Engels may have initially recognized, though. If Feuerbach was a grubby crypto-theologian for invoking the “species-being” of humanity, then it followed that Marx’s fledgling vi-

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sion of a Communist Revolution in the name of this phantom was no less suspect. In a shifting wind, Marx tacked. One of the earliest signs that Marx felt compelled to distance himself from Feuerbach was scribbled out sometime during the spring of 1845. Along the top of a notebook page, he wrote Ad Feuerbach. “Feuerbach dissolves the essence of religion into the essence of the human being,” Marx notes a few lines down: But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of societal [gesellschaftlichen] relations. Feuerbach, who does not respond to the critique of this real essence, is thus forced: To abstract from the course of history and focus on religious sentiment by itself, and to presuppose an abstract—isolated—human individual. The essence, therefore, can only be conceived as “species,” as an inner, mute generality that naturally unites the many individuals (MECW 5: 4– 5/MEGA2 IV.3: 20 – 21; my translation).

To a first approximation, this is Marx siding with Stirner against Feuerbach—and as such, represents a key moment in his intellectual development. For this reason, Wolfgang Eßbach has gone so far as to suggest that Stirner was present at the birth of Marxism as both “midwife and evil fairy” (Eßbach 2010). Over the next decade, Marx continued to retool his critique of political economy and whittle away his explicit appeals to Feuerbach—all the while retaining the rhetoric of inversion. The manuscripts from the early 1860s return again and again to capitalism’s oddness by emphasizing how the age-old relationship between active subjects and passive objects has been flipped. “For labor to be wage labor, for the worker to work as a non-owner, for him to sell not commodities but control over his own labor capacity—to sell his labor capacity itself in the only manner in which it can be sold—the conditions for the realization of his labor must confront him as alienated conditions, as alien powers, conditions under the domination of an alien will,” he proposes: Living labor thus becomes the means by which objectified labor is preserved and reproduced. Inasmuch as the worker creates wealth, it becomes a power of capital; similarly, all development of labor’s productive forces is the development of capital’s productive forces. What the worker sells, always replaced with an equivalent, is labor capacity itself, a definite value, whose magnitude may oscillate between wider or narrower limits, which is always conceptually reducible to a definite amount of food required to preserve labor capacity as such, i. e., so that the worker can live as a worker. Objectified, past labor thereby becomes the ruler of living, present labor. The relationship between subject and object is inverted (MECW 30: 112– 113/ MEW 43: 105; my translation).

Capital in the form of the means of production—which is the objectified presence of once subjective labor—dictates the actual conditions under which a worker’s

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labor power is bought and consumed by a capitalist. In industrial production, the past controls the present, the mechanical commands the organic, things dominate people, and the dead rule the living. The world is upside-down.⁵⁴ He notes that in the capitalist production process: the socially productive forces of labor appear as productive forces transposed into capital, the independence and personification of past labor and value exists in the form of the capitalist; past labor’s domination of living labor constitutes the essence of capital. On the other hand, the transformation of the worker into a mere, objective labor capacity, a commodity, does not appear as a consequence of the social relation of production, but of capital’s fertility—which itself appears as the result of the material relation between objects and labor during the production process rather than the social relation of production. The essential characteristic of the capital-relation—as far as it can be considered independently of the circulation process— is the mystification, the inverted world, the relation between the subjective and the objective turned on its head, as it already appears in money. Correspondingly, this inverted relationship within the actual production process—which is completed through the transformations and modifications of the actual circulation process—gives rise to an inverted conception, a transposed consciousness (MECW 33: 73/MEGA2 II.3.5: 1604; my translation).

To clarify what he means by “the inverted [verkehrte] world” that capital accumulation creates, Marx reaches into his bag of tricks. The upended relationship between dead, objective labor and the living, subjective laborer, he judges, is just like “the religious thought-process, where the product of thinking not only claims but actually exercises control over thought itself ” (MECW 32: 409/MEGA2 II.3.4: 1410; my translation). The pump still worked.

Conclusion In the draft of a “Conclusion” to a manuscript he was now calling Das Kapital, we find Marx revisiting and expanding the notion that the capitalist mode of production yields an upside-down world. “The domination of the capitalist over the worker is therefore the domination of the thing over the human, dead labor over living, the product over the producer,” he observes:

 In a sense, Marx was repeating a point made by another revolutionary democrat a century before. “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies,” Thomas Paine demands in The Rights of Man: “Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated” (Paine 2000, 63).

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the commodities which become the means of domination over the worker (but only as the means of capital’s rule) are just the results of the production process, the products of the production process. The same relationship in the sphere of material production, in the real social life process – for this is the production process —is represented in the ideological sphere by religion: the inversion of the subject into the object and vice versa. Looked at historically, this inversion appears as the necessary entry point for the creation of wealth as such, i. e., the ruthless development of social labor’s productive forces, which alone can form the material basis for a free human society, at the expense of the majority. It is necessary to pass through this antagonistic form, just as human beings first had to shape spiritual forces as independent powers in religion (MECW 34: 398 – 399/MEGA2 II.4.1: 63; my translation).

Where Feuerbach once reached for dreams to make sense of religion, this is Marx reaching for Feuerbach’s religion to make sense of capital. In many ways this looks identical to something Marx could have written in the 1840s. A gruff critic might even conclude that Marx had spent the last twenty years treading water (Stedman Jones 2007). Until the 1867 publication of Capital, however, virtually no one had the opportunity to follow Marx’s lead and consider how both capitalism and religion involve a “characteristic inversion of the relation between dead and living labor, between value and value-creating force” (MECW 35: 315/MEW 23: 329; my translation). It turns out that Marx was smart to hang on to the intuition pump. Many readers have a difficult time grasping the finer points of his argument regarding the capitalist’s coercive expropriation of surplus labor in pursuit of surplus value. Yet nearly everyone who has ever tried to read Capital is able to grasp what he means by the “fetish-character” of commodities—the peculiar power that products come to have over their producers. By making the inversion of the living and the dead one of the fundamental “mysteries” of the capitalist order, Marx is free to depict capitalism as religion’s Doppelgänger—the philosopher’s once fantastic misrecognition made brutally, unmistakably real. The classical political economists may have treated the process of capital accumulation as a natural law akin to gravity, but this: just states that the nature of capital accumulation requires that nothing should be done to diminish the degree to which the laborer is exploited or increase the price of labor—both of which might seriously threaten the ceaseless expansion of the capitalist relation between the buyers and sellers of labor power. It cannot be otherwise. In the capitalist mode of production the laborer exists only to create wealth for the capitalist, rather than material wealth existing to satisfy the laborer’s developmental needs. In religion, human beings are dominated by the products of their brains. In capitalism, they are dominated by the products of their hands (MECW 35: 616/MEW 23: 649; my translation).

The story doesn’t end there, though. Just as with wage rates, the discovery that there is nothing “natural” about the rule of metapersons over persons or capital

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over labor or things over people means there is also, in principle, a way out. What we have done to ourselves can also be undone. Since religion is only ever a disguised “reflection” of the real world, Marx concludes: The religious reflection [Widerschein] of the real world can disappear only after the conditions of mundane life—of material, day-to-day existence—provide human beings with transparent, rational relationships between each other and nature. The form of the social life-processes—of the material production processes—will lose its mystical haze only when it is the conscious, deliberate product of freely associated human beings. However, a specific material basis of society is required for this to happen; or, a series of material, existential conditions which are themselves the natural product of a long and painful developmental history (MECW 35: 90/MEW 23: 94; my translation).

This profound lack of interest in the nature or meaning of religion per se is, I think, what we always should have expected from someone like Marx. The point of all this heavy lifting was not merely to understand the world; it was to assist the working classes in setting it right-side-up.

Postscript Marx and the End of Marxist “Ideology” Sharp-eyed readers will have noted by now the almost total absence of a term that is virtually synonymous with traditional accounts of Marx, Marxism, and religion. The missing word is ideology. In a passage from the so-called “German Ideology” that has been reproduced countless times, we are told: In every era the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas (i. e., the class which is the dominant material power over society is, at the same time, the dominant intellectual power). The class which has the means of material production at its disposal also deploys the means of intellectual production, so that the ideas of those lacking the means of intellectual production are, on average, conquered or subjugated [unterworfen]. The dominant ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations put into ideas; the conditions that make one class dominant makes their ideas dominant as well. The individuals who make up the dominant class possess consciousness among other things and thus think; insofar as they rule as a class and determine the full scope of an historical era, it goes without saying that they do this to the fullest extent—that is, they also rule as thinkers, producers of ideas, who regulate the production and distribution of the thoughts of their time (MECW 5: 59/MEW 3: 46; my translation).⁵⁵

At first blush this looks like an imaginative—but, it should be said, not especially groundbreaking—extension of the Feuerbach-derived principle that being is subject, thinking is predicate. There is something slightly different at play here, though. Something that would have long-term consequences for twentieth-century political thought. The novel claim is that the power of the expropriating classes is so encompassing that the expropriated classes come to accept the “official,” top-down version of things as true. The dominated somehow lose the capacity to think for themselves over time—if, in fact, they ever had that ability to begin with. It is tempting to interpret Marx and Engels as making the following analogy. Much as capitalists control the social conditions within which potential, abstract labor is converted into actual, concrete labor, the capital class also controls the circumstances in which potential, abstract thought is converted into actual, concrete thought. I know this because, truth be told, I used to do it. In most ways, it was the appropriate analytic move for a twentieth-century academic Marxist to make.

 I have inserted an artificial break for ease of reading. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-009

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However, this old-school temptation should be unceremoniously rejected for one crucial reason: Marx had not yet arrived at this understanding of wage labor and the capitalist mode of production. He could not have meant what I once thought he meant. Neither “abstract labor” [abstrakte Arbeit] nor “abstract human labor” [abstrakt menschliche Arbeit] appear in the 1845 – 1846 texts. We read only that the savvy social critic will begin with “embodied” [leibhaftig] human beings and then treat “the development of ideological reflexes and echoes” as cognitive by-products which emerge from “the actual processes of life” [wirklichen Lebensprozeß] (MECW 5: 36/MEW 3: 26; my translation). The passive metaphors of cognitive echoes and psychological reflexes set-up what I take to be the intended punchline: Morality, religion, metaphysics, and other ideologies—as well as their corresponding forms of consciousness—no longer retain their appearance of autonomy [Selbständigkeit]. They have no history, no development; but those who develop their material production and material commerce [Verkehr] change reality as well as their way of thinking and the products of their thought” (MECW 5: 36 – 37/MEW 3: 26 – 27; my translation).⁵⁶

In a suitably “materialist” analogy, one could say that religion is to a specific mode of production much as flatulence is to digesting a specific meal—a mostly unintended by-product that is funny on some occasions, barely noticed on others, politely ignored on still others, but a deal-breaker when noxious. “The view that religion, or more generally common culture, can be manipulated to the political advantage of the dominant class can be traced back through the rational criticism of the Enlightenment philosophes to Plato’s ‘golden lie,”” Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Turner observed in the late 1970s: However, the main impetus for contemporary analysis of dominant ideologies comes from Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology [sic] and, partly through the influence of Marxism on the sociology of knowledge, the thesis occurs in many areas of sociological research, particularly in studies of politics and culture. Its argument is, very basically, that there is in most class societies a pervasive set of beliefs that broadly serves the interests of the dominant class. This dominant ideology is then adopted by subordinate classes which are thereby prevented from formulating any effective opposition (Abercrombie and Turner 1978, 149 – 150).

Notice how it isn’t merely the case that the powerful are guilty of hypocrisy or dishonesty—this, I gather, is something everyone already knows. The crucial bit is that the powerless buy it as true.

 Althusser makes the absolute positive sense of a-historicity the spur gear for his own “theory of ideology.”

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More recently, Tim Fitzgerald has proposed a meta-theoretical version of this claim by treating the category of “religion” itself as a product of ideological domination. “If the critics of liberal capitalism critiqued the pretensions to objective scientific knowledge of economics and the social sciences in general,” he advises: then I believe a more fundamental critique of ideology could be achieved. This would imply abandoning one’s own claim to a superior kind of the same secular epistemology, and shifting the critique to secularism itself as a mystifying ideology. And to do this would require looking again at “religion” and noticing that this is itself a modern invention that has the ideological function of mystifying the secular as ‘natural’ rationality. Such a shift in positionality makes possible not only a critique of the rationalistic pretensions of the secular capitalist state, but also of the secular socialist state. Yet the critique of the category religion and its supposed distinction from the secular is in some significant ways consistent with a critical reading of Marx. The central aspect of Marxist philosophy that has influenced my deconstruction of “religions” as imaginary objects of scientific knowledge has been the role of ideologies and their ability to transform and disguise power relations as the inevitable and natural order of things (Fitzgerald 2011, 256 – 257).

From Fitzgerald’s perspective, some constituency should take critical aim at the mistaken, false belief in “religion” rather than a mistaken, false belief in gods, witches, and spirits. ⁵⁷ “I would suggest that Marx’s theorization of ideology reduces the importance of any possible distinction between a religious and a non-religious secular ideology,” Fitzgerald concludes: “The general point in Marxian analysis is to focus on ideal constructions of knowledge dominant in a historical era, and to show how these serve the interests of the status quo. By masking real relations of production and power, a dominant ideology legitimates the status quo and makes it seem inevitable” (Fitzgerald 2011, 258). This may be the general point for all sorts of post-World War II Marxist analyses, but it isn’t quite the task that Marx set for himself.

 It is unclear which constituency should pursue the meta-theoretical critique of “religion.” This ambiguity underscores the gap between Marx’s socialist critique of classical political economy and the essentially Kantian sorts of “critique” which are written by university types. When Marx was wrestling with figures like David Ricardo, he was addressing an audience of labor activists, democratic reformers, and fellow socialists. By dissecting classical political economy from the insideout, he hoped to reveal where and how the struggle for a just collective order might achieve some measurable success. I can’t help but think he would chuckle at the idea that professional scholars might advance the revolutionary virtues of liberté, égalité, fraternité through the ideological critique of “religion.”

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Marx, Politics, and “Ideology” Given that Marx is widely viewed as sanctioning a critical interest in ideology, it is time for me to come clean about its conspicuous absence. I wish I could say that my rationale for avoiding the topic is tethered to some radically inventive interpretation capable of stopping the academic world in its tracks. It isn’t. In truth, it could not be simpler: the category plays a vanishingly small role in Marx’s writings. Ideology, it turns out, is yet another matter about which the flesh-and-blood Marx did not really “theorize.” Take his trilogy on French politics after the 1848 Revolution. By my count the term, or its adjectival form, appears eight times in The Class Struggles in France. On the one hand, Marx uses it to identify the link between: (a) a set of political claims associated with a more-or-less specific class position; and (b) agents who specialize in articulating these claims. Thus, after briefly introducing what he takes to be the Revolution’s key constituencies—the financial bourgeoisie, the industrial bourgeoisie, the lesser or “petty” bourgeoisie, and the peasantry—he pauses to mention “the ideological representatives and spokesmen of the cited classes, their scholars, lawyers, doctors, etc., in a word: their so-called experts” (MECW 10: 49/MEW 7: 12; my translation). On the other hand, he uses the term to highlight the gap separating political desires from political realities. Simply put, ideology highlights the difference between what a particular constituency would like to be the case—their strategic interests, social expectations, normative commitments, etc.—and the way things are. Reflecting on the National Guard’s brutal suppression of working-class unrest during les journées de Juin (23 – 26 June 1848), for example, Marx notes that the “official representatives of French democracy were so caught up in republican ideology that they only began to suspect the meaning of the June struggle a few weeks later. They were stunned by the gunpowder smoke in which their fantastical republic dissolved” (MECW 10: 68/MEW 7: 31; my translation). In February, the leaders of the Second Republic publicly appealed to the ‘89 ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité; the bloody events of June revealed they were just another regime of class domination. The words had become abstract, contentless slogans. Two years later, in Brumaire, “ideology” appears only once. Here again, the term gestures toward two relatively distinct but conjoined phenomena: (a) a set of political claims associated with a more-or-less specific class position; and (b) those agents who specialize in, and make a living from, such claim-making. “The spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie,” Marx writes: “its tribune and its press, in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself— the representatives and the represented—were estranged from one another and no longer understood each other” (MECW 11: 169 – 170/MEW 8: 182; my translation).

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In other words, the intellectuals were so caught up in the revolutionary moment that they forgot who paid the bills. The term doesn’t show up at all in The Civil War in France. The category of “ideology” wasn’t all that helpful for making sense of actual political struggles.

Marx, Economics, and “Ideology” So much for Marx’s overtly “political” analysis; how about his more obvious “economic” writings? To avoid all sorts of text-critical headaches, I’m going to stick to what Marx himself published. In Poverty of Philosophy, the term appears twice and is used to condemn Proudhon’s desire to plot a path towards socialism by too eagerly adopting categories from classical political economy. He judges: “As soon as one builds the edifice of an ideological system with the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated” (MECW 6: 166 – 167/MEW 4: 131; my translation). By this he means that the validity of political economy depends upon a particular constellation of institutions—the principles, tools, and techniques are all historically contingent and socially specific. From Marx’s perspective, trying to achieve socialism by the principles of “bourgeois” economic thought is as pointless as trying to build a house with the lofting plans for a sailboat. “Economists express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labor, credit, money, etc., as fixed, immutable, eternal categories,” he points out: But as soon as we fail to pursue the historical development of production relations—and remember, the categories are only theoretical expressions of these relations—as soon as one views these categories as self-generated ideas, thoughts independent of real relations, we are forced, for better or worse, to locate their origin in the exercise of pure reason (MECW 6: 162/MEW 4: 126; my translation).

The pursuit of surplus value is neither written in the stars nor our DNA. Change the historical conditions of production and the economic “laws” change with them. To secure a justification for caring about ideology—without having to deal with the text-critical nightmare of “German Ideology”—one might instinctively reach for the procedural counsel of Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. There we are told that “one must always distinguish between the material revolutions in the conditions of economic production—which can be stated with the rigor of a natural science—and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short, the ideological forms in which people become aware of this conflict and fight it out” (MECW 29: 263 – 264/MEW 13: 8 – 9; my translation). However, I’m now convinced there is less here than once met the twentieth-century eye.

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First, the category of “ideology” plays no substantive role in the rest of the volume. That is, the term fails to make even a spotlight cameo after the heavily oversampled “Preface.” Second, even if one reaches back beyond the text to insist that this formula recapitulates the Feuerbach-derived, “materialist” principle that being is subject, thinking is predicate, the result is still only a relatively modest sort of historicism. That is, if the structure of human cognition is context-dependent then—as a rule of thumb—we should expect the content of human cognition to be generally context-dependent as well. Think of it this way: there’s no grand mystery why Plato or Aristotle never mentioned fax machines. As I understand Marx, this stuff matters because it introduces enough daylight between mind and world for him to mount an attack against classical political economy as the abstract and timeless description of a concrete and historically contingent order. “Ricardo views the bourgeois form of labor as the eternal, natural form of social labor,” we read a bit later: He has the primitive fisher and the primitive hunter exchange fish and game directly as commodity owners, in proportion to the labor-time objectified in these items as exchange values. On this occasion, he falls into the anachronism of having the primitive fisher and hunter calculate the value of their respective tools by consulting the 1817 annuity tables from the London Stock Exchange (MECW 29: 300/MEW 13: 46; my translation).

Marx’s farcical but still-serious point is that calculating the depreciation rate of capital assets—the way in which, say, machinery’s labor-generated use value is gradually “consumed” or “transferred” to other products over time—is not, in any way, an essential truth about what it means to be a human being. This accounting practice has a historical beginning and therefore, in principle at least, an end as well. The story is basically the same in Capital, where Marx uses ideology or ideological in a substantive way only a handful of times—and with the same basic constellations of meaning. Much as in The Class Struggles in France, he invokes the category to identify those “experts” who publicly advocate on behalf of the capital class.⁵⁸ To put it as frankly as possible, Marx is talking about capitalist bullshit ar-

 A few years earlier, in the 1861– 1863 manuscripts, Marx observes that from the bourgeoisie’s perspective “the transcendent occupations [Beschäftigungen]—the venerable sovereigns, magistrates, officers, priests, etc.—and the totality of the old ideological classes [ideologischen Stände] which they generate—their scholars, magistrates, and priests—are economically equivalent to their own swarm of lackeys and merry-makers: the idle rich, minor nobility, and idle capitalists” (MECW 31: 197/MEGA2 II.3.2: 617; my translation). In general, Marx viewed the “bourgeois ideological class” as a kind of aspirational proletariat which enjoyed a more comfortable life by flattering the bosses in public and educating their children to be the next generation of bosses. Thus, he distin-

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tists (Frankfurt 2005). He observes that, by virtue of modern industry’s unprecedented productivity, some individuals are now able to secure the means of their own subsistence by advancing the legal, political, and social interests of capital through various forms of intellectual labor. Among this group are: “the ‘ideological’ classes [“ideologischen” Stände], such as government officials, priests, lawyers, soldiers, &c.” (MECW 35: 449/MEW 23: 469). Chief among these chosen few are political economists, the “ideological windbags” [ideologischen Zungendrescher] who earn their keep by representing the subjective desires of capitalists as non-negotiable economic laws (MECW 35: 604/MEW 23: 635; my translation). But never forget that Marx views these folks as tedious, chin-wagging sycophants rather than discursive masters of the universe. “The expression ‘labouring poor’ appears in English legislation the moment the class of wage laborers becomes noteworthy,” Marx writes in a footnote from Capital: The “labouring poor” stand in contrast to, on the one hand, the “idle poor,” beggars, etc. and, on the other hand, those workers who are not yet plucked chickens and still possess their own means of production [Arbeitsmittel]. The expression “laboring poor” then passed from the law into political economy, from Culpeper, J. Child etc. to A. Smith and Eden. After this, one may judge the good will [bonne foi] of the “execrable political cantmonger” Edmund Burke, when he declares the expression “labouring poor” to be “execrable political cant.” This sycophant who, in the pay of the English oligarchy, played the Romantic to the French Revolution— and who, in the pay of the North American colonies, played the liberal to the English oligarchy at the beginning of the American troubles—was a common bourgeois through and through: “The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” No wonder that, true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself in the best market! (MECW 35: 747– 748/MEW 23: 788; my translation).

Considered in this light, the “ideologists” are venal grifters and bullshit artists perpetually engaged in one swindle or another. Pay attention to the wrong thing, or innocently take them at their word, and you miss the sleight-of-hand—likely walking away poorer than when you arrived. Yet, it must be noted: at no point does Marx suggest that workers accept the official version of their precarious existence. The proletariat are never taken in by the bullshit artists. Are they lied to? You bet. Do some workers believe the lies? Perhaps. Although, there’s no reason to believe that wage laborers are reading elite treatises on the nature of wages or listening to what political economists have to say about them. Everything they know about the capitalist mode of production guishes between two types of “unproductive” workers who provide various services for the capitalist class: (1) a low-status population of mistresses, clowns, soldiers, jugglers, police, etc.; and (2) a middling-status pack of artists, lawyers, physicians, scholars, headmasters, etc. (MECW 31: 112– 113/ MEGA2 II.3.2: 535).

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comes from their struggle to end the working day with their bodies, and some dignity, intact. “It is not enough that the working conditions are such that capital occupies one pole while people who have nothing to sell but their labor-power occupy the other,” we read: Nor is it enough to force them to sell it voluntarily. As capitalist production progresses, a working class develops that recognizes the demands of this mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature through education, tradition, and habit. The organization of the capitalist production process destroys all resistance, the constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of supply and demand of labor—and therefore wages—in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital; the silent compulsion [stumme Zwang] of economic relations completes the rule of capitalists over laborers. Extra-economic, direct force is still used, of course, but only in extreme cases. In the ordinary course of things, the laborer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i. e., a dependency upon capital arising from the conditions of production and guaranteed in perpetuity (MECW 35: 726/MEW 23: 765; my translation).

Marx does not suggest that the working classes view their existence as one of “voluntary servitude.” He concedes that the nascent proletariat were initially overwhelmed by the avalanche of economic and social transformations precipitated by industrialization; but he adds that working-class resistance to capital began as soon as these communities regained their senses (e. g., MECW 35: 283/MEW 23: 294). Nor does he imply that the proletariat suffer from false consciousness (i. e., the subjective misperception of objective reality). How could they? Workers know deep in their bones that they aren’t genuinely free when their options are wage labor or death, that “the time for which they are free to sell their labor power is the time for which they are forced to sell it” (MECW 35: 306/MEW 23: 319; my translation). These are men, women and, historically speaking, children who are left with few alternatives except to make the best of a bad situation—and prepare themselves for the day that capital’s final hour arrives (MECW 35: 750/MEW 23: 790).

On the Political Economy of Windbags The fact that Marx was far less interested in ideology than commonly advertised is not, in any way, a novel insight. Scholars have often puzzled over why Marx never seems to have found much use for the notion after “German Ideology” (e. g., Balibar 2014). However, once one shucks the habit of treating Marx as a grand theorist

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or honorary academic—or viewing the remnants of a failed political quarterly as the royal road to Marx’s “thought”—the riddle essentially resolves itself.⁵⁹ As a political journalist and committed socialist, Marx recognized that what people say they will do is less important than what they actually do. High-minded slogans are like balloons, he once counseled: “squeeze them together and you are left with nothing in your hands, not even the air that once made something of them” (MECW 12: 272/MEW 9: 280; my translation). At best, abstract beliefs are weak predictors of concrete behavior because human beings are braggarts, cowards, fools, and liars. At worst, shrewd actors can get away with murder by exploiting the gap that separates words and deeds. “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization is unveiled before our eyes as soon as we turn our attention from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked,” Marx observed about the British occupation of India: While they prated in Europe about the inviolable sanctity of the national debt, did they not confiscate in India the dividends of the rajahs, who had invested their private savings in the Company’s own funds? While they combatted the French revolution under the pretext of defending “our holy religion,” did they not forbid, at the same time, Christianity to be propagated in India, and did they not, in order to make money out of the pilgrims streaming to the temples of Orissa and Bengal, take up the trade in the murder and prostitution perpetrated in the temple of Juggernaut? These are the men of “Property, Order, Family, and Religion” (MECW 12: 221– 222).

Grifters, as a rule of thumb, always hope their marks believe the lies. A few years before his death, Marx began complaining about a certain kind of erudite socialist that seemed to be multiplying like mushrooms. “These lads—theoretical zeros, practically useless—want to make socialism toothless by preparing it according to university recipes,” he griped to Adolph Sorge: “to enlighten workers or, as they put it, to provide them with ‘educative elements’ —out of their own confused, superficial knowledge; and, above all, to make the Social-Democratic Party ‘respectable’ in the eyes of philistines. They are poor, counter-revolutionary windbags [konterrevolutionäre Zungendrescher]” (MECW 45: 413/MEW 34: 412; my translation).⁶⁰

 It is, however, worth pointing out that Engels continued to use the category of “ideology” over the next forty years (e.g., MECW 26: 353 – 399/MEW 21: 259 – 307).  Engels, as usual, put things a bit more memorably. In an 1885 letter to August Bebel, a founding member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Engels observed that Karl Kautsky—editor of SPD’s Die Zeit and a leading light in Second International Marxism—“learned a bunch of bullshit [Blödsinn] in universities but is doing his best to unlearn it” (MECW 47: 306/MEW 36: 336; my translation).

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I mention this because there is often a jarring discontinuity between what I’ve come to think of as pre- or non-academic Marxism and the unmistakably academic varieties we find on university campuses in the second half of the twentieth century. This generational disconnect is captured by the relative insignificance of ideology in Marxist circles prior to World War Two—apart, that is, from the outsized role it played in the work of Frankfurt School figures like Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse.⁶¹ “The sites of Marxism as a discourse gradually became displaced from trade unions and political parties to research institutes and university departments,” Perry Anderson noticed long ago: Inaugurated with the rise of the Frankfurt School in the late twenties and early thirties, the change was virtually absolute by the period of the High Cold War in the fifties, when there was scarcely a Marxist theoretician of any weight who was not the holder of a chair in the academy, rather than a post in the class struggle. This shift of institutional terrain was reflected in an alteration of intellectual focus. Where Marx had successively moved from philosophy to politics to economics in his own studies, Western Marxism inverted his route. Major economic analyses of capitalism, within a Marxist framework, largely petered out after the Great Depression, political scanning of the bourgeois state dwindled away after the silencing of Gramsci; strategic discussion of the roads to a realizable socialism disappeared almost entirely. What increasingly took their place was a revival of philosophical discourse proper, itself centred [sic] on questions of method – that is, more epistemological than substantive in character (Anderson 1983, 16).

I think Anderson is essentially correct. The Marxist turn towards ideology mirrors the decline of Marxism as a transatlantic political movement and its subsequent rise as a transatlantic professorial vocation. ⁶² In my estimation, this cap-and-gowned outcome is deeply at odds with who Marx was, what he wrote, why he wrote, and his presumed audience. It is also why I suspect Marx himself would have been deeply suspicious of the jargon-riddled “Marxism” one can still occasionally find on college campuses. On the eve of the Reagan counter-revolution, Richard Applebaum lamented that—in retrospect— the work of the Frankfurt School and Althusser, “appeared to be, for one thing, pro-

 Second International Marxists would have pilloried Frankfurt School-types for synthesizing Freud and Marx. For example, Rosa Luxemburg denounced those who “have managed to create in the circles of the faithful intelligentsia the conviction that Marx’s works are ‘one-sided’ and ‘exaggerated’” (Luxemburg 1903).  “The real significance of Althusser is in the transition from a Marxism of the party to a Marxism of the academy” McKenzie Wark estimates: “Curiously, this severing of Marx from the actual party was in very different fashions also the goal of the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness and the Sartre of Critique of Dialectical Reason. In the first case, the party was strong enough to shut this rival down, in the latter case to ignore it” (Wark 2016).

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foundly anti-empirical: it dealt with ideas, not things, and seemed far more suited to the classroom and the library than the ‘outside world’ of people and institutions and political events. Related to this was another problem: this new Marxism was, in the last analysis, philosophy” (Applebaum 1979, 18). In the Manifesto, Marx roundly criticized those who “emasculate” socialism by ignoring the interests of flesh-andblood workers and theorizing instead about “the interests of human beings—of human beings in general—who do not belong to any class; who do not belong to reality at all, who exist only in the misty heavens [Dunsthimmel] of the philosophical imagination” (MECW 6: 511/MEW 4: 486; my translation). Twentieth-century Marxism spawned its own version of an upside-down Marx.

Conclusion With a sliver of daylight now established between Marx and Marxism regarding “ideology,” I’d like to conclude by returning one last time to Capital. In my estimation it is Marx’s critical understanding of capitalist logic which accounts for his continuing relevance.⁶³ It therefore matters how he himself categorized the discourse of classical, “bourgeois” political economy. Was he attacking the academic’s ideology or the swindler’s bullshit? The answer, I think, is clear. “This is the place to return to one of the great deeds of economic apologetics,” he begins: Recall that when a piece of variable capital is transformed into constant capital by the introduction of new—or the extension of old—machinery, the economic apologist interprets this operation—which “ties up” capital and thereby “frees up” workers—in the opposite way; it is said to free up capital for the worker. Only now can one truly appreciate the apologist’s brazenness [Unverschämtheit]. Not only are the workers directly displaced by machinery cut loose; so too are their replacement crews [Ersatzmannschaft] and the typical contingent of workers who would, eventually, be reabsorbed by the return to business as usual. They are all now “liberated” and can be utilized by any new capital with a desire to be applied or used [funktionslustig]. Whether capital attracts these workers or others, the general demand for labor will be zero so long as it is enough to absorb just as many of the workers as the machines throw at it. If it employs a smaller number, the quantity of the surplus grows. If it employs a larger number, the general demand for labor only grows by the surplus of those employed over and be-

 Anthony Giddens’s critique of Marx is often exhilarating because of his willingness to amputate whatever looks gangrenous. “Marx’s analysis of the mechanisms of capitalist production, I believe, remains the necessary core of any attempt to come to terms with the massive transformations that have swept through the world since the eighteenth century,” he begins: “But there is much in Marx that is mistaken, ambiguous or inconsistent; and in many respects Marx’s writings exemplify features of nineteenth-century thought which are plainly defective” (Giddens 1981, 1).

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yond those “liberated.” The stimulus to the general demand for labor, which additional capital investment would have otherwise generated, is thus neutralized by the degree to which the number of workers tossed out on the pavement is adequate. That is, the mechanism of capitalist production guarantees that an absolute increase of capital does not mean a corresponding increase in the general demand for labor. And this is what the apologist calls compensation for the misery, suffering, and possible ruin of the displaced workers who are now banished to the industrial reserve army! The demand for labor is not identical to the growth of capital; the supply of labor is not identical to the growth of the working class; these two independent powers each act upon the other. Les dés sont pipes [The dice are loaded]. If, on the one hand, capital accumulation increases the demand for labor, it also increases, on the other hand, the supply of workers by “liberating” them; and, at the very same time, the growing number of the unemployed tends to squeeze more labor out of the employed—thereby increasing, to some extent, the supply of labor relative to the supply of workers. Capital’s despotism over labor is perfected by the exercise of the law of supply and demand. Because of this, as soon as the workers discover the secret of how it comes to be that the more they work, the more their productive power grows, the more they produce wealth for someone else [fremden Reichthum], their function as the means through which capital is realized becomes more precarious as well; as soon as they discover that the degree of competitive intensity between them totally depends on the pressures of relative overpopulation; as soon as they seek to organize, by means of trade unions and so on, a systematic collaboration between the employed and the unemployed in order to break or weaken the disastrous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their own class; that’s when capital and its sycophant, political economy, begin to howl about this violation of the “eternal” and so “sacred” law of supply and demand (MECW 35: 633 – 634/MEW 23: 636 – 637; my translation).⁶⁴

Again and again, Marx treated bourgeois political economy as sycophancy instead of ideology; a discourse more farcical than tragic. The critique of religion or “religion” in terms of ideology could be a valuable endeavor or a ghastly waste of time (e. g., Faber 2004). Either way, the Marxian pedigree for this conventional Marxist pursuit is delicate and slight. More than that: I’m almost certain Marx would have ridiculed the idea that working men and women need academic weathermen to know which way the wind blows (Dylan 2014, 141).

 I have introduced artificial breaks in this lengthy passage for ease of reading. Marx is often credited with the notion of a “reserve” population of unemployed but eager-to-be-employed laborers—in German, eine unbeschäftigte Reserve von Arbeitern—but Engels introduced a version of this theme in The Condition of the Working Class in England (MECW 4: 384/MEW 2: 314– 315).

Chapter Three False Friends and True Comrades: Engels on the Limits of Christian Socialism The book’s focus thus far has been limited to clearing away some of the bramble that has grown up around Marx in general and Marx on religion in particular. As I see things, the key is to stop treating his writings as those of an academic. He did not “theorize” about religion. The truth is that he hardly even cared. Based on the available textual evidence, the most that can be responsibly maintained is that Marx often used a specific understanding of religion—initially taken on loan from Feuerbach—as a kind of intuition pump. That is, religion was an imaginative tool for organizing and dramatizing his critical understanding of classical political economy. Similes are literary figures of speech, attempts to capture something essential about one thing by placing it in front of or behind another. They are closer to poetry than prose. Consider how, in “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” Wallace Stevens brings together waves of gossip rippling across a room and a rainstorm’s scrambled hush with nothing more than the word like: Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain (Stevens 2015, 98).

Stevens is not theorizing here. He is making a point about lust and beauty by comparing the soft hum of people whispering with the image of a willow tree’s elegiac droop. Now pay close attention to how Marx makes his points with that literary technique in mind. “Much as religion entails people controlled by the constructions of their heads,” we are told: “capitalist production means that they are dominated by the constructions of their hands” (MECW 35: 616/MEW 23: 649; my translation).⁶⁵ Marx is not theorizing about ancestors, gods, and spirits here; he is

 An alternative translation, which recognizes the polysemy of Machwerk, would be: “Much as religion entails men and women controlled by the lousy work [Machwerk] of their heads, capitalist production means that they are dominated by the constructions [Machwerk] of their hands” (MECW 35: 616/MEW 23: 649; my translation). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-010

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thinking about the nature of capitalist production with an assist from religion— something along the lines of what Lévi-Strauss meant by animals being good to think. Did Marx develop a set of theoretical claims about the nature of capital accumulation which are empirically confirmed or in principle confirmable? Almost certainly (e. g., Brenner 2006, Desai 2002, Piketty 2013, Shaikh 2016).⁶⁶ A set of theoretical claims about the nature of religion or “religion”? Not even close. The notion that history is written by the victors is, like every cliché, a fool’s guide to the truth. Nevertheless, our grasp of nineteenth-century socialism has typically lacked much sophistication because committed twentieth-century Marxists and anti-Marxists were the ones telling the story. That it is now shamefully easy to lose sight of the presumed audiences that Marx and Engels were addressing – fellow German socialists, communists, and democratic reformers as well as the members of a polyglot, European workers’ movement—is a by-product of this arrangement.⁶⁷ Some of this has to with the pinched conditions under which they typically wrote. “From the beginning, censorship imposed the most abstract expression on just about all of the least popular [mißliebig] elements,” Engels once confessed: The confusion in the minds of “the educated” was terrifying and seemed to increase with every passing moment. It was a true, multi-lingual mash-up of German, French, and English ideas from ancient, medieval, and modern sources. This confusion was further amplified by the fact that these ideas were only acquired in a second-, third-, or fourth-hand way, and therefore circulated in forms beyond all recognition. The liberal and socialist concepts from England or France weren’t the only ones to suffer this fate. It happened to German ideas as well, e. g., Hegel (MECW 10: 489/MEW 7: 429 – 430; my translation).

Marx reflected on this theme a bit later in an article for the New York Tribune. Because of Prussian censorship, he explained to his American readers, German philosophy is the most complicated but also the most reliable guide to the German mind. So, when Hegel concluded that a constitutional monarchy was the most perfect form of government in Philosophy of Right:

 One shouldn’t go overboard on just how much of Marx’s account has been empirically confirmed, though. As Robert Brenner noted an economic lifetime ago: “Marxist economists are famous for having accurately predicted seven out of the last one international economic crisis” (Brenner 1998; e. g., DeLong 2013).  Lars Lih formulates the point this way: while Marx the philosopher or Marx the economist occasionally mentions the conquest of political power by the proletariat, “the Marx who had the greatest impact on the nineteenth century was the activist who tried to draw out all the implications for political strategy that lay hidden in these few words” (Lih 2006, 53).

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he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here. While the more advanced section of his followers, on one hand, subjected every religious belief to the ordeal of a rigorous criticism, and shook to its foundation the ancient fabric of Christianity, they at the same time brought forward bolder political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French Revolution. The abstruse philosophical language in which these ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the “Young Hegelian” writers enjoyed a liberty of the press unknown in every other branch of literature (MECW 11: 14– 15).

If the thought police and censors can’t understand what’s being said, they can never be sure that a crime has been committed. Bullshit is also a weapon of the weak. We know far more about the mid-nineteenth century than our mid-twentieth century forebears. Unfortunately, this also means that generations of scholars have consistently misrecognized the point of this philosophical “shadow-boxing” [Spiegelfechterei] (MECW 10: 489/MEW 7: 429 – 430). The shibboleth-like codes and secret handshakes that writers like Marx and Engels used to sneak something past the censors became, with the passing of time, part of a given text’s didactic meaning. Writing about figures like Hegel became the point, rather than a clever way of negotiating a censorious context. “Marx did not write for the ages from any kind of academic perspective we would recognize today,” Terrell Carver reminds us: “His presumed readership, which was always educated—or at least self-educated— would or should in his view take a dim view of such academic vocations and avocations as other-worldly and de-politicizing” (Carver 2018, 37). It is by mistaking the jargon’s meta-significance, for example, that far more doctoral dissertations and scholarly monographs have been written about Marx and Hegel than Marx and Ricardo. The same is doubly so for Engels. He was even less of a “scholar” than Marx. In fact, he lacked any sort of post-secondary academic pedigree. The closest he came to formal university training was occasionally attending lectures at the University of Berlin during a one-year stint as an artillerist in the Prussian army. Otherwise, Engels was a committed and rather charming autodidact. Moreover, he was never as withdrawn from the mundane world—never as free to pursue his “studies”—as Marx. Whatever scholar-like leisure Marx enjoyed after 1849 was, in fact, largely underwritten by the near-constant flow of bank notes that Engels sent down to London. Read through their correspondence from the 1850s and 1860s, and it seems like every fourth or fifth letter that Marx writes to his old friend begins: “Dear Fred, Thanks for the £10” (e. g., MECW 42: 252, 282, 338/MEGA2 III.3: 318, 338, 369). If we are to understand why Engels wrote what he did, we must know

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something about the audience he was addressing. This is particularly important when it comes to considering Engels on religion. One of the most enduring hobgoblins of the twentieth century was the threat of Godless Communism (Gunn 2009, Strube 2020). Yet, for most of the nineteenth century, European socialists went out of their way to play up the parallels between their vision of a just social order and the Christian virtue of agape (Berenson 1989, Bowman 1987, Pilbeam 2000). “JESUS CHRIST WAS A COMMUNIST!!!” Etienne Cabet breathlessly announced in the run-up to the 1848 French Revolution: “Égalité and Liberté are, in Communism as in Christianity, the inseparable consequence of Fraternité” (Cabet 1847, 621; my translation). Fin de siècle Marxists were notable outliers on this point, suspicious of anyone who felt compelled to make Jesus the first Jacobin. So, in a bid to avoid treating Engels in the abstract—as a thinker thinking thoughts out of time—I want to show how his apparent desire to “theorize” about religion is best understood as an attempt to demonstrate to other socialists why Christian moralizing results in unreliable political allies.

The View from Above: Religion, Revolution, and the Past Eric Hobsbawm often argued that the foundations of the modern world were laid by a “dual revolution” that began in late-eighteenth-century England and France. On one side of the English Channel, the basic structure of modern economic life was hammered into shape as the Industrial Revolution took command. On the other shore, the basic vocabulary of modern politics was introduced by the French Revolution and its muddled aftermath. This dual revolution, Hobsbawm writes, marked “the triumph not of ‘industry’ as such, but of capitalist industry; not of liberty and equality in general but of middle class or ‘bourgeois’ liberal society; not of ‘the modern economy’ or ‘the modern state’, but of the economies and states in a particular geographical region of the world” (Hobsbawm 1996, 1). One virtue of Hobsbawm’s account is that it helps to make sense of the roughly contemporaneous appearance of both reactionary, right-wing and socialist, left-wing political movements in the nineteenth century.⁶⁸ In a pinch, these opposed-yet-conjoined discourses may be fruitfully understood as a dual response to the dual revolution.

 It is also worth keeping in mind Ellen Meiksins Wood’s misgivings regarding the apparent “historical conjuncture” of British capitalism and French politics. In her judgment, the Philosophes’ Enlightenment project emerged from a distinctly non-capitalist context and its values “belong to a social form that is not just a transitional point on the way to capitalism but an alternative route out of feudalism” (Wood 1997, 545). Highlighting the disjuncture between capitalist logic and democratic

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The reactionaries spoke on behalf of the nobility, landed gentry, monarchs, and clergy, those who recoiled in disgust as the feudal order was attacked by the hoi polloi. Their greatest alarm was over the threat to traditional social hierarchies which any and every appeal to “popular sovereignty” entailed. In a 1790 speech before the House of Commons, for example, Edmund Burke accused the French revolutionaries of “breaking all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together communities by one chain of subordination: raising soldiers against their officers: servants against their masters: tradesmen against their customers: artificers against their employers: tenants against their landlords: curates against their bishops and children against their parents” (Burke 1823a, 15; see Robin 2011). For the Old Guard, social order requires authority and authority presumes disciplinary—if not explicitly coercive—social hierarchies. Some are entitled to rule, others duty-bound to obey. The Jacobin move to abolish the time-honored legitimacy of Church and Crown was, therefore, an invitation to chaos. In Considerations on France, Joseph de Maistre is consumed by the dread of a world in which the Ancien Régime’s empirico-metaphysical foundations have been demolished. “In order to bring about the French Revolution, it was necessary to overthrow religion, outrage morality, violate every propriety and commit every crime,” he writes: Frenchmen, it was to the noise of hellish songs, the blasphemy of atheism, the cries of death, and the prolonged moans of slaughtered innocence, it was by the light of flames, on the debris of throne and altar, watered by the blood of the best of kings and an innumerable host of other victims, it was by the contempt of morality and the established faith, it was in the midst of very crime [sic] that your seducers and your tyrants founded what they called your liberty. It will be in the name of the VERY GOOD AND VERY GREAT GOD, in the train of those whom He loves and inspires, and under the influence of His creative power that you will return to your old constitution and that a king will give you the only thing which you ought wisely to desire—liberty through the monarchy (de Maistre 1994, 84– 85).

The French Revolution was, if you will, the political equivalent of a Black Mass: a grotesque inversion of the providential order created by God alone to save us from ourselves. If the rabble are free enough to kill kings, de Maistre warns, then no one is safe: “There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil” (de Maistre 1994, 31). Instead of the holy throne, Ro-

principles is critical after the neoliberal era, when political rights and freedoms were often described as presuming or arising from economic rights and freedoms (e. g., Gerstle 2022).

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bespierre and his confederates sat upon an upside-down cross [une croix renversée]. With time, this longing for a lost aristocratic order was joined with a visceral rejection of the quickened pace, competitive timbre, and reeking cities of nineteenth-century commercial society. “The project of republicanizing Europe is the project of introducing atheism,” Louis de Bonald lamented: “Commerce is now viewed as the only religion, since money is the only God” (Bonald 1843, 336; my translation). Where liberal political economists like Adam Smith discerned progress—praising the social consequences that follow from the honest hard work of tradesmen and mechanics—the reactionaries saw only catastrophe. For his part, Marx would eventually mock this school of patrician thought as feudal socialism, “half lament, half lampoon; half reverberation from the past, half impending future; sometimes stabbing the bourgeoisie in the heart with a bitter, witty, tearing judgement, always comical in its effect due to a total inability to understand the course of modern history” (MECW 6: 507/MEW 4: 483; my translation). Anti-capitalism takes many forms. When viewed in this light, European Romanticism comes into focus as the aesthetic expression of elite political nostalgia. That is, Romantic painters, sculptors, and writers collectively appealed to Nature in order to distinguish pastoral innocence from urban corruption; rural authenticity from metropolitan artifice; pristine meadows from filthy factories; aristocratic order from democratic confusion. If anything defines the Romantic movement, Michael Sayre and Michael Löwy argue, it is this abiding “opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values” (Sayre and Löwy 1984, 46; Löwy 1987; Löwy and Sayre 2001). François-René de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848) ached for a life that might once again follow the pure rhythms of Nature rather than the mechanical regularity of a clock. “In the early ages of the world it was the flowering of plants, the fall of the leaves, the departure and arrival of birds, that regulated the labors of the plowman and shepherd,” we read in Genius of Christianity: The marriage of a young woman, on the edge of a fountain, was related to the blooming flowers; and the old, who often die in autumn, fell along with the acorns and the ripe fruits. While the philosopher, cutting or stretching the year, made the winter trample upon the spring turf, the farmer had no reason to fear that the astronomer who came from Heaven was mistaken. He knew that the nightingale would not confuse the month of frost with that of flowers; or make the winter solstice listen to the songs of summer. Thus all the concerns, games, and pleasures of the rural community were determined, not by the uncertain calendar of a scientist, but by the infallible laws of Him who has traced the sun’s course. That supreme Governor himself decreed that the festivals of his worship should be determined by the simple periods borrowed from his own works; and in those days of innocence, according to the seasons and their works, it was the voice of the zephyr or the storm, the eagle or the dove, that summoned them to the temple of the God of nature (Chateaubriand 1830, 210; my translation).

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Damning comparisons between the organic beauty of an agrarian past and the tedious brutality of an industrializing present feature no less prominently in the poetry of William Blake (1757– 1827). All those dark Satanic Mills do more than scar England’s green and pleasant Land: they replace simple workmanship with intricate wheels; transform the Arts of Life into the Arts of Death; and condemn their howling Captives to lives of sorrowful drudgery (Blake 1988, 95, 216). By willfully disregarding Nature’s moral authority, the mechanical contrivances of modern life jeopardized our humanity. Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) is, for me at least, the most compelling nineteenthcentury critic of the dual revolution. Reactionary anti-egalitarianism and Romantic anti-industrialism are woven together in his writings to form a potent anti-modern melancholy. Carlyle, for instance, despaired over the “levelling” effects of capitalist economies and democratic politics. “Were we required to characterise [sic] this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word,” he sighed in 1829: In fact, if we look deeper, we shall find that this faith in Mechanism has now struck its roots down into man’s most intimate, primary sources of conviction; and is thence sending up, over his whole life and activity, innumerable stems,—fruit-bearing and poison-bearing. The truth is, men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible; or, to speak it in other words: This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised among us, or is mechanically explained into Fear of pain, or Hope of pleasure. Our true Deity is Mechanism (Carlyle 1984, 34– 35).

The human imagination can only wither away in a world mechanistically stripped of gods, kings, and heroes. According to Carlyle, the embrace of democratic, egalitarian ideals by the lower sorts was a measure of this foreshortened horizon: warning signs that human beings have grown suspicious of greatness and envious of nobility. The dolorous greys of Gradgrindian Utility were now all that remained. “There is no longer any God for us! God’s Laws are become a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency,” he warns in Past & Present: the Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper; a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at:—in our and old Jonson’s dialect, man has lost the soul out of him; and now, after the due period,—begins to find the want of it! This is verily the plague-spot; centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with

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its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force and desperateness next hour (Carlyle 2005, 140).

Carlyle would spend the rest of his life warning all who would listen about modernity’s moral decay, aesthetic vulgarity, and industrial brutality—a project which, incredibly, acquired the patina of academic radicalism in the twentieth century (e. g., Holmes 1996).

The View from Below: Religion, Revolution, and the Future Where reactionaries saw decline in the spread of egalitarian ideals and industrial production, socialists detected progress. By the early 1830s, the terms socialist or socialism were stable features of the European political lexicon. However, it wasn’t until the formation of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD) in the late 1860s that they gestured to anything more concrete than a congested landscape of rival “schools.” A mid-century menagerie of the most prominent factions would have included: Babouvists, Blancists, Blanquists, Buchezians, Fourierists, Icarians, Owenites, Proudhonists, and Saint-Simonians. Marxists would not feature in this bestiary because Marxism did not yet exist. The target of the socialists’ collective concern was the so-called social question: a growing awareness that something more than a liberal constitution protecting individual rights was needed to address the novel forms of poverty and vagabondage produced by a new economic order. In fact, the misfortunes of poverty, crime, hunger, and vagrancy were magnified by the strictly formal, juridical equality of French citizens secured by The Declaration of the Rights of Man. “This was an essential moment,” Robert Castel writes: “when the divorce first appeared between a juridico-political order founded on the recognition of the rights of citizens and an economic order that carried with it widespread misery and demoralization” (Castel 2003, xx; see Aftalion 1990, Sewell 1980). What united the first generation of socialists was a shared sense that whenever human beings competitively pursue their own self-interests, the outcome is more akin to the Hobbesian war of all against all rather than the optimized equilibrium of Smith’s invisible hand. Inhouse disagreements could sometimes dissolve into the narcissism of small differences, but three relatively distinct socialist tendencies can be identified.

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Some were “libertarian” socialists who endorsed autonomous, co-operative communes that would barely involve the state apparatus at all. In England, Robert Owen maintained that the social problem could be solved by parceling the population into cooperative, self-sustaining, and self-governing villages of at least 500 and at most 1500 members—settled on a corresponding number of acres. The standardized town plan consisted of a small cluster of buildings and surrounding pastures that were organized around the physical, social, and spiritual needs of the community as a community. In place of individual families stocking their own kitchens and larders, for example, the co-operative would have a public kitchen and several communal mess halls. Owen estimated that a co-operative village of 1200 members would require an initial capital investment of £60,000 if the land was rented and £96,000 if it was purchased outright. Not only would the longterm costs of these co-operative villages approach zero; they would also improve the value of the land and thereby increase the nation’s wealth. Rather than creating a broadly egalitarian society, Owen’s goal was to “ameliorate” the conditions in which the poor and working classes lived. “The change contemplated has no tendency, even in the slightest degree, to remove those who enjoy any supposed advantages in eminent stations to which they have attained,” he assured an audience in 1818: “No one will envy them their privileges, whatever they may be; and every hair of their heads will be securely guarded by the rapidly improving condition of the great mass of the people” (Owen 1818, 61). On the other side of the Channel, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760 – 1825) and Charles Fourier (1772– 1832) drew up even more elaborate plans for a “harmonious” society where the poor were guaranteed work and something like a universal basic income. Yet, they agreed, there was no compelling reason to make a modern, industrial society any less hierarchical than its feudal, agricultural precursor. “The hands of the poor will continue to nourish the rich,” Saint-Simon counseled: “but the rich man is commanded to put his brain to work, and if his brains are not up to the task, he will then have to work with his hands. For Newton will not allow anyone to remain useless on this planet” (Saint-Simon 1975, 81; see Yonnet 2004). The key difference was that where privileges in the past were irrationally secured by the accident of aristocratic birth, in the novus ordo seclorum they would become rational, meritocratic honors. The elite would now consist of those agents who are more intelligent, more virtuous, or more hardworking than the rest. On this point, Fourier agreed. “Poverty is the principal cause of social disorders. Inequality, so much maligned by the philosophers, is not displeasing to men,” he insisted in 1808: For social science there is thus only one problem to resolve, that of the graduated metamorphosis which I have mentioned. By this I mean the art of raising each of the classes of civi-

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lization to the condition of the class above it. Then indigence and discomfort will be eliminated, since the lower class will have become the middle class and will enjoy an honest comfort like our petty bourgeois who are far removed indeed from a spirit of sedition. When the people enjoy constant comfort and a decent minimum, all the sources of discord will be dried up or reduced to very little. Administration will become child’s play, and in Harmony the government of the whole planet will be much less complicated than that of a civilized empire (Fourier 1971, 87).

Poverty was a sign of economic inefficiency rather than exploitation, prima facie evidence of an irrational distribution of goods or the sub-optimal use of human talent (Beecher 2001). Solving the social question, Fourier concluded, simply required “an industrial system more productive than our own” (Fourier 1971, 87).⁶⁹ Others were “democratic” socialists, arguing that the republican virtues of liberté, egalité and fraternité were meaningless unless collective, public needs were prioritized over individual, private wealth. Unfortunately, the industrial scale of the problem meant that the decentralized, scattershot projects proposed by the likes of Owen and Fourier weren’t up to the task. Only the modern administrative state had the resources and authority to oversee the transition from one socio-economic order to another. Louis Blanc’s proposed system of “social workshops” [ateliers sociaux] shares enough traits with those proffered by others to be a useful stand-in for this camp as a whole. Rather than nationalizing industries through the forced expropriation of private property, Blanc envisioned a system of state-managed market competition. The working-edge of this policy advanced on two fronts simultaneously. On the left flank, there would be a constitutionally guaranteed “right to work” for all citizens —something analogous to Hyman Minsky’s suggestion that governments should act as “the employer of last resort” (e. g., Wray 2007, Tcherneva 2020). On the right flank, the state would float no-interest loans for workers to establish trade-specific “producer associations.” The state-advanced capital would permit workers to collectively own the means of production and, therefore, collectively share a right to their own self-produced surplus. The emancipation of the proletariat, Blanc judges:

 In the Manifesto, Marx dismisses this species of socialism for its sentimentality, as it is concerned about the working class only because it is “the most suffering class” (MECW 6: 515/MEW 4: 490; my translation). Brad DeLong has recently argued that the material and technological challenges of making enough stuff for everyone was only possible after the second Industrial Revolution (c. 1870) (DeLong 2022; see Gordon 2016). If he is correct, one takeaway from the long twentieth century is that greater efficiency or productive capacity per se does not, in fact, resolve distributional politics.

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is too complicated a work; it is linked to too many questions; it disturbs too many habits; it thwarts—not in reality but in appearance—too many interests; there is no reason to believe that it can be accomplished through a series of partial efforts and isolated attempts. The full force of the State is required. What the proletarians lack to free themselves are work instruments: the function of the government is to provide them. If we had to define the State in our approach, we would answer: the State is the poor’s banker (Blanc 1850, 23; my translation).

Like so many others, Blanc believed the parasitic Age of the Rentier was coming to an end. Individual capitalists and private investment firms would be entitled to advance capital to the workers’ co-operatives, but they could only collect non-predatory rates of interest. One had to work to have any claim on profits. According to his plan, government administrators would be responsible for regulating prices within the various industrial sectors. This was to prevent privately-owned enterprises from strategically underselling the social workshops in hopes of bankrupting them. Over time, the worker-owned enterprises would out-perform the competition and, ironically, the means of production would be gradually socialized through the mechanism of market competition. Capitalists and workers would become social partners rather than economic adversaries.⁷⁰ Reactionaries like Burke and Bonald may have discerned the threat of godless anarchy in the writings of Owen, Fourier, and Blanc, but their fidelity to Church and Crown blinded them to the truth. Again and again, both British and French socialists represented themselves as the agents of true religion. The basic assertion was that the socialist’s desire to address the needs of the poor and working classes —or, as they often put it, to replace individualism with mutualism—was synonymous with Christian agape. As early as 1816, Owen emphasized how his model of communal living fulfilled the Biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor. The principles of co-operation were so effective that he did not hesitate: to assert their power heartily to incline all men to say, “This system is assuredly true, and therefore eminently calculated to realize those invaluable precepts of the Gospel—universal charity, goodwill, and peace among men. Hitherto we must have been trained in error; and we hail it as the harbinger of that period when our swords shall be turned into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning-hooks; when universal love and benevolence shall prevail; when

 The “bourgeois” socialist portrait of labor and capital as rational partners underwrites someone like Durkheim’s hope that the modern corporation—as a public institution—allows employers and employees to end the class war. For his part, Marx rejected this breed of conservative, bourgeois socialism out of hand. “The socialist bourgeoisie want all the living conditions of modern society without the necessary struggles and dangers. They want existing society without the revolutionary and disintegrating elements,” he estimated: “They want the bourgeoisie without the proletariat” (MECW 6: 513/MEW 4: 488; my translation).

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there shall be but one language and one nation; and when fear of want or of any evil among men shall be known no more” (Owen 1857, 341).

Owen’s social experiments were not organized around explicitly sectarian religious practices in the way that, say, Shaker communities were. Children raised within the co-operative would receive “general” religious and moral instruction —Sunday-school lessons on the Beatitudes, for example—but nearly all doctrinal controversies and denominational distinctions were left at the commune’s front gate. By virtue of arguing that vice was a symptom of sick societies rather than the expression of our ontological sinfulness, Owen was decried as an infidel by his coreligionists: one had to begin with original sin to be a real Christian. Nevertheless, he maintained that Christianity was the only true, universal religion because it commanded the love of one’s neighbor. “The disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, the first Christian, were all Socialists, as far as their practical knowledge of worldly matters then extended,” Owen wrote a year before his death: “to be a Christian indeed, that is, in mind and practice, it is necessary to become a Socialist, in the true meaning of the term. A true Christian and a true Socialist are two names for the same thing” (Owen 1856, 87– 88). What appeared to be radical politics was really nothing more innovative or revolutionary than traditional Christianity. Louis Blanc similarly tried to blur the lines that distinguished republican fraternité from Christian agape. Socialism, he explains in Catéchisme des socialistes, “is the Gospel in action” (Blanc 1884, 213; my translation). By this he meant that the socialist ambition is to create a society in which no one does to another what they would not want done to themselves; the first among a community serves the least; there is good will for all and between all. Thus, we learn, “according to Saint Paul, and following the spirit of the Gospel, all human beings—though unequal in strength and intelligence—should be one and the same, just as, in the human body, the members, although very diverse, form one and the same whole” (Blanc 1884, 213; my translation). Blanc contends that his system of social workshops would achieve this Pauline vision of communal harmony by using the state to replace market competition and human misery with socialist order and human flourishing. “Is there fraternité in the domination of the maxim: To each his own, and everyone for himself? Can fraternité be realized through competition, where one person builds a fortune on the ruins of one’s neighbor? No, gentlemen, fraternité cannot be found there; fraternité means the solidarity of all interests,” he argued in 1850: What we demand is that we replace egoism—as it called in moral and philosophical discussions—and individualism—as it is called in the anarchistic, industrial order of unlimited com-

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petition—with the union of all hearts, the association of all forces, the solidarity of all interests. I do not see how such a system could lead to disorder and civil war! No, this system is not one of disorder because its source is the Gospel; from this divine source hatred, war, and the friction of interests cannot flow; the doctrine articulated in the Gospel is one of peace, union and love (Blanc 1850, 170; my translation).

When formulated in this way, socialists were not only virtuous republicans—they were good Christians to boot. The moral circle was rhetorically squared. To find nineteenth-century socialists unwilling to make common cause with conventional Christian ethics, one must turn to the movement’s revolutionary left-wing. An aversion to limp moralizing about charity, combined with a readiness to seize control of the state through armed insurrection, basically defined what it meant to be a radical socialist in the nineteenth century. Auguste Blanqui was one of the few revolutionaries to have any genuine influence. He actively participated in both the “July” (1830) and “February” (1848) Revolutions, had a hand in several failed coups, and earned an esteemed reputation as a cunning streetfighter. “Bourgeois revolutionaries and socialists are rare, and the few that exist only wage a war of words. These gentlemen think they will change the world with their books and newspapers,” he moaned: Do they ever consider picking up a sword? NO! Just the pen, always the pen, nothing but the pen. Why not both, which is the duty of a republican? In times of tyranny, writing is good; but when the enslaved pen remains powerless, fighting is better. So, what do they do? They found a newspaper, they go to prison. No one thinks to open a book of military maneuvers and learn in twenty-four hours the skill that constitutes our oppressor’s force—something that would put our revenge and their punishment in our hands (Blanqui 2006, 262– 263; my translation).

Towards this end, Blanqui produced a small, underground instruction manual on how best to stage an insurrection. The pamphlet includes practical advice on barricade construction, ideal platoon size, and the basic principles of urban combat. The only reason he wasn’t part of the 1871 Paris Commune is that he was already in prison for his role in the stalled 31 October 1870 uprising against the provisional Government of National Defense. Nevertheless, those who followed Blanqui’s revolutionary example were among the Commune’s most militant participants. As a token of gratitude, they appointed him President in absentia. Blanqui insisted that poverty and inequality were two expressions of the same problem. So long as the few own the means of production, the many can never be anything more than their vassals. “Servitude does not mean being the transferable slave of a man, or being a serf tied to the land,” he judged: “it means being completely dispossessed of the instruments of labor, and then being at the mercy of those privileged groups who usurped them, and who retain through violence

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their exclusive ownership of these instruments that are indispensable to workers” (Blanqui 2018, 49 – 50). The socialization of the means of production—especially arable land—was therefore necessary to fulfill the 1789 Revolution’s promise. High-minded appeals to love one another were as useless as paper swords. In fact, Blanqui thought the “Golden Rule” was neither intrinsically religious nor uniquely Christian. As he saw things, the philosophical maxim Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris existed long before “Semitic monotheism rushed into the Roman world” (Blanqui 2006, 253). More to the point, he maintained that Christians have never been all that good at honoring what they claim to be their own moral discovery. “Rather than destroying slavery, the new religion hastened to enshrine it,” he reminds us: “Christian women walked around with a procession of slaves and eunuchs mutilated for the small pleasures of opulence. Such a family, preserved in the love of Jesus Christ, might have three thousand slaves, each of whom could be beaten with a stick at will” (Blanqui 2006, 253; my translation). So much for the social principles of Christianity. More generally, Blanqui rejected all appeals to extra-human authority because it violated a properly basic commitment to democratic equality—the principle that all legitimate authority emerges from, and must be held accountable by, the people. With the gods in heaven and their well-fed emissaries on earth: “Everything is set in advance, like sheet music for those poor little automatons—and in perpetuity, if you please! Perpetual religion, perpetual dynasty, perpetual laws and, especially, perpetual debt as the rightful remittance for so much solicitude” (Blanqui 2006, 211; my translation). Because the gods make some social arrangements ontologically necessary, they were tyrants—and thus the legitimate enemies of revolutionaries everywhere (Edelman 2009). This is one of the reasons why Blanqui claimed the French Revolution ended on 8 June 1794 (20 Prairial Year II)—the day Robespierre presided over the creaky Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champ des Mars. “Robespierre killed the Revolution in three blows,” he judged: “the scaffolds of Hébert and Danton, and the altar of the Supreme Being. Struck to death, the Revolution stumbled, staggered for a few moments, and then fell, never to get up again. Robespierre’s victory, far from saving the Revolution, only marked its profound and irreparable downfall” (Blanqui 1930, 232; my translation). The gods, in a word, are inevitably tied to the kinds of oppressive regimes which always and everywhere deserve to be overthrown. The goal was no masters, no kings, no bosses —and that meant no gods as well.

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Local Gods and International Struggles It is important to keep this landscape of Right- and Left-wing responses to the “dual revolution” in mind when reading Engels on religion. Broadly speaking, his goal was to demonstrate why religion in general, and Christianity in particular, were liabilities rather than assets for the working-class, democratic struggle. One way of introducing what Engels had to say on the subject is to describe him as developing an explicitly political version of David Hume’s philosophical critique of religion. Hume famously viewed religion as the product of a universal, anthropomorphic predisposition combined with local ignorance. That is, he postulated a natural tendency among human beings to ascribe human characteristics to nonhuman creatures and phenomena—a tendency that is amplified whenever we’re ignorant about what is really going on. “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds,” Hume writes: “and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe good will or malice to every thing, that hurts or pleases us” (Hume 2008, 141). Taken on its own, this predilection for populating the world with imaginary agents who have beliefs and desires just like us is harmless. One might even say that it is occasionally close enough to the truth to represent a clever default strategy in a hostile environment (e. g., Barrett 2000, Dennett 1989, Guthrie 1993). “No wonder, then,” Hume continues: “that mankind, being placed in absolute ignorance of causes, and being at the same time so anxious concerning their future fortune, should immediately acknowledge a dependence upon invisible powers, possessed of sentiment and intelligence” (Hume 2008, 142). And yet, no matter how practically useful this default cognitive “setting” may be in certain circumstances, success is always a matter of luck. Pray for days on end, sacrifice all the pigs and goats you desire, fast until your skin sags—none of it matters. Asteroids and hurricanes and viruses will continue to chart their own paths through space-time. “Could men anatomize nature,” Hume concludes, “they would find, that these causes are nothing but the particular fabric and structure of the minute parts of their own bodies and of external objects; and that, by a regular and constant machinery, all the events are produced, about which they are so much concerned” (Hume 2008, 140 – 141). The universe doesn’t care what we do. In fact, the vast expanse doesn’t want anything from us at all. It is just there. In Anti-Dühring, Engels begins with something very close to this Humean portrait of vulnerable human beings equipped with an understandable, but still errorprone, anthropomorphic instinct. “Humans step out of the animal kingdom—in the strict sense—and enter history: still half-animals, crude, powerless against the forces of nature, ignorant of their own power; therefore, just as poor as the animals and hardly more productive,” he speculates (MECW 25: 166/MEW 20: 166;

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my translation). He assumes that the earliest hominids, given their primitive minds and crude-to-absent technologies, would have huddled together in small, herd-like bands. In his judgment, there was “a certain equality of life and, for the heads of families, a kind of social equality as well – or at least an absence of social classes, which still persists among the natural, agricultural communities of later, civilized nations” (MECW 25: 166/MEW 20: 166; my translation). In these conditions—where nature’s elemental forces overpower our forebears’ meager abilities to adapt and overwhelm their ability to understand—the anthropomorphic instinct was triggered. Religion, in this light, is both a bug and a feature of human cognition. Over time, accumulated knowledge and hard-won innovation resulted in a surplus of both food and people. Population density and nutritional reserves, in turn, supported ever-increasing degrees of social differentiation—beginning with the fundamental distinction between producers and appropriators. ⁷¹ Religion acquires a new bandwidth at this point as the unknown or misrecognized forces are now both natural and social. On one side of the ledger, the dynamics of intra-communal complexity give rise to an inchoate sense among the exploited that they are not in control of their own lives— which is true. On the other, the exploiting classes of chiefs, kings, and priests begin to coerce work in the name of the more-thanhuman gods, witches, and spirits—which is and can only ever be an elaborate grift. “All religion is nothing other than the fantastic reflection, in minds of human beings, of those powers that dominate their everyday existence; a reflection in which earthly powers take the form of heavenly powers,” Engels submits: At the beginning of history, it was the powers of nature that were initially reflected in this way; in the further development of various nations, these powers underwent the most varied and colorful personifications. At least for the Indo-European peoples, this first process has been traced back to its origin in the Indian Vedas by comparative mythology and its progress has been documented in detail with Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Teutons and—as far as the material allows—also with Celts, Lithuanians and Slavs. But soon, in addition to natural powers, social powers also come into effect: powers which were just as strange and inexplicable to people in the beginning; powers which controlled them with apparently the same necessity as the natural powers themselves. These fantastic figures, which in the beginning only reflected the mysterious forces of nature, now are given social attributes and become representatives of historical powers. At an even further stage of development, all the natural and social attributes of the many gods are transferred to One Almighty God, who is himself, again, only the reflex of the abstract human being. Thus arose monotheism, which was historically the last product of vulgar, ancient Greek philosophy and found its embodiment in the exclusively Jewish, na-

 Graeber and Wengrow (2021) make a compelling case for thinking this familiar version of human history gets almost everything wrong.

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tional god Yahweh. In this comfortable, handy and adaptable form, religion could continue to exist as an unmediated (i. e., emotional) form of human behavior towards the alien, natural and social powers that dominate it—as long as human beings are under the rule of such powers (MECW 25: 300 – 301/MEW 20: 294; my translation).⁷²

Engels thought the historical record revealed a consistent pattern of punctuated but steady socio-cognitive progress. As collective life grows more complex, and our grasp of nature grows more comprehensive, increasingly monotheistic and universalizing gods displace the ancient polytheistic gods tied to specific locations, phenomena, or communities.⁷³ The history of religion is, in this sense, a history of mundane powers made so abstract, so empirically vacuous, that they become other worldly. A decade later, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels revisited this sweeping variation on Hume’s natural history of religion. “Religion emerged at a very primitive time in human history on the basis of mistaken, crude conceptions of human nature and the world,” he maintains: But once an ideology has arisen, the pre-existing material from the imagination [Vorstellungsstoff ] is further developed; otherwise, it would not be an ideology (i. e., we would be treating thoughts as independent, self-contained things that develop according to their own laws). It is necessary that human beings, in whose heads these thoughts take place, remain unaware that the material conditions of existence ultimately govern [bestimmen] the course of this developmental process; otherwise, all ideology comes to an end. Thus, these primitive religious ideas—which are typically shared by all the members of an ethnic group [Völkergruppe]—develop along specific routes after the original community splits up and according to the conditions of existence in which each sub-group finds itself. This process is well-documented through comparative mythology for any number of ethnic groups—especially the Aryan or so-called “Indo-European” peoples. In this way, the gods developed by each people [jedem Volk] were national gods whose domains were no larger than the national territory they were expected to protect; beyond these borders, the commandments of other gods were absolute. These national gods could only live on in the imagination while the nation existed; they fell with its destruction. The demise of the ancient nations was brought about by the Roman Empire, whose economic conditions of origin we don’t need to examine here. The ancient national gods slowly decayed; even the Roman gods, who were only tailored to fit the narrow limits of the city of Rome. The need to supplement the world empire with a world religion is clearly evident in the attempts to recognize and build altars for any god that

 I have introduced artificial breaks for ease of reading.  This contrast was already a well-established theme among transatlantic revolutionaries by the late-eighteenth century. “As to what are called national religions,” Thomas Paine advised in Rights of Man: “we may, with as much propriety, talk of national Gods. It is either political craft or the remains of the Pagan system, when every nation had its separate and particular deity” (Paine 2000, 261).

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was half-way respectable—regardless of whether it was foreign or indigenous. Yet, a new world religion is not created by imperial decrees. Christianity, the new world religion, had already quietly emerged from a mixture of general Oriental theology (esp. Jewish) theology and vulgar Greek philosophy (esp. Stoic) (MECW 26: 394/MEW 21: 303 – 304; my translation).⁷⁴

It is unclear where Engels was getting all of this; written for a non-academic audience, the pamphlet lacks a robust scholarly apparatus. If we pick through the catalog of his personal library, nothing obvious jumps out as a likely source.⁷⁵ Given that the distinction between national and universal religions—or ethnic and world religions—was already a pervasive feature of German-language discussions by the late 1870s, it could be from almost anywhere (Masuzawa 2005). When we bracket the question of provenance, however, two points stick out. First, it is Engels and not Marx who explicitly treats religion as ideology—and ideology as false consciousness. “Great turning points in history have been accompanied by religious changes only with the three world religions that have existed thus far: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam,” Engels conjectures: The old tribal and national religions which naturally arose were not propagandistic [propagandistisch] and lost all powers of resistance as soon as the independence of the tribes and peoples was crushed; in the case of the Germanic peoples, even the briefest contact with the decaying Roman world empire and the Christian world religion—which was adapted to the empire’s economic, political and intellectual conditions—was enough. Only with the more or less artificial origins of the world religions—especially, Christianity and Islam—do we find general historical movements which begin to take on a religious character. But even then, for those revolutions with truly universal significance, their religious character is limited to only the initial stages of the bourgeoisie’s struggle for emancipation. With respect to Christianity, this is explained by medieval European history which knew no other form of ideology than religion and theology from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries—and not, as Feuerbach says, by the human heart and its religious needs. But once the 18th century bourgeoisie was strong enough to have its own ideology, fitted to its specific class perspective, it went through its great and final revolution: the French Revolution which, appealing to nothing but juridical and political ideas, only cared about religion to the degree that it now stood in its way (MECW 26: 376/MEW 21: 284– 285; my translation; emphasis added).

 I have introduced an artificial break in the text for ease of reading.  Engels seems to have always been far more curious about the gods than his comrade. In 1853, for example, he writes Marx about something he’s been reading: The Historical Geography of Arabia by Reverend Charles Foster. An appreciation for the landscape within which Islam emerges, Engels writes, “explains a good deal about the Muhammadan [sic] invasion. As far as the religious con-job [Religionsschwindel] is concerned, it seems from the ancient inscriptions in the South—in which the ancient, national tradition of Arabic monotheism still predominates (as among the American Indians), and the Hebrews represent only a small part—that Muhammad’s religious revolution, like every religious movement, was formally a reaction, ostensibly a return to the old and simple” (MECW 39: 327/MEW 28: 247; my translation).

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Ancestors, gods, and spirits are thus akin to Wittgenstein’s ladder: something human beings should feel free to discard once these cognitive “reflexes” fail to fit the material conditions of their existence. Second, this “universalizing” tendency in the history of religion would have meant something distinct for Engels. One well-defined feature of the workingclass politics envisioned by both Marx and Engels was that—since industrial capitalism reduces all workers to generic sellers of abstract labor—capitalism makes the particularized, concrete identities of workers as anything other than workers obsolete.⁷⁶ The proletariat’s revolution had to be international in scope. Otherwise, “liberation” in one place likely meant “proletarianization” in another. For his part, Marx never backed away from this rejection of nationalism as bourgeois chauvinism. In an early draft of The Civil War in France, for example, he judged: The chauvinism of the bourgeoisie is only the supreme vanity, giving a national cloak to all their own pretentions. It is a means, by permanent armies, to perpetuate international struggles, to subjugate in each country the producers by pitching them against their brothers in each other country, a means to prevent the international cooperation of the working classes, the first condition of their emancipation (MECW 22: 501/MEGA2 I.22: 18).

So long as inherited social identities prevented or dissolved the latent solidarity of workers as workers, they also tended to perpetuate the tyranny of capital over labor. To be a socialist, then, meant reimagining a sense of self beyond already existing national borders, linguistic groups, or religious traditions.⁷⁷

 This intuition would eventually bear intriguing theoretical fruit. In The General Theory of Law and Marxism, for instance, Evgeny Pashukanis argues that the law’s commitment to disregarding traits like race, sex, gender, and income—everything that makes a generic, abstract someone the concrete individual they are—reproduces the merely “formal equivalence” between buyers and sellers of labor power. “Only in commodity production does the abstract legal form see the light,” he contends: “in other words, only there does the general capacity to possess a right become distinguished from concrete legal claims. Only the continual reshuffling of values in the market creates the idea of a fixed bearer of such rights” (Pashukanis 2002, 118). Contemporary demands for extra-procedural or “social” justice are, in principle, meant to address the limitations of this merely formal legal equivalence (see Chapter Six).  Many critics—none more trenchantly than Cedric Robinson—have argued that both Marx and Engels failed to recognize how racial domination is baked into capitalist logic. “For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion,” Robinson writes in Black Marxism: “Ultimately, this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would prove inadequate, a mistake ordained by the preoccupation of Marxism with the industrial and manufacturing centers of capitalism” (Robinson 1983, 4). On the fraught relationship between Black radicalism and Marxism—two emancipatory projects with different explanatory mechanisms— Robert L. Allen (1969) is an excellent place to begin.

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More to the point, Engels insisted that part of what it meant to be a Marxist was to be a committed internationalist. When the French Worker’s Party published a brief notice in Le Socialiste to celebrate Engels’ 70th birthday, for example, the septuagenarian replied in kind. “I thank you with all my heart for the congratulations which you were kind enough to send me on the occasion of my seventieth birthday,” he begins: Rest assured that what remains of my life and my strength will be spent fighting for the proletarian cause. May I be allowed to die the moment I am no longer fit to fight. But the battles won by you, by our brothers in Germany, England, Austria-Hungary, Russia, in fact everywhere, form a brilliant series of victories that are enough to rejuvenate a man older and more exhausted than I. And what pleases me most is the sincere and, I hope, permanently established brotherhood between the French and German proletarians, despite the chauvinistic cries of our corrupt bourgeoisies. It was your great countryman Saint-Simon who was the first to foresee that the alliance of the three great Western nations – France, England, and Germany – is the first international condition for the political and social emancipation of all Europe. This alliance – the nucleus of the European alliance which will put an end to the wars between government cabinets and dynasties [Kabinetts- und dynastischen Kriegen]— I hope to see realized by the proletarians of the three nations. Long live the international social revolution! (MECW 27: 87– 88/MEW 22: 87; my translation).

The revolutionary ambition was to move beyond the burdens and constraints of the past. The goal was more than a merely non-capitalist collective order; the goal was a post-capitalist society. As such, the historical conditions once responsible for generating merely local, bourgeois chauvinisms had to be overcome. On the one hand, since the gods have been historically tied to discrete political communities—whether that means a nation-state, tribe, ethnic group, kingdom, or empire—the proletariat’s status as a supranational constituency means that these metapersonal authorities have lost their routine footings. Without a concrete place or a specific collective order to anchor them, the gods and spirits will—or should, in both the normative and predictive senses —gradually drift away. That the gods presuppose various social asymmetries and territorial borders is one of the reasons why both Marx and Engels viewed religious institutions as reliable reservoirs of counter-revolutionary forces.⁷⁸ They were leftovers from an obsolete age, heavy chains tugging the post-class future into the class-saturated past. “Which morals are preached to us today?” Engels asks:

 Engels estimated that “religion, once formed, always contains handed down [überliefern] material, much as tradition is a conservative power in all ideological fields” (MECW 26: 396/MEW 21: 305; my translation).

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First of all, there is the Christian-feudal—handed down from an earlier religious age; this is essentially split between a Catholic and a Protestant version, with unending subdivisions that range from Jesuit-Catholic and Orthodox-Protestant to lax, ‘enlightened’ moralities. Additionally, there is the modern-bourgeois variety and, beside it, the proletarian morality of the future. Thus, three broad categories of moral theories—one from the past, present and future— exist side by side in the most advanced European countries (MECW 25: 86 – 87/MEW 20: 86 – 87; my translation).

The “actually existing” religions of the nineteenth century necessarily bore the stamp of class antagonisms which conditioned their creation. For this reason, they could not be called upon to build a classless society: working-class solidarity on an international scale meant embracing a post-religious future.⁷⁹ On the other hand, industrial capitalism’s unprecedented development of productive forces—signified by the technological marvel of the steam-engine, which Engels tellingly described as “the first truly international invention”— tends to be an incubator of sorts for a rational grasp of reality that is free from religious superstitions (MECW 25: 399/MEW 20: 393; my translation). The reason for this is that the conquest of the natural world is, at the same time, the conquest of those territories which often have been ceded to gods, witches, and spirits. As our instrumental control and theoretical comprehension of Nature expands, there are fewer and fewer things on the planet for these metapersonal agents and forces to accomplish. Faith in a god who is in principle omnipotent, but unwilling or unable to do anything in the here and now, is a short step away from the recognition that this abstract being doesn’t exist. ⁸⁰ Capitalism begets atheism. Yet, Engels insisted that atheism was just a symptom of capitalist exploitation; it was not a revolutionary achievement in itself. For the German social-democratic workers, “atheism has already outlived them; this purely negative word no longer applies, in that they no longer live in a theoretical but only in a practical opposition to all belief in God. They are just done with God. They live and think in the real

 “The transition from socialism to communism, the transition from the society which makes an end of capitalism to the society which is completely freed from all traces of class division and class struggle,” we are told in The ABC of Communism, “will bring about the natural death of all religion and all superstition” (Bukharin and Preobrazhensk 1922, 254).  In this way, Marx and Engels are “materialists” in the sense that each identified conceptual abstraction as an epistemic practice with disastrous political consequences. “Is it any wonder,” Marx asks in Poverty, “that if one gradually removes, drip by drip, everything that constitutes the individuality of a house—disregards the construction materials used to build it, the form which distinguishes it from another—all that is left is a body [Körper/corps]; that if one disregards the body’s shape, nothing but a space remains; that if one abstracts the dimensions of this space, eventually nothing is left but the logical category of pure quantity?” (MECW 6: 163/ MEW 4: 127/Marx 1896, 146; my translation; emphasis added).

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world and are, therefore, materialists” (MECW 24: 15 – 16/MEW 18: 531– 532; my translation). This may or may not have been true, but its significance was merely symptomatic. That is: even if Engels viewed working-class atheism as an encouraging sign, it could only ever represent the negation of a nothing that never was. The asymmetries between capital and labor endure in a godless universe.

Proletarian Politics and the Limits of Christian Charity While his case against people like Owen and Blanc presumed all of this, Engels took special aim at what he took to be the weakest link of the bourgeois, Christian socialism they were peddling: the suspect political consequences of agape. When it comes to the class struggle at least, “love-bombing” the enemy is not the answer. First, Engels notes how the allegedly “socialist” appeals to Christian charity tend to come from members of the bourgeoisie in hopes of preserving the bourgeois order. “Since this book is about the poor, it is addressed to you, the rich. Their cause is yours,” Louis Blanc writes in the Introduction to Organisation du travail: “If poverty causes suffering, it also produces crime. The poor end up in both the hospital and the prison. Poverty makes slaves; it also makes thieves, murderers, and prostitutes” (Blanc 1845, 1, 10; my translation). Engels viewed this kind of patronizing socialism from above as little more than enlightened self-interest pompously dressed up as benevolent Christian altruism: no amount of bourgeois philanthropy adds up to socialism. These are the sorts of so-called socialists, he complained in 1847, who think that capitalism would be perfect—if it weren’t for the poor, who make a mess of things: “The true content of this reflection is hypocritical, petite bourgeois philanthropy, which embraces the positive aspects of contemporary society and regrets that it has a tendency to result in poverty, the negative aspect—and just wishes that this society could exist without the conditions of its existence” (MECW 6: 246/MEW 4: 219; my translation). By virtue of addressing the symptoms rather than the disease, Christian “socialists” were political faux amis. Second, because this species of Christian charity is only a polite disguise for bourgeois self-preservation, Engels was certain these kind-hearted souls would abandon the poor and working classes whenever socialist demands threatened the core interests of capital. Christian charity was so spineless as to become a porridgy mush in even marginally trying times. The recognition that moral principles are weak predictors of political and economic decision-making goes to the heart of Engels’ case against anyone who “preaches a strange mixture of blubbering souls, benevolent socialism, and Red Revolution” (MECW 8: 249/MEW 6: 180; my translation). It is true that working-class unrest may occasionally frighten some members

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of the bourgeoisie enough for them to “acquire an uncritical, philanthropic sort of armchair-socialism [kathedersozialistisch-philanthropisch].” With that said, Engels was confident that every strain of cap-and-gown socialism is made of “a soft, elastic, gelatinous substance that can be compressed into any form at will” (MECW 47: 184/MEW 36: 199; my translation). When wealth is at stake, capitalists and their representatives can be counted on to negotiate the costs of agape down to a more reasonable price. Working-class emancipation required stronger stuff. Here again, Louis Blanc appeared to prove Engels’s point. After King LouisPhilippe was deposed in February 1848, Blanc served as Chair of the Luxembourg Commission on Labor in the Second Republic’s provisional government. He tried to introduce elements of the ateliers sociaux program but met legislative resistance and backroom intrigue at almost every turn. By March, Engels was already shaking his head: “Unfortunately, little Louis Blanc is embarrassing himself with his vanity and crazy plans” (MECW 38: 168/MEW 27: 477; my translation). The national election in April produced a Legislative Assembly unwilling to introduce new taxes to fund the experiment or grant the workers as much autonomy as Blanc’s agenda implied. One of the few work programs to emerge involved paying the Parisian unemployed to plant “Liberty Trees” throughout the city in a deliberate invocation of the ’89 Revolution (Ozouf 1988). When legislators moved to eliminate even this watereddown version of the National Workshop program, it provoked days of urban unrest—les journées de Juin (23 – 26 June 1848). The National Guard was dispatched and crushed the insurrection. Accused by some Assembly members of encouraging the uprising, Blanc fled to England—where he would remain until the Second Empire collapsed after the Franco-Prussian War. For Engels, the historical lesson to draw from the 1848 Revolution was that the proletariat would have to emancipate themselves—and only an insurgent socialism from below could lead the way.

Conclusion Engels was not alone in thinking that a progressively democratic age might be an increasingly irreligious one as well. Yet, where reactionaries like de Maistre and Bonald saw only desolation, revolutionaries applauded as the ancient “aura” [Heiligenschein] which once surrounded collective life was evaporating—exposing the fundamental antagonisms between expropriators and expropriated as classes (MECW 10: 413/MEW 7: 344; my translation). Everyone involved could now clearly see that there was a war to fight and a world to win. “There exists a class of philanthropists, and even of socialists, who consider strikes as very mischievous to the interests of the ‘workingman himself,’ and whose great aim consists in finding out

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a method of securing permanent average wages,” Marx writes in an 1853 New York Tribune article: I am, on the very contrary, convinced that the alternative rise and fall of wages, and the continual conflicts between masters and men resulting therefrom, are, in the present organization of industry, the indispensable means of holding up the spirit of the labouring classes, of combining them into one great association against the encroachments of the ruling class, and of preventing them from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production. In a state of society founded upon the antagonism of classes, if we want to prevent Slavery in fact as well as in name, we must accept war. In order to rightly appreciate the value of strikes and combinations, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the apparent insignificance of their economical results, but hold, above all things, in view their moral and political consequences. Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, over-excitement, crisis and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring cycles, with the up and down of wages resulting from them, as with the constant warfare between masters and men closely corresponding with those variations in wages and profits, the working-classes of Great Britain, and of all Europe, would be a heart-broken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome. We must not forget that strikes and combinations among the serfs were the hot-beds of the mediaeval communes, and that those communes have been in their turn, the source of life of the now ruling bourgeoisie (MECW 12: 69/MEGA2 I.12: 205 – 206).⁸¹

Participation in the class struggle, rather than Christian agape, was a wise socialist’s strategic response to exploitation. Before offering love, it was prudent for the workers of the world to stop and ask: Which side are you on? Consider, as a case in point, Engels’ case against Feuerbach in The End of Classical German Philosophy—especially his complaint that Feuerbach’s “philosophy of the future” gradually turns into a bundle of sticky-sweet pronouncements about love. “I mean man’s love for himself, that is, love of the human essence, the love that spurs him on to satisfy and develop all the impulses and tendencies without whose satisfaction and development he neither is nor can be a true, complete man,” Feuerbach gushes in Lectures on the Essence of Religion: “I mean the individual’s love for his fellow men—for what am I without them, what am I without my love of fellows?” (Feuerbach 1967, 50). As far as Engels was concerned, this was bullshit. Magically, bourgeois selfishness and Christian agape turn out to be the same thing! “But love!” he insincerely protests:

 I have inserted an artificial break in the text for ease of reading.

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Yes, love is everywhere and always the magic god who is supposed to help Feuerbach through all the difficulties of practical life—and this in a society that is divided into classes with diametrically opposed interests. This is the point where the last residue of a revolutionary character disappears from his philosophy, leaving nothing but the old tune: Love one another, fall into each other’s arms without the distinctions of sex or class, the general intoxication of reconciliation [Versöhnungsdusel]! (MECW 26: 381/MEW 21: 289; my translation).

If agape means disregarding the systemic, macro-structural inequalities essential for class-domination—asking only that one isolated individual love another in the discrete moment—how exactly is the inter-generational despotism of capital to be broken? How can the workers ever hope to expropriate the expropriators if they must spend their days passively turning the other cheek while making their bosses rich?⁸² “Love also reigns in the stock market, insofar as it is not a merely sentimental phrase, because everyone finds in each other their blissful satisfaction,” Engels adds with caustic glee: “And when I have proper foresight into the consequences of my operations and gamble with success, I fulfil all the strictest injunctions of Feuerbachian morality—and become a rich man to boot. In other words, Feuerbach’s morality is tailored to modern capitalist society, even if he doesn’t want it or imagine it to be so” (MECW 26: 380/MEW 21: 289; my translation). The liberation of the working classes required something more than enfeebled, and selectively enriching, Christian charity. At the same time, however, Engels worried that the newly irreligious working classes might become a demoralized population. Even the godless need some motivating vision of the good. Without it, the proletariat could degenerate into the squalid lumpenproletariat of pimps, prostitutes, pickpockets, and beggars. Christian love was fraudulent; the gods weren’t real—but mere disbelief was insufficiently radical. Working-class emancipation meant moving from the “theoretical humanism” of atheism to the “practical humanism” of Communism. Or, as Engels formulates the point, one must exchange utopian socialism for its scientific cousin in order to seize control of modern industry and organize economic life around the common good. It is necessary to pursue this explicitly post-capitalist, communist agenda because:

 Engels would be disappointed but not surprised to learn that, in the weeks following Kristallnacht, a principled, metaphysical pacificist like Gandhi proposed that German Jews should gladly offer themselves up for slaughter. “The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews,” the Mahatma concluded: “But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy” (Gandhi 1938). So much for the social principles of satyagraha.

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in bourgeois society people are dominated by the economic conditions they themselves have created, by the means of production they themselves have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the religious reflex-action [Reflexaktion] still exists and thus, so does the religious reflex-action itself. And although bourgeois political economy gives us some insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, it does not substantially change anything. Bourgeois political economy can neither prevent crises in general, nor protect individual capitalists from losses, bad debts, and bankruptcy; nor can it protect the individual worker from unemployment and misery. It is still true that man proposes and God disposes (i. e., the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production). Mere knowledge, even if it goes much further and deeper than bourgeois political economy, is not enough to subject social forces to the rule of society. Above all else, this requires a social act. And when this act is accomplished, when society has freed itself and all its members from bondage by taking possession of all the means of production—that they themselves have produced, but which now confront them as an overwhelming alien force—and systematically manages them; when man no longer just proposes, but also disposes – only then will the last alien force still mirrored in religion disappear; and the religious reflection will disappear along with it for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left for it to mirror (MECW 25: 301– 302/MEW 20: 295; my translation).⁸³

The socialist’s ambition was not a godless society per se. If that were the goal it might be pointlessly achieved through state prohibitions, police surveillance, and prison camps—but the capitalists would still enjoy a monopoly over the means of production. The animating desire was constructing a world in which terrestrial powers are no longer perceived as alien or hostile forces; where human beings intelligently and collectively liberate themselves from the dead hand of Fate. The revolutionary aspiration was assembling a collective order where human deference to non-negotiable authority is no longer expected by would-be rulers, and hardly imaginable by those they would rule.

 I have inserted an artificial break for the sake of readability.

Postscript Marx and Engels? Marx or Engels? Marx vs. Engels? Ever the Prussian gentleman he was raised to be, Marx recoiled at the prospect of a Marxist political identity. It reeked of a bourgeois on the make. After the American publication Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly played up his contributions to the IWA, for example, he groused about the newspaper peddling a “humbug cult of myself ” (MECW 23: 638). He bristled at the notion that his writings offered a “socialist system” that others might apply or follow (MECW 24: 533). When a handful of French socialists—including his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue—started calling themselves Marxistes in the late 1870s, he objected. In a well-known letter from 1882, Engels observed: “so-called ‘Marxism’ in France is something all its own—so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste’ [‘One thing is certain: I am not a Marxist’]” (MECW 46: 356/MEW 35: 388; my translation). Recognition for his contributions to the socialist movement was often its own distinct form of disappointment. And then there was Henry Hyndman. Hyndman was a founding member of England’s first socialist political party. In England for All, he laid out the organization’s platform. The most interesting bits were cribbed from Capital. Marx remained unnamed and uncredited. The only hint that the book’s ideas weren’t Hyndman’s appears in the splinter of a Preface, where readers learn that the author is “indebted to the work of a great thinker and original writer, which will, I trust, shortly be made accessible to the majority of my countrymen” (Hyndman 1881, vi). That’s it. Full stop. Marx was initially furious but—older and wiser—mostly kept it to himself. He even suggested that his erasure was probably for the best since Hyndman’s book was meant to articulate the party’s vision. “I am decidedly of the opinion that to have named the Capital [sic] and its author, would have been a big blunder,” Marx advised Hyndman in July 1881: Party programs ought to keep free of any apparent dependence upon individual authors or books. But allow me to add that they are also no proper place for new scientific developments, such as those borrowed by you from the Capital, and that the latter are altogether out of place in a commentary on a Program with whose professed aims they are not at all connected (MECW 46: 103).

At this point in his life, Marx was too tired to fight back in public; in private he spoke more freely. “The chapters on labor and capital are just literal excerpts https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-011

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from or paraphrases of Capital, but the guy doesn’t give credit to the book or its author,” he complained to Adolph Sorge in December 1881: “All these lovely middle-class writers—unless they are specialists—are eager to make a quick buck [unmittelbar Geld], or a name for themselves, or some political capital out of any new thought that’s brought to them by a favorable wind. This guy stole so many evenings from me in order to learn quickly and then fleece me” (MECW 46: 162– 163/MEW 35: 248; my translation). Marx couldn’t catch a break.

A Star Is Born For reasons that are still murky—at least to me—Engels spent the last decade of his life lovingly ignoring his comrade’s preferences and supervising the construction of a Marxist system. First and foremost, Engels served as Marxism’s loving midwife by tending to Marx’s literary remains. He shepherded a stream of previously published but ignored writings to new audiences; all with a helpful Introduction or Afterword meant to establish the texts’ true meaning and the enduring significance of the man who wrote them. Without question, his most remarkable achievement as a friend and socialist was transforming a cache of radically incomplete and almost indecipherable manuscripts into the so-called “Second” (1885) and “Third” (1894) volumes of Capital (Carver 1996). “Marx left behind a thick manuscript for the second part of Capital,” Engels noted in April 1883: “the whole of which I must first read (and what handwriting!) before I can say whether it is printable and how much will need to be added later” (MECW 47: 6/MEW 36: 7; my translation). A few days later, he told another correspondent: “The 2nd volume of Capital is there, but I can’t tell you what a state it is in – 1,000 pages of ms. to go through” (MECW 47: 8/MEW 36: 9). “We will have Marx’s house around our necks until next March,” he informed one confidante: so there is no need to rush when it comes to moving out or planning for the future. It will be one heck of a job to get this estate in order. What surprises me is that M has even saved papers, letters, and manuscripts from the pre-’48 period—splendid material for the biography which, of course, I will be writing and will include: the history of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the movement of 1848 – 1849 on the Lower Rhine, as well as the louse-ridden London Refuge Association [Lause-Flüchtlingschaft] between 1849 and 1852, and the International. The first task is publishing Volume II of Capital and that will be no fun. There are 4– 5 versions of the second book, of which only the first is complete, the others merely begun; this will take some work when you’re dealing with a man like M, who weighed every word on a jeweler’s scale [Goldwaage]. Nevertheless, it is dear work for me, as I am once again together with my old comrade (MECW 47: 26/MEW 36: 28; my translation).

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We have always known that volumes “Two” and “Three” of Capital were shaped by well-meaning editorial interventions. However, thanks to the overhauled Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), twenty-first century readers are in a unique position to evaluate the distance between the polished final products and the fragmentary, equivocating source materials. Among other things, it is now clear that Engels was far more than just the editor of these posthumous “volumes.” Given the way he rearranged blocks of texts, eliminated whole sentences and paragraphs, cut-and-pasted material from different manuscripts, introduced intra-chapter divisions or headings, and revised countless sentences, there’s a good case for recognizing Engels as their co-author (Heinrich 1996, 97; see Roth 2002, Vollgraf, Jungnickel, and Naron 2002). For good measure, Engels also cultivated a younger generation of European socialists who championed Marxism as the revolutionary alternative to both anarchism and “bourgeois” socialism. He wasn’t sure he was up to the task at first. “All my life I have done what I was made to do; namely, playing second violin [zweite Violine],” he wrote to Johann Becker, a fellow veteran of the 1848 German Revolution: I was happy to have such a splendid first violin [erste Violine] as Marx. But I now suddenly find myself in Marx’s position when it comes to theory, and I am expected to play first violin. There will inevitably be slip-ups, and no one is more aware of this than I. And when times get a little more turbulent, it will be all the more obvious what we have lost in Marx. None of us have the grand vision to do the right thing at the right time at the most critical moment. In quiet times, events may have occasionally proved me right—but in revolutionary moments, his judgment was almost infallible (MECW 47: 202/MEW 36: 218 – 219; my translation).⁸⁴

Engels mastered his insecurities and coached a growing band of socialists into fighting shape. We can occasionally catch a glimpse of Marxism-in-the-making if we read his correspondence from these years closely. In an 1886 letter to August Bebel, for example, he reflected on the hodgepodge tactics adopted by some selfdescribed French radicals: These people all call themselves socialists but are now learning from bitter experience that the threadbare rags they inherited from Proudhon and Louis Blanc are nothing but haute and petite bourgeois crap [Bourgeois- und Kleinbürgerdreck]; they are thus quite open to Marx’s theory. This is because the radicals are only half at the helm; once wholly so, they

 The received English translation understandably uses the idiomatic “second fiddle” to translate zweite Violine. I have chosen to use first violin and second violin in the orchestral senses, however, given that both Marx and Engels tended to view the socialist movement as a mass, collective effort —but one in which some had the honor and duty of speaking on behalf of the community.

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will lose all of the working-class and I maintain: the victory of radicalism—i. e., of old, threadbare French socialism—in the Chamber will spell victory for Marxism [Marxismus] in the Paris City Council. Oh, if only Marx could have lived to see his principle tried and tested in France and America, to know that the democratic republic of today is nothing more than the battleground on which the decisive battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will be fought (MECW 47: 470/MEW 36: 509; my translation).

This is one of the first times we see Engels writing about Marxism without surrounding it in ironic scare quotes (MECW 27: 70/MEW 22: 69). Without Karl’s preternaturally irritable presence to negotiate, the fledgling had become something for Fred to nurture. When the Reichstag refused to renew Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws in 1890, Kautsky, Bernstein and Bebel were assigned the task of reformulating the SPD’s political agenda—with some helpful, behind-the-scenes advice from Engels (MECW 27: 218 – 233/MEW 22: 225 – 240). The explicitly Marxist “Erfurt Program” was the result. Marx, or at least Marx-by-way-of-Engels-Kautsky, now defined the party line. In time, the out-sized role that Engels played in constructing Marxism would be used against him. That is, still another technique by which twentieth-century academics transformed Marx into a great theorist was by pinning anything they found objectionable onto Engels’ overcoat. Of course, what counted as a desecrating sacrilege was largely a matter of political context and intellectual fashion. The most common accusation has been that Engels—lacking his comrade’s philosophical pedigree or raw intelligence—created an insufficiently nuanced or vulgarized version of Marx’s “thought” which is at odds with the master’s original (e. g., Lichtheim 1964, Lukács 1968, Thomas 2008).⁸⁵ Sebastiano Timpanaro, the great Italian philologist and Marxist, perhaps put it best: there is a need for somebody on whom everything which Marxists, at that particular moment, are asking to get rid of can be dumped. That somebody is Friedrich Engels. Vulgar materialism? Determinism? Naturalistic metaphysics? Archaic and schematic Hegelianism? Marx turns out to be free of all these vices, provided one knows how to “read” him. It was Engels who, in his zeal to simplify and vulgarize Marxism, contaminated it. Thus, whereas Engels is loaded down with materialist ballast, Marx can take on that physiognomy of a profound and subtle (and still uncomprehended) great intellectual which is de rigueur in our cultural world (Timpanaro 1975, 74).

Engels has not only been the scapegoat for anything perceived to be bad about Marx or Marxism; he has just as often been cut loose from anything perceived to be good. Given the text-critical puzzles surrounding “German Ideology,” for  Bakunin judged that Engels was less erudite than Marx, but equally intelligent and vastly more practical (Bakunin 1971, 26).

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example, it is noteworthy just how frequently Marx is described as the author of this “book” (e. g., Barbalet 2015, 175; McLellan 1973, 151). Engels seems to have been a decent, funny, and—at times—even heroic man. He deserves much, much better.

The Fine Art of Muddling Through Given this contested history, it is worth briefly considering how scholars have made sense of the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels (Carver 1983). It deserves some attention if only because, at this point, it is legitimate to ask: If there is no theory of religion to be found in Marx, should we think of the first “Marxist” theories of religion as owing more to Engels? There are three general schools of interpretation. The first camp is a party of clumpers. According to these scholars, Marx and Engels always speak with a single authorial voice. The second camp consists of muddlers. As the name suggests, these readers argue that the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels is too complicated for a single, one-size-fits-all solution. The third camp is made up of splitters. They insist that, despite their abiding friendship, Marx and Engels were engaged in distinct, even conflicting intellectual projects—something which became increasingly clear after Marx was no longer around to keep Engels in check (e. g., Levine 1975). The arguments from both the clumpers and the splitters are, in general, either question-begging or lackluster. “Orthodox narratives of partnership rely on an ultimate identity of authorial voice in Marx and Engels,” Terrell Carver advises: “Those arguing, by contrast, that vocal unison, or at least harmony, between the two must be established instance by instance, rather than presumed in advance, point to major discrepancies between Marx’s manuscripts, which have now been separately published, and Engels’ editorial adjustments thereto” (Carver 1999, 20). This strikes me as the right approach. We must muddle through their vast literary remains and address particular topics as they arise.⁸⁶ What does the textual evidence indicate with respect to religion? Did Marx and Engels speak with one voice or two about gods, witches, and spirits? And, if there are two voices, do they clash or harmonize? A postscript is no place to tackle a text-critical and conceptual problem pitched at this level of generality. For this reason, I want to focus on just one theme: the quasi-Humean claim that human beings have an anthropomorphizing cognitive “instinct.”

 See Stedman Jones (2017) for an excellent example of muddling through.

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As this chapter has tried to demonstrate, the crux of the Engelsian “theory of religion” is that human beings personify the phenomena they don’t understand. A true understanding of nature is a historical achievement, he writes: To the earliest human beings, the forces of nature were something alien, mysterious, superior. At a certain stage, through which all civilized peoples must pass, they are assimilated through personification. This instinct to personify created gods everywhere, and the consensus gentium regarding the proof of God’s existence, only proves the universality of this instinct to personify as a necessary transitional stage, and also of religion itself. Only the real knowledge of natural forces of nature banishes the gods or God from one position after another (MECW 25: 605/MEW 20: 582; my translation).

The key political twist on this familiar Humean fable is that—in the course of human history—misunderstood and personified “natural” forces are initially comingled with but eventually supplanted by misunderstood and personified “social” forces. We come to have gods, in other words, because we come to have kings, queens, and bosses who expect blind obedience—or, at the very least, quick submission. The key question is whether Marx himself ever endorsed this portrait of human cognition as personifying the world in the midst of uncertainty. I have thus far been unable to identify a text written by Marx—with, I should add, an uncomplicated provenance—indicating that he found much use for the idea. Mind you, it isn’t that he fails to mention personification; it is that he deploys the concept differently. On my reading, Marx consistently experiments with personification as a literary device. He personalizes the structural elements of capital accumulation in order to de-personalize his socialist critique of capitalist logic. Capitalism isn’t cruel because capitalists are evil; capitalists are cruel because the essence of capital accumulation is increasingly impersonal forms of domination (see Postone 1993). As he makes the point in the “Preface” to the first German edition of Capital: Just a word to avoid possible misunderstandings. I don’t portray the characters of the capitalist and the landlord in a rosy light. But these are individuals only in the sense that they are the personification of economic categories, bearers [Träger] of particular class relations and interests. My point of view, which considers the evolution of the economic formation of society [Gesellschaftsformation] as a natural-historical process, makes the individual less responsible for the social conditions that create him, however much he may subjectively rise above them (MECW 35: 10/MEW 23: 16; my translation).

This goes to the heart of both Marx’s critique of capitalism and his impatience with nineteenth-century schools of “sentimental” socialism. Cultivating private, individual virtues to combat the consequences of globalizing capitalist logic was ineffec-

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tive and therefore bad politics—something a twenty-first century critic might discount as virtue signaling. “Since, for example, private property is not a simple relation, an abstract concept or even a principle, but exists within the totality of the bourgeois relations of production,” he judged as early as 1847: “these bourgeois relations of production are class relations, a lesson which every student must have learned from Adam Smith or Ricardo—thus a change in, or even the abolition of, these relations can only result from a change in these classes and their interrelation” (MECW 6: 337/MEW 4: 356 – 357; my translation). To understand capitalism, you had to understand class—and there is no class of one. This emphasis on the systemic conditions of capital accumulation is one reason why we find Marx suggesting in the 1861– 1863 manuscripts that: (a) capitalists are the personification of capital; (b) merchants the personification of circulating capital; and (c) industrial machinery the personification of past labor (MECW 33: 63, 73/MEGA2 II.3.5: 1595, 1604). It is, for example, the impersonal nature of capitalist domination which makes the embrace of Blanquist conspiratorial terror unhelpful: bumping off a CEO here or there is not, and will never be, the right strategy. Wars don’t end when a general dies on the field of battle. The only effective strategy of resistance and revolutionary transformation is, therefore, class struggle. “We know that in practice, whether a good is sold below or above its value depends on the relative balance of power between the buyer and seller (which is economically determined each time),” he observes: Again, whether or not the worker provides surplus labor beyond the normal amount depends on the resistance he can mount to the boundless demands of capital. The history of modern industry teaches us, however, that the excessive demands of capital were never constrained by the isolated efforts of the worker; but that the clash first had to take the form of a class struggle and thus to provoke the intervention of state power (MECW 30: 184/MEW 43: 172– 173; my translation).

The productive forces unleashed by the capitalist mode of production were too great for this or that exceptional member of the proletariat to resist very long on their own. Class-based solidarity was the only hope. None of this amounts to definitive proof that Engels and Marx thought about the gods in fundamentally different ways. Demonstrating that premise would require a vastly more thorough analysis. In the meantime—as I hope to demonstrate in the next chapter—the first Marxist “theories” of religion likely owed far more to Engels than Marx. Whether this is a virtue or a vice is, as always, up for grabs.

Chapter Four Vanguard of the Revolution: Plekhanov, Russian Marxism, and the Peasant Question Being a Marxist has always meant imaginatively reaching beyond what Marx himself committed to paper. Engels often led by example on this score. A legion of socialist writers soon followed. With the benefit of hindsight, 1895 turns out to be a threshold year for the rise of Classical, Orthodox, or Second International Marxism. ⁸⁷ Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and Paul Lafargue published the expansive Forerunners of Modern Socialism—a kind of “soup to nuts” history which begins with ancient Greek philosophy and concludes with a study of French political radicals prior to the 1789 Revolution. Exiled from tsarist Russia, Georgiĭ Plekhanov published the diffidently titled Zur Frage der Entwicklung der monistischen Geschichtsauffassung [On the Question of the Monistic Conception of History]—a book widely considered to be the first, full-throated defense of historical or “dialectical” materialism as Marxism’s conceptual center of gravity. In my estimation, the surge of intellectual creativity which Engels inaugurated has too often been taken for granted. That is, the same sort of creeping academicism that has bedeviled our understanding of Marx also muddles our perception of what first-generation Marxists were doing. Even when we keep in mind that they were typically writing to convince other socialists of some point, the thematic scope and relentless volubility of fin de siècle Marxists remain puzzling. First-generation Freudians were no less garrulous, but their literary output makes more immediate sense. Men like Alfred Adler and Sándor Ferenczi were university-trained physicians eager to bootstrap potentially lucrative private practices into existence. They wanted to see psychoanalysis incorporated as a feature of the elite medical school curriculum—if only to further legitimate those private practices. All the work invested in publishing books, establishing training institutions, founding research journals, and holding annual congresses addressed both concerns at once: the institutionalization and professionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge were two sides of the same Freudian coin (Winter 1999). Not much of this accounts for the cadre of late-nineteenth century Marxists. Even if one accepts Bourdieu’s portrait of intellectuals as the “dominated fractions of the dominant class,” there is no single, comprehensive explanation for the preponderance of anti-bourgeois, bourgeois Marxists (Bourdieu 1993, 281). One might  Throughout this chapter I will use these terms interchangeably. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-012

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point to the pervasive nineteenth-century culture of “moral reform” which aimed at improving working-class lives from above. It was in this spirit, for example, that many Marxists hoped to organize the proletariat through mass education—thereby developing their latent revolutionary class-consciousness and the skills necessary to govern. Evening lectures and reading courses—that sort of thing. “Modern socialist consciousness is based on deep scientific insight,” Karl Kautsky estimated: The bearer of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia; it was from individual members of this stratum that modern socialism emerged; and through them it was taught to intellectually distinguished proletarians, who then introduced it into the proletariat’s class struggle—wherever conditions permitted. Socialist consciousness is, therefore, something delivered to the proletariat’s class struggle from without, not something that originally arose from within (Kautsky 1902, 79 – 80; my translation).

This patronizing sense of a politico-pedagogical duty to “deliver” class consciousness to the proletariat underscores just how many of the Second International’s leading lights were the same sort of declassé bourgeois as Marx himself. This is something of a historical puzzle. “The charge that capitalism was creating an ‘intellectual proletariat,’ comparable to the ‘reserve army’ of the working class, was common in the socialist literature of the nineties and beyond,” Stanley Pierson cautions: “Yet vocational setbacks do not go very far in explaining the decisions of the educated recruits. Thousands among the academically educated were unable to enter the professions in these years. Only a few joined the socialist movement” (Pierson 1993, 8 – 9). Frustrated ambitions go some way towards explaining Kautsky’s own volubility, but cannot account for why only some over-educated and under-employed bourgeois became Marxists but most did not. One might also point to the autocratic regimes under which these first-generation Marxists lived. At a time when it was illegal to pursue a political transformation “through social-democratic, socialistic, or communistic endeavors,” articles and essays about topics that weren’t obviously seditious—in a technical language that non-initiates couldn’t quite grasp—was one of the few forms of political activism on the table (As quoted in Retallack 2017, 133). This accounts for both Kautsky’s literary activity during the era of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws (c. 1878–1890), as well as Plekhanov’s deliberately fusty title. But it also means that we must look past the high-minded, manifest content of this work to discover the latent interests of the fin de siècle Marxist imagination. This includes Plekhanov’s surprisingly nimble essays on the political history of European art. “In so far as Plekhanov was writing for, and working with, treasonous and subversive intellectuals in a pre-constitutional and anti-liberal context,” Terrell Carver submits:

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his engagements with philosophy and philosophers apparently mimicked some of Marx’s political efforts and strategies, not least in promoting an awareness of historical change and of ‘liberal’ Enlightenment values. But in less repressive contexts these debates—and eventually Marxist researches—look more like a displacement of politics into intellectual activity than like the organizational activisms pursued by Marx himself (Carver 2018, 66).

If Carver is right—and there’s a good chance he is—the twentieth-century habit of treating Marx as a scholar or theorist was anticipated by a much older, nineteenthcentury tendency for declassé Marxists to eschew politics for intellectual posturing. Nevertheless, since Plekhanov occupied a post in the European class struggle rather than a tenured chair in the academy, it is worth our time trying to piece together how his intellectual work informed his own “organizational activisms” (Anderson 1983, 16). This is what the chapter tries to accomplish. I’ve chosen to focus on Plekhanov for two reasons. First, since Plekhanov wrote before Marxists knew about the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844” or “German Ideology,” he is much closer to Marx’s explicit anti-idealism or “materialism” than the various schools of “Western Marxism” that emerged after World War II. Because of this, I believe that no first-generation Marxist comes closer to meeting the programmatic challenge of assembling a strategically useful, political “theory of religion” than Plekhanov—but it takes some digging to understand why he thought it was worth the bother. Second, he is often described as the “father of Russian Marxism” (Baron 1963). It was Plekhanov who produced the first Russian translations of key writings from Marx and Engels. In fact, the two were so pleased with his translation of the Manifesto that they wrote a Preface for its 1882 publication—if only because it made Mikhail Bakunin’s earlier, suspect version obsolete. It was Plekhanov who, along with Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch and Pavel Axelrod, founded Osvobozhdenie Truda (“Emancipation of Labor”)—the first explicitly Marxist Russian political party. It was Plekhanov who convinced Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—now better known by the underground alias Lenin—that Marxism held the key to Russia’s post-tsarist future. It was Plekhanov who, along with Lenin, Axelrod, Zasulich and Julius Martov, launched Iskra—the first Russian-language, Marxist newspaper. In Isaac Deutscher’s estimation, “Plekhanov and his friends were the real vanguard of revolution, or rather the vanguard of a vanguard that was to come before the end of the century” (Deutscher 1966, 207– 208). It was also Plekhanov who cautioned against Lenin’s April 1917 call for Marxists to seize political power as “an insane and extremely harmful attempt to sow anarchistic confusion and division within the Russian land” (As quoted in Goodwin 2007, 109). If the history of twentieth-century Marxism cannot be told responsibly without mentioning the Soviet Union, then some discussion of Plekhanov is no less necessary.

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Anarchism, Marxism, and Revolutionary Ambition Plekhanov began his adult political life as a member of the clandestine Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Liberty”). One of several underground parties in the Russian Narodnichestvo (“populist”) movement of the 1860s and 1870s, the Zemlevolets called for the violent overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and creation of an egalitarian, largely agrarian, social order. “Our ultimate political and economic ideal,” one 1878 manifesto explained, “is anarchy and collectivism” (As quoted in Yarmolinsky 1956, 211; e. g., Grant 1976, Lavrin 1962, Offord 1986, Watters 1968). The group’s anarchism meant that they were uninterested in constitutions, elections, parties, or parliaments. European political history since the English Civil Wars demonstrated that merely “political” freedom was a sham; the exploitative relationship between governors and the governed were, at best, gently reformed rather than abolished. And even then, the results from allegedly “democratic” reforms were uninspiring. As Mikhail Bakunin made the point in Statism and Anarchy, “so-called constitutional forms, or forms of popular representation, do not impede state, military, political, and financial despotism. Instead, they have the effect of legitimizing it and giving it a false appearance of popular government” (Bakunin 1990, 114). The revolutionary task-at-hand for the Narodniks was triggering the imperial state’s collapse through strategic acts of violence and systemic sabotage. The future mode of governance could be counted on to take care of itself. The group’s collectivism entailed the social ownership of all productive property. More specifically, they called for the expansion of the obshchina or mir system; whereby arable land was collectively controlled by more-or-less autonomous villages, and allocated to individual households based on need. The populists believed that peasants, rather than the proletariat, were the key revolutionary constituency in Russia. Their reasoning was two-fold. On one side of the balance sheet, peasants were thought to live simpler, more virtuous lives that were untouched by either the degradations of industrial capitalism or the corruptions of modernity. For lack of a better word, they were viewed as natural-born socialists. “Our people are still unfamiliar with the word socialism,” Alexander Herzen observed in the early 1850s, “but its meaning is close to the soul of a Russian who has lived out his days in a rural commune” (Herzen 2012, 35). It was this sort of confidence in the peasants’ inherent wisdom that persuaded anarchists like Bakunin that the ideal social order would essentially manifest itself “on the ruins of the disintegrating state and bourgeois world” (Bakunin 1990, 196). All the radicals needed to do was clear the deck.

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On the other side, nineteenth-century Russia remained an empire of peasants. It may have been one of the great imperial powers of Europe, Shelia Kirkpatrick explains: “But it was a great power that was universally regarded as backward with comparison with Britain, Germany and France. In economic terms, this meant that it had been late to emerge from feudalism (the peasants were freed from legal bondage to their lords or the state only in the 1860s) and late in industrializing” (Kirkpatrick 2008, 15). According to the 1897 census, for instance, the population of the sprawling Russian empire was a bit shy of 126 million subjects; the peasant population constituted 113 million or roughly 90 % of that total (Chandra 2002, Kinston-Mann 1983, Kotsonis 1999, Moon 2014, Shanin 1981, Wada 1981). Almost by definition, any meaningful democratic transformation in Russia would have to be a peasants’ revolution. Zemlya i Volya was never destined for success, but its fate was sealed after a Zemlevolet attempted to murder Tsar Alexander II in April 1879. The would-be assassin was hanged a few weeks later and the imperial secret-police soon began a coordinated campaign to arrest every troublemaker they could find. A majority of the group’s members argued that the autocratic regime was on its heels—now was the time for a reinvigorated wave of terror. They reorganized themselves as Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Liberty” or “The People’s Will”) and redoubled their efforts to kill the Tsar. A minority maintained the regime was much stronger than it appeared and random acts of violence were counterproductive. This second group—which included Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod, and Deutsch—called themselves Chorny Peredel (“Black Repartition”) and began surreptitiously printing literature to distribute at secret study-groups and organizational meetings. After a team of Narodovolets tried and failed to blow up the Tsar’s railroad car in November 1879, the police intensified their crack-down on suspected radicals (Schenk 2010). Shortly after New Year’s Day 1880, Plekhanov and his wife fled to the relative security of Western Europe. He was beyond the reach of Russian police when still another Narodovolet planted an explosive at the Winter Palace in February 1880. By the time Alexander II was finally assassinated in March 1881, Plekhanov had settled into a modest life tutoring the children of wealthy ex-pat Russians in and around Geneva. All the while, however, he was reconsidering the foundations of Russian revolutionary ambition with Marx as his guide. Five texts seem to have been especially important for his “conversion” to Marxism in the early 1880s: Poverty of Philosophy, the Manifesto, Brumaire, the “Preface” from Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, and Capital. On his reading, Brumaire and Capital “tested” and confirmed the theoretical principles laid out in the other writings (Plekhanov 1976 1: 646). By way of summary, the conceptual framework he cobbled together can be whittled down to three historiographical principles (Cohen 1978).

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The first is the primacy thesis, which contends that the sine qua non for any collective order is the ability to reproduce itself day after day, year after year— to “metabolize” the environment in ways that meet the basic, physiological needs of its members.⁸⁸ For his part, Marx had described the various physical skills, technical know-how, tools, machinery, and sources of power used to satisfy these elemental needs as productive forces [Produktionskräft]. The social arrangements which coalesce in and around the application of these productive forces were, in turn, identified as social production relations [gesellschaftliches Produktions Verhältnis or Produktionsverhältnisse]. “Labor is organized and shared in different ways, depending on the tools at its disposal. The hand mill requires a different division of labor than the steam mill,” Marx explains in Poverty of Philosophy: “Machines are just as little an economic category as the ox pulling the plough, they are just a productive force. The modern factory based on the use of machines is a social production relationship, an economic category” (MECW 6: 183/MEW 4: 149; my translation). It isn’t a perfect analogy, but the link between productive forces and production relations resembles that between content and form; the first term of the equation establishes the what, while the second identifies the how. Marx gestured toward a few different “modes of production” [Produktionsweise] in his work but saved most of his powder for what he identified as the modern, bourgeois, or capitalist form (Hindess and Hirst 1975, Graca and Zingarelli 2015). The second is the integration thesis, which maintains that the productive forces and production relations together establish the material possibilities for and the formal limitations of various political, legal, and broadly “cultural” institutions (MECW 6: 166/MEW 4: 130). Plekhanov had no access to the 1857– 1858 manuscripts, but there Marx uses an optical metaphor to explain how a particular mode of collective existence emerges from within a given mode of production. For every social order, he writes, there is a dominant mode of production that is the “general lighting in which all other colors are bathed and modified by its particularity” (MECW 28: 43/MEW 13: 637; my translation). Fatefully, Marx changed gears in the 1859 Preface to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie and described this arrangement in terms of a material “base” [Basis] or “foundation” [Grundlage] upon which various “superstructures” [Überbau] are assembled. The productive forces and production

 Orthodox Marxists typically over-emphasized mere biological reproduction while discounting the demands of social reproduction. As Shami Ghosh reminds us, the sorts of things that medieval peasants could buy on the market—“stone for your house, some furniture, better utensils, more animal protein, a nice set of clothes, perhaps even some curtains”—weren’t physiologically essential. However, “you do need this sort of stuff to survive with the same social status and ability to display it within your village, and to ensure that at least some of your offspring can enjoy the same status” (Ghosh 2022; see also Dyer 2011).

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relations together provide, he judges, “the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which a legal and political superstructure rises, and to which correspond certain social forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process [geistig Lebensprozeß] in general” (MECW 29: 263 – 264/MEW 13: 8 – 9; my translation).⁸⁹ Stripped down to the fewest moving parts, the integration thesis asserts that societies are bounded, heterogeneous totalities rather than loose assemblies of autonomous “life-orders” [Lebensordnungen] or “life-spheres” [Lebenssphäre] (Jay 1984). Collective orders are less like a bag of marbles than a jigsaw puzzle in which things “hang together” in a mostly coherent and functional-enough fashion to reproduce themselves. For his part, Plekhanov preferred to give Marx’s architectural metaphor an anatomical twist. In Entwicklung der monistischen Geschichtsauffassung, he writes that social and historical analysis must always start with “the productive forces and the economic relations of the given country. But naturally research must not stop at this point: it has to show how the dry skeleton of economy is covered with the living flesh of social and political forms, and then— and this is the most interesting and most fascinating side of the problem—of human ideas, feelings, aspirations and ideals” (Plekhanov 1976 1: 647– 648/Plekhanov 1975, 262). By virtue of comparing collective orders to organic bodies, Plekhanov fashions societies as internally heterogenous wholes which are “adapted” to a productive niche and may be said to “evolve” through time. Revisiting this metaphor a few years later, he insists that a Marxist science of history: cannot limit itself to the mere anatomy of society: it embraces the totality of phenomena that are directly or indirectly determined by social economics, including the work of the imagination. There is no historical fact that did not owe its origin to social economics; but it is no less true to say that there is no historical fact that was not preceded, not accompanied, and not succeeded by a definite state of consciousness. Hence the tremendous importance of social psychology. For if it has to be reckoned with even in the history of law and of political institutions, in the history of art, philosophy, and so forth, not a single step can be taken without it (Plekhanov 1940, 24).

This did not mean that societies are perfectly integrated totalities, however. The human feelings, aspirations, and ideals that interested Plekhanov are not automatically aligned with the mode of production as monomaniacal functionalists might contend. In fact, one of the hallmarks of Marxist theorizing during this period is the conviction that class struggles preclude what social scientists would later call so-

 Although “base” and “superstructure” appear in Brumaire, they do so only in passing. Marx does not present these terms as elements of a formal methodological or operational principle as in Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie.

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cial, “interpersonal” integration as well as systemic, “structural” integration (Lockwood 1964). The various “contradictions and antagonisms” that are inherent features of capitalist social-property relations can be managed more-or-less effectively here or there, but they can never be finally resolved so long as a proletariat exists somewhere (MECW 35: 504/MEW 23: 526).⁹⁰ Taken together, the first and second theses provide the building blocks for something approaching a Marxist typology of macro-social arrangements. In this way, the thesis that production relations are anchored to the available productive forces gestures toward a comparative catalog of distinct collective orders. However, despite its promise, one limitation of this strictly taxonomic approach is that it can only identify the historical correlations of traits within a single mode; it cannot account for the possible or actual historical relationships between the various modes of production. There is no mechanism to explain why, for example, some countries in nineteenth-century Europe adopted the bourgeois form while others remained tethered to its feudal cousin. The third and final component of Classical Marxist historiography—the development thesis—is what allowed figures like Plekhanov to claim they understood how one type of social formation gives rise to its own revolutionary successor. The streamlined version of Plekhanov’s argument goes something like this. At any given point in history, the interests of a dominant social fraction are tied to the existing state of productive forces. So much so, in fact, that rentier classes are somewhat notorious for stifling innovation (e. g., Christophers 2020). Given how often labor-enhancing innovations become labor-replacing technology, the short-term interests of some dominated fractions may be no less bound to the status quo (e. g., Benanav 2020, Frey 2019). Yet, there are always reasons for some segment of a collective order to expand the available productive forces— whether it is in hopes of increasing yields, reducing workloads, monopolizing trade, improving efficiency, or whatever. After all, the noble early-modern history of “machine breaking” wasn’t opposed to technological innovations per se—just the ones which threatened the ability of rural families to earn a living in customary ways (e. g., Hobsbawm 1952, Horn 2005, Nuvolari 2002). Perhaps it is best to say only that for any group who dreams of keeping things just as they are, there is likely an offsetting coalition who imagines a different future.

 This portrait of societies as heterogenous totalities helps to explain why no twentieth-century Marxist could accept Weber’s nearly tautological claim that religion bears the “stamp” of religious sources and religious needs (Weber 1978, 270). If religion bears the stamp of anything, they would insist, it is the matrix of productive forces and production relations which define the class-saturated realities of everyday life.

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The key Marxist assertion is that, at some point in this process, a quantitative expansion in the available productive forces yields a qualitative transformation of the existing social relations of production. When this happens, a revolutionary class appears whose existential, material interests entail overthrowing the existing order of things. “The discovery of America, the circumnavigation of Africa, created a new terrain for the emerging bourgeoisie,” Marx contends in The Manifesto: The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, the exchange with the colonies, the multiplication of means of exchange and of goods in general gave trade, shipping, industry an unprecedented boost—and thus a rapid development of the revolutionary element within the disintegrating feudal society. The previous feudal or guild [zünftig] mode of operation was no longer enough to meet the growing needs of new markets. The factory took its place. The guild-masters were displaced by the industrial middle class; the division of labor between the distinct corporations disappeared with the division of labor within the individual workshop itself. But the markets always grew; demand always increased. Even the factory was no longer sufficient. Steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production (MECW 6: 485/MEW 4: 463; my translation).

New productive powers, techniques, demands, and knowledge all scraped against the constraints of the medieval order; the result was enough wiggle room for a novel set of agents to seize control and usher a new social formation into place. Viewed over the short-term, this process looks like a chaotic mix of technological innovations, unintended consequences, and radical contingency. However, Orthodox Marxists thought that—given enough time—this micro-historical chaos revealed a particular logic to macro-historical development. Even though mechanical clocks were initially constructed as tokens of civic pride and status, for instance, they eventually transformed the nature of work itself in early modern Europe (Boerner and Severgnini 2015, Mokyr 1992, Thompson 1993). As a rule of thumb, the folks who control how new machinery is utilized usually determine its historical significance. So, whether by design or dumb luck, some innovations expand the productive forces or interrupt the existing social relations of production. When this happens, changes to the “superstructural” institutions which establish the warp and woof of collective life inevitably follow. Or, as this premise famously appears in Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie: At a certain stage of the development of the material productive forces of society, they come into conflict with the existing conditions of production; or—in what is really only a legal expression of this process—with the conditions of ownership within which they had previously moved. These relations go from being forms that once developed the productive forces to being their fetters. This is when an era of social revolution begins. With a change of the eco-

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nomic foundation, the whole enormous superstructure rolls over [wälzten] more or less quickly (MECW 29: 263 – 264/MEW 13: 8 – 9; my translation).

At Marx’s burial, Engels claimed that this dynamic represents the “inner, hidden laws” of all historical development (MECW 26: 387/MEW 21: 297). Whether Marx would have agreed with this assessment is beside the point; it was this “nomological” vision of history which convinced Plekhanov that Russian anarchists, populists, and non-Marxist socialists were chasing their tails.

Revolutionary Hope and Marxist Discipline What Plekhanov thought he found in Marx, therefore, was the portrait of a dynamic but nevertheless causally determined relationship between modes of social being and modes of social cognition. As he advised readers in Fundamental Problems of Marxism: What first claims [beanspruchen] our attention is Marx’s thesis that property relations [Eigentumsverhältniss], as they have developed at a given stage of growth of the productive forces— which, at a certain time, favored the further development of productive forces—thereafter begin to stand in their way. This raises [verweisen] another point. Even if a given state of the productive forces acts as a cause, giving rise to specific relations of production—in particular, to specific property relations—they begin to act upon the cause which brought them into being. What emerges is an interaction between productive forces and the social economy. Given that a whole superstructure of social relations, sentiments [Gefühlen], and concepts is raised on an economic base—a superstructure which first fosters and then hinders further economic development—there arises between the superstructure and the base an interaction; herein lies the solution to every riddle, the complete explanation for all those phenomena which seem to contradict the fundamental thesis of historical materialism at first glance (Plekhanov 1920, 59 – 60; my translation).

The accusation buried in all of this is that non-Marxists sidestep the question of practical limits by allowing social consciousness to float free from social existence. More to the point, these groups are always in danger of overestimating the political will’s independence from and power over the real world—something that Blanqui’s admirable but rather fruitless revolutionary career vividly demonstrated. As a Zemlovet, Plekhanov’s revolutionary goals had been anarchy and collectivism. As a Marxist, he realized he had been wrong on both counts. His first objective was convincing his fellow Russian radicals that anarchism was a dead end. Their faith in random acts of violence was beyond naïve—it was utopian foolishness. “An anarchist will have nothing to do with ‘parliamentarism,’ since it only lulls the proletariat to ‘sleep’; he wants no part of ‘reform’ be-

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cause reform means compromise with the property owning-classes,” Plekhanov writes in Anarchism and Socialism: “He wants the revolution, a full, complete, immediate, and immediately economic revolution. To achieve this goal, he takes a pot full of explosives and throws it at the crowd in some public place like a coffee house or theatre. He claims that this is a part of the ‘revolution,’ but we only see the ‘direct’ action of a raving madman” (Plekhanov 1894, 76; my translation). Acts of theatrical violence may generate goosebumps, but they are profoundly counter-productive: “It goes without saying that bourgeois governments, no matter how harshly they deal with the assassins, can only congratulate themselves about these tactics. ‘Society is in danger!’ ‘Caveant consules!’ The police ‘consuls’ get to work and public opinion applauds all the reactionary measures that the ministers plot to save society” (Plekhanov 1894, 76; my translation). Anarchism and all other forms of “utopian” socialism are doomed to be ineffective precisely because they are undisciplined. Thus, he concludes: “The Anarchist is a man who—if he is not an undercover agent [Spitzel]—is condemned to always and everywhere achieve the opposite of what he sets out to accomplish (Plekhanov 1894, 76 – 77, 78; my translation). Political emancipation required something more than hope and a stick of dynamite. Or, as Plekhanov would later make the point in his Preface to Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the problem is that non-Marxists work: at random, today addressing themselves to enlightened monarchs, tomorrow to enterprising and profit-hungry capitalists and on the following day to disinterested friends of humanity and so on. The scientific socialists, on the other hand, have a well-balanced and consistent programme based on the materialist understanding of history. They do not expect all classes of society to sympathise with socialism, being aware that the ability of a given class to be amenable to a given revolutionary idea is determined by the economic position of that class, and that of all classes in contemporary society only the proletariat finds itself in an economic position inevitably pushing it into revolutionary struggle against the prevailing social order. Here, too, as everywhere, the scientific socialists are not content to view the activity of social man as the cause of social phenomena; they look more deeply and perceive this cause itself as the consequence of economic development. Here as everywhere they examine the conscious activity of men from the point of view of its necessity (Plekhanov 1976 3: 46).

Political struggles should not presume the good will of the dominant. To be successful, they require a strategic sense for where the dominating class is most vulnerable. To borrow a line from Marx himself: political and social progress is achieved through the strength of the weak, not the weakness of the strong (MECW 6: 281, 288/ MEW 4: 306). The second goal was demonstrating how the anarchists’ principled rejection of electoral politics and liberal constitutions was a catastrophic mistake. What historical materialism made clear to Plekhanov was that revolutionary movements are

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class struggles, which means that they are inescapably economic and political and social and aesthetic affairs all at once. Kill as many ministers of state as you wish, they are only the latest crop of ruling-class representatives. Eager understudies and well-fed scions are always waiting in the wings. “The bourgeoisie destroyed feudal property relations; the proletariat will eradicate bourgeois property relations,” Plekhanov alleges: The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is an irreconcilable struggle, a fight to the very end [Neußerste], just as unavoidable as that between the bourgeoisie and the hereditary [privilegirt] nobility in its time. But every class struggle is a political struggle. In order to abolish feudal society, the bourgeoisie had to seize political power. The proletariat will have to do the same to bury capitalist society. Its political task is therefore mapped out from the start by the power of things themselves and not by this or that abstract consideration. It is a remarkable fact that it is only since Karl Marx that socialism has placed itself on the ground of class struggle (Plekhanov 1894, 15; my translation).

In this way, political power represents the “living flesh” which surrounds the economic order’s “dry skeleton.” One can no more treat these elements as autonomous “life-spheres” than one can reset a broken bone without touching the skin. Political and legal institutions are anchored to specific production relations which are, in turn, tied to a particular suite of productive forces. Parroting Marx, one might even say that revolutionary classes and revolutionary machines often arrive in tandem. Given that the capitalist mode of production is a specifically bourgeois way of arranging social production relations, Plekhanov concluded that the struggle against those relations is a constitutive feature of the struggle against capital’s despotism.⁹¹ The fight against those political regimes which regulate and protect the existing capitalist relations of production wasn’t the only or most important front, of course—but it was one of the flanks on which the working classes might smash the historical “fetters” that prevented a new, socialist mode of production from emerging. Every class struggle is a political struggle,” he insisted: “Whoever doesn’t want to hear about the political struggle, has already renounced the class struggle itself ” (Plekhanov 1894, 33; my translation).

 Plekhanov could point to The Manifesto as a canonical proof text for this conclusion: “never for a moment fail to develop among the workers the clearest possible awareness of the inimical antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, so that the German workers can immediately turn the social and political conditions which the bourgeoisie must bring about with its rule as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie itself ” (MECW 6: 519/MEW 4: 493; my translation).

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Marx, Marxism, and a Sack of Potatoes Forging a Marxist brief against anti- or non-political anarchism was, in many ways, to gather low-hanging fruit. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II proved that bloodletting may be a revolutionary necessity, but it is far from sufficient. Yet, assembling a persuasive Marxist case against Narodnichestvo-style primitive collectivism—where Russian economic “backwardness” was viewed as a revolutionary virtue—was more of a stretch. Whatever the differences between Marx and Engels, they were both relatively clear about one thing: modern, bourgeois society was a distinct form of collective life which emerged out of, and eventually supplanted, European feudalism. So, while it is possible to speak in generic terms about the antagonisms that exist between expropriators and expropriated or the governors and the governed regardless of time and place, the relationships between capitalists and the proletariat are distinct from those between medieval landlords and peasants. This mattered because, according to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, a “social formation never passes before it has developed the productive forces as much as possible; new, superior relations of production never take their place before the material conditions of existence have been incubated within the womb of the old formation” (MECW 29: 263 – 264/MEW 13: 8 – 9; my translation). If this is true, it indicates that bourgeois societies must first exhaust the space of capitalist possibilities before a post-capitalist order is achievable. More to the point, the material conditions for a socialist revolution are not yet in place so long as the productive forces and productive relations from the feudal past still dot the landscape. Plekhanov could not have known about the document, but Marx made this very point in an 1870 memo to the General Council of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party: Although the revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, only England can serve as the lever for a serious economic revolution. It is the only country where there are no longer any peasants and where landed property is concentrated in a few hands. It is the only country where the capitalist form—that is to say, labor organized on a large scale under capitalist employers—has taken over almost all production. It is the only country where the vast majority of the population consists of wage laborers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organization of the working class through the trade-unions have acquired a certain degree of maturity and universality. Thanks to its domination of the world market, England is the only country where any revolution in economic matters must have a direct impact on the whole world. If landlordism and capitalism have their classical seat in England then, on the other hand, the material conditions for their destruction have matured the most there. The General Council is now in the fortunate position of having its hand directly on this great lever of the proletarian revolution; what folly, one might almost say what a crime it would be, to leave it in English hands alone! (MECW 21: 118 – 119/MEW 16: 386; my translation).

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England was the only country ready to move beyond capitalism because it was the only genuinely post-feudal society. This judgment was theoretically coherent, but it also created a crisis of revolutionary path-dependency: Was the advanced capitalism in England a historical precondition for socialism everywhere? Plekhanov looked to Capital for an answer and found only uncertainty. In the Preface to the first German edition, Marx suggests that even after capitalism’s law of economic motion [Bewegungsgesetz] is discovered it is impossible to “skip or dismiss by decree the natural, developmental phases; but it can shorten and ease the labor pains” (MECW 35: 10/MEW 23: 15 – 16; my translation). There is more than a little ambiguity afoot here. Not only does Marx mix his physical and biological metaphors; he also disregards the distinction between ontogenetic development as a quantitative process and birth itself is a qualitative event. For example, gestation passes through a fixed sequence of temporal phases or stages— first trimester, second trimester, and so on—but parturition does not (e.g., the membranes that make up the amniotic sac may rupture prior to labor, during labor, during delivery, or not at all). In his discussion of capital’s origin in acts of “initial” [ursprünglich] accumulation, Marx claims that genuinely epoch-making revolutions are: above all, those moments when great masses of people are suddenly and violently torn away from their means of subsistence and thrown onto the labor market as proletarians free as birds [vogelfreie]. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, the peasant, from the soil forms the basis of the whole process. This history takes on different colors in different countries, passing through various phases in different orders of succession at varied historical periods. Only in England, which we are using as our example, does it assume this classical form (MECW 35: 705, 707/MEW 23: 744; my translation).

Unfortunately, this reproduces rather than dissolves the ambiguity. What sort of “natural law” permits the various phases of development to appear in different orders of succession? In Homo sapiens, for example, it is physiologically necessary for the head end of the neural tube to close prior to brain development. If it does not, anencephaly is the disastrous and tragic result. Couched in these organic terms, the revolutionary question was whether the rise of capitalism, or its socialist successor, is more like gestation or parturition. Should Marxists think of the socialist revolution in terms of a process or an event? These may seem like exceedingly abstract, perhaps even academic concerns, but they had strategic consequences for fin de siècle Russian Marxists. The revolution-as-event reading of Marx flirted with the anarchists’ conspiratorial violence. Plekhanov thus concluded that it was premature, even reckless, to talk about a socialist—much less a Marxist—revolution in tsarist Russia. Yet, the revolution-asprocess option presented a seemingly unsurmountable obstacle: How could the tra-

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ditional obschina system develop the material productive forces any further? It was an ancient, pre-capitalist social arrangement that inhibited productive expansion (MECW 6: 489/MEW 4: 467). “The revolution sought by modern socialism is, in short, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and the reorganization of society through the destruction of all class distinctions,” Engels advised in 1874: Only at a certain point in the development of social productive forces, which is beyond our current conditions [Zeitverhältnisse], is it possible to further increase production to the degree necessary for the abolition of class distinctions to be actually and permanently achieved without precipitating a standstill or even decline in the social mode of production. But the productive forces have reached this developmental state only in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, from this point of view, the bourgeoisie is as much a necessary precondition for the socialist revolution as the proletariat itself. Those who say that it is easier to accomplish the revolution in a country without either a proletariat or bourgeoisie only demonstrate that they still need to learn the ABCs of socialism (MECW 24: 39 – 40/MEW 18: 556; my translation).

Plekhanov took this to mean that, rather than preserving the rural peasant commune, the Russian revolutionary challenge was facilitating the rapid expansion of productive forces beyond the social production relations of primitive collectivism— an arrangement Plekhanov described as petty-bourgeois peasant socialism. “Being in or not far from their present stage of development, the people would not wish or even be able to establish a communist economy. Even as far as corn-growing is concerned, the people would probably maintain the present organisation of production,” Plekhanov writes in Our Differences: What about the further independent development of the village community? Well, its development consists in disintegrating! Whoever disputes this must prove the opposite; he must show us, if not historical examples of a village community becoming a communist one, at least of the tendency to such a transition, existing not in the heads of our Narodniks but in the very organisation of the community and in all the dynamics of its agricultural economy. We know where, how and why the primitive communist communes were changed into communities of individual householders. But we do not know why and how our Russian village community will accomplish the transition into a communist one. Enjoying an occasional conversation with the Narodniks, we naturally could not remain unaware that two or three of our communities had organised collective cultivation of the fields. The village of Grekovka, which has distinguished itself by this good action, was once spoken of by absolutely all the “friends of the people” and its example was thought to solve the whole social problem in Russia. But if the peasants in that famous village were ever persecuted for communist tendencies it would not be difficult for their counsel to prove that the prosecutor knew nothing at all about communist doctrines. Collective cultivation of the soil is only a little nearer to communism than collective work in the form of corvée or the “collective ploughing” introduced under Nicholas I with the help of bayonets and birch-rods. However stupid the “unforgettable” tsar [sic] was, even he never thought that collective ploughing could give rise to an inde-

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pendent movement towards communism in the village communities (Plekhanov 1976 1: 309 – 310).

Russia had to first pass through a “bourgeois” phase of economic and political development before it could achieve a post-capitalist future. Because of this, Plekhanov was certain the Russian peasants would never be the agents of revolutionary transformation. He was in good company. In Brumaire, Marx portrayed the French peasants as an intrinsically counterrevolutionary population. “Their mode of production isolates them from each other instead of bringing them into reciprocal relations,” he judges: Their field of production, the small plot of land, does not allow for any division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science; and therefore no diversity of development, no variety of talents, no richness of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly producing for itself most of what it consumes, and thus secures its means of subsistence less through an interaction with society than an exchange with nature. The plot, the peasant, and the family; next to them another plot, another peasant, and another family. A cluster of these make up a village, and a cluster of villages make up a departement. Thus, the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of roughly similar masses, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Inasmuch as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes—and place them in opposition to these classes— they constitute a class. Inasmuch as there is only a local connection among these plot-farming peasants, and the commonality of their interests produces no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore unable to express their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a constitutional convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented (MECW 11: 187/MEGA2 I.11: 180; my translation).

Marx granted that the peasants were, in principle, capable of rebelling against the social conditions of their existence [Existenzbedingung]. However, the most defiant elements of the peasantry had been beaten into submission by the post-1848 Republic. All that remained were rural men and women who, “indolently trapped [verschlossen] within the old order,” simply wanted more arable land, fewer taxes, and some measure of peace (MECW 11: 188/MEGA2 I.11: 181).⁹² Primitive col-

 “Unlike modern popular leaders, Napoleon III had no ‘movement’,” Hobsbawm writes in Age of Capital: “In practice, he therefore relied on the conservative element and especially on the peasantry, mainly of the western two-thirds of the country. For these he was a Napoleon, a stable and anti-revolutionary government firm against threats to property” (Hobsbawm 1975, 125 – 126). Other historians have taken issue with this portrait of an instinctively conservative peasantry (e. g., Margadant 1984).

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lectivism, in other words, was insufficiently dynamic to produce its own gravediggers. As Plekhanov formulates the Marxist lesson: Collective tilling of the soil is good provided there is an active force which causes and accelerates its transition to a higher form of social life. In the West the proletariat would play that role, beginning the communist revolution in a completely different sphere, the sphere of large-scale production and agriculture, in works and factories and on big farms. The force of the proletariat would be created and directed by absolutely definite economic relations existing outside and independently of the community. But where would we get that force from here in our peasant state, set up by the revolution of the Narodnaya Volya party? From among the peasants themselves? (Plekhanov 1976 1: 310).

No radical democrat worthy of the title wanted to hear that the pre-condition for some socialism was more capitalism—but that appeared to be the only way forward. Thus, the question on every Russian Marxist’s mind soon became: are we supposed to hold our noses and advance the capitalists’ class-interests so that we might someday emancipate the proletariat we’ve helped to create? Isn’t there some principled way to bring the peasants on-side without abandoning the historically specific interests of the industrial working class? The Marxist critique of peasant populism introduced a dilemma that demanded a Marxist solution.

Are the Peasants Revolting? Vera Zasulich, Plekhanov’s comrade in Geneva, was one of the first to grasp why Russian Marxists must confront what was then widely known as the peasant question. In 1881, exercised by the historical dilemma of pursuing “scientific” socialism in the midst of Russian economic “backwardness,” she wrote Marx in search of a definitive answer (Bergman 1979). “In one way or another, even the personal fate of our revolutionary socialists depends upon your answer to the question,” she begins with the earnestness of a pupil: For there are only two possibilities. Either the rural commune, freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration, is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis. In that case, the revolutionary socialist must devote all his strength to the liberation and development of the commune. If, however, the commune is destined to perish, all that remains for the socialist, as such, is more or less ill-founded calculations as to how many decades it will take for the Russian peasant’s land to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and how many centuries it will take for capitalism in Russia to reach something like the level of development already attained in Western Europe. Their task will then be to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers, while these workers will be continually drowned in the peasant mass

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which, following the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on to the streets of the large towns in search of a wage (As quoted in Shanin 1983, 98).

Marx’s reply was—as one might expect by now—both more complicated and less helpful than Zasulich desired. In an early draft of his response, he entertained the Narodnichestvo premise that capitalism’s “dreadful vicissitudes” [furchtbaren Wechselfälle] might be avoided altogether if the Russian socialists could tinker with the social and economic structures already on hand (MECW 24: 349/MEW 19: 385; my translation). However, that line of thought was ultimately trimmed away. The letter he finally sent to Zasulich refused to speculate about whether the obshchina form of agrarian collectivism was a revolutionary virtue or vice. Instead, he blandly observes that the “commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia; but in order for it to function as such, one would first need to eliminate the destructive influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure the normal conditions of natural development” (MECW 46: 72/MEW 19: 243; my translation). This is a bit like saying that more money is the “fulcrum” for becoming less poor—true enough, but not all that helpful. Without explicitly spelling it out for them, Marx was suggesting that the Russians were on their own. Engels, true to form, was more forthcoming. In 1885, he explained to Zasulich that Marx should be understood as gesturing toward a specifically post-capitalist society rather than a merely non-capitalist one. After all, both primitive collectivism and feudalism count as non-capitalist orders. There was no special, Russian exemption from the laws of economic motion. “In my eyes, Marx’s historical theories [historischen Theorien von Marx] are absolutely essential to revolutionary tactics, if these are to be consistent and logical; to discover what those tactics ought to be, all one has to do is to apply the theory to economic and political conditions in the country concerned,” Engels begins: What I know, or believe I know, of the situation in Russia leads me to think that that country is approaching its 1789. Revolution must break out eventually; it could break out any day. In these circumstances, the country is like a charged mine; all one needs to do is set the fuse. Especially after 13 March. This is one of those special cases where it is possible for a handful of men to make a revolution, i. e., to topple, with a gentle push, an entire system whose equilibrium is more than a little unstable (to use Plekhanov’s metaphor), and release, through some insignificant act, explosive forces which can no longer be controlled. Well, if Blanquism—the fantasy of revolutionizing a whole society through the actions of a small group of conspirators—ever had a raison d’être, it would be in St Petersburg. Once the flame meets the powder, once the forces are liberated and the national energy has been converted from potential to kinetic (another of Plekhanov’s favorite metaphors, and an excellent one) – the men who triggered the mine will be carried off by the explosion, which will be a thousand times more powerful than they; one which will pursue its own path depending on the economic forces and resistances.

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Let’s assume these men imagine they will be able to seize power; what’s the harm? Even if they only drill a hole in the dam, the current will soon enlighten them about their illusions. But, if these illusions endow them with superior willpower, why worry about it? People who boast about having forged a revolution have typically discovered on the following day that they didn’t know what they were doing, that the revolution they produced does not resemble the one they intended. Hegel calls this the irony of history, an irony which few historical ДҌятели [figures] can escape (MECW 47: 280 – 281/MEW 36: 304, 307; my translation).⁹³

Part of what it meant to be a disciplined Marxist—to be something more than an ineffective, foolishly “utopian” socialist—was to insist that material conditions ultimately determine what kind of successful revolutionary struggle is possible. As the tragedy of the Paris Commune proved all too well, seizing political power was one thing. Seizing power in the right way at the right time—so that Marx might guide radicals through the post-revolutionary terrain—was something else altogether. In one of his last published essays, Engels—ever loyal to the cause—tried to outline a definitive answer to the peasant question in the Kautsky-edited Die Neue Zeit. He begins where one might predict, rehearsing the portrait of glumly reactionary peasants that Marx paints in Brumaire. “The peasants have thus far proved themselves to be a factor of political power only through their apathy, which has its roots in the isolation of rustic life,” Engels observes: “This apathy of the great mass of the population is the strongest support not only for parliamentary corruption in Paris and Rome, but also Russian despotism. But this is by no means insurmountable” (MECW 27: 483/MEW 22: 485; my translation). The decidedly unpleasant truth was that most socialists, in most countries, had no choice but to view the peasantry—or some fraction of it—as a potential constituency. If radical democracy meant the rule of the masses, it implied the rule of the peasants in Russia. At the same time, however, Engels acknowledged that it was going to be a tough sell. “Let’s say it straight away: given the prejudices arising from their whole economic situation, their upbringing, their isolated way of life—all nurtured by the bourgeois press and the big landowners—we can win over the mass of small peasants overnight only by making promises we know we can’t keep,” he concedes: We would need to promise them, not only to protect their property from the onslaught of economic forces in all circumstances, but also to free them from the burdens that already oppress them: to transform the tenant into a free owner, to pay the debts of owners who took on a mortgage. But if we did this, we would only return to where we started and the

 By 13 March, Engels is referring to the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

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present situation would necessarily develop anew. We would not have emancipated the peasants; we would have only given them a brief reprieve. Yet, it is not in our interests to win over the peasants overnight only to lose them the next day because we are unable to keep our promise. We have no more use for peasants who—in order to become a Party member—expect us to perpetuate their small-holdings than for those small craftsmen who want to be masters in perpetuity (MECW 27: 495/MEW 22: 498; my translation).

Revolutionaries promise that the future will be brighter than the past and present; they must also confess that things will be very different on the other side of the horizon. Radicals, by definition, cannot pledge to conserve the status quo by overthrowing it. Nonetheless, Engels reminds his readers that Marx revealed the subterranean connections between political regimes and economic modes of production. Marxists are thus uniquely positioned to demonstrate why the peasants’ own best interests must, eventually, align with the demands of the urban proletariat. As he summarizes the point: The main thing in all of this is, and will continue to be, making the peasants understand that we can only save their homes and fields—can only preserve them—by transforming them into cooperative property and enterprises. It is precisely the system of individual enterprise [Einzelwirtschaft], conditioned by individual ownership, that is driving the peasants to ruin. If they insist on individual farms, they will inevitably be driven out of their houses and off their fields as their obsolete mode of production is replaced by capitalist, large-scale enterprise. That is the situation; and here we come, offering the peasants the opportunity to introduce large-scale production themselves, not for the capitalist but for their own, common account. The fact that this is in their own interests, that it is their only means of salvation—how can the peasants not understand this? (MECW 27: 497/MEW 22: 500; my translation).

If nothing else, then, Engels encouraged Russian Marxists to appeal to the peasants’ self-interested desire to avoid the catastrophe that has accompanied the transition from an agrarian, feudal order to an industrial, capitalist one. Mass expropriation of the land was going to happen one way or another, but the human costs could be ameliorated. “The greater the number of peasants whom we can spare from plunging into the proletariat, whom we can win over as peasants, the faster and easier the social transformation will be,” Engels concludes: “It will do us no good to wait until the consequences of capitalist production are evident everywhere, until the last small craftsman and the last small peasant have been sacrificed to capitalist, large-scale enterprise” (MECW 22: 498/MEW 22: 501; my translation). And so, this is what Plekhanov proposed. More substantively, he outlined a three-tiered strategy. First, he tried to reassure his less-patient comrades by developing a version of what Trotsky later called

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“the privilege of historic backwardness” (Trotsky 2008, 4; Selwyn 2011). Since technological innovation is always more difficult and time-consuming than technological adoption, Russia’s revolutionary path to socialism would be relatively faster and less calamitous than Western Europe’s. “Many people think that the social revolution can take place in Russia ‘now, or in a very remote future, perhaps never’–in other words on the basis either of our present economic relations or of a system whose institution and consolidation are a matter of the most hazy future,” he concedes: But we already know—and this we learn from the history of that same Western Europe—that only the first step was difficult for capitalism and that its uninterrupted advance from “West” to East is taking place with constantly increasing acceleration. Not only the development of capitalism in Russia cannot be as slow as it was in England, for example, its very existence cannot be so lasting as it has been fated to be in the “West European countries.” Our capitalism will fade before it has time to blossom completely—a guarantee for which we find in the powerful influence of international relations (Plekhanov 1976 1: 335).

In the past, critics have accused Plekhanov of being a “technological determinist” for pursuing this line of thought. However, there is another way of reading his focus on expanding productive forces. Marx did not believe that History itself would somehow achieve what revolutionaries could not. “Contrary to a century and a half of misreading,” Geoff Mann insists, Marx “knew that history does not just happen, it has to be made. Instead, the Marxian wager—the salto mortale—was based on the guarantee that however long it might take, unrelenting struggle will be rewarded” (Mann 2017, 25). I believe that Plekhanov is similarly misread. His guarantee is better understood as a Marxist wager on the ultimate efficacy of the working-class struggle—a bit like the American Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” After all, why bother fighting if you don’t think you can ever win? “Sharply defined economic relations determine no less sharply defined political groupings, the antagonism between labour and capital gives rise to the struggle between the workers’ and the bourgeois parties,” Plekhanov judges: “And the development of the productive forces brings this struggle closer to its end and guarantees the victory of the proletariat. So it has been and still is in all the ‘Western’ countries” (Plekhanov 1976 1: 290). To draw the implicit lesson out of its shell: we can push back against the dead hand of Fate by focusing our short-term attention on expanding the available productive forces. Second, he argued that everyone but the Tsar and his lackeys have an interest in supplanting autocratic absolutism with a broadly democratic, constitutional state. For his part, Engels claimed that even when the bourgeoisie turns reactionary and looks for the protection of a repressive state, the proletariat have no choice

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but to champion conventional, bourgeois civil liberties: “Without these freedoms, it cannot move freely; in this struggle it is fighting for its own vital element [Lebenselement], for the air it needs to breathe” (MECW 20: 78/MEW 16: 77; my translation). Thus, Plekhanov had proof-texts to demonstrate why the near-term, “scientific” socialist goal should be the formation of an elected, representational government in which workers and peasants wield the power of a “bourgeois” state. That is, the goal should be the creation of a workers’ state that oversees the transition to an industrialized economy. “The state will be wholly and entirely on your side only if it is wholly and entirely yours, a workers’ state. That is the aim at which you must direct all your efforts,” he counsels: And as long as it is not attained you must force even a state which is hostile to you to make concessions to you. And in so doing, do not forget that the more resolute you are in demands and the stronger your party, the more decisive those concessions will be. So set up such a party, unite in a single, formidable, disciplined force. When you have succeeded in winning the final victory you will throw off completely the yoke of capital, but until then you will at least hold it in check to some extent, you will at least safeguard yourselves and your children against physical, moral and intellectual degeneration. You have only two ways out of your present condition: either struggle or complete subjection to capital. I call to my side those who wish to struggle! (Plekhanov 1976 1: 333 – 334).

In an 1887 draft program for the Russian Social-Democrats, Plekhanov identified a platform of narrowly political objectives which—to twenty-first century eyes at least—look quite modest. Chief among the most immediate goals were: the universal right to vote and be elected to all national, provincial and communal bodies of government; a salary for all elected representatives, allowing even the poorest to assume public office; universal, free and compulsory education for all children; guaranteed rights to freedom of speech, the press, assembly and association (Plekhanov 1976 1: 355 – 356). Electoral politics were a necessary but not sufficient condition for radical, social-democratic change. So, too, Plekhanov judged that the Marxists’ immediate economic aims should be broadly reformist rather than strictly revolutionary. This entailed the introduction of progressive taxation; legislation protecting workers’ constitutional rights and physical health; state financial assistance for the creation of worker- and peasant-led “production associations” in all sectors of the economy (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, etc.). Revolutio non facit saltum. ⁹⁴ Finally, he urged his fellow Marxists to use non-coercive “propaganda” to convince the rural peasantry that urban socialists were engaged in a struggle which  In Origin, Darwin proposes that the laborious course of evolutionary history reveals Natura non facit saltum (Nature does not make or take leaps).

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advanced their material interests as well. The peasants’ merely potential politicalstrength-in-numbers would become actual, kinetic political power by joining the Russian Social-Democratic Party. Plekhanov judged that the socialists’ constitutional demands and legislative agenda were: as favourable to the interests of the peasants as to those of the industrial workers; hence, aiming at their implementation, the workers’ party will open for itself a broad road for an approach to the agrarian population. The proletarian ejected from the countryside as an impoverished member of the village commune will return there as a Social-Democratic agitator. His appearance in that role will change the present hopeless fate of the village commune. The disintegration of the latter is unavoidable only as long as this very disintegration has not created a new popular force capable of putting an end to the reign of capitalism. That force is the working class and the poorest peasantry drawn in its wake (Plekhanov 1976 1: 361).

Political discipline, rather than conspiratorial violence or utopian hope, were the Russian Marxists’ marching orders.

Russian Gods and the Modes of Production This generational uncertainty regarding the peasant question is crucial for understanding why Plekhanov might have thought a Marxist “theory of religion” could be useful. Throughout Europe, the Russian peasantry were commonly identified with the baroque system of Orthodox folk piety which defined the calendar flows of traditional village life (Chulos 1995, Heretz 2008, Lewin 1985, Pearl 1993). Some, like Leo Tolstoy, sentimentalized the peasants’ unlettered, “childlike” faith; others, like Maxim Gorky, viewed the illiterate masses and their religious superstitions with blistering contempt. Either way, the peasant question inexorably raised the religion question in tsarist Russia. Engels made it clear that, with respect to private property at least, Marxists should make no concessions to the peasants in the name of political expediency. That was ill-advised, undisciplined opportunism. But what about religion? Was there a principled way to recruit the peasants but look the other way when they hauled out their icons or begged priests for a blessing? Plekhanov was certain the answer was an unambiguous yes—and that historical materialism explained why. By grasping the historical relationship between base and superstructure— or, as he put it, between the economic skeleton and the living flesh of civil society—Marxists could replace the pejorative critique of religion for a genuinely explanatory science of religion. On his account, the fatal problem with traditional error theorists like Hume is that they treat religion as a strictly epistemological affair of abstract thought

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rather than the discrete expression of concrete social existence. By treating thinking as prior to or insulated from being, philosophers can only ever disparage religion as a product of ignorance. Since pre-Marxist critics dismissed religion as a grab-bag of superstitious nonsense, Plekhanov writes, they “could only wage a struggle against religion. However useful this kind of work was for their times, it made not the least contribution to the scientific study of religion” (Plekhanov 1976 2: 128). Yet, assembling a Marxist “science of religion” was not an academic end-in-itself. Analyzing the relationship between productive forces, social formations, and modes of consciousness was meant to identify politically effective strategies. Although the anatomy of society may lay in its economics, Marxist social science must not be content with economic history alone. So conceived, the goal was to identify the “causal link” that anchors specific forms of religious thought and behavior to specific constellations of productive forces and social relations (Plekhanov 1976 3: 151). Plekhanov was confident that, given how economic activity established the contours of human cognition, “every stage of economic development has its own distinct conception of the role of the god” (Plekhanov 1976 3: 58). The study of religion was thus meant to inform a comprehensive, Marxist social science of revolutionary transformations. The vaulting ambition of Plekhanov’s proposed marxistische Religionswissenschaft is perhaps best measured by his proposed solution to the riddle that virtually defined the anthropology of religion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the origins of “totemism.” Painting in broad strokes, armchair anthropologists and imperial ethnographers tried to explain why it was that “primitive” societies: (a) claimed descent from or kinship with a class of flora or fauna; (b) surrounded the members of that class with various ceremonial taboos; and (c) “worshipped” the particular plants or animals as sacred. Scholarship on the subject all but disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, largely due to the sense that totemism was never really a thing in the first place (e. g., Lévi-Strauss 1963a).⁹⁵ Yet, in one way or another, nearly all of the academic study of religion’s foundational texts belong to this vast totemic archive. The most common explanation for totemism identified some variety of cognitive error as the root. The imagined kinship between humans and non-humans was a form of pre-scientific speculation about conception and embryological development; or it was a species of linguistic confusion in which the “primitive” mind forgets that when a group identifies with bears or wolves they don’t become descendants of bears or wolves; or it was a form of sympathetic magic whereby

 Who knows where it will lead, but Philippe Descola (2018)—a student of Lévi-Strauss, ironically —is trying to bring totemism back.

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members of a clan hoped to acquire the traits associated with a particular species; or it was a circuitous path by which a society worships itself; or it was just another awkward product of a mind predisposed to populate the world with human-like, sentient agents. Totemism was obviously false, but it was so charmingly naïve about how the world works that metropolitan observers were endlessly intrigued by its misguided audacity. Plekhanov pushes off from roughly the same spot as Engels—with a relatively hairless ape whose ability to metabolize the surrounding environment is not all that different from other animals. “Man is without doubt an animal connected by ties of affinity to other animals. He has no privileges of origin; his organism is nothing more than a particular case of general physiology,” Plekhanov judges: “Originally, like all other animals, he was completely under the sway of his natural environment, which was not yet subject to his modifying action; he had to adapt himself to it in his struggle for existence” (Plekhanov 1940, 20). Conventional “intellectualist” accounts frame the history of religion in terms of rational actors who slowly eliminate one failed animistic hypothesis after another. After untold millennia, these communities would—or at least should—approach a properly scientific account of the world; only the eccentric “survivals” of ancient superstition and habit could remain. However, Plekhanov maintains that this portrait of the mind as a self-correcting engine of reason disregards “the causal dependence of the given content of consciousness on the given content of being” (Plekhanov 1976 3: 335). To explain religion as a scientific socialist means treating these forms of thought and behavior as dependent variables which reflect the specific historical, political, and economic conditions that generate them. If, as Durkheim argues, totemism is the “elementary form” of religion, it is only because the forces of production in totemic societies are no less elementary. Thus, Plekhanov argues totemism is tied to a mode of production which consists of foraging, hunting, and minimal pastoralism. Indeed, the fact that a community claims descent from or kinship with non-human species is prima facie evidence for the minimal development of productive forces. At this level, there is not much daylight between the ways bears, beavers, and humans metabolize their environments to survive. “We already know that at one time man did not contrast himself to animals; on the contrary, in very many cases he considered himself to be inferior to them,” he observes: “This was the time of the origin of totemism” (Plekhanov 1976 3: 331). As the domestication of plants and animals becomes more widespread and intensive, however, the material foundations for totemic thought shift. Yet, it is not domestication per se that is the critical innovation. As our household pets prove every day, the mere domestication of a creature does not automatically expand the available productive forces. Rather, it is the move to treat domesticated species as sources of agricultural labor that makes the crucial difference.

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“When man begins to utilise animals as a labour force he thereby increases his productive forces quite significantly,” he explains: “And the growth in the productive forces gives an impetus to the development of socio-economic relations” (Plekhanov 1976 3: 334). The productive relations of domination that exist between plow-oxen and their drivers, for example, are responsible for introducing a material asymmetry between human beings and other creatures. In Plekhanov’s judgment, once “man began to realise his superiority over animals, and to draw a contrast between himself and them. Then totemism had necessarily to disappear” (Plekhanov 1976 3: 332). The gods are less a by-product of ignorance or anthropomorphizing “instinct” than an artifact of hierarchical social relations of production. Prior to the use of domesticated animals as productive forces, the argument goes, it would have been impossible for communities to imagine intelligent beings who stand over against Nature. Afterwards, however, the material conditions of possibility permit us to begin trafficking with metapersonal agents who control our fates in ways that mirror the concrete, asymmetrical relationship between drivers, plows, and animals. Just as Marx promised: Feuerbach’s alienated consciousness is not a brute fact of human nature. “On a particular economic basis —that of primitive hunting life—there grows up a primitive form of religious consciousness, totemism,” Plekhanov concludes. Yet, as domesticated species become an economic variable, they introduce a “significant increase in the productive forces of the hunting tribes. The increase in the productive forces modifies man’s attitude to Nature and, in particular, his conception of the animal world. Man begins to contrast himself to animals. This gives a very strong impetus to the development of anthropomorphic conceptions of gods; totemism has outlived its day” (Plekhanov 1976 3: 335). Once one understands why totemism must give way to anthropomorphism—or why the conditions that produce the industrial proletariat give rise to irreligion—a Marxist worrying about religion is a bit like a teenager plotting against a pimple. Given enough time, what should happen and what will happen coincide and the offending blemish goes away.

Conclusion Plekhanov took Marxist “historical materialism” to demonstrate why all forms of religion are nothing more worrisome than cognitive by-products of a specific mode of production. Good clinicians worry about the underlying infection, not the swelling. “If many people still believe in spirits and supernatural beings,” he advised:

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this is because, for various reasons, they have been unable to overcome the obstacles preventing them from adopting the scientific point of view. When these obstacles have been removed —and there is every reason to believe that social evolution will accomplish this—every trace of supernatural conception will disappear and morality will come into its own. Religion, in the maximum sense of the word, will cease to exist (Plekhanov 1976 3: 98).

The gods are always and everywhere diagnostic symptoms, not causes. Russian Marxists could therefore safely ignore the religious contours of village life in the name of effective political practice. After all, why pick a fight with something that isn’t there? This inference helps to explain why Lenin—who initially took his Marxist cues from Plekhanov—thought Russian radicals should do nothing more confrontational than insist on a rigorous separation between the Orthodox Church and the Russian state. The revolutionary goal was seizing state power, not shadow-boxing with imaginary metapersonal beings. “We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various ‘Christians.’ But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all,” he argued in 1905: “The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned” (Lenin 1960a 10: 87). When the 1905 Revolution failed to topple the Romanov regime, Lenin continued to champion some measure of solidarity between town and country against the Tsar. Yet, this fragile coalition was impossible unless the struggle against religion was subordinated to the struggle for socialism. “The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism,” Lenin advised: Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way (Lenin 1960c 15: 405 – 406).

The Marxist imperative was advancing the revolutionary class struggle. This, in turn, meant preventing any disunion between Russia’s tiny urban proletariat and its vast rural peasantry. The decision to look the other way with respect to religion was not mere opportunism, sacrificing “the fundamental interests of the pro-

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letariat to the half-hearted, muddled aims of liberalism” (Lenin 1960b 12: 178). Russian Marxists did not “believe” in the fantastic reality of gods and spirits; but they weren’t at war with them either. In time, this would change.

Postscript How Heavy is a Nightmare? Now that Lenin and the Bolsheviks have made an appearance, I feel compelled to document how they tried—and mostly failed—to translate Second International Marxism into coherent state policy (e. g., Madsen 2014). I can’t do much more than skim the surface, but it is irresponsible for anyone to write about Russian Marxism in the twenty-first century without acknowledging some of its obscene legacy. One way or another, the awful weight of history must be shouldered—even if it is as heavy as a mountain.⁹⁶ The peasant and religion questions were bound together well before, and remained so well after, October 1917 (Froese 2008). Peter the Great had abolished the Moscow patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1721, replacing it with a governing synod. Since that body’s membership was determined by the Tsar, this effectively made the Church an administrative arm of Romanov autocracy (Walters 1988). One nineteenth-century expression made the point with exhilarating directness: the Tsar is God’s policeman (Heretz 2008, 125). On the heels of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War and 1905 Revolution, Pyotr Stolypin doubled down on this relationship and used state funds to build more than 5000 new Orthodox churches between 1906 – 1911. After years of senseless death in the First World War and general incompetence, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne in March 1917. A stop-gap regime was shoved into place. For a while, the Provisional Government even enjoyed popular support based on a promise to organize free and fair elections for a new Constituent Assembly later that year. This support quickly dissolved as war-time food shortages and creeping inflation grew worse. The hem frayed beyond repair when it became clear that the provisional state ministers intended to remain in the War. The Petrograd Council (Soviet) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies positioned itself as an independent check on the improvised and unelected administration. Before

 This is an allusion to what I think of as an inconsequential but still memorable pun. In the received English translation of Brumaire, we read: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (MECW 11: 103). This is powerful, poetic, memorable, and faithful to what Marx wrote. Yet, the German original reads: “Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden” (MEW 8: 115; emphasis added). That is to say, the past is as heavy as a nightmare [ein Alp] and, potentially, as heavy as one of the Alps (i. e., a mountain). Did Marx intend this play on words? I don’t know. He could have used the more common Alptraum or Albtraum or just Alb. If nothing else, this is a reminder that some things may indeed be lost in translation—and they are often the most delicate and literary turns of phrase. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-013

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long, the Soviet was a rival center of political gravity. The result was a standoff. The traditional formula is that while the former had authority without power the latter had power without authority (Merridale 2017, 238). In late July, mutineering sailors, striking industrial workers, and disaffected soldiers—many of whom had deserted their posts along the War’s futile Eastern front—occupied the streets of Petrograd. Calls for the immediate dissolution of the government echoed throughout the city. Order was restored after three days of frenzied urban combat, but only just. In mid-September, the Bolsheviks helped to put down a right-wing military putsch led by General Lavr Kornilov. The Petrograd Soviet was suddenly the only viable alternative to the broken status quo. A few weeks later, Lenin—who had arrived in St. Petersburg in mid-April, and then fled to Finland after the cluttered “July Days”—furtively returned to Russia and organized a small band of Bolshevik insurgents to seize power. Their motto: peace for the soldiers, bread for the workers, and land for the peasants. As Lenin is alleged to have said years later, they “found power lying in the streets and simply picked it up.”⁹⁷ Truth be told, the “October Revolution” was more coup d’état than popular insurrection (McMeekin 2017). By 7 October 1917, a clique of Marxists tentatively controlled key levers of state power—and, more crucially, the rudimentary lines of communication and transport into and out of the city. With minimal authority or state-administrative capacity, Lenin was initially comfortable granting the Church’s long-standing desire to restore the patriarchate’s autonomy. If nothing else, this arrangement satisfied the traditional democratic goal of decoupling “private” religion from the “public” affairs of state. The modus vivendi would not last for long. In hindsight, we can identify three relatively distinct phases of the Bolshevik bid to resolve the religion question prior to the 1941 German invasion (Husband 2000, Pospielovsky 1987, Smolkin 2018).

Power without Control: 1917 – 1922 The first phase is bookended by the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War’s end. In principle, the Council of the People’s Commissars—the revolutionary government’s executive council—recognized the right of citizens to believe or not as they wished. Inasmuch as the Bolshevik state paid any attention to religious matters, it was generally focused on introducing a clear separation between Church and State—things like prohibiting religious rites at state events, ending govern-

 I say alleged because—for all the times this expression has been repeated in books about Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the October Revolution—no one ever seems to cite an original source.

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ment subsidies to maintain Church buildings, and so on. To be sure, there were also hints of institutional antipathy: including, for example, the appropriation of Church property and financial assets. Nevertheless, the Leninist regime was mostly content to wait for the peasants to grow tired of bankrolling the Church’s continued existence. Like so many things in life, though, de jure rights were one thing and de facto freedoms another. Many of the contradictions between orthodox Marxist doctrine and improvised Bolshevik practice can be traced back to the widespread perception that the Church had taken the wrong side in the Civil War: the Priests were part of the loose, anti-communist coalition of “White” forces. Both the Whites and the Reds recognized that the peasantry’s allegiances would go a long way in determining the Civil War’s outcome, and so tried to cultivate their loyalty (Brovkin 1997). It is partially for this reason that Lenin publicly renounced anti-religious campaigns. “We must be extremely careful in fighting religious prejudices, some people cause a lot of harm in this struggle by offending religious feelings,” he advised: “By lending too sharp an edge to the struggle we may only arouse popular resentment; such methods of struggle tend to perpetuate the division of the people along religious lines, whereas our strength lies in unity. The deepest source of religious prejudice is poverty and ignorance; and that is the evil we have to combat” (Lenin 1960 g 28: 181; e. g., Marchadier 1981). In The ABC of Communism, Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky made this measured attitude part of the official Bolshevik agenda: the campaign against the backwardness of the masses in this matter of religion, must be conducted with patience and considerateness, as well as with energy and perseverance. The credulous crowd is extremely sensitive to anything which hurts its feelings. To thrust atheism upon the masses, and in conjunction therewith to interfere forcibly with religious practices and to make mock of the objects of popular reverence, would not assist but would hinder the campaign against religion. If the church were to be persecuted, it would win sympathy among the masses, for persecution would remind them of the almost forgotten days when there was an association between religion and the defence of national freedom; it would strengthen the antisemitic movement; and in general it would mobilize all the vestiges of an ideology which is already beginning to die out (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 1922, 255).

Officials pursued this tactic whenever cooler heads prevailed. However, less conciliatory measures were never far from hand. When he learned of priests assisting White battalions to secure grain in the Penza region, Lenin telegraphed the local authorities: “It is necessary to organize a reinforced guard from specially trustworthy people to carry out a merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White Guardists; lock up doubtful types in concentration camp outside the town. Get an expedition in motion” (As quoted in

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Service 1995, 109). He wanted at least 100 fatcats and bloodsuckers to be publicly hanged, immediately (Ryan 2012, 106). If those who spoke on behalf the gods were the Bolsheviks’ material enemies, then it was time to treat them as such. Much to Lenin’s dismay, however, the Red Army failed to display enough ferocity because he dispatched another telegraph a week or so later: “I am extremely indignant that there has been absolutely nothing definite from you as to what serious measures have at last been carried out by you for ruthless suppression of the kulaks of five volosts and confiscation of their grain. Your inactivity is criminal” (Lenin 1960k 44: 135). Another crisis soon demanded his attention and Lenin apparently forgot about the mass public executions. The end of the Civil War was in sight by the Fall of 1921. The country was in tatters, but the Bolshevik regime was positioned—for the first time—to address something more ambitious than self-preservation. In a desperate bid to address shortages in food and heating fuel, Lenin proposed a tactical reversion from war communism to state capitalism through the controversial “New Economic Policy” or NEP (Davies 1998, Suny 2011). Supplementing the bid to restructure the Russian economy on “bourgeois” principles, the NEP also introduced a variety of educational and cultural reforms that were meant to enrich—if not create—Soviet civil society (Ryan 2013). “We must raise culture to a much higher level. A man must make use of his ability to read and write; he must have something to read, he must have newspapers and propaganda pamphlets,” Lenin maintained: “That is why we must, in connection with the New Economic Policy, ceaselessly propagate the idea that political education calls for raising the level of culture at all costs” (Lenin 1960i 33: 60 – 79). On the demand-side, the People’s Commissariat for Education introduced compulsory education for children and created special institutions for the “liquidation of illiteracy” among adults. On the supply-side, it subsidized newspapers, magazines and pamphlets that translated the finer points of Marxism into an idiom suitable for the uninitiated. “It would be the biggest and most grievous mistake a Marxist could make to think that the millions of the people (especially the peasants and artisans), who have been condemned by all modern society to darkness, ignorance and superstitions – can extricate themselves from this darkness only along the straight line of a purely Marxist education,” Lenin confessed in 1922: “These masses should be supplied with the most varied atheist propaganda material, they should be made familiar with facts from the most diverse spheres of life, they should be approached in every possible way, so as to interest them, rouse them from their religious torpor” (Lenin 1960j 33: 229). Even if Lenin never quite put it this way, godless Russian communists were made rather than born. One of the most popular of these state-financed ventures was Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”)—visualize an edgier, Marxist version of Mad magazine where cor-

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rosive humor is mixed with muckraking journalism about clerical malfeasance. Its success can be measured by circulation statistics. The weekly version had press runs of at least 210,000 in the mid-1920s and more than 500,000 copies by the early 1930s (Perris 1998, 76; Gérin 2004). Given how it was passed around on job sites and in taverns, the actual readership may have been three or four times that size. Another measure of Bezbozhnik’s impact is the sprawling civic organization that coalesced around the magazine’s public mission. The Society of the Militant Godless—whose official motto was “The Struggle against Religion is the Struggle for Socialism”—trained activists how to establish their own local atheist “clubs” and organize entertaining, antireligious evenings to recruit new members. The numbers speak for themselves. In 1926, there were 87,000 card-carrying members. By 1931, there were more than 5.5 million (Davis 2003). Yet, the regime was also prepared to use less “discursive” strategies when deemed necessary. A severe drought during the summer of 1921 gave way to a catastrophic famine during the winter of 1922– 1923. Hardline Bolsheviks discerned an opportunity to finally erase the Church from the Russian landscape. For his part, Lenin was convinced the priests were in league with the right-wing, paramilitary “Black Hundreds.” The Central Executive Committee decreed that all remaining Church valuables would be expropriated and sold to raise famine relief funds—but the real goal was provoking a “counter-revolutionary” response. Members of provincial parishes soon played into Bolshevik hands by clashing with requisition squads throughout the Moscow, Novgorod, and Petrograd oblasts. After four Red Army soldiers were badly beaten by a crowd in Shuia, Lenin sent a top-secret memo to Vyacheslav Molotov (Krivova 2007). The telegram is worth quoting at length, if only to recognize that Soviet state-terror did not begin with Stalin: I think that here our opponent is making a huge strategic error by attempting to draw us into a decisive struggle now when it is especially hopeless and especially disadvantageous to him. For us, on the other hand, precisely at the present moment we are presented with an exceptionally favorable, even unique, opportunity when we can in 99 out of 100 chances utterly defeat our enemy with complete success and guarantee for ourselves the position we require for decades. Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at least will not be in a position to support to any decisive degree this handful of Black Hundreds clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force. We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especial-

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ly is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side. One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. This observation in particular is further strengthened because harsh measures against a reactionary clergy will be politically impractical, possibly even extremely dangerous as a result of the international situation in which we in Russia, in all probability, will find ourselves, or may find ourselves, after Genoa. Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i. e., the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness. Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades (Lenin 1996, 152– 153).⁹⁸

The violence unleashed against the resisting parishes was meant to be swift, devastating, and extremely visible. The documentary evidence is patchy, but estimates are that at least 8,000 priests, monks, and nuns were killed as part of the 1922 crack-down (Mayer 2000, 472; Roslof 2002).

Distant Early Warning: 1922 – 1928 The second phase roughly coincides with what might be called the Interregnum— the years between Lenin’s debilitating second stroke (1922) and the roll-out of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan (1928). This is the crucial period when, as Stephen Kotkin puts it, Stalin was patiently consolidating a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship (Kotkin 2017). On the domestic front, officials were perpetually worried that the peasants were plotting another round of rural insurrection (Velikanova 2013). On the international front, they were convinced that Western na-

 By Milyukovites, Lenin means the moderate, left-wing Kadet Party: Pavel Milyukov was its standard bearer. On the Kadet Party’s origins and eventual fate, see Enticott 2016.

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tions were preparing to invade with an eye for what we, in the twenty-first century, euphemistically call “regime change.” These perceived threats help to explain why the hardline against religion was largely abandoned in the 1920s: the fear was that anti-religious violence played into the hands of anti-Bolshevik elements at home and abroad. One consequence of this tactical shift is that when the post-Revolution head of the Russian Orthodox Church (Patriarch Tikhon) died in 1925, the regime prevented a successor from being named. More than that, Stalin had every would-be candidate arrested. After putting the screws to the relevant hierarchs, the Soviet State eventually recognized a locum tenens (Patriarch Sergius)—but only after he recognized the Soviet State’s ultimate authority over the Church (Kalkandjieva 2015). Another consequence was a series of coordinated campaigns by the State to “capture” traditional religious practices rather than simply abolish them. For example, the Bolsheviks preserved many of the Orthodox Holy Days but assigned new, Marxist-inspired names and significance for the occasions. Thus, the late-summer Feast of the Transfiguration was reimagined as the Day of Industry. (Gabel 2005, 196 – 197).

No Place to Hide: 1929 – 1941 The third and most eventful phase begins with the campaign to collectivize agriculture and expand the Soviet economy’s industrial capacity. It is artificially precise but nevertheless useful to think of Leon Trotksy’s expulsion from the USSR in January 1929 as the inaugurating event. According to Stalin, immediate industrialization was a Bolshevik imperative. “We have assumed power in a country whose technical equipment is terribly backward,” he warned: Look at the capitalist countries and you will see that their technology is not only advancing, but advancing by leaps and bounds, outstripping the old forms of industrial technique. And so we find that, on the one hand, we in our country have the most advanced system, the Soviet system, and the most advanced type of state power in the world, Soviet power, while, on the other hand, our industry, which should be the basis of socialism and of Soviet power, is extremely backward technically. Do you think that we can achieve the final victory of socialism in our country so long as this contradiction exists? What has to be done to end this contradiction? To end it, we must overtake and outstrip the advanced technology of the developed capitalist countries. We have overtaken and outstripped the advanced capitalist countries in the sense of establishing a new political system, the Soviet system. That is good. But it is not enough. In order to secure the final victory of socialism in our country, we must also overtake and outstrip these countries technically and economically. Either we do this, or we shall be forced to the wall (Stalin 1954 11: 257– 258).

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Thanks in part to the 1918 decision to repudiate the foreign debts accumulated by the Tsar and Provisional Government, the Bolshevik state found itself on the wrong side of a Western financial blockade. Frozen out of international credit markets, their only live option for raising the investment capital necessary to industrialize depended upon exporting as much grain—especially wheat—as possible. Brigades of young communists, state officials, and urban workers were deployed throughout the countryside to oversee the collectivization process. The peasants were expected to voluntarily transfer control over their plots of land and livestock in the name of achieving socialism and crushing capitalism. The central problem was that all the peasants had ever really wanted from the 1917 Revolution was more land and to be left alone. So, when persuasion wasn’t enough to secure the peasants’ assent, violence and intimidation typically followed. The result was something approaching a protracted civil war between town and country (Fitzpatrick 1994, Viola 1996). On paper, aggregating peasant small holdings into either collective farms (kolkhoz) or state farms (sovkhoz) achieved several goals at once. By collectivizing the land, the patchwork quilt of small holdings would be replaced by continuous tracts; this opened the door to the mechanization of agricultural labor. By organizing and mechanizing agricultural labor, the efficiency which economies of scale and the division of labor provide could be realized. Also, by mechanizing agriculture, fewer peasants were required to work the land—and an incipient industrial, properly proletarian labor force was automatically created.⁹⁹ On paper at least, collectivization appeared to be a virtuous economic circle: more land, more grain, more exports, more hard currency, more capital, more industry, more socialism. Very little, if anything, went according to plan (e. g., Allen 2003, Conquest 1986, Davies and Wheatcroft 2004, Pryor 1992). The cascade of failures was invariably blamed on “counter-revolutionary” intransigence among the rural peasants and urban laborers. From Stalin’s perspective: the last remnants of the moribund classes—the private manufacturers and their servitors, the private traders and their henchmen, the former nobles and priests, the kulaks and kulak agents, the former Whiteguard officers and police officials, policemen and gendarmes, all sorts of bourgeois intellectuals of a chauvinist type, and all other anti-Soviet elements— have been thrown out of their groove. Thrown out of their groove, and scattered over the whole face of the U.S.S.R., these “have-beens” have wormed their way into our plants and factories, into our government offices and trading organisations [sic], into our railway and water

 The only way to forge an agricultural proletariat out of the backward peasantry, Lenin advised: “is through the material basis, technical equipment, the extensive use of tractors and other farm machinery and electrification on a mass scale” (Lenin 1960 h 32: 217).

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transport enterprises, and, principally, into the collective farms and state farms. They have crept into these places and taken cover there, donning the mask of “workers” and “peasants,” and some of them have even managed to worm their way into the Party (Stalin 1954 13: 211– 212).

These misgivings about tsarist dead-enders go some way towards accounting for a reinvigorated campaign against religious communities throughout the 1930s (Luukkanen 1997). “In order to consolidate its rule,” Donald Filtzer explains, “the emerging Stalinist elite had to break down actual and possible opposition emanating from virtually the entire society: the peasants who resisted forced collectivization, and the industrial workers (largely drawn from that same peasantry), the majority of whom resented and to a certain extent resisted the hardships and pressures of industrialization” (Filtzer 1996, 9). Broadly speaking, this was achieved by eliminating the social spaces available for all non-state- and non-party-directed civic organizations. The fact that religious assemblies were meeting to commune with the gods was not, in some key sense, the relevant issue. The real problem was that they were meeting at all (Bernhard 1996). Thus, a 1929 decree introduced seven-hour/three-shift workdays, an uninterrupted workweek, and a rolling schedule of off-days (four days on, one day off, etc.). The manifest purpose of this legislation was to maximize economic productivity; the latent effect was to erase the traditional Sabbath-day distinction (Husband 2000). If this bureaucratic agenda represents the Stalinist “cold” line on religion, it was consistently supplemented by an assortment of “hot” strategies. One policy was simply destroying Christian churches, including the occasional Islamic mosque or Jewish synagogue (Keller 2001). The most notorious example of this was the 1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to memorialize the 1812 victory over Napoleon. Another tactic was converting religious buildings into utilitarian spaces like cafeterias, granaries, and schools. Prior to collectivization, there were as many as 30,000 functioning Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1930s there were probably fewer than 500 (Pospielovsky 1988, 70). Still another tactic—adopted with blasé ferocity during the Great Terror (1936 – 1938)—was to “liquidate” the clerical classes by working them to death in forced-labor colonies or summary execution. The documentary evidence is hitor-miss, but it is likely that at least 40,000 “servants of religious cults” were killed in 1937– 1938 (Binner and Junge 2004, Kuromiya 2007). A conservative estimate is that between October 1917 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, something like 80,000 “Church people” [tserkovni] were executed—with the vast majority of these killings occurring after Stalin’s “Great Break” from the NEP in

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1929 (Davis 1995). Yet, after all this bloodshed and destruction, the Orthodox icons and saints remained. A 1937 census revealed that within an adult population of roughly 98 million men and women, around 55 million (57 %) described themselves as “religious believers” and approximately 42 million (43 %) explicitly identified themselves as “Orthodox Christians” (Wynot 2004). These numbers are probably artificially low, however, since many Soviet citizens were reasonably suspicious of the regime’s desire to identify the “true believers.” Almost everything abruptly changed course after Operation Barbarossa (1941). One reason for this is that in Wehrmacht-occupied territories, Germans often returned churches to the parishioners. If nothing else, these were relatively painless ways of pacifying the populace and exploiting their grievances with the Stalinist state. Another rationale is that, after a decade of top-down state terror, it was unclear whether Soviet citizens—especially non-Russian ethnic groups in the peripheral republics—would fight to preserve the Union or take their chances with the Nazis. Early defections by Orthodox bishops in Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine indicated that Stalin had a problem on his hands. “German talk of granting religious freedom at first struck a sympathetic chord among certain elements of the Soviet population, particularly in Ukraine and the western borderlands” Steven Miner notes: The possible defection of millions of Orthodox subjects struck the Soviets as all too plausible, causing them immediately to silence their more strident antireligious propaganda. Within a few days of the German invasion, Soviet atheist journals ceased publication and, in an ironic twist, the last issue of Bezbozhnik, the leading atheist periodical condemned Nazi persecution of Christian churches and even called upon true believers to rally to the Soviet cause (Miner 2003, 68 – 69).

Orthodox hierarchs were soon on state-radio making the case that the defense of Communist Russia was “a holy struggle for Christian civilization, for freedom of conscience and faith” (As quoted in Miner 2003, 86). By November 1941, Stalin himself was invoking the traditional, tsarist trope of “Holy Mother Russia” to motivate the defense of Moscow. After securing the loyalty of the Church, Stalin fully restored the Patriarchate in 1943. The gods were apparently less of a socio-economic “reflex” than Stalinist DiaMat demanded. More than that, the skeletal Bolshevik state desperately needed their metapersonal assistance to survive.

Interlude Capital Red in Tooth and Claw The notion that we must build a new order “from the historical achievements of a sinking world” convinced most twentieth-century Marxists that normative concerns are legitimately addressed only after we’ve finished our empirical homework (MECW 6: 319 – 320/MEW 4: 339; my translation). For example, György Lukács isolated this kind of epistemological discipline as the ultimate explanation for Lenin’s (perceived) theoretical superiority over Rosa Luxemburg. “Lenin did not make a single practical decision in his whole life which was not the rational and logical outcome of his theoretical standpoint,” Lukács judged: “That the fundamental axiom of this standpoint is the demand for a concrete analysis of the concrete situation removes the issue to realpolitik only for those who do not think dialectically” (Lukács 2009, 41). And so, before asking whether Marx’s “dead dog” status in the study of religion should be corrected, my aim up to this point has been establishing three empirically-sound premises. 1. Marx did not theorize about religion but rather theorized about capital accumulation by thinking with religion. 2. Engels did theorize about religion but in hopes of guiding political practice rather than as a quasi-academic end-in-itself. 3. Plekhanov’s “orthodox” Marxist theory of religion is historically significant in part because it relies on modes of production rather than ideology to do the heavy lifting.

The “scientific” socialist theories of religion developed by Engels and Plekhanov have, for me at least, always been tantalizing in their suggestiveness. At this late hour I can now admit that my early enthusiasm for models of “extended cognition” or the “extended mind” was secretly fueled by the hope that they would permit me to explain the apparent historical correlation between what Marx called “objective thought-forms [Gedankenformen]” and the structure of social formations (MECW 35: 87/MEW 23: 90; my translation). I even knew what to call it: Cognitive Marxism. ¹⁰⁰ However, it is time to confess that classical historical materialism cannot foot the bill. To see why, let’s stipulate that there is a properly causal, empirical relationship to discover between modes of social existence and modes of social consciousness. “We not only say that individuals, with all their thoughts and feelings, are the products of a social milieu,” Plekhanov submits:

 I’m not the only one to have “invented” the category in a fit of ambition (Hogan 2015, 331). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-014

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we try to understand the genesis of that environment. We say that these characteristics are determined by this or that cause which, until now, has been independent of our will. The diverse transformations in the actual relations between individuals necessarily brings about modifications in the “constitution of the brain” [Verfassung der Hirne] by the correlation or interrelation [Wechselbeziehungen] between ideas, feelings, creeds [Glaubensbekenntnisse]. These ideas, feelings, and creeds are then combined and connected [verbinden] according to their own laws (Plekhanov 1947, 213/Plekhanov 1975, 116; my translation).

So far, so good. In the earth sciences, earthquakes, islands, and volcanoes are empirically discrete phenomena which the modern theory of plate tectonics “reduces” to the boundary dynamics of lithosphere-asthenosphere interaction. In the biological sciences the Red Queen effect, mimicry, and sexual dimorphism are empirically discrete phenomena which the modern theory of evolution “reduces” to the mechanism of natural selection. William Whewell called this “the consilience of inductions” and for contemporary philosophical naturalists it is the gold standard of sound theorizing (Bechtel and Callebaut 1993). For now, it doesn’t matter all that much whether Plekhanov had in mind something akin to David Hume’s laws of association, Gottlob Frege’s rules of inference, or Donald Davidson’s rationality when it comes to the “laws” which govern how ideas, feelings, and creeds hang together in mostly coherent ways. What concerns us is the claim that Marxism—taken as a general theory of collective life—allows us to explain social structures and cognitive structures as discrete expressions of a single causal matrix. In principle, Engels might well have been reaching for something like this when he compared Marx to Darwin: where one discovered the “evolutionary law of human history” the other discovered “the law of the evolution of organic nature” (MECW 24: 467/MEW 19: 335; my translation). We know, for example, that Engels carefully read Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Along these same lines, it may also have been what Plekhanov meant when he wrote: “Logically, Marx’s investigation begins precisely where Darwin’s investigation ends” (Plekhanov 1975, 136; my translation). The comparison itself suggests the problem, however.¹⁰¹

 It is widely known that Marx was bemused by the way Darwin “recognizes [wieder-erkennen] his own English society—with its division of labor, competition, opening of new markets, ‘inventions,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’—among the beasts and plants” (MECW 41: 381/ MEGA2 III.12: 137; my translation). Once upon a time, this was widely taken to imply that Darwin had committed the ideological sin of “naturalizing” a historically contingent social order (e. g., Young 1985). Two quick points. First, in the same letter to Engels from 1862, Marx goes on to note how this move reminds him of “Hegel in Phenomenology, where civil society appears [figurieren] as a ‘spiritual’ or ‘intellectual’ [geistig] animal kingdom, while in Darwin the animal kingdom appears as civil society” (MECW 41: 381/MEGA2 III.12: 137; my translation). Darwin and Hegel are

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Grasped at its most abstract level, natural selection is an algorithmic-like process of random variation, non-random death, and non-random reproductive success over an indeterminate timescale. It is the for-cause transmission of randomly mutating bits of DNA which yields adaptation to an environmental niche. As it turns out, this same process also accounts for ever-increasing amounts of biodiversity because natural selection discriminates on function (e. g., reproductive success) rather than structure (e. g., the males of some sexually reproducing species are penis-less). “Natural selection thus makes functional equivalence cum structural diversity the rule and not the exception,” Alex Rosenberg explains: “By contrast, nonevolutionary processes (mechanical, thermodynamic, electromagnetic, chemical) make structural difference with equivalent effects the exception, if they permit it at all” (Rosenberg 1994, 33). Unlike particle physics, natural history thus accumulates increasingly unpredictable types and degrees of complexity over time. Measured against the deep geological timescale, the Darwinian version of ecclesiastical wisdom is: Contingency, contingency, all is contingency. One of capitalism’s distinctive features is that—thanks to the forces of marketcompetition and market-dependency—money itself becomes a kind of selective mechanism. Markets are dynamic environments in part because profits signal available resources to economic rivals, mimics, and predators. This, in turn, increases competition and creates the conditions under which efficiency, innovation, and ruthlessness might be rewarded: profitability is the market selecting for a good or service, bankruptcy is the market selecting against. ¹⁰² Darwin might as well have been describing the retail electronics industry when he compared Nature to “a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force” (Darwin 1964, 67). Yet, neither

pulling the Nature-Society analogy in opposite directions, but Marx doesn’t indicate which one is making the mistake! It would be odd for him to suggest they are both wrong—that it is always improper to use “natural” phenomena to describe “social” phenomena (or vice versa)—because he routinely does just that. Thus, in the roughly contemporaneous 1861– 1863 Manuscript we read: “Initially, nature itself is the storehouse [Vorratshaus] in which human beings find natural products ready-made [fertig] for consumption” (MECW 30: 65/MEW 43: 61; my translation). Second, even if Marx is pooh-poohing Darwin’s version, the empirical and theoretical foundations of evolutionary biology are now too robust for his understandable mid-nineteenth-century skepticism to be all that compelling.  This wildly oversimplifies reality in almost unforgivable ways. In the interests of brevity, for example, I am ignoring how the socio-political power of money encourages various types of rentseeking practices which choke competition and establish monopoly control. Stiglitz (2012) offers one of the very best, non-technical accounts of this dynamic. For a canonically Marxist analysis of capital’s monopolistic tendencies, see Baran and Sweezy (1966).

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Engels nor Plekhanov could identify a mechanism or “feedback loop” which selects for or against anything where success and failure is not enumerated as financial gain or loss.¹⁰³ Despite the fact that capitalism establishes a financial imperative to commodify as many aspects of life as possible, the Global Market has never achieved the menacing omnipresence that many have feared—at least not yet. So, while Marxists may have often promised historical causation between a material “base” [Basis] or “foundation” [Grundlage] and various “superstructures” [Überbau], they could only deliver the sort of historical correlations which are easily unearthed without an assist from Marx. The tried-and-true distinction between causation and correlation remains the crucial to keep in mind. A shrinking population and declining food production may always be correlated, for example. But depending on the temporal sequence— which phenomenon gives rise to which—we are either talking about a new stable equilibrium or a famine. Without some mechanism to explain how non-market commitments congruent with “bourgeois” societies are selected for—and, more to the point, how incongruent practices are selected against—Engels and Plekhanov have merely identified the sort of holistic, macroscopic patterns that Weber called “elective affinities” [Wahlverwandtschaften]. Rephrased in rather more formal terms, the functional equivalence of diverse structures—or the “multiple realizability” of discrete functions—means that while the content of social consciousness may be causally dependent upon the structure of social being, there is no compelling prima facie reason for thinking “totemists” can’t be ravenous captains of industry or “polytheists” astute hedge fund managers. Thankfully, as I hope to demonstrate over the next two chapters, Marx’s relevance for the twenty-first century study of religion does not depend on moribund, twentieth-century Marxism.

 Some sort of feedback loop is required to avoid the vicious circularity of structural functionalism, for example. This recognition helps to explain Bourdieu’s decision to treat various social “fields” as market-like competitions in pursuit of accumulating non-financial or symbolic “capital” (i. e., the outcome from one round of selection becomes the starting point for another).

Part Two Taking Marx to Work

Chapter Five Which Side Are You On? Religion as Contentious Cosmopolitics The core mission of Good Old-Fashioned Religious Studies (GOFRS) is often described as cultivating the virtues of toleration in an increasingly globalized and “pluralistic” world.¹⁰⁴ The rationale is that if the field could help destabilize some of the moral certainties we acquire during childhood and adolescence, it might lead to adults willing to peacefully recognize various types and degrees of diversity. Human beings needed proper training to appreciate religious difference in a brave new world, and the Cold War University was there to help. “We are being bound together by shipments, telephone calls, aeroplanes, tankers, freight exchanges and electric pulses,” Ninian Smart observed in the late 1980s: the power of Islam in Iran, Libya or Indonesia is there, independently of what we (or whoever we are) think of the rationality or otherwise of the beliefs held by the leaders and activists in these societies. Buddhism in Sri Lanka has its influence independently of our judgment about it. Christianities retain a degree of power and vitality: the measurement of these is a major task for the sociologist of religion. So knowing about these matters is positively important in the new global civilization (Smart 1987, 8).

Considered in this light, the promise of GOFRS is that it could make everyone involved better “global citizens” in an age of international capital flows and transoceanic production chains. One can even imagine a latter-day John Maynard Keynes skimming through a book on comparative religion while sipping his morning tea in bed and trading lean hog futures on the Nikkei.¹⁰⁵ Where the capitalism of the past had been violent, exploitative, and extractive, the capitalism of the fu-

 GOFRS is a riff on John Haugland’s (1989) classic portmanteau GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence).  Reflecting on the extraordinary comforts of middling- and upper-class life in England prior to 1914, Keynes writes: “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world” (Keynes 2019, 50). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-015

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ture would more closely resemble the doux commerce promised by the Philosophes. ¹⁰⁶ I take it that something akin to this is what college administrators and faculty mean when they praise the study of religion as part of a “liberal education.” The hope is that much as a liberal education displaces unlettered ignorance, campusgenerated lessons about liberal toleration will replace unlettered prejudice. This institutional vision is one reason why so many in the field have pinned their hopes on a twenty-first century demand for “religious literacy.” “In a globalized world increasingly threatened by religious extremism and fanaticism, educators must think about how religious education can play an important role in helping their students become global citizens,” Ulrich Rosenhagen writes in a Chronicle of Higher Education commentary: Studying another religious tradition is much like learning a foreign language. In order to speak a different language, it is not enough to know how to translate certain words or phrases. There are rules for grammar and syntax, but the meaning of words, phrases, and symbols may change depending on context. The ideal way to learn a foreign language is often to immerse oneself in a culture where the language is spoken. Language is learned best from native speakers in their own habitat (Rosenhagen 2015).

In my judgment, Rosenhagen gets just about everything important wrong—including his decision to resurrect the zombie-like “insider/outsider problem” that, apparently, cannot be killed (e. g., McCutcheon 2003). Nevertheless, it remains a conviction widely shared: the academic study of religion facilitates the production of liberal global citizens by teaching them how to appreciate, admire, and embrace the Religious Other (e. g., Berling 2004). When Connecticut College announced plans to eliminate its Religious Studies Department, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) published an imploring response that largely echoes the thrust of Rosenhagen’s case. “Because religious phenomena are complex, the methodologies for studying them have been wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, but the study of religion cannot be reduced to any one method or discipline,” the letter maintains: The field of Religious Studies has always required its own domain separate from other departments and disciplines. The study of religion can therefore be done adequately only in its own academic home. Although professors in other departments such as sociology and political science have increasingly and of necessity become concerned with religious issues—just as they

 “Commerce is a cure for destructive prejudices,” we read in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws: “and it is almost a general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores” (Montesquieu 1989, 338).

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have with economic issues—the field of religion is marginalized in those disciplines and not treated in a holistic way. Like economics, only Religious Studies courses can provide the intellectual coherence and fundamental grounding such study requires. The work of your Religious Studies Department is critical to your mission to educate students to put the liberal arts into action as citizens in a global society (Cabezon et al. 2020).

At this point, I would like to pose a few uncomfortable, even coarse questions: What is it in particular that “religious literacy” reveals about the geopolitical past, present, or future? Why is no other method, field, or department on campus positioned to offer these lessons? How exactly does the “holistic” study of religion help us make sense of the world—much less, contribute to making it a better place?

Draft Records, Buddhist Monks, and Other Fiery Things Think of my concern as a version of the epistemological “frame problem” in the neurocognitive and computer sciences—the recognition that successfully navigating the world means ignoring most of what we know, or believe to be the case, at any given time.¹⁰⁷ As research into “fast-and-frugal” cognitive heuristics illustrates, more data in-and-of-itself does not guarantee better outcomes (Gigerenzer et al. 2016). “A walking encyclopedia will walk over a cliff, for all its knowledge of cliffs and the effects of gravity,” Daniel Dennett reminds us, “unless it is designed in such a fashion that it can find the right bits of knowledge at the right times, so it can plan its engagements with the real world” (Dennett 1998, 194– 195). When couched in these terms, the “holistic” study of religion obviously contributes to our encyclopedic knowledge of human diversity—but there is no compelling reason to assume it positions us to make better strategic sense of the world. Remain focused on, say, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or the Five Pillars of Islam—the typical sorts of things that show up in a “World Religions” course—and you’re likely to stumble off a cliff or walk headlong into the rising and warming seas.

 The same point can be made by drawing on the economic literature regarding Knightian uncertainty. Under these conditions—where one cannot, in principle, ever know enough to quantify the probability distribution—more data does not resolve the strategic ambiguities regarding the investment decision. On Knightian uncertainty and its implications for the social sciences, see Blyth (2002).

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Yet, the advocates of religious literacy treat encyclopedic knowledge and strategic wisdom as synonyms. For example, Stephen Prothero argues that religious illiteracy in North America makes it difficult for well-meaning people: to make sense of a world in which people kill and make peace in the name of Christ or Allah. How are we to understand protests against the Vietnam War, which compelled Catholic priests to burn draft records in Maryland and Buddhist Monks to set fire to themselves in Vietnam, without knowing something about Catholic just war theory and the Buddhist principles of noself and compassion? How are we to understand international conflicts in the Middle East and Sri Lanka without reckoning with the role of Jerusalem in the sacred geography of the Abrahamic faiths and with the differences between Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast Asia? (Prothero 2007, 11– 12).

Prothero should be commended for providing us with specific geopolitical cases where others offer wafer-thin first principles and moralizing platitudes. Unfortunately, these are all instances where the decision to treat religion as religion is excruciatingly unhelpful. Take the two Vietnam-era examples. I assume that by draft-record-burning Catholic priests in Maryland, Prothero is referring to the 1968 “Catonsville Nine”—a small band of peace activists that included two priests (Philip Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan), one De La Salle Brother (David Darst), two former Maryknoll priests (Thomas Melville, John Hogan), a former Maryknoll sister (Marjorie Bradford Melville), a left-wing “guerilla artist” (Tom Lewis), a nurse (Mary Moylan), and an Army vet (George Mische). This group is an odd candidate for demonstrating the utility of religious literacy since focusing on these nine people as Catholics needlessly muddies the waters. One indicator of the group’s denominational irrelevance is that American Catholics had a difficult time securing “conscientious objector” status at draft board hearings. This is because the Church treated anti-communism as satisfying the jus ad bellum standard of a “just cause” for much of the twentieth century. The only question that seems to have worried those Catholics who thought about the war in these terms was whether defeating the Viet Cong meant violating jus in bello principles. That is, there was an uneasy recognition among both the clergy and laity that victory in Southeast Asia likely entailed the occasional war crime (Winters 2008, 98). Then there’s the not-so-small issue that—although Prothero suggests a tight, causal link between the group’s anti-war activism and Catholic theology—the Catonsville Nine opposed the Vietnam War in spite of the Catholic “just war” tradition. “The ‘just war theory’ is in fact a cruel oxymoron. War, no matter its provocation or justification, is of essence and nature supremely unjust,” Daniel Berrigan insisted at the time: “We are done with that theory forever” (As quoted in Ludwig 2012, 38).

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I’ll be brief and blunt: I have no idea how religious literacy is at all helpful in this case. It feels like a bait-and-switch. Instead of making sense of Cold War geopolitics—which I assumed was the goal—we are now needlessly attending to the finer points of Catholic doctrine. We are left studying religion as religion yet again. Similar sorts of problems hound the case of self-immolating Buddhist Monks. As a general rule-of-thumb a constant cannot explain a variable without introducing significant degrees of randomness. Gravity alone cannot explain why a plane crashed, for example, because every plane that has ever landed safely has also experienced its relentless pull. Thus, right off the bat, it is odd appealing to the Buddhist principle of anatta or “no-self ” (i. e., the constant) to explain these historically discrete acts of Vietnamese agitprop (i. e., the variable). If there was something distinctly Buddhist or Therevadan about monkish self-immolation, we would expect to find some co-religionists in neighboring Laos or Cambodia setting themselves on fire as well. Presumably, they also accepted this principle and were drawn into the same regional conflict—but we don’t, and this tells us that something else must be the difference-maker. Moreover, attending to the principle of karuna (“compassion” or “mercy”) is less than helpful since human compassion is not in any way a uniquely “Buddhist” or “Therevadan” virtue. Indeed, one might pause to ask why Vietnamese Catholic priests— raised on the notion of “redemptive suffering” and motivated by Christian agape—did not join the Buddhist monks and become anti-war religious martyrs. Or, perhaps, stop and wonder why Madame Nhu (née Tran Le Xuan)—sisterin-law to President Ngo Dinh Diem, de facto First Lady, and a Catholic—responded to Thich Quang Duc’s fiery demise by suggesting: “if the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match” (As quoted in Willbanks 2018, 104). To account for these affiliated patterns, we need to know how the Catholic-Buddhist boundary acquired a particular socio-political significance in the colonial and post-colonial landscapes of French Indochina. The basic outlines of that story are well-known. Vietnamese Catholics were members of the urban, middling- and upper-classes who materially benefited from colonization and thus adopted a variety of French mannerisms—including the colonizers’ language, cuisine, fashion, education, and Catholicism. Once the French quit Vietnam in the aftermath of Dien Bien Phu (1954), the United States recruited members of this elite population to run the anti-communist regime. Once the US settled on President Ngo Dinh Diem as their man in Saigon, one modestly predictable outcome was that Diem exchanged patronage and privileges for loyalty amongst the well-heeled, well-bred, well-edu-

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cated and, therefore, Catholic Vietnamese (Miller 2013). Social scientists call this dynamic opportunity hoarding. ¹⁰⁸ In fact, Seth Jacobs notes that Diem’s government “lent new urgency to the traditional Vietnamese saying, first spoken during the era of French colonialism: ‘Turn Catholic and have rice to eat’” (Jacobs 2006, 93). As a now-declassified CIA memorandum explained at the time: Under French Colonial control, Catholicism was promoted in Vietnam, and Vietnamese Catholics dominated the political scene. President Diem’s Catholicism, following the ouster of the French, caused opponents to rally under the aegis of Buddhism—the religion of the majority of the South Vietnamese. Of the 18 million people in South Vietnam, perhaps 5 – 6 million are active Buddhists, nearly 2 million are Catholics (Anonymous 1974, 4).

What this anonymous intelligence officer “gets”—and what the religiously literate too often do not—is that the Catholic-Buddhist boundary in post-colonial Vietnam was energized by the antagonisms between an urban, expropriating elite and a rural, expropriated peasantry. Miss that and you’ve missed almost everything strategically important. How then shall scholars handle the televisual spectacle of a dozen or so selfimmolating Therevadan monks in the 1960s? Treat it as one might handle IRA hunger strikes in the 1980s, where attending to the longue durée of Christian asceticism obscures what was at stake during the Troubles (Hennessey 2014). Treat it as an evocative way of personalizing and damning the American military’s use of Napalm to “flush out” insurgent guerillas from the verdant jungle (Neer 2013). Treat it like a theatrical act of resistance in a globalizing age of televisual media; a weapon of the weak that relies on the few things that the poor and powerless always have: their bodies, the ability to suffer, and some hope that things will improve.¹⁰⁹ After all, there is nothing in the Buddhist oral or written traditions which might explain why these actions had to take place in public; or why it was necessary to tip off the foreign journalists in Saigon about when and where to appear. Good press isn’t one of the Noble Truths. Simply put, the slipup is treating Thich Quang Duc’s self-selected death as religion and asking whether there is something uniquely “Buddhist” or “religious”

 Opportunity hoarding is most often described as a socio-political condition where members within a categorically bounded network or socio-taxonomic group “acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network’s modus operandi” (Tilly 2016, 160).  In this sense, the figure of a self-immolating monk is adjacent to the classic social bandit, who “establishes his freedom by means of the only resources within reach of the poor—strength, bravery, cunning, and determination” (Hobsbawm 2000, 95).

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about setting oneself on fire. That path of inquiry is no less mistaken or questionbegging than asking whether there is something distinctively “Hindu” about widow-burning (Dirks 2001, Mani 1998). The most obvious questions, it turns out, are often the least revealing.

The Shirts and Skins of Geopolitics Prothero is one of the most articulate and recognizable proponents of “religious literacy.” He also happens to illustrate why the project does not—and, I argue, cannot—accomplish much of what it is supposed to do. The problem is that, by treating religion as religion, scholars may provide colorful bits of ethnographic knowledge here and there but they miss the strategic target. On the one hand, the study of X as X—no matter what specific variable “X” represents—is incapable of doing much more than invent novel ways to describe what is already known. When biologists select a model organism for their research, they are trying to understand, explain, or discover something fundamental about evolution, or genetics, or the molecular foundations of disease. They do not study the common fruit fly as the common fruit fly. Rather, they use Drosophila melanogaster to answer empirical and theoretical questions more pressing than How does the fruit fly fruit-fly? On the other hand, if even religion must be treated as religion—if “religion” is the master socio-taxonomic category for understanding all of collective life—then “religion” is analytically useless because everything is religion. Given enough time, scholars will begin to argue that advertising, or shopping, or sports, or even capitalism itself counts as religion (e. g., Bain-Selbo and Sapp 2016, McCarraher 2022, Miller 1998, Sheffield 2006, Löwy 2009). This bit of throat-clearing is meant to highlight how the conceptual issue going forward is not whether academics take note of what actors explicitly or inferentially “believe” regarding the demands made by metapersonal agents.¹¹⁰ These sorts of commitments will always be empirically significant variables if only because they reveal some of the local, normative expectations regarding social interactions.¹¹¹ That is to say, the specific terms in which one party makes political claims

 The genealogy of “belief ” as a category of either implicitly or explicitly comparative scholarship is, in many ways, the history of twentieth-century anthropology (Evans-Pritchard 1976, Horton 1993, Moore 1999, Sperber 1982). For contemporary reflections, see Moore (2009), de Castro (2012).  David Graeber proposes that we cannot avoid attending to cosmologies—orthodox, heterodox, or outré—because “one cannot understand political institutions without understanding the people who create them, what they believe the world to be like, how they imagine the human situation

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on another—the mode by which it engages in contentious politics—ultimately depends upon what the claimants believe they are due.¹¹² What at first look like chaotic “food riots” in eighteenth-century England, for example, begin to look like a coordinated mode of popular direct action upon closer inspection (Archer 2000, Bohstedt 2010, Charlesworth and Randall 1987, Randall 2006, Wells 1979). The sacked granaries, plundered mills, and wrecked bakeries are thus historical evidence for “a deeply-felt conviction that prices ought, in times of dearth, to be regulated, and that the profiteer put himself outside of society” (Thompson 1993, 229). The affects, convictions, and customs regarding the priority of people over profits are part of the relevant causal matrix: we ignore them at our analytic peril.¹¹³ Given all of this, it strikes me that the most pressing concern for an academic study of religion worth having is explaining why—under some conditions, but not others—otherwise inconsequential intuitions, opinions, and commitments regarding ancestors, gods, spirits, and witches come to matter. That is, the conventional claim that religion matters is too rigid and dogmatic in that it implies religion always matters. The conceptual gaffe at the heart of treating religion as religion—the myth of its intrinsic importance—must be challenged and, ideally, banished. In its place, future scholars should explain how metapersonal agents and forces come to be constitutive features of socio-political existence. “Human societies the world over are not only interdependent with societies of other kinds,” Marshall Sahlins reminds us: they are also dependent for their own existence on relations with humans of other kinds, I mean the gods, ancestors, ghosts, demons, species-masters, and other such metapersons, including those inhabiting plants, animals, and natural features: in sum, the host of “spirits”— wrongly so-called; they are this-worldly and indeed have the attributes of persons—the host of whom are endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population (Sahlins 2017b, 347).

within it, and what they believe it is possible or legitimate to want from it. This is true everywhere, even though cosmological formulations themselves can vary enormously” (Graeber 2017a, 127– 128). Rephrased with a philosophically stiff upper lip, the academic study of “cosmological formulations” is at best a propaedeutic for examining the contentious dynamics of mundane politics.  The formal definition of contentious politics is “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when: (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants or objects of claims” (McAdam et al. 2001, 5).  With that said, the relevant cognitive science suggests that explicit theological “beliefs”— the sorts of commitments typically prioritized by GOFRS—are invoked as post hoc rationalizations and reflections (e. g., Pyysiäinen 2021, Yong and Kanazawa 2021). Or, to borrow Daniel Kahneman’s distinction, scholars of religion have traditionally overemphasized slow, “System 2” cognition relative to fast, “System 1” heuristics (Kahneman 2011).

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Rather than trying to bridge the gap between “religion” and “politics,” these scholars will become experts in what Stanley Tambiah called “galactic polities” or what I will awkwardly call cosmopolitical economy (Tambiah 1973).¹¹⁴ The distinctions and expectations that follow from belonging to one religious community rather than another may help us identify the social networks involved in some episode of contentious politics—but not always, and certainly not automatically. The reason for this is that the brute fact of difference per se is never enough to generate a conflict; nor is the brute fact of similarity per se enough to guarantee an alliance. Social boundaries are historically fluid and perpetually contested zones of interaction between and within population clusters. Every barrier used to mark an exterior limit is, at the same time, a potential port of entry or exile given that they are formed, destroyed, suppressed, and transformed within landscapes of opportunity hoarding and exploitation. These sorts of distinctions only become relevant—are only “activated” as Charles Tilly liked to put it—when members of overlapping, multi-dimensional social networks find themselves divided on either side of what had been an otherwise unimportant fault line.¹¹⁵ Metapersonal actors may eventually assume acute cosmopolitical significance, but it is an unforced error to claim they matter in and of themselves. Take the allegedly “religious basis” of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as an illustration. In Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Henry Glassie (1982) carefully mapped out how—in one south Fermanagh village—the patterns of antagonism and cooperation routinely ignored denominational boundaries. Sometimes the difference between a Protestant cross and a Catholic crucifix on the dining room wall was salient; other times it wasn’t. “Participation in religious services and some forms of sociability (musical bands) segment the community along religious lines. Yet others (the local football team) bring the two sides together,” Tilly explains: Despite surmounting religious differences in daily social relations, however, villagers line up on occasion along the Protestant-Catholic boundary. When networks of mutual aid segregate on either side of a boundary, a dispute that pits people on the two sides against each other

 Whether or not this is different from, or can be productively synthesized with, the thesis that —in some contexts—trafficking with metapersonal agents is a constituent element of a given “mode of production” is an exercise for another day (e. g., Godelier 1977, Lansing 1991). The main point, for now, is that the Cosmos is invoked by a social faction in hopes of justifying or denouncing some distribution of labor and leisure.  If the mere fact of existing on either side of a categorical boundary is itself sufficient to explain inter-communal conflict, Tilly asks: “How and why do people who interact without doing outright damage to each other shift rapidly into collective violence and then (sometimes just as rapidly) shift back into relatively peaceful relations?” (Tilly 2003, 11).

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(for whatever reason)—and then leads them to seek support from their fellows—redefines the dispute as categorical. For example, two neighbors get in a fight over a badly dug ditch without any particular categorical definition of their disagreement; however, when they start calling in kin and friends to back them, the contrast in social networks favors a categorical redefinition of the participants and issue (Tilly 2003, 119).

This suggests that the Protestant-Catholic boundary in Northern Ireland could, in principle, be replaced with the pick-up game distinction between “shirts” and “skins” without losing much of the strategically relevant information. The “irreducibly religious” dimension which some insist can only be understood “holistically” might account for why some actors throw their hats in with one social network rather than another. Yet, it does not and cannot explain what is driving a specific conflict or alliance. “Boundaries of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, or nationality reinforce exploitation and opportunity hoarding,” Tilly notes: “In their turn, exploitation and opportunity hoarding lock such differences in place by delivering greater rewards to occupants of the ostensibly superior category” (Tilly 2003, 10).¹¹⁶ All sorts of inter-personal and inter-communal differences exist, after all. Each of us walks around with several identities crowded together at once: the son or daughter of A, the brother or sister of B, the spouse of C, a member of D, an enemy of E, and so on.¹¹⁷ It is only in particular circumstances that one of these identities comes to matter more than all the others—when being a Ukrainian man of fighting age, for example, is more locally consequential than being the father of Gleb or the husband of Valeria (Kamenetz 2022).¹¹⁸ The pressing question for

 Although some argue that capitalist logic is inseparable from regimes of racial domination, Marxists have traditionally argued that capital accumulation is largely indifferent about whom is exploited—but that this structural disregard for ascriptive identities is a mixed blessing. On the upside, capitalist exploitation is not “inextricably linked with extra-economic, juridical, or political identities, inequalities, or differences” (Wood 1988, 5). On the downside, “capitalism is likely to co-opt whatever extra-economic oppressions are historically and culturally available in any given setting” (Wood 1988, 6).  Rita Astuti and Maurice Bloch point us in the right direction when they suggest we have no choice but to look past the empirical complexity of most human beings most of the time. As they note: “a moment’s thought will reveal that in order to live with others as efficiently and smoothly as we do in our everyday lives, we continually and routinely abandon our own, inevitably variable, critical examination and accept to trust and defer to others as our default mode of social interaction” (Astuti and Bloch 2013, 110 – 111).  This is an updated version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known reflections about a young man and former student forced to choose between joining the French Resistance or caring for his mother (Sartre 2007). The moral tragedy of his predicament—akin to Kierkegaard’s discussion of Agamemnon in Fear and Trembling—is that he cannot be a good son and a brave patriot at the

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scholars should be: what event or set of events leads to a situation where the polyphony of intersubjective identities is pared down to the One which then becomes a sort of primum mobile? ¹¹⁹ Pay too much attention to the religious identities at play and one risks mistaking the colorful uniforms, odd texts, and splashy traditions as the game’s raison d’etre. Expanding our horizons, think about the emptiness of appealing to “religious sectarianism” as an explanation for Shia-Sunni violence in post-Saddam Iraq— rather than recognizing that this is, and can only ever be, a synonymous redescription of the inter-communal pattern itself. According to Fanar Haddad, the full sweep of Islamic history indicates that “rather than explicit division or consciously performed ecumenism, a far more common setting in Sunni–Shi‘a relations is sectarian irrelevance” (Haddad 2020, 8; Hashemi and Postel 2017). So, wherever the Shia-Sunni boundary is contentious, it is a relatively safe bet that the local cause is not the seventh-century succession crisis following Muhammad’s death. Divergent commitments to different religious authorities may help establish a social boundary; but these commitments cannot, in themselves, explain why the boundary is contentious at some times and places but not others. It is viciously circular to claim that the boundary is combative because each side takes its religious identity seriously as this simply repackages the myth of religion’s intrinsic significance —a bit like Molière’s befuddled physicians who “explain” a drug’s sedative effects by talking about its virtus dormitiva. “The construction of the Iraqi state largely took place by excluding the Shi‘a. This can largely be explained by the attitude of Shi‘i ulama, who spearheaded the largest uprising against British occupation,” Laurence Louër recounts: “The Shi‘a resistance therefore explains why the British decided to turn toward the former Ottoman elites, who were mainly drawn from the Sunni Arab population, to form the backbone of the Iraqi state” (Louër 2020, 111). In other words—much like the Buddhist-Catholic boundary in South Vietnam or the Protestant-Catholic boundary in Northern Ireland— the Shia-Sunni boundary in modern Iraq only appears to be an example of “religious hatred” at first blush. Closer inspection reveals how these antagonisms have developed within a political economy of post-colonial domination, opportunity hoarding, and state power that has only grown more contentious with time. Focus on the contested sta-

same time. When one of these social identities must take priority over the others, “intersectionality” meets its existential match.  John Bohstedt advises that neither brute scarcity, nor the widely shared norms of the Thompsonian “moral economy,” can explain the waves of food riots in eighteenth-century England: “The question is what conditions, relationships, and likely outcomes gave traction to motivations, so that the probability of success outweighed the risks of collective action” (Bohstedt 2010, 106 – 107).

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tus of a clerical elite, or who Mohammed’s rightful heir was, and you miss the geopolitical boat. Here’s still another way of expressing the same idea, this time by means of a chemical analogy which Engels and Plekhanov might have appreciated. When iron is introduced into a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen, ammonia is produced— something known as the Haber-Bosch process. Without iron, the nitrogen and hydrogen live side-by-side, mostly indifferent to each other’s molecular differences. So, not only must we be able to recognize how eye-catching uniforms are part of a game but never the reason for it. We must also look for the social catalysts that “activate” some differences rather than others and thus “trigger” the collective phenomena which interest us.¹²⁰

Mundane Stakes and Cosmic Frames The most basic lesson that Marx has to offer an academic study of religion worth having is this: abandon the habit of treating religion as religion. The sorts of things that GOFRS typically fixates on aren’t inherently interesting, significant, meaningful, or relevant. The phenomena conventionally located under the “religion” category do not intrinsically matter. The academically interesting question is the one E.P. Thompson always posed for himself and his students: Which socio-economic context allows us to make sense of this or that peculiar historical fact? (Calhoun 1994, 225). One could even go a step or two further than a scrupulous historian like Thompson was willing to go. The modern neurocognitive sciences indicate that, with human beings, evolution fashioned a kind of mind that generates intuitions regarding spooky agents constantly and in response to no specific environmental or cultural cues (e. g., Bloom 2007, Keleman 2004).¹²¹ At the very least, the concep-

 These are all metaphors, of course—but then again, so is Darwin’s natural “selection” or Einstein’s “fabric” of space-time. Only stubborn positivists still worry about models and metaphors as unobservables.  That is, the relevant evidence points toward an in-built tendency for human beings to process everything in terms of social relations, norms, and intentions—something revealed by the wonderfully simple Heider-Simmel Illusion (Guthrie 2016). In the nineteenth century, this “natural tendency” or cognitive predisposition was called anthropomorphizing. That label was correct, but only up to a point. A more accurate, though less felicitous, name for this would be sociomorphizing (Seibt et al. 2020). After all, to paraphrase Edmund Leach’s still-useful reminder: Gods, ghosts, and spirits do not need and cannot use the physical gifts we offer them (Leach 1976, 83). What they require are signs of submission, which is a quintessentially socio-political relationship. I take it that some version of this insight is what led Marshall Sahlins to conclude that even the most remote human so-

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tual analogy between the human and non-human realms is far too fruitful for a linguistically equipped, social creature like us to avoid (Hofstadter and Sander 2011). However, once these metapersonal agents appear on the scene—in whatever higgledy-piggledy, neuro-cognitive fashion they are generated—the gods are soon deployed and recruited in ways meant to secure, legitimate, promote, or topple some all-too-human order of things. Or, as Engels once made the point regarding elite opposition to the Ten Hours Bill: At all periods of history the vast majority of the people have been, in some shape or another, mere instruments for enriching the privileged few. In all past times, however, this bloodsucking system was carried on under the cover of various moral, religious, and political pretexts; priests, philosophers, lawyers, and statesmen told the people that they were handed over to misery and starvation for their own good, and because it was God’s ordinance. Now, on the contrary, the free-traders boldly declare – “You, working men, are slaves, and shall remain slaves, because only by your slavery can we increase our wealth and comforts; because we, the ruling class of this country, cannot continue to rule without you being slaves.” Now, then, the mystery of oppression has, at last, come out; now, at last, thanks to the free-traders, the people can clearly perceive their position; now, at last, the question is fairly, unmistakably put – Either we, or you! And therefore, just as before the false friend we prefer the open foe, so to the canting philanthropic aristocrat we prefer the brazenfaced free-trader (MECW 12: 271– 272).

There is, I submit, very little to be gained by studying religion as religion. The beginning of strategic wisdom is to look past the confounding riddles of metapersonal causality, cosmic speculation, and holistic meaning. Another way of unpacking this claim is to say that the academic study of religion would do well to refashion itself as the investigation of a relatively distinct— but not unique—strategy for advancing contentious political claims.¹²² The official AAR position is that: “Religion matters. It is the way people around the world have expressed what matters most to them, including their social identities and aspirations” (Cabezon et al. 2020)? Am I rejecting that claim? Yes and no.

cial orders are never truly alone; they are typically “galactic polities” or cosmopolitical economies engaged in “cosmic systems of governmentality” which typically include metapersons as allies and enemies, protectors and destroyers (Sahlins 2017, 24).  Charles Tilly argues that “terrorism” is a relatively useless analytic category, but “terror” is not —so long as it is understood as a strategy consisting of the “asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime” (Tilly 2004b, 5). I suspect that the study of religion would have been far better off imagining “religion” as a strategy rather than a thing.

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This is where Marx is a bracing tonic. Recall his account of the struggle between Orleanists and Legitimists over the post-Napoleonic French state in Brumaire: What kept these factions apart were not so-called principles; it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old opposition between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property [Grundeigenthum]. That old memories, personal antagonisms, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house at the same time, who denies this? Upon the various forms of property—the social conditions of existence—there arises a whole superstructure of different, peculiar forms and peculiarly formed sensations, illusions, ways of thinking and views of life. The whole class creates and shapes these things out of their material foundations and corresponding societal relations. The individuals, to whom these things flow by means of tradition and upbringing [Erziehung], can imagine that they are the starting point of, and the determining reasons [Bestimmungsgründe] for, their actions. Though the Orleanists and Legitimists tried to convince themselves as well as the other faction that it was their attachment to one of the two royal houses which separated them, the subsequent facts proved that it was their divided interests which prohibited their union. Just as in private life, where one must distinguish between what someone thinks and says about himself and what he really is and does, it is even more necessary to distinguish the phrases and conceits of the parties in a historical struggle from their real organism [Organismus] and their real interests, their imagination from their reality (MECW 11: 127– 128/ MEW 8: 139; my translation).

Once upon a time, this passage was taken to mean that the Orleanists and Legitimists were somehow ideologically mystified by the stakes of their rivalry. That is not what Marx writes. How then do we make sense of Marx without the hoary comforts of “ideology”? I propose that Marx is gesturing toward something Tilly described as “a categorical redefinition of the participants and issue” (Tilly 2003, 119). That is, once an exceedingly mundane conflict erupts, it makes sense for agents to recruit allies and identify foes by playing up a set of previously acknowledged but not intrinsically motivating inter-communal differences and similarities. Stripped down the bone, as it were, the “skins” aren’t trying to beat the “shirts” because they want their clothes.¹²³ This is a strategy, a technique for identifying reliable allies and likely opponents in a given contest. Shirts and skins matter, but only up to a point and only in certain contexts.  This is meant to echo a specific passage in Totemism where Lévi-Strauss critically observes: “According to Radcliffe-Brown’s first theory, as for Malinowski, an animal only becomes ‘totemic’ because it is first ‘good to eat’” (Lévi-Strauss 1963a, 68). We are not, in other words, dealing with a cognitive by-product of utility maximization.

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To see what I’m driving at, consider a dispute which came to be categorically redefined—this time from the contested territory of Kashmir in the mid–1950s. “Golam Fakir’s cow got loose, strayed across the limits of Golam’s property, and ate lentils in Kumar Tarkhania’s field. At that time, Panipur belonged to Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim state with a substantial Hindu minority,” we learn: In the village’s broadest religious divisions, cow-owning Golam qualified as a Muslim, lentilowning Kumar as a Hindu. Kumar’s friends seized the cow, which Golam then forcibly freed over the protests of those who were guarding it. At that point the two men could have taken their dispute to a local court, which would no doubt have ordered Golam to compensate Kumar according to an established scale of damages. Instead of settling their differences immediately, however, both farmers called in kinfolk, patrons, and allies. As a result, a minor dispute precipitated broader and broader alignments of bloc against bloc (McAdam et al. 2004, 128).

After every contentious round of tit-for-tat brawling, each side returned home to enlist a few more allies. For this reason, the initial clash between Golam and Kumar over a lentil-pilfering cow was increasingly recast by the participants themselves in communal and, thus, religious terms. “With each step outward and upward, redefinition of the conflict proceeded,” we learn: “the farther and higher the incident went, the less it concerned complex, caste-and-class-mediated local relations among farmers and the more it became part of national level communal struggles between Hindus and Muslims” (McAdam et al. 2004, 129). Was this fracas about the line demarking the Muslim or Hindu side of the equation? Not really. Did that categorical boundary make a difference when one farmer’s property violated that of another? Yes, of course—especially in the post-Partition context of a Pakistani state that was barely a decade old. “The Muslims, in the wrong to begin with, did not do what they normally would have done, which was to posture a bit, finally apologize, and make amends for the injured plants,” and Golam’s confederates were willing to deviate from the traditional script “because they knew there now was a Muslim-dominated government and they expected it to favor Muslims over Hindus” (Roy 1994, 180). If religion has such little empirical purchase when it comes to living next to cows, perhaps religious literacy isn’t all that useful after all. For this reason, I think the future study of religion would do well to make strategic sense of those “categorical redefinitions” which scholars have too often described as “religious hatred,” or “religious intolerance,” or “religious sectarianism.” As polities change, so too do the identities deployed to navigate the shifting landscapes. The historical record demonstrates, with the brittle clarity of pond ice, that it doesn’t take long for mortal enemies to become fast friends—or the other way ‘round—whenever a community’s interests are endangered or pro-

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moted.¹²⁴ The moment we treat a fixed catalogue of intersubjective, individual or communal differences and similarities as the throbbing engine which drives collective life, both the material stakes (land) and the normative concerns (honor) disappear.¹²⁵ We are then left with homogeneous pools of well-bounded, intrinsically meaningful cultural identities which should learn to “tolerate” or “recognize” the Other (Brown 2006). This is also why the future study of religion will need to overcome the longstanding tendency within GOFRS to obscure—or simply disregard as unimportant—what Marx called the “material foundations” and “corresponding societal relations” within which generic human beings become particular individuals. “Ultimately life is about the production of people,” David Graeber noticed: “in the sense that human beings are constantly shaping and fashioning one another, training and socializing one another for new roles, educating and healing and befriending and rivalling and courting one another” (Graeber 2011, 197). This labor—this work—includes producing and reproducing the kinds of human beings who own cows or grow lentils; who own the means of production or work for a wage; who are prepared to defend some lives and take others; who traffic with many gods or none at all.¹²⁶ Fortunately, no one needs to reinvent the wheel. Bruce Lincoln spent the better part of his career trying to clear a path in this direction. Following the second American military assault on Fallujah and the mur-

 As my friend and colleague Adam Gaiser (2013) has demonstrated, a deep, theological disagreement between the Umayyads and Kharijites was one thing; the profit to be made trading slaves in the early-medieval Mahgrib and western Mediterranean was another.  “Historical and cultural materialism cannot explain ‘morality’ away as class interests in fancy dress,” E.P. Thompson rightly advised a half-century ago: “since the notion that all ‘interests’ can be subsumed in scientifically-determinable material objectives is nothing more than utilitarianism’s bad breath” (Thompson 1978, 176).  Twentieth-century Marxists solemnly invoked the concept of praxis to describe the “dialectical” process by which human subjects—who are, at least initially, largely passive products of objective social conditions—transform themselves as they transform the world around them. The tried-and-true textual source for this notion is the so-called “Theses on Feuerbach,” where Marx observes: “The materialist theory about transforming conditions and education forgets that the conditions must be transformed by human beings and educators must themselves be educated” (MECW 5: 4/MEW 3: 5 – 6; my translation). Too much has been made about the philosophical, “Hegelian” nature of this claim. In my estimation it is better grasped as part of Marx’s initial bid to insulate himself from Stirner’s criticisms of Feuerbach: the ahistorical, crypto-theological essentialism of species-being is replaced with a more dynamic and contingent portrait of human beings as “unfinished” creatures. Two years later, in Poverty of Philosophy, this move began to pay dividends as Marx was now free to judge: “M. Proudhon is unaware of the fact that all of history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature” (MECW 6: 192/MEW 4: 160/Marx 1896, 208; my translation).

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der of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, for instance, he outlined an approach to studying religious violence that does more than treat it as religious violence. “Religious considerations are never the sole determining factor and there is no necessary relation between religion and violence,” he cautioned: “In most instances, religious considerations probably help to inhibit violence. But when religious discourse, authority, or communal identity are deployed in such a way as to facilitate the leap from non-violent to violent conflict, they can be enormously effective in accomplishing what Kierkegaard called ‘the religious suspension of the ethical’” (Lincoln 2005). This is a promising start, but at least one aspect of this framework is worth fine-tuning. To the extent that witches, gods, and spirits have a role to play in any of this, they contribute to the contentious dynamics of “categorical redefinition.” That is, religious vocabularies, practices, and institutions often provide the means by which plodding clashes over ditches and kings and wayward cows are reframed by the actors themselves as supramundane, winner-take-all struggles. This, I take it, is the rationale behind Lincoln’s surprising decision to summon the notion of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” from the shadows. As proposed by Johannes de Silencio (aka Søren Kierkegaard) in Fear and Trembling, the idea of a good that violates our run-of-the-mill understanding of the Good is the only way to justify the Pauline portrait of Abraham. Otherwise, the “Father of Faith” is just a monstrous dad and attempted murderer. “The ethical expression for what Abraham did is, that he would murder Isaac; the religious expression is, that he would sacrifice Isaac,” we read: “but precisely in this contradiction consists the dread which can well make a man sleepless, and yet Abraham is not what he is without this dread” (Kierkegaard 2006, 24; emphasis added). Whether religious agents and institutions advocate policies of state-making or state-destruction—brutal violence or shrewd diplomacy—they are always positioned to raise the perceived stakes. Metapersonal allies are especially good at making mountains out of molehills. If the academic study of religion needs to have a specific bailiwick—to pay its own way, as it were, by producing useful knowledge about the world around us—it should be this strategy for reframing and obscuring contentious political claims.

Conclusion In my estimation, GOFRS presumes that religious differences and identities are somehow intrinsically significant or socially relevant phenomena per se. Yet, the sorts of “we-they” categorical boundaries defined in broadly religious terms only matter sometimes—and even then, only up to a point. Most of the time,

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these sorts of communal borders are only a precondition for social coalitions and rivalries: a source of potential social energy which requires some catalyst to “convert” it into kinetic social energy (Tilly 2004a). To argue otherwise is to claim that— insofar as religious conflicts are driven by religious differences—religious commitments are beyond rational reflection, negotiation, or satisfaction: Catholics hate Protestants because they are Protestants; Sunni hate Shi‘a because they are Shi‘a; Muslims hate Hindus because they are Hindus. Adjust the lens for scale and we eventually arrive at tumbledown stories of a perpetual clash between one “civilization” and another. No matter the scale, however, we know this isn’t so. Reconsider the Partition-era violence between Hindu and Muslim communities. If Hindus hated Muslims because they were Muslims, or Muslims hated Hindus because they were Hindus, we would expect to find village after village ripped apart by “religious sectarianism” prior to 1947. But we don’t. “I was born in Lahore, in west Punjab. And the name of this town has now been changed to Faisalabad,” a Sikh interview subject tells Anindya Raychaudhuri: In the road I lived in, on one end of the road was a mosque and the other end of the road, there was a Sikh temple so we were so close to each other. We used to go to the mosque to get some cold water, actually, that time in summer. Nobody ever stopped us, why you are coming here. We have very happy memories. It was an urban town—it was newly built town. I don’t think it was more than fifty, sixty maybe hundred years old and it was a newly built. What I say is the center of the town, there was a clock tower. There were all those streets, roads, they diverged from the clock tower—all those roads were called bazaars—Montgomery Bazaar, Kacheri Bazaar, Karkhana Bazaar, some other bazaars, and then there was another road which cuts across all these bazaars in the middle, and it was called God bazaar, and as I said, beautiful town, new town, very nice (Raychaudhuri 2019, 83 – 84).

Accounts like these are common and demonstrate that, across the sub-continent, communal boundaries defined by religious difference “stiffened” as hopes and fears regarding the post-colonial state transformed the socio-political landscape. When we assign blame to the atavistic “intolerance” or blind “hatred” of religious sectarians, we too quickly accept the state’s claim to a monopoly on legitimate violence. In fact, it is often these sorts of fears regarding the default legitimacy of the modern state’s coercive apparatus which raises the stakes of a once unimportant religious difference. The received myth of religion’s intrinsic significance—and, as a correlate, the inherited portrait of all-or-nothing conflicts driven by unquenchable religious intolerance—has something to do with the unfortunate habit of conceptualizing religion as a uniquely comprehensive aspect of collective life. According to Robert Orsi, for example, religion is “the practice of making the invisible visible, of concretizing the order of the universe, the nature of human life and its destiny, and the

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various dimensions and possibilities of human interiority itself, as these are understood in various cultures at different times, in order to render them visible and tangible, present to the senses in the circumstances of everyday life” (Orsi 2005, 73). Heady stuff. In this way, he continues, religions engender distinct “universes of meaning” within which individuals are born, live, love, and die (Orsi 2005, 199). Note the scale. Orsi isn’t talking about neighborhoods, or ecosystems, or continents, or planets, or solar systems, or even galaxies—different religious traditions apparently have the capacity to generate different moral universes. Not the sort of arrangement which allows a gaggle of kids in for a drink of cool water on a hot, dusty afternoon. In Crossing and Dwelling, Thomas Tweed deploys a variety of orienteering tropes to emphasize how religion locates communities in socio-cognitive spaces which are experienced as discontinuous and absolute. “Religions position women and men in natural terrain and social space,” he advises: you are this and you belong here. You are in this clan, and you are an uncle. You are a member of this caste. You are a slave, and the gods approve. You are Tibetan, Israeli, or Cuban. Religions mark this place as unlike others. Religions say: take off your shoes before you enter here. Religions say: walk no farther than this on the Sabbath, or that mountain is where the gods live, or face this way when you pray. In these and other ways, religions help the pious to find a place of their own. Religions, in other words, involve homemaking. They construct a home—and a homeland. They delineate domestic and public space and construct collective identity. Religions distinguish us and them—and prescribe where and how both should live. Put this on the threshold of your home to signal who you are. Mark your bodies with clay every morning. Don’t eat pork. Do this, but not that, when you lie down to sleep, and sleep only with this person, not that one. Homemaking extends even to the cosmos, the space beyond the home and the homeland. The religious not only set aside sacred sites on the earth, but they also survey celestial and subterranean worlds. They say: you came from the underworld or you were formed by the copulation of these two deities. They say: when you die, if you have lived and died properly, you will go where you truly belong. You will live among the ancestors. You will dwell in the house of the Lord. Finally, religions promise, you will be home (Tweed 2006, 74– 75).

Here again, we can see how “religion” has swollen into the master analytic category given that it includes just about everything that makes a human life recognizably human. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s accept Tweed’s definition of religion as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries” (Tweed 2006, 167). What practical scholarly consequences follow? Well, if that’s “the what” of the academic study of religion, “the how” of the enterprise seems to be documenting the ways these organic-cultural flows intensify

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joy and confront suffering. This is more of the same cold porridge, I’m afraid. After every inventive hydrodynamic, topographic, and chronotropic metaphor has been put to bed, Tweed leaves us tethered to the study of religion as religion. Religion as the meaning of it all. This may help to explain his nebulous account regarding “the why.” Tweed believes his admittedly non-explanatory and non-predictive “theory” is a success if it can be used to “mark the boundaries of religion, distinguishing it from other cultural trajectories and, thereby, helping scholars to meet their role-specific obligation to reflect on their field’s constitutive term” (Tweed 2006, 165). This is awfully thin gruel in terms of academic motivation or institutional justification. Things go from bad to worse with Orsi, unfortunately. Given his commitment to exploring the various “universes of meaning” that religion generates, he eventually arrives at an Eliade-like project of hermeneutical transformation and self-discovery. “The understanding of other religious worlds and of the moral impulses of these worlds,” he writes: “comes only through the multiplicity of stories told and stories attended to and to the new possibilities that emerge in the places between heaven and earth, between lives and stories, and between people and their gods” (Orsi 2005, 204). That is, the academic study of religion is meant to scrutinize “their” universes so that “our” universes might be radically destabilized. To the extent that the study of radical religious alterity implies that human beings really do live in different universes—as the “ontological turn” in History and Presence (2016) occasionally comes close to maintaining—it is an environmentally and politically untenable project. The microplastics polluting the ocean floor should put an immediate end to academic tales of radically incommensurate inter-communal and inter-subjective difference. ¹²⁷ Transforming the academic study of religion into an investigation of contentious political claims and cosmopolitical economies would not only yield a progressive research programme in the technical, Lakatosian sense of the term: generating fresh facts, new predictions, and so on. It would also better address the quite reasonable desire that has pulsed through the field almost from the start—an earnest hope that the enterprise could somehow play a part in building a better world. You see, if it really is the case that religious difference per se is ultimately responsible for various forms of inequality or injustice or violence—if liberal toleration or post-liberal recognition is our only salvation—then an encyclopedic knowledge of those differences will never achieve the desired outcome. Another way of mak What once passed as “postmodernism” was, in hindsight, probably just one hyper-articulate generation recognizing that it was growing old. This matters because, as David Graeber advised, it provides us with an opportunity “to establish one simple truth: that it is absurd to pretend that one could really have an intellectual universe in which there is no principle of articulation between different perspectives whatsoever” (Graeber 2007, 326).

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ing the point is to insist that mere ignorance of difference is not the hot button issue so many contemporary academics believe it to be. If some version of “toleration” is the only possible solution to religious conflict, the problem is not a lack of ethnographic data. It is the brute, non-negotiable fact of radically incommensurate “universes of meaning” which drives the powder-keg dynamic of religiously defined social boundaries. However, if what appear to be cases of religious hatred or religious intolerance turn out to be instances of economic exploitation, or communal humiliation, or opportunity hoarding which have been categorically redefined, then there are practical things in the real world that can be done to address these kinds of “durable inequalities” (Tilly 1999). In this way, Marx justifies our widely shared experience that inter-personal and inter-communal differences are more easily tolerated and more casually ignored than GOFRS imagines—and the material conditions of collective life are more important than it has ever been willing to concede.¹²⁸

 The twenty-first century rise of “populist” or anti-system politics in the transatlantic world is often explained as an expression of intolerance rather than a symptom of neoliberal political economy. See Hopkin (2020) and Sandu (2020) for apt criticisms of these culture-driven and stubbornly anti-materialist accounts.

Postscript Interwar Fascists, Post-War Boomers, and the Study of Religion My brief against Good Old-Fashioned Religious Studies is easily summarized. By virtue of treating religion as a sphere of collective life which transcends power politics and class antagonisms—where abstract Human Beings locate themselves in equally abstract “universes” of Cosmic Meanings and Sacred Spaces—the academic study of religion needlessly handcuffed itself to studying some-thing that was taken to be intrinsically special or important per se (Bloch 2008). Yet, to paraphrase Marx, only theologians are satisfied treating religion as religion.

Anti-Communism and the Ding an sich Historically speaking, the move to insist that a “religious manifestation must be understood as a religious manifestation” was a break from nineteenth-century precedent (Wach 1989, 162). “Why is it that theoreticians working prior to 1925 or thereabouts were able to meet with such success and continue to exert such influence,” Cristiano Grottanelli and Bruce Lincoln ask: Why is it that prior to this time the study of religion was a central concern for scholars of such varied interests? And why is it that so little significant work has been done since their pioneer researches? One particularly striking datum must be noted at the outset: of those individuals whose contributions have had enduring influence, not one was or would have considered himself a serialized student of religion, nor were any of them—in principle—particularly interested in “religion” per se. Rather, they tended to be people of varied professional callings—sociologists, anthropologists, political activists and the like—who came to study the nature of society, and in so doing were forced to confront the powerful role of religion in shaping, maintaining, and also at times in changing the nature, structure, and functioning of those societies with which they were concerned. As a result, for all their differences —and they are many—classic theoreticians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose writings continue to inform the great majority of current studies, explored religion not as a denatured and isolated Ding an sich, but as one part, albeit an extremely important part, of a broader sociopolitical and historic field (Grottanelli and Lincoln 1998, 312).

The claim, as I understand it, is that during the interwar era (c. 1918 – 1939) European scholars began doing something that their predecessors had not. Grottanelli and Lincoln do not speculate on why this happened, but the timing is suggestive:

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the move to conceptualize religion as a denatured and isolated thing roughly corresponds with the rise of militant anti-Marxism. I prefer militant anti-Marxism over the more familiar fascism because it highlights what I take to be the true center of gravity for truculent right-wing politics in the early twentieth century. As Benjamin Carter Hett (2018) points out, the map of Fascist Europe mirrors another map from the interwar period: those countries home to a powerful Marxist insurgency. Hungary was home to aggressively anticommunist, “national Christian” political movements such as the Scythe Cross (e.g, Pittaway 2014). In Germany, the 25-Point platform of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party announced that it “represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without denominationally binding itself to a particular confession. It fights the Jewish-materialistic spirit [jüdisch-materialistischen Geist] within and surrounding us and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation and people from within can only take place on this basis” (NSDAP 1920; my translation). A reactionary like Oskar Spengler may have rejected the Nazi Party’s crass anti-Semitism, but he nevertheless agreed that Bolshevik materialism represented “the last dishonoring of the metaphysical by the social” (Spengler 1928, 195). Further south, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento also made claims about Europe’s inescapably Christian identity. “The fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society,” we learn in The Doctrine of Fascism: The Fascist State is not indifferent to religious phenomena in general nor does it maintain an attitude of indifference to Roman Catholicism, the special, positive religion of Italians. The State has not got a theology but it has a moral code. The Fascist State sees in religion one of the deepest of spiritual manifestations and for this reason it not only respects religion but defends and protects it. The Fascist State does not attempt, as did Robespierre at the height of the revolutionary delirium of the Convention, to set up a “god” of its own; nor does it vainly seek, as does Bolshevism, to efface God from the soul of man (Mussolini and Gentile 1932).

Julius Evola may have been repulsed by Italian fascism’s embrace of “bourgeois” Christian morals, yet still insisted that the poisoned heart of Marxism was not the critique of capitalism: “The primary element is the disavowal of every spiritual and transcendent value, the philosophy and sociology of historical materialism are just expressions of this disavowal and derive from it” (Evola 1995, 346). Where the revolutionary Left talked about materialism, progress, and class war, the reactionary Right emphasized transcendence, decline, and die Volk—and counted on paramilitary gangs to handle the less “discursive” side of the equation.

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That is to say, the forces of European reaction agreed that spiritual values were weapons against the Red Menace—and so portrayed themselves as the vanguard of a spiritual rebirth made necessary by the decadent banality and metaphysical nihilism of modernity (Hanebrink 2018, Soucy 1995). Corneliu Codreanu—founder of the paramilitary Iron Guard in Romania —made the point this way: “the new man, or the renewed nation, presupposes a great rebirth of the soul, a great spiritual revolution of the whole people, in other words a fight against the spiritual direction of today” (As quoted in Iordachi 2006, 29; Livezeanu 1995). Volkish politics lost much of its appeal after the Second World War, but the militant anti-Marxist conviction that historical materialism dishonors the spiritual and transcendent remained in place.¹²⁹

Conclusion Mention of the Romanian Iron Guard ineluctably raises the specter of Mircea Eliade’s own checkered past.¹³⁰ Many have struggled with the fact that he never publicly renounced his membership in the right-wing, paramilitary movement (e. g., Rennie 2018). Far fewer have been troubled by Eliade never recanting the initially fascist premise that religious phenomena must be handled “as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false” (Eliade 1958, xvii). The Cold War University upended the link between reactionary politics and the study of religion per se—as the field took institutional form, its political identity softened—but the myth of religion’s deep, intrinsic significance remained intact (MECW 47: 184/MEW 36: 199; my translation). “‘Religious Studies’—as it came to be called about twenty years ago—was forged in the retort of cultural upheaval and intellectual unease,” Carl Raschke observed in the mid-1980s: The notion that an effective field of inquiry could be organized around a body of data or as a cluster of “studies,” as in “black studies,” “women’s studies,” or “American studies,” without an underlying conceptual architecture was unique to that heady age of ethno-idealism and

 With someone like Jan de Vries— who viewed the academic study of religion as a response to modern banality—anti-communism and fascism are mostly indistinguishable. Yet, Willem Hofstee (2008) concludes that with someone like Gerardus van der Leeuw, anti-communist did not mean fascist.  Anne Mocko reports that while the inter-war discourse on Judeo-Bolshevism was explicitly antisemitic, “Eliade never makes any of these connections; it is possible that rhetoric against Communists could have carried anti-Semitic valences to interwar readers, but it is not something he explicitly invokes” (Mocko 2010, 289)

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self-confident positivism. It was at the same time the coalition politics of a waning New Deal democracy smuggled into the old, aristocratic polity of the university. The study of religion did not suffer the fate of its semantic kin because, by comparison, it had a much older heritage and a modest pride of place in the realm of letters from which it could trace descent—what was once known as theology. Finally, the human impulse for the academic study of religion, whether under clerical or strictly magisterial oversight, has always been the Augustinian fides quaerans intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”). Up until the great American “cultural revolution” of the sixties, the fides had been couched at an institutional level in the Protestant/Catholic/Jew complex. Subsequent to that era, when Religious Studies came aboard, the locus of faith shifted toward the privatized, syncretistic, psycho-spiritual experimentalism of middle class consumer society, which was seeded within the drug culture of youth, watered by the rise of the “alternative” religious groups that followed, and harvested in the so-called human potential movement of the late 1970s. Such a fides from the outset had also been shaped by the existentialist and neo-Romantic protest of the post-war literate against the suzerainty of science and the fascination with technology. The field now must face the wincing fact that all the aforementioned factors, in which the operative assumptions of the “discipline” have been embedded from the beginning, have been quietly erased (Raschke 1986, 131– 132).

Raschke packs a lot of cultural history into this passage, but his thesis may be condensed into a single, hard-to-deny observation: the modern academic enterprise was created during the Cold War by drawing on ideas first developed by twentieth-century anti-communists (Arvidsson 2006, Benavides 2004, Grottanelli 2008, Lincoln 1999, Stausberg 2007, Stausberg 2008). As Gustavo Benavides puts it, by digging up the field’s past we have discovered “a case of ideological transfiguration in which both religion and its counterpart, the study of religion, play a central role” (Benavides 2008, 271). As evidence for this assertion, compare Tweed’s reflections on dwelling with those of, say, Eliade on the Centre. “Dwelling, as I use the term, involves three overlapping processes,” Tweed advises: mapping, building, and inhabiting. It refers to the organic-cultural flows that allow devotees to map, build, and inhabit worlds. It is homemaking. In other words, as clusters of dwelling practices, religions orient individuals and groups in time and space, transform the natural environment, and allow devotees to inhabit the worlds they construct (Tweed 2006, 82).

In principle, this point could be formally recast in the language of evolutionary biology: religion identifies the stochastically significant peaks, valleys, and local optima for individuals and groups living within particular four-dimensional “fitness” landscapes. Tweed means more than this, though. By establishing a home—a point from which all distances can be measured as X units away—religion thereby establishes the precondition for every other act of mapping, building, and inhabiting. We are back to pondering the nature of Homo religiosus. To see why, recall Eliade’s well-known ruminations on the vast, polysemic nature of the Hindu mandala:

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This multivalency, this applicability to multiple although closely comparable planes, is a characteristic of the symbolism of the Centre in general. This is easily understandable, since every human being tends, even unconsciously, towards the Centre, and towards his own center, where he can find integral reality: sacredness. This desire, to find himself at the very heart of the real—at the Centre of the World, the place of communication with Heaven—explains the ubiquitous use of “Centres of the World.” We have seen how the habitation of man was assimilated to the Universe, the hearth or smoke-hole being homologized with the Centre of the World; so that all houses—like all temples, palaces and cities—are situated at one and the same point, the Centre of the Universe (Eliade 1991, 54).

To my eye, Tweed’s home is a dead ringer for Eliade’s Centre of the World; his dwelling a substitute for the other’s desire to find ourselves at the heart of the real. Crossing and Dwelling was published more than a half-century after Images and Symbols. Nevertheless, if Tweed’s book is any indication, GOFRS remains the kind of Daseinsgeschichte that twentieth-century anti-Marxists desired.

Chapter Six Real Enough to Count: Critical Criticism and the Genealogy of “Religion” I’d like to begin this chapter with an implausible, borderline absurd proposition: Karl Marx could be essential for assembling an academic study of religion worth having in the twenty-first century. I say this because his anti-idealizing attitude is especially useful for clearing away, in a properly Lockean fashion, the historical bramble “which lies in the way to knowledge” (Locke 1825, xi). The previous chapter tried to identify how Marx’s diagnostic attitude—bolstered by the work of Charles Tilly—might be harnessed to bypass the uninspiring study of religion as religion. In what follows, I will argue that only someone like Marx can help scholars get past the broadly post-structuralist thesis that religion is a mirage, a mere discursive effect of the “religion” category.¹³¹ Broadly speaking, the religious literacy folks represent a middle-of-the-road coalition of institutional conservatives and dyed-in-the-wool liberals eager to preserve as much of the status quo as they can. There has never been anything wrong with GOFRS, they insist, it’s just that no one else on campus ever seems to get it. As a result, the field’s defenders inevitably come off a bit preachy. It is this reputation for being “square” which has allowed the critics of “religion” to fashion themselves as the field’s critical vanguard. That is, only a figure with the bona fides of a radical can challenge the genealogical critique of “religion” without sounding like someone’s chaperone or accountant. It takes someone like Marx, in other words, to persuasively cast doubt on the “genealogical” project from the far Left—to reveal how the genealogy of “religion” loses much of its outré allure once we agree that it is time to close the curtains on the dying study of religion per se.

 In what follows I treat the genealogists of “religion” as relatively distinct from GOFRS, but things are murkier at ground-level. There are plenty of equivocating genealogists who argue—à la Wilfred Cantwell Smith—that “religion” is a discursive construct which represents an artificially thin slice of real religion. Notwithstanding her appeals to Talal Asad, for instance, Saba Mahmoud makes stunningly conventional, non-genealogical comparisons throughout Politics of Piety. Thus, we are told: “It is noteworthy that Islam, unlike a number of other orthodox religious traditions (for example, strands of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity), does not place a high premium on the practice of sexual abstinence and regards the pursuit of sexual pleasure (within the bounds of a marital relationship) as a necessary virtue both for women and men” (Mahmoud 2005, 110). Genealogically speaking, this sentence is meaningless. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-017

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From Something to Nothing: The Early-modern Politics of Not-politics One of the best-established and most plausible genealogical critiques of “religion” is that the category belongs to a conceptual cluster which initially provided—and, to one degree or another, continues to furnish—the means by which politics might be distinguished from not-politics. In essence, the concept helped elites discriminate between the issues they preferred to treat as public and collective and those they would rather handle as private and singular. ¹³² The public part of this equation typically meant establishing a politico-juridical regime capable of enforcing contracts and, above all else, protecting private property. Not for nothing did the British Parliament expand capital punishment for crimes against property until the “Bloody Code” identified more than two hundred such transgressions from poaching rabbits on a nobleman’s wilds to pickpocketing anything worth more than 5 shillings (King and Ward 2015, Linebaugh 1991).¹³³ But what socialists disparaged as the “night-watchman idea” [Nachtwächteridee] of the modern state represented genuine historical progress for those positioned to flourish in this new order. “The prosperity of manufactures and commerce in any state implies at once that it has freed itself from the worst parts of the feudal system,” Thomas Malthus judges in the sixth edition of Essay on the Principle of Population: “It shows that the great body of the people are not in a state of servitude; that they have both the power and the will to save; that when capital accumulates it can find the means of secure employment, and consequently that the government is such as to afford the necessary protection to property” (Malthus 1992, 141). The embryonic capitalist order meant freedom— for some, at least. Yet, the specter of the nightwatchman state has always presented a dilemma for the capital class. Any regime strong enough to punish cheats, frauds, and thieves is also strong enough to ignore contracts, expropriate property, and tax wealth at will. Constitutional liberals are thus saddled with a kind of perpetual pushmi-pullyu ambivalence regarding state power—something Mark Blyth calls

 Consider British confusion over “hook-swinging” in colonial India as a case in point (Dirks 2001). The policy of “cultural” non-intervention—adopted by colonial administrators in the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising—helped to create a context in which a socio-taxonomic question like “Is that religion?” became an urgent matter of gouvernementalité.  These sorts of calculations are always something between unreliable and pointless, but by one measure an 1815 shilling was worth about $103 (USD 2022). This means that men and women could be sent to Tyburn’s Tree for stealing anything more valuable than $515 (USD 2022) in early nineteenth-century England.

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liberalism’s “can’t live with it, can’t live without it, don’t want to pay for it” problem (Blyth 2013, 127). This fear of a tyrannical, property-expropriating state helps to explain the other liberal trait worth highlighting. Since the public domain (i. e., politics) is by definition the realm of coercion and constraint, liberals have historically preferred to relegate as many things as possible to the “private” realm of voluntary contracts and, let’s say, extremely selective notions of individual liberty. State power is there to deal with the bad apples who disrupt “invisible hand” equilibria between voluntary buyers and sellers. The good apples are barely aware that the state exists at all. “Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government,” John Stuart Mill warned: If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name. And the evil would be greater, the more efficiently and scientifically the administrative machinery was constructed—the more skillful the arrangements for obtaining the best qualified hands and heads with which to work it (Mill 1991, 107).

By arguing that public transportation is tantamount to tyranny, Mill accidentally reveals how classical liberalism presupposes a specific class position within a particular kind of property-based social order. In short, liberalism represents the moral conscience of the moneyed and the propertied: the folks who have enough wealth to pay for what they want and, therefore, enough wealth to fear that others are coming for it. In other words, the sorts of people Marx had in mind when he talked about the bourgeoisie. For the genealogists, the category of “religion” thus gestures toward both the coercive apparatus of the modern, administrative state as well as its twin: “bourgeois” civil society.¹³⁴ William Penn was an early advocate for this bilateral social vision and called upon the ancient Christian trope of the two kingdoms as justifi-

 Despite his reputation for obscurity, Hegel couldn’t be clearer about this in Philosophy of Right: civil society mediates individual needs and satisfactions “by means of the police and the corporation” (Hegel 1991, 226, §188).

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cation.¹³⁵ “My Kingdom, says Christ, is not of this World, nor is the Magistrate’s Kingdom of the other World,” he stipulates in An Address to Protestants: Let Christ have his Kingdom, he is sufficient for it; and let Caesar have his, ’tis his Due. Give unto Caesar the Things that are Caesar’s, and to God the Things that are God’s. Then there are Things that belong not to Caesar, and we are not to give those to him which belong not to him; and such are God’s Things, Divine Things, Things of an Eternal Reference: But those that belong to Caesar and his Earthly Kingdom, must be, of Duty, rendred to him. If any shall ask me, What are the Things properly belonging to Caesar? I answer in Scripture Language, To love Justice, do Judgment, relieve the Oppressed, right the Fatherless, and in general be a Terror unto Evil-doers, and a Praise to them that do well; for this is the Great End of Magistracy: And in these Things they are to be obey’d of Conscience as well as Interest (Penn 1679, 797).

Penn’s Biblical lesson on “religion” and “politics” was everything in its place and a place for everything. Around the same time, Samuel Pufendorf was imagining a similar sort of socio-taxonomic order in The Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. For Pufendorf, it was “most evident, that Civil Governments were not erected for Religions sake; or that Men did not enter into Civil Societies, that they might with more conveniency establish, and exercise their Religion” (Pufendorf 1698, 9). Religion and mundane governance were different sports played on different fields with different equipment; try to play both at the same time and you end up playing neither. Then, of course, there is John Locke’s well-known distinction between the business of civil government (i. e., the protection of “outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like”) and the business of religion (i. e., the care for, or salvation of, souls) (Locke 2010, 7). Telling metaphors, one might add, from a Church of England scrivener with some financial “skin” in the British colonial enterprise (e. g., Armitage 2004). Both critics and cranks know that it is rhetorically savvy to denounce an opponent’s mere rhetoric in the name of the Truth. Walk a bit farther along these tracks and we can see how there is nothing more quintessentially political than the ability to designate some issue as non-political. ¹³⁶ This recognition is what fem-

 Genealogists of the category rarely pay it much mind, but the early modern discourse on religion as a civic institution for moral instruction draws upon ancient (Livy), Renaissance (Machiavelli), early-modern (Harrington), and Enlightenment (Rousseau) varieties of republicanism (Fontana 1994; van Gelderen and Skinner 2002).  Hegemonic power, David Graeber offers, “is not the power to win a contest, but the power to define the rules and stakes, not the power to win an argument, but the power to define what the argument is about” (Graeber 2007, 403). Considered from this perspective, the institutional stalemate between GOFRS and the critical critics of “religion”— where, ironically, the genealogists have mostly won at the discursive level but are utterly out-matched at the institutional level—in-

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inists mean when they insist “the personal is political.” Keep travelling along this same path and eventually it becomes obvious that “religion” is one of those furtive categories—like “riot” or “injustice” or “civil society”—which “serve political and normative ends admirably despite hindering description and explanation of the social phenomena at which they point” (Tilly 2004b, 5).¹³⁷ Appreciating the category’s ineluctably hybrid, empirico-normative status helps to explain why genealogists insist that any and every attempt to use “religion”—to speak of some set of practices or institutions or actors as religious—necessarily pursues some set of local, politico-normative interests. They aren’t totally off base. When bakers and county clerks in the United States refuse equal treatment to members of the LGBTQ community, they typically cite their “sincerely held” and thus non-negotiable religious beliefs. This unseemly pattern fuels the genealogical hunch that “religion” is a tool so specialized that it can only be used to do one thing: depoliticize some corners of our collective lives. “The category ‘religion’ and its essentialized distinction from secular politics, economics, the nation state and other rhetorical constructions is basic to modern Anglophone thinking about the world,” Tim Fitzgerald warns us: “These categories have historical origins in specific power conditions in early colonialism, and have become transformed into an Anglo-American mythology that takes on the appearance of intuitively obvious, universal truths” (Fitzgerald 2011, 85). If I understand him correctly, Fitzgerald’s thesis is that religion only appears to exist in the present, or seems to have existed in the past, because the category of “religion” itself has confused and deranged the Anglophone mind.¹³⁸

dicates that neither side is strong enough, thus far, to make a given definition of the field “stick.” If we view the critical study of “religion” as a stalled or failed academic insurrection, the two most likely outcomes are: either (1) the movement withers on the vine and is forgotten; or (2) the project is neutralized and incorporated into the field’s institutional memory. However, if neither side can win or agree to move on—and thereby establish some working consensus regarding what the field is about—the entire academic enterprise is likely bound for the dustbin.  The basic issue is whether a given category does or does not identify causally coherent and relatively distinct sets of social actors, phenomena, mechanisms, etc. Since Tilly rejects terrorism and terrorist because they are politically powerful but explanatorily weak, the analogous question about “religion” is whether it is closer to the problematic-but-analytically-useful “riot” or the problematic-but-analytically-useless “terrorism.”  I am, philosophically speaking, uneasy about the way Fitzgerald moves between a claim regarding: (a) the readily traversable gap that separates “Anglophone thinking” and “European languages”; and (b) the apparent chasm that distinguishes them both from “non-European languages.” All good translation is a matter of more-or-less rather than yes-or-no. To the extent that the category’s critical critics are toying with the notion of “religion” as an untranslatable term or category, they are also flirting with the deeply suspect notion of an untranslatable or private language.

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One way of parsing this claim is to say that within the Space of Reasons, “religion” is so close to being an odious racial slur—and so far away from being a nonprejudicial category like “gravity” or “atoms”—that anyone who wants to retain or retool the category should be ashamed. Another, less provocative way of formulating the idea is to insist, à la Derrida, that the category’s constitutive outside makes it impossible to establish a lasting, portable distinction between religion and notreligion (Derrida 1998). The fieldstone wall meant to separate the category’s interior from its exterior is too low to prevent phenomena on the is-not side from drifting over into the is side, or vice versa.¹³⁹ If the genealogical analysis is correct, no amount of scholarly rigor or methodological self-reflection can ever overcome the category’s past. Epistemically speaking, to study religion is to forget that Christmas cookies do not naturally assume the idealized forms of trees and snowmen: we impose this order of things. Normatively speaking, to study religion is to rubber stamp something akin to a Tylorian survival from the septic, Anglo-European colonial past.¹⁴⁰ When we use “religion” to organize a data set, it is as if we are using repugnant racial slurs to categorize and study human beings. This is why, they argue, the only legitimate academic pursuit is the deconstruction of the “religion” category itself. In fact, not even last chapter’s modest proposal to treat religion as a strategy for pursuing contentious politics is clean enough to pass the genealogists’ sniff test. Since it is incoherent to talk about religion without “religion,” even this approach is complicit in an “ideological” attempt to conceal or misconstrue political struggles—or, I suppose, evidence of my inability to “unthink” a metaphysical assumption.¹⁴¹

 Squint hard enough, and the “new” post-structuralist claim that everything on the not-religion side of the wall eventually migrates to the religion side begins to resemble the “old” conceit that all human activity has an “unconscious” religious dimension. On the paradox of post-structuralism’s radical conservativism, see Pankakoski and Backman (2020).  Fitzgerald insists that while Bruce Lincoln appears to be a critical, sophisticated scholar: “his work is actually re-embedding an uncritical and essentialized discourse on both religion and the secular. In this sense his writing performs important ideological work in reconfirming a network of categorical assumptions around which the world can remain polarized, while generating the appearance of a man hard at work deconstructing myths” (Fitzgerald 2006, 392). From this perspective, it is impossible to use the category without committing a petty academic thought crime or misdemeanor.  The genealogists of “religion” are consistently disappointed that so few in the field have abandoned the category. “For some scholars,” Russell McCutcheon suspects, “it is because the discourse on religion has been so successful that they cannot unthink their shared assumption that some parts of the human are transcendental and thus deeply meaningful” (McCutcheon 2018, 117; emphasis added). I suppose it could be the case that these folks are unable to “unthink” their linguistic practices, but it is a singularly uncharitable diagnosis. Here’s another explanation: most scholars

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Puzzles of Production: Wage Labor, Slavery, and the Economy Even though the genealogists prefer to invoke Nietzsche and Foucault, the basic historical thrust of the genealogical argument regarding “religion”—namely, that our conceptual vocabularies are human creations which tend to prioritize some things and disregard others—is a recurrent theme in Marx’s various critiques of political economy. Here he is in Poverty of Philosophy, addressing the half-hearted historicism he discerned in Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions: Economists articulate the bourgeois relations of production, division of labor, credit, money, etc., as fixed, immutable, eternal categories. M. Proudhon finds these categories ready-made and wants to explain how these categories, principles, laws, ideas, thoughts are formed and created. Economists explain to us how to produce under these conditions; but what they don’t explain is how these relations are themselves produced—that is, the historical movement that brings them to life. M. Proudhon takes these relations as principles, categories, abstract thoughts, and need only arrange them in a specific order, which is already there, in alphabetical order, at the end of every treatise on political economy. The economists’ material is the moveable and moving life of human beings; M. Proudhon’s material is the economists’ dogmas. But as soon as we fail to follow the historical development of the relations of production—and the categories are merely the theoretical expression of these relations; as soon as we see in these categories nothing more than spontaneous thoughts—thoughts that are independent of the real relations—we are forced to assign their origin to the movement of pure reason. How does pure, eternal, impersonal reason give birth to these thoughts? How does it manage to create them? (MECW 6: 132/MEW 4: 126 – 127/Marx 1896: 144– 145; my translation).

Marx is making two distinct points here. First, the categories of political economy are “socially” and thus analytically valid in some contexts because they describe how the capitalist mode of production works—at least from the capitalist’s perspective. This also helps to explain why—after quoting David Ricardo on the way in which raw materials and “subsistence costs” (i. e., wages) are equivalent line-items on the balance sheet—Marx tries to assuage the moral indignation of his readers. “Of course, Ricardo’s language could not be more cynical,” we read: “To put the cost of manufacturing hats and the cost of maintaining human beings in the same row is to turn people into hats. But don’t cry out too loudly about his cynicism. The cynicism is to be found in the situation and not in the words used to describe the situation” (MECW 6: 125/MEW 4: 82– 83/Marx 1896, 65; my translation). It is, if you will, this mode of social being which establishes the historical conditions of possibility for this form of social consciousness. It is the capitalist mode of proin the field are unwilling to shelve “religion” because it is difficult to earn one’s keep in a Department of Religion while insisting that everyone who claims to study religion is a doofus.

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duction itself which gives rise to a second-order discourse which equates human beings and hats in terms of costs. ¹⁴² Arguing otherwise is like using the wrong end of a shovel to dig a hole. Marx’s second point is that, even though they are instrumentally useful within a capitalist order, the categories of classical political economy cannot account for themselves. They are unable explain how the capitalist mode of production itself came to be; nor can they indicate whether it does, or should, have much of a future. By way of philosophical analogy, one could say that Marx is tweaking the familiar Kantian distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. If your aim is accumulating capital, then pay close attention to Ricardo: he was on to something. However, if your aim—as a socialist, radical republican, militant democrat, or communist—is constructing a post-capitalist collective order, these same principles will lead you astray. “Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production,” Marx continues: M. Proudhon, like a true philosopher, turns things upside down and then sees in the real relations only the incarnation of those principles, those categories, which—the philosopher tells us—lay sleeping within the “impersonal reason of humanity.” M. Proudhon, the economist, understands quite well that people make cloth, linen, or silk under specific relations of production. But what he does not understand is that these particular social relations are produced by human being as well as the cloth, linen, etc. Social relations are intimately linked [verknüpfen] to productive forces. By acquiring new productive forces, human beings change their mode of production; and by changing their mode of production—the way they earn a living—they also change all of their social relations. The handmill yields a society with feudal lords, the steam-mill a society with industrial capitalists. The same people who shape their social relations according to their material productivity also shape the principles, ideas, and categories according to their social conditions. Thus these ideas, these categories, are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory [transitoires] or fleeting [vergänglich] products (MECW 6: 165 – 166/MEW 4: 130/Marx 1896: 151– 152; my translation).

From this perspective, Proudhon was guilty of mistaking the hypothetical imperatives of capital accumulation for the categorical imperatives of moral duty and rational reflection. Once discovered, Marx never strayed far from this position.

 “We never find in the ancients an investigation into which form of land ownership, etc. is the most productive or creates the greatest wealth,” Marx notices in the 1857– 1858 manuscripts: “Wealth does not appear as the purpose of production, even though Cato may very well examine which way of cultivating a field is the most profitable, or Brutus on how to lend his money and yield the most interest. The inquiry is always about which mode of property [Weise des Eigentums] produces the best citizens” (MECW 28: 411/MEW 42: 395; my translation).

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In the 1857– 1858 manuscripts, for example, he once again spars with Proudhon to clarify his own sense of classical political economy’s radical historicity. “What Mr. Proudhon calls the extra-economic emergence of property—by which he means landed property—is the pre-bourgeois relationship of the individual to the objective conditions of labor,” he judges: In other words, the extra-economic emergence of property means nothing but the historical emergence of bourgeois economy, of the forms of production that are theoretically or ideally expressed by the categories of political economy. That pre-bourgeois history, and every phase of it, also has its economy and an economic basis of movement, is au fond the mere tautology that human life has always rested on production, social production—d’une maniere ou d’une autre—whose relations we call economic relations (MECW 28: 412– 413/MEW 42: 396 – 397; my translation).

One could gloss this passage as the claim that Homo sapiens has always engaged in productive, creative activity—but we have not always had an economy which could be fruitfully analyzed with the categories of political economy. We have always “metabolized” bits of the world to survive; we haven’t always done so in clumps of time measured by money. Once one knows to look for it, this intuition—that temporary but objectively valid economic categories emerge out of historically contingent material and social conditions—can be found darting in and out of view throughout his writings. It appears in the claim from “Grundrisse” that economic categories are cognitive expressions of particular “ways of life” [Daseinsformen] or “conditions of existence” [Existenzbestimmungen] (MECW 28: 43/MEW 42: 40). It is what Marx means when he suggests that the categories of classical political economy “are socially valid, and thus objective thought-forms [Gedankenformen] for the relations of production within a historically specific, social mode of production” (MECW 35: 87/MEW 23: 90; my translation). It is the muscle behind his conviction that it is not natural for human beings to live or die according to capital’s effective demand for labor. “Nature does not produce owners of money or commodities on one side and mere owners of labor power on the other,” he writes: This relationship is not a natural-historical one, nor is it a societal relationship that is common to all historical periods. It is obviously the result of past historical development, the product of many economic upheavals [Umwälzungen] and the destruction of a whole series of older forms of social production. Even the economic categories that we considered earlier bear the tracks of history. The existence of a product as a commodity is wrapped up in [eingehüllen] specific historical conditions. To become a commodity, a product must not be produced as the immediate means of subsistence for the producer himself. If we investigated further and asked under what circumstances do all or even the majority of products assume the form of commodities, it

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would be discovered this only happens on the basis of a very specific, capitalist mode of production (MECW 35: 179 – 180/MEW 23: 183 – 184; my translation).

At first glance, the move to rigorously historicize the categories of political economy appears to be promising fodder for the genealogists of “religion.” Upon closer inspection, however, things turn out to be both more complicated and more interesting. It goes without saying that “religion” is no less fleeting and temporary than “wage labor.” This is why it makes sense to argue that Homo sapiens may have always trafficked with ancestors, gods, and spirits, but we have not always done so under the category’s taxonomic banner (Smith 1982, xi). So far, so good. But if we follow Marx’s lead, and view categories as the abstract or conceptual expression of real social relations, the crucial genealogical misstep becomes apparent. In the 1861– 1863 manuscripts, Marx howls at Proudhon’s contention that the difference between capital and labor is entirely subjective. “As if one could say: From the standpoint of society, there are neither slaves nor citizens; only human beings,” he barks: Rather, they are only this outside of society. Being a slave or being a citizen are specific social modes of existence [Daseinsweisen] of person A and B. Human beings as such are not slaves. They are slaves in and through the society to which they belong. A slave’s existence and a citizen’s existence are social determinations, the relations between person A and B. What P says here about capital and its product [Produkt] means that, from the standpoint of society, there are no differences between capitalists and workers—but, to be precise, these differences only exist from the standpoint of society (MECW 30: 154/MEW 43: 146; my translation).

Pace Aristotle, no human being is a “natural-born” slave. The status of bonded laborer is a “fleeting” juridical and social identity pinned to a body, not a genotypical trait which is phenotypically expressed. This does not mean, however, that human beings haven’t been born into slavery or can’t be turned into slaves through the violent process of enslavement. It is only a peculiar sort of metaphysician who finds any comfort in thinking that—despite all the bills of sale and shackles and bullwhips and mortgage contracts—no African-American was ever really a slave in the antebellum South. Slightly rephrased, although “slave” is a discursive or rhetorical category it isn’t only or merely so; the category also refers to objective juridico-political practices and economic relations. Throughout the Mississippi Delta, Black chattel slavery was a real social construction that generated real financial profits (e. g., Coclanis 2010).¹⁴³

 This intuition regarding the socially objective but temporally subjective nature of economic cat-

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Now, compare Marx’s perspective on the real lives of social categories with Fitzgerald’s central contention regarding “religion.” “Though the history of the emergence of modernity is well known through the writings of historians,” he writes in Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: the changing ideological functions of “religion” as a category in relation to the emergence of “politics” and “economics” conceived as separate domains tends to get buried from view. There are countless studies of the relation between religion and capitalism, or religion and society, or religion and science, or religion and politics. But these are not studies of the formation and function of categories in rhetorical discursive constructions. They are studies between something called religion and something called society, or something called politics. Today, it is widely assumed that religion and religions are and have existed universally at all times and in all places. That is to say, they are a constituent of human nature and in the order of things. As such they can be studied as special objects of scientific investigation. But my point is that this set of assumptions is modernity. The categories ‘religion’ and ‘religions’, which are being constantly regenerated by the subject area of Religious Studies, are an important constituent part of modernity. The ideology of Religious Studies defines both modernity and colonial consciousness. We are not studying what exists in the world, but by reproducing religion and religions we are tacitly reproducing the whole rhetorical configuration (Fitzgerald 2007, 25 – 26).

I take Fitzgerald’s point here to be that “religion” is only and can only ever be a discursive or rhetorical category: there are no social determinations, institutions, practices, or relations to which the category can possibly refer. Religion, as a result, is everywhere and always a kind of mirage.¹⁴⁴ At a bare minimum then, Fitzgerald is arguing that the ideological category of “religion” coaxed us into falsely believing that religions exist. Religion, as a point of fact, belongs to that class of things that we once thought existed but no longer do—like the monstrous races of Blemmyae and Cynocephali (Daston and egories is another enduring theme in Marx’s writings. For example, a version of the claim that slave is a socially objective but not “natural” status appears a decade earlier in the 1849 “Wage Labor and Capital” articles published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. “One only becomes a slave in certain circumstances,” he points out: “A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in specific conditions does it become capital. Torn out of these relations, it is as little capital as gold is money in and of itself, or sugar is the price of sugar” (MECW 9: 211/MEW 6: 407; my translation).  Steven Engler takes a different route but eventually arrives at a similar conclusion regarding Fitzgerald’s core claim. In his judgment, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity “presumes that either ‘generic religion’ refers to something objective, in which case the study of religion is viable, or it is ideological, in which case the study of religion is not viable. This is the basis of its view that if ‘religion’ does not pick out a distinct domain of objects, if it functions only as the occluded other of ‘the secular,’ then there is nothing to study apart from that discursive opposition itself ” (Engler 2011, 429).

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Park 1998). Since “half-human, half-non-human” creatures were never created by natural selection, their brief historical “existence” was always a figment of the human imagination. Because of this, their elimination from the pages of natural history was nothing more than the negation of a nothing that never was. A similar lesson goes for the modern humanities and social sciences: we have mistaken the dream world of “religion” for reality. Now that we have awaken from that dogmatic slumber, we must add religion to the Catalogue of Non-existent Things. But this is where the story begins to get more complicated and more interesting. Marx would pillory the genealogists’ idealizing habit of inverting the historical relationship between “social existence” and “forms of social consciousness.” Case in point: I don’t see how he could avoid sneering at the notion that by modifying the “rhetorical configuration” we use to talk about modernity we transform modernity itself. As early as The Holy Family, Marx was attacking Herr Bruno & Co.’s “critical critique” of socialism for this kind of linguistic idealism. “According to critical critique, the whole evil lies only in the workers’ ‘thinking,’” Marx writes: Now, it is true that English and French workers have formed associations in which their immediate needs as workers, as well as their needs as human beings, form the subject of mutual instruction; moreover, in these associations they express a very thorough and comprehensive consciousness of the ‘immense’ and ‘immeasurable’ force which arises from their interaction. But the masses of communist workers active in the workshops of Manchester and Lyons, for example, do not believe that they can, by ‘pure thought,’ escape from their industrial masters or their own practical humiliation. They experience, quite painfully, the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage labor and the like are not ideal fantasies but very practical, very concrete products of their self-estrangement; and that, therefore, they must be abolished in a practical, concrete way if the individual is to become an individual both in thought, in consciousness, as well as in mass existence, in life. Critical critique, on the other hand, teaches them that they are no longer wage laborers in reality once they abolish the idea of wage labor in thought, once they stop thinking of themselves as wage laborers in thought and—in accordance with this exuberant conceit—no longer allow themselves to be paid for their person. As absolute idealists, as ethereal beings, they can then live naturally on the ether of pure thought forever after (MECW 4: 52– 53/MEW 2: 55 – 56; my translation).

For the textile workers in Manchester and Lyon, a revolution in thought—or, recast in the appropriate scholastic idiom, the “deauthorization” or “deconstruction” of the operative rhetorical configuration—was inadequate for one fundamental reason: the source of their misfortune was neither inside their heads nor generated by the discourse of political economy. Granting language this much leverage over social reality ignores the fundamental difference between being and thinking. Or, at the very least, it puts the metaphysical cart before the flesh-and-blood horse. In the 1840s, Marx even hurled the insult that only theologians are unwilling or

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unable to recognize “that there is a world in which consciousness and being are distinguished, a world that remains as it is if I merely abolish its existence in thought, its existence as a category” (MECW 4: 193/MEW 2: 204; my translation). Ironically, with Marx as our guide, the twenty-first century genealogy of “religion” ends up resembling nineteenth-century Christian theology. To my mind, then, Marx’s historical guideline suggests one unavoidable conclusion. If the category of “religion” is genuinely no less essential than the categories of “capital” or “slavery” or “wage labor” for understanding modernity, then it cannot be dismissed as a linguistic mirage or a merely rhetorical configuration. Recast in a slightly different and more critical way: if “religion” is not like the other categories, then it is not a candidate for what Marx means by critique. Anything that fails to make a real difference really doesn’t matter. As he and Engels humorously make the point in “German Ideology”: A brave man once imagined that people drown in water only because they are possessed by the idea of heaviness [Schwere]. If only they could put this notion out of mind—for example, by declaring it to be a superstitious, religious concept—they would never be in danger around water. All his life he fought against the illusion of heaviness, the harmful consequences of which statistics delivered new and abundant proof (MECW 5: 24/MEGA2 I.5: 3; my translation).

Substitute “religion” for heaviness and the conclusion remains more-or-less the same. That is, once the genealogical critique of socio-taxonomic categories is decoupled from a properly basic interest in the material conditions of existence [Existenzbedingungen] or social living conditions [Lebensbedingungen], the project dissolves into an unsavory puddle of linguistic idealism.¹⁴⁵ Do categories matter? Of course they do—but, once again, only up to a point. Reformulated in a way that both Marx and Engels might enjoy: no matter which rhetorical configuration Don Quixote adopts or assumes—regardless of his discursive “positionality”—the windmills on the hill never become fire-breathing dragons.¹⁴⁶

 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposes that twenty-first century anthropologists should take as their subject the existential worlds that indigenous conceptual vocabularies “project.” This enterprise, he explains, is not “a matter of reducing anthropology to a series of ethno-sociological essays about worldviews. This is because, in the first place, no world that is ready to be viewed exists—no world that would precede one’s view of it, or precede even the distinction between the visible (or thinkable) and the invisible (or presumed), which provides the coordinates for this manner of thinking” (de Castro 2013, 484). If idealism is fairly described as the claim that “sensible objects (such as tables and chairs, apples and pears) and their sensible properties (such as shape and color) are nothing more than mind-dependent entities,” then de Castro has managed to repackage traditional, Berkeleyan idealism as an epistemically radical stance (Rickless 2013, 1).  “When Don Quixote takes up his lance against windmills, that is in keeping with his office and role,” Engels writes: “but we cannot possibly allow Sancho Panza to do such a thing” (MECW 24:

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Now extend this piece of wisdom to the historical relationship between the economy and the “economy” category. What Marx noticed earlier than most is that a specific juridico-political arrangement is the historical a priori for the modern economy. That is, our ability to talk meaningfully about the economy as something distinct from the people around us carrying and cooking and cleaning and making and planting and swapping stuff is itself a consequence of capital’s globalizing history. This includes measuring things like the Consumer Price Index, Gross Domestic Product, or “velocity” of money. ¹⁴⁷ Is “the economy” a contingent, fleeting category?¹⁴⁸ Yes. Does this mean that the twenty-first century economy isn’t real or is merely an ideological mirage? Not at all—unless you’re prepared to argue that the University of Oxford isn’t real because only colleges like Balliol, Jesus, and Magdalen really exist. But this move commits what philosophers call the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or a category mistake. ¹⁴⁹ We are justified in talking about the economy because “the economy” is an abstract expression of, or a shorthand reference to, real material conditions and social relations. For example, in “Results from the Direct Production Process” (c. 1863 – 1864)— informally known as the “unpublished sixth chapter” of Capital—Marx reflects on the tendency for capital to flow towards the path of least resistance when it comes 458/MEW 19: 187; my translation). In this sense, the genealogists of “religion” have been emulating the wrong half of Cervantes’ comedic duo.  Moses Finley succinctly posed the key historiographical question this way: “But what if a society was not organized for the satisfaction of its material wants by ‘an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets’? It would then not be possible to discover or formulate laws (‘statistical uniformities’ if one prefers) of economic behaviour, without which a concept of ‘the economy’ is unlikely to develop, economic analysis impossible” (Finley 1973, 22). Thus, one might say that the ancient world had commerce but no “economy” and gods but no “religion.” At the same time, however, there is nothing inherently wrong about using contemporary analytic categories to think about how ancient societies produced, distributed, and consumed both necessary and discretionary goods (e. g., Scheidel and Friesen 2009). If one views organized-crime syndicates and state-making as points along a continuum, for example, there is a sense in which Marcus Aurelius—or Augustus, or Vespasian, or Trajan—really was the CEO of Rome, Inc. (Martin 2015; see Tilly 1985).  On the “performativity” or discursive effects of economic categories see MacKenzie (2006), MacKenzie et al. (2007).  Gilbert Ryle (2009) described the distinction been an imaginary University of Oxford which does not exist, and specific colleges and libraries which are real, as a “category mistake.” Fitzgerald uses this term but in philosophically unfamiliar ways: “To read a distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ – in the sense of ‘non-religious’ – spheres into earlier European formations, or into formations articulated in non-European languages, is to muddy the waters before immersing in them, that is to say is to commit a category mistake” (Fitzgerald 2007, 7). It is unclear where the Rylean type-error or categorical mistake is being made. Fitzgerald seems instead to be talking about what analytic philosophers would call the challenge of radical translation or radical interpretation (e. g., Davidson 1973, Quine 1960).

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to creating and realizing surplus value. However, he shifts gears unexpectedly and underscores capital’s serpentine genius for finding ways over, under, around, and through all impediments or points of friction: on the one hand, creating for itself the means to overcome these frictions, insofar as they only arise from the nature of the relations of production themselves; on the other hand, eliminating all legal and extra-economic obstacles to its free movement in the various spheres of production by developing the specific [eigentümlich] mode of production [Produktionsweise]. More than anything else, it overthrows all legal or traditional barriers which prevent it from buying this or that kind of labor capacity, or from appropriating at will this or that kind of labor (MECW 34: 420/Marx 1970: 38; my translation).

Capital has a well-documented ability to “unpaint” itself out of the catastrophic corners it creates. As a result, the instrumental production and exchange of things for a financial profit has achieved an unprecedented degree of independence from traditional forms of socio-political authority and surplus extraction.¹⁵⁰ For now, it doesn’t matter all that much whether one prefers to describe this historical process in terms of an economy gradually “disembedded” from society (Polanyi 2001) or one increasingly “re-embedded” in transnational and global institutions (Slobodian 2018). The enduring point is that even if the economy isn’t a fact of natural history like bipedalism or prehensile thumbs, it has nevertheless become a fact of global social history. ¹⁵¹ A butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in the Amazon may not actually generate a storm powerful enough to destroy half of Europe. However, during the Asian Financial Crisis (c. 1997), we learned that a perceived weakness in the Thai baht could have laid waste to the entire Pacific Rim (e. g., Hunter et al. 1999). “To speak of the differentiation of the economic sphere in these senses is not, of course, to suggest that the political dimension is somehow extraneous to capitalist relations of production,” Ellen Meiksins Wood cautioned: The political sphere in capitalism has a special character because the coercive power supporting capitalist exploitation is not wielded directly by the appropriator and is not based on the

 This principle—that capital treats every would-be limit on its movement as “a barrier to be overcome”—is a foundational premise of David Harvey’s geography of global capitalism (e. g., Harvey 1999).  Benedict Anderson arrives at a similar conclusion regarding the exogenous categories used by Spanish census takers in the Philippines. “The new demographic topography put down deep social and institutional roots as the colonial state multiplied its size and functions,” he judges: “The flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices created ‘traffic-habits’ which in time gave real social life to the state’s earlier fantasies” (Anderson 1991, 169; emphasis added).

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producer’s political or juridical subordination to an appropriating master. But a coercive power and a structure of domination remain essential, even if the ostensible freedom and equality of the exchange between capital and labour mean that the “moment” of coercion is separate from the “moment” of appropriation. Absolute private property, the contractual relation that binds producer to appropriator, the process of commodity-exchange – all these require the legal forms, the coercive apparatus, the policing functions of the state. Historically, too, the state has been essential to the process of expropriation that is the basis of capitalism. In all these senses, despite their differentiation, the economic sphere rests firmly on the political (Wood 2016, 29 – 30).

One way of unpacking this claim is to highlight how the structures of medieval domination in Europe were gradually turned upside-down by capital. Political power and social status were no longer the preconditions for accumulating wealth or extracting a surplus. In this brave new world, financial affluence—rather than, say, hereditary nobility or military rank—is the appropriate foundation for acquiring political influence, social status, and raw power.¹⁵² Brick by brick and law by law, capital’s agents have created collective orders which create, regulate, and protect a near-absolute individual right to convert simple control into property—and these assets into monetizable capital. William Blackstone nearly gave the game away when he described the right of property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe” (Blackstone 2016, 1; see Pistor 2019). At least, that’s the view from above. Thomas Rainborough, hero of the seventeenth-century Putney Debates, expressed a version of this insight from below with exquisite brevity: “Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy” (As quoted in Linebaugh 2003, 121). The tendency of actual economic inequality to eat away at nominal juridico-political equality is what initially convinced nineteenth-century French socialists that the ‘89 virtues of liberté, égalité, fraternité remained largely unfulfilled. It is also why Marx ridiculed the French Constitution of 1848 as a bourgeois swindle. “The eternal contradictions of this Constitution of Humbug show plainly enough that the middle-class can be democratic in words, but will not be so in deeds,” he concluded at the time: “they will recognise [sic] the truth of a principle, but never carry it into practice” (MECW

 “All modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion. Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the means whereby the surplus is pumped out of the direct producer is ‘purely’ economic in form,” Perry Anderson concludes: “All other previous modes of exploitation operate through extra-economic sanctions—kin, customary, religious, legal or political” (Anderson 1974, 403).

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10: 578/MEW 7: 504). The Second Republic’s founding document wasn’t a case of ideological mystification; it was thumb-in-your-eye hypocrisy. Bring all of this together and it seems clear to me that Marx would ridicule genealogists for insisting that “religion” can only ever be a category but “wage labor” and “slavery” are both analytic categories and real social relations. This looks like a classic case of special pleading. Unless, of course, genealogists are also prepared to argue that neither wage labor nor slavery is real; but this would rather confirm the point about their idealism, wouldn’t it? If “religion” is only ever part of a rhetorical configuration—rather than, say, realized in the sorts of institutions, practices, and structured relations that make wage labor real enough to organize against, slavery real enough to abolish, and the economy real enough to measure—there are only two explanations. The first option is that “religion” does not emerge from real social relations and is instead, like the Blemmyae or Cynocephali, a linguistic fantasy generated by “the movement of pure reason” (MECW 6: 164/MEW 4: 128). If this is the case, then the “ideological critique” of the category lacks all but a quaint, antiquarian appeal. It is, in other words, a pejoratively academic endeavor. The second option is that the category emerges from real social relations which turn out to be largely inconsequential in the history of capitalism—and, thus, the modern world itself. Once again, rather than a radical historical project, the genealogist’s enterprise begins to look like the sort of extraneous, pointlessly scholastic exercise that Marx loved to belittle. In the 1861– 1863 manuscripts, he pauses to reflect on the strictly academic or “professorial type” [Professoralform] of political economy: which goes to work “historically” and, with wise moderation, seeks out what is “best” from everywhere; the contradictions don’t matter, just completeness. It is the enervation [Entgeistung] of all systems; the sharp point is snapped off, and everything fits together peacefully in a commonplace book [Collectaneenheft]. The heat of apologetics is moderated by erudition, which benevolently looks down on the exaggerations of economic thinkers and permits them to swim around in their mediocre porridge, but only as curiosities (MECW 32: 501/ MEGA2 II.3.4: 1500; my translation).

In the years to come, any academic study of religion worth having around will need to avoid the leaden disappointment of day-old porridge.

Is There a Class in This Text? For anyone familiar with classical or contemporary social theory, the meta-theoretical debates over “religion” wilt in comparison with efforts to nail down an opera-

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tionally productive, empirically adequate, and non-prejudicial notion of “class.” The literature is too vast to even begin summarizing.¹⁵³ Given this embarrassment of conceptual riches, however, one of the most remarkable trends over the last forty years or so has been the precipitous decline of class-based analysis in both the humanities and social sciences.¹⁵⁴ Indeed, the rhetorical turn ushered into place by post-structuralism has convinced many that the alleged existence of classes in general is a socio-taxonomic “myth” (e. g., Clark and Lipset 1991, Kingston 2000, Maza 2005, Pakulski and Waters 1996). There are no classes, we are told, only the rhetoric of “class.” ¹⁵⁵ “This development constitutes a striking repudiation of our disciplinary heritage,” David Grusky and Jesper Sørensen observed in the late 1990s: “it was not so long ago that commentators as mainstream as Stinchcombe (1979) could allege, without generating much in the way of controversy, that social class was the one and only independent variable of sociological interest” (Grusky & Sørensen 1998, 1188). It is, I submit, no mere coincidence that during the decline of class-analysis many of the most influential figures explicitly positioned themselves as post-Marx in a more-than-chronological sense (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Lash and Urry 1993, McLennan 1996). As Vivek Chibber observes, what makes the rise of political theorizing after Marx: politically interesting, and important, is that this is a theoretical current that, while holding on to the mantle of radical critique, has evinced not only a suspicion of class theory and the Marxist tradition, but an outright hostility to it. It is perhaps the first time that a major radical current in the Western intellectual firmament has been so hostile to the entire tradition of class analysis, and by extension, class politics. So while Marxists came to expect criticisms from the Right over the past century, they have now had to contend with a well-armored phalanx attacking from the Left. Hence, it is not that the retreat from class has heralded a fading of left-wing scholarship. It is, rather, that the very meaning of Left critique is changing. Class is just being pushed out of the progressive milieu (Chibber 2006, 359).

 The historiographical issues surrounding the category of class are so familiar that even a cursory review is unnecessary (e. g., Eley and Nield 2007). The friendliest overview of the relevant issues is probably Erik Olin Wright (2013). Wright —who once described himself as falling into Marxism, but choosing to stay—was dedicated to defending, fine-tuning, and probing the potentials of class analysis (Wright 1991).  As early as the mid-1990s, some academics were puzzled why—despite the omnipresence of the gender-class-race triad—the “second component is more often than not discretely dropped out even though it is the most potent and rising vector of inequality” (Wacquant 1996, 21).  Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that “class” is not also or cannot be a politically useful rhetorical instrument (Stedman Jones 1984). Lyndon Johnson once described Gerald Ford, the future President of the United States, as too dumb to “fart and chew gum at the same time” (As quoted in Brinkley 2007, 135). Unlike Ford, useful categories are typically capable of multi-tasking.

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The story of how the academy displaced Marx to make room for Derrida & Co., has been written about and argued over so many times that little more than a brief sketch is called for here (e. g., Chibber 2013).¹⁵⁶ Dashed off in a few broad strokes, the tale goes something like this. The initial seeds of discontent were sown in the late 1960s and early 1970s as several constituencies were marginalized within the anti-war and anti-imperialist Global Left. Since each form of injustice is irreducible to another, the subjective experience of oppression accumulates in biographically unique and damaging ways. The snag was that the “big tent” agenda never seemed to address the distinctive forms of injustice that were only experienced by members of non-white, nonmale, and non-straight communities. Reflecting on the political legacy of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), for example, Todd Gitlin—one-time president of SDS (1963 – 1964)—figures that the organization “engendered second-wave feminism, though sometimes in a paradoxical fashion. Many female members felt both empowered and thwarted—they gained skills and experience in organizing, but were angered by their second-class status in the organization” (Gitlin 2017). Rightly so, one might add. During the 1980s and early 1990s, academics began forging a new critical vocabulary for analyzing the particularities of injustice by drawing together various strands of post-structuralist Continental philosophy and “communitarian” AngloAmerican political theory. The result was the multicultural politics of difference (Wilmsen and McAllister 1996). While traditional Left-liberal concerns typically orbited around normative claims regarding individual rights, toleration, and procedural justice, the post-liberal Left prioritized group-differentiated rights, the virtue of recognition, and social justice (e. g., Kymlicka 1996, Miller 1999, Taylor 1992, Young 1990). Some went further and concluded that the universalist ambitions of conventional Left-liberalism had always been disingenuous—a placating front for far more insidious desires. From John Locke to Immanuel Kant to John Rawls, the project of maximizing individual liberty in the name of equal rights and institutional fairness always presupposed an appallingly patriarchal and racialized order (e. g., Eisenstein 1994, Mills 1997). Others went further still and claimed that—since marginalized racial and sexual communities have so often been excluded from modern, formal economies—

 Pounds of rotten fruit have been exchanged between those who emphasize particularity and recognition and those who prioritize solidarity and redistribution—more generous descriptions of what the combatants typically call “identity politics” and “class reductionism.” I mention this because much of what has been written to defend or attack these diverging agendas resembles an argument between the half-deaf. Each side seems to assume that, since the other side continues to disagree, they need to speak a bit louder next time (e. g., Fraser and Honneth 2003).

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even the traditional Marxist focus on class struggle fails to clear the bar. Scratch the surface, they argue, and you’ll notice that the invocation of “class” invariably means an interest in industrial wage laborers who are male, white, and straight (e. g., Roediger 1991, Frankenberg 1993). Marx wasn’t the champion of human emancipation in general; just the respectable White men who made up the nineteenth-century, transatlantic proletariat.¹⁵⁷ Recall that Marx described the lumpenproletariat as “the passive rot of the old society” in the Manifesto (MECW 6: 494/ MEW 4: 472; my translation). Engels, as usual, was more colorfully direct: The lumpenproletariat, this scum of degenerate subjects from every class, sets up its headquarters in big cities and is the worst of all possible allies. This riff-raff [Gesindel] is absolutely for sale [käuflich] and demanding [zudringlich] to boot. If, during every Revolution, the French workers wrote on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to thieves!) and even shot some of them, it was not out of enthusiasm for property but in the correct realization that, above all else, it is essential to keep this gang off one’s neck. Any leaders of the workers’ movement who rely on this rabble, or use them as bodyguards, demonstrates—by this fact alone—that they are traitors (MECW 21: 98/MEW 16: 398; my translation).

Here’s the thing: the American equivalent of the European lumpenproletariat is the hyper-segregated, mostly non-white “urban underclass.” How then can Marx and Engels be advocates for the emancipation of people for whom they had only scorn? “Ironically, to Black radicals of the twentieth century, one of the most compelling features of Marxism was its apparent universalism,” Cedric Robinson concludes in the second edition of Black Marxism: “But Marxism’s internationalism was not global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient explanator of cultural and social forces; and its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom struggles beyond or outside of the metropole” (Robinson 2000, xxx). No wonder Charles Mills (2003) gave one book the tell-tale title: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. The conscious, principled turn away from a Marxist focus on class has always seemed disastrous for those who think Marx remains relevant so long as capital stalks the planet in search of a return. Adolph Reed, Jr. is perhaps the most acute and enduring critic of the academic Left’s long-standing desire to be done with class. As such, he deserves to be quoted at length:

 “Just as we must make the distinctions between the mother country and the colony when dealing with Black people and White people as a whole,” Eldridge Cleaver warned his fellow Panthers: “we must also make this distinction when we deal with the categories of the Working Class and the Lumpenproletariat” (Cleaver 1968, 6; emphasis added).

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Of the multiple identities that can be gleaned from the life of a given individual—student, worker, parent, manager, child, stamp collector, fantasy baseball enthusiast, precinct captain, deacon, veteran, homeowner, landlord, nurse, developer, teacher, electrician—why should we assume that perspective is endowed fundamentally by race, gender, or sexual orientation? A common response to the last question is that those identities stand out because they are the ones through which populations in this society are marked for marginalization. True enough, but those are not the only categories of people marginalized in the society; the more than forty-three million with no healthcare access, the hundreds of thousands of permanently displaced steelworkers and mineworkers, the millions of homeless and near homeless people, the so-called urban underclass, residents of low-income public housing, low-wage workers in sweatshops and the consumer service sector are among the most obvious. Those categories crosscut race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for individuals many of them overlap. Nonwhites and women are disproportionately present within nearly all of them, but they are not reducible to race or gender. And it is by no means a foregone conclusion that, say, a displaced black steelworker, who is a single parent working an insecure, low-wage job with no benefits and trying to negotiate the metropolitan crisis in affordable housing, will experience her daily life and social position, fashion her dreams and expectations, or interpret her concerns and grievances primarily or typically through perceptions of racial or gender identity over the other categories that reflect pertinent facets of her practical life (Reed 2000, xvii – xviii).

I take this to mean that Reed is perplexed why an academic emphasis on the rhetorics of race, gender, and sexuality ends up obscuring the most fundamental material realities of social life. Why is there a choice?¹⁵⁸ Tell me what color someone’s skin is, whether they identify as a man or woman, whom they prefer to bed—and I can never do anything more than hazard a wild guess at the ways in which they earn a living. It is always possible to ask: Does this person primarily issue commands about work or generally receive them? Do they typically control resources or mostly just supply them? In a world of social asymmetries and economic exploitation, which side are they on? ¹⁵⁹ My overriding point is that the historical causes and consequences of what Reed means by class slip through our fingers when we focus on the “intersectionality” of ascriptive identities. But what is class? And why, given the powerful intersectional

 One possible answer is that “identity politics” actually represents a type of class politics with a healthy dose of melanin heterogeneity (e. g., Reed 2018).  Pierre Bourdieu warned that treating one’s colleagues as data is impolite at best. Nevertheless, something he noticed about the “life of the mind” hits close to home: “How could one not believe that capitalism has dissolved in a ‘flux of signifiers detached from their signifieds’, that the world is populated by ‘cyborgs’, ‘cybernetic organisms’, and that we have entered the age of the ‘informatics of domination’, when one lives in a little social and electronic paradise from which all trace of work and exploitation has been effaced?” (Bourdieu 2000, 41).

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critique of “class,” should we consider keeping it around as an academically useful and politically acceptable analytic category in the twenty-first century?

Capitalist Logic and the Razor-sharp Edge of Class Although one often hears of Marx’s “theory” of class, many readers will be surprised to discover just how little interest he had in specifying what he meant by the term (e. g., Sørenson 2000). Even an abbreviated selection of its uses is daunting (See Table One). Table One: Selections From Marx’s “Class” Catalogue. bourgeois class [Bourgeoisklasse]

peasant class [Bauernklasse]

capitalist class [Kapitalistenklasse]

poorer classes [ärmere Klassen]

class of capitalists [Klasse der Kapitalisten]

privileged class [privilegierte Klasse]

class of great landlords [Großbesitzerklasse]

progressive classes [progressive Klassen]

class of idle pensioners [Klasse müßiger Rentner]

proletariat class [Proletarierklasse]

class of machine workers [Klasse von Maschinenarbeitern]

property-owning class [besitzende Klasse]

class of wage laborers [Klasse der Lohnarbeiter]

reactionary classes [reaktionäre Klassen]

educated classes [gebildete Klassen]

revolutionary class [revolutionäre Klasse]

industrial classes [industrielle Klassen]

ruling class [herrschende Klasse]

lesser or petty middle class [kleine Mittelklasse]

serving class [dienende Klasse]

main classes [Hauptklassen]

suppressed or oppressed class [unterdrückte Klasse]

manufacturing class [Fabrikantenklasse]

three big classes [drei große Klassen]

mercantile classes [merkantile Klassen]

two big classes [zwei große Klassen]

middle class [Mittelklasse]

unproductive classes [unproductive Klassen]

most numerous class [zahlreichste Klasse]

working class [Arbeiterklasse]

If we take Marx’s writings to be those of a professional academic, we have every right to point out that the category of “class” seems to be awfully undertheorized. Where are the principles of necessary and sufficient conditions that allow us to locate an individual or coterie in one class or another? Can someone or some group belong to several classes at once? If so, what are the “nesting” principles

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that allow us to map the relative socio-taxonomic priorities à la Linnaeus (order, family, genus, etc.)? And what about the Manifesto’s well-known claim that the capitalist mode of production tends to split modern societies into “two great hostile camps” (MECW 6: 485/MEW 4: 463)? I find it difficult to see how Marx’s cacophony of classes could possibly fit together with a satisfying degree of logical coherence. For instance, he sometimes uses “class” to highlight various relations between structural positions within the capitalist order (the class of wage earners). Other times, Marx uses the category to itemize relations or types within a structural position (monied capitalists). Still other times, he uses it to emphasize various qualitative gradations within a structural position (the lesser or petty middle class). He also uses the category to highlight qualitative distinctions that may bleed across structural positions (educated classes). And then, just for good measure, Marx uses the category to highlight dispositional tendencies that might also seep between structural positions (reactionary classes). However, I think criticizing Marx for undertheorizing class is the wrong move. He no more needed a “theory” of class than carpenters need a “theory” of hammers or gardeners a “theory” of shovels. Marx used the category of “class” like a scalpel, revealing how—within a capitalist order—it is both practically impossible and grotesquely naïve to expect everyone involved to get along by tolerating difference. The ultimate reason for this is that some folks are always receiving more than what they pay for (i. e., surplus value); and, as a corollary, others are always receiving less for what they are selling (i. e., labor power). Thus, in Capital, we are told that: the driving motive or decisive aim of capitalist production is the greatest possible self-utilization [Selbstverwertung] of capital, i. e., the greatest possible production of surplus value, or the greatest possible exploitation of labor power by capitalists. With the mass of workers employed at the same time, their resistance grows and with it, necessarily, the burden [Druck] of capital to cope with this resistance. Capitalist management is not only a special role arising from, and belonging to, the nature of the social labor process; it is at the same time a result of the exploitation of a social labor process and therefore conditioned by the inevitable antagonism between the exploiter and the raw material of his exploitation. Likewise, the greater the extent of the means of production which the wage laborer faces as alien property [fremdes Eigentum], the greater the need to control their proper use (MECW 35: 336/MEW 23: 350 – 351; my translation).

Slightly rephrased, a class of industrial capitalists which privately owns the means of production implies a class of industrial managers to supervise the production process, as well as a class of industrial mechanics to look after the capital-intensive

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“dead” or “objectified” labor (i. e., machinery).¹⁶⁰ All of them, together, help to establish the specific social contexts within which a class of industrial workers produces both commodities for the market and surplus value for the capitalist. As Marx formulates the point: “The process of consuming labor power is, at the same time, the process of producing commodities and surplus value” (MECW 35: 185/MEW 23: 189; my translation).¹⁶¹ Does this mean we should think of distinct capitalist, managerial, and machinist classes in addition to the working classes? Perhaps, but Marx would likely advise that is the wrong question. The question worth pursuing is: How does capital manage to consistently squeeze more productive labor out of workers than they are paid for or desire to furnish?¹⁶² Simply put, the whole point of talking about class is to shine some light on the relevant mechanisms of social domination and economic exploitation—phenomena it seems odd to tolerate as “difference” (Benn Michaels 2006).

Conclusion Marx seems to have thought that the consequences of a world governed by capitalist logic were so appalling that anyone with a shred of human decency would see past the kinds of moralizing prattle meant to justify it. Thus, in the 1861– 1863 manuscripts, he writes that with the advent of the capitalist mode of production, the relationship between the expropriators and the expropriated appears: in its pure economic form, without all the political, religious, and other trimmings. It is a pure money-relation or cash nexus [Geldverhältnis]. Capitalist and worker. Objectified labor and living labor-capacity [Arbeitsvermögen]. Not master and servant, priest and layman, feudal lord

 “The laborer works under the control of the capitalist who owns his labor,” Marx writes: “The capitalist sees to it that the work proceeds in an orderly fashion and that the means of production are used prudently—that no raw materials are wasted and the work instrument is looked after, which is to say that it is destroyed only to the extent necessary for its use by labor” (MECW 35: 195/MEW 23: 199 – 200; my translation).  Hundreds of pages later, Marx returns to this theme: “The capitalist production process—considered in context or as a process of reproduction—thus produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but also produces and reproduces the capital relation itself ” (MECW 35: 577/MEW 23: 604; my translation; emphasis added).  In Capital, Marx distinguishes between two broad strategies for producing surplus value. Capitalists may increase or maximize the total number of hours worked before labor is able to collect its wage (i. e., absolute surplus value); or they may adopt a variety of techniques and technology to squeeze more productive labor out of workers during a fixed or even minimized workday (i.e., relative surplus value). The literature on this topic is beyond vast. Two of the most easily digested accounts remain Mandel (1973) and Sweezy (1981).

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and vassal, master craftsman and apprentice, etc. In all states of society the class (or classes) that rules is always the one that has the objective conditions of labor in its possession; that is, even the bearers [Träger] of these conditions—to the extent that they work—do not appear as workers but as owners; and the serving class is always the class or classes that is owned as labor-capacity (slavery or is disposed of as labor-capacity (even if, as in the case of India, Egypt, etc. it appears they have possession of the land, but the actual owner is the king or caste). But all these relations are distinguished from the capitalist relation in that they appear as a relation of masters to servants, of free men to slaves, of demigods to ordinary mortals, etc., and existing in the consciousness of both parties as a particular kind of relation. Only with capital is the political, religious, and other idealistic embellishments stripped off. It is reduced—in the consciousness of those on each side—to nothing but buying and selling. The working conditions as such nakedly confront the worker as objectified labor, value, money, understood as a mere form of labor which enters into exchange only to maintain and multiply itself as objectified labor. The relationship thus emerges as nothing more than a relation of production—a purely economic relationship (MECW 30: 131– 132/MEW 43: 123 – 124; my translation).¹⁶³

Charles Darwin famously found the existence of parasitoid wasps a deal-breaker for any and all accounts of a beneficent, omnipotent creator-god. The world was just too cruel to take that hypothesis seriously. Likewise, Marx found Panglossian accounts of the market’s wise but invisible hand to be depraved jokes given how the textiles industry “slaughtered children for their delicate fingers, much as horned cattle in southern Russia are slaughtered for their skin and tallow” (MECW 35: 298/MEW 23: 310; my translation). This, at last, brings me to why I believe the genealogical critique of “religion” is incapable of building a new enterprise from the sinking fragments of GOFRS. One recurring claim made by the genealogists of “religion” is that the category —or a near-cognate term like “spirituality”—has played a consequential role in the ideological history of capitalism (e. g., Martin 2014). This way of distinguishing between politics and not-politics helped to blaze the trail for capitalist social-property relations to take root. “The construction of ‘religion’ and ‘religions’ is therefore part of a historical ideological process,” Fitzgerald writes: the invention of the modern concept of religion and religions is the correlate of the modern ideology of individualism and capitalism. This ideological product was assumed to have its analogue in colonial cultures, and if religions could not be found then they were invented, along with western individuals, law courts, free markets, and educational systems. “Religion”

 I’ve hedged my linguistic bets by providing both a flat translation of the German original [Geldverhältnis] and the English phrase that Marx and Engels were borrowing from Thomas Carlyle (“cash nexus”). On the history and limitations of this concept, see Dant (2000). I have added an artificial break for the sake of readability.

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was part of the complex process of establishing the naturalness and ideological transparency of capitalist and individualist values. The industry known as Religious Studies is a kind of generating plant for a value-laden view of the world that claims to identify religions and faiths as an aspect of all societies and that, by so doing, makes possible another separate “non-religious” conceptual space, a fundamental area of presumed factual objectivity (Fitzgerald 2000, 9).

I find this sort of ideology-talk deeply unconvincing, but I’ve already said what I want to say on that front. For now, the more urgent question is: How did Marx get it so wrong? That is, he clearly thought part of what made the capitalist mode of production historically unique is that this mode of surplus-extraction appeared “in its pure economic form, without all the political, religious, and other trimmings” (MECW 30: 131– 132/MEW 43: 123 – 124; my translation).¹⁶⁴ Without the traditional social mechanisms of patronage, fealty, and custom to cushion the blows, the cruelties of industrial wage labor were such that the workers could not help but notice the objective precarity of their lives and conclude, this sucks. I don’t mean to imply that Fitzgerald is wrong because he and Marx disagree. By my reckoning, Jean Baudrillard—mostly riding on Thorsten Veblen’s coattails— makes a good case for thinking Marx was madly over-confident about capitalism marking the end of symbolically-encoded or socially-signified production, exchange, and consumption (Baudrillard 1981; Veblen 2009). However, Marx’s apparent inability to see through the artificiality of “religion”—while easily looking beyond the apparent “naturalness and ideological transparency of capitalist values”—raises serious questions about the category’s actual historical significance and alleged powers of ideological mystification.¹⁶⁵ If the category were deployed in ways that made the capitalist mode of production seem natural, we would expect to find some anti-clerical critics or public atheists denaturalizing “religion” and then going on to discover that capitalist logic is, historically speaking, very peculiar. I am unable to find a single case of this. An absence of evidence doesn’t amount to evidence of absence—although, sometimes, it

 In The Preconditions of Socialism, Eduard Bernstein argues that Marx got the brute realities of surplus extraction backwards. “When surplus labour was performed in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, there was no deception about it,” he surmises: “it was not obscured by any representation of value. When the slave had to produce for exchange, he was a simple surplus labour machine; the serf and the bondsman performed surplus labor in the open form of compulsory service and taxes in kind” (Bernstein 1993, 49). I raise this issue because it has implications regarding the alleged Marxian pedigree of Fitzgerald’s meta-theoretical revision of the “dominant ideology thesis.”  Fitzgerald seems to recognize this problem and appeals to the notion of discursive “positionality” to explain how it is that: (1) Marx was not tricked by the nineteenth-century discourse of political economy; and (2) Marx was taken in by the discourse on “religion” (Fitzgerald 2011, 256).

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does lead to that conclusion. So, too, if the category were deployed in ways that made capitalist exploitation all but invisible, we might expect to find a few communists denaturalizing capital accumulation and then discovering that—since “religion” is just another ideological category—religions don’t exist. Yet, when figures like Blanqui or Engels envisioned a world without religion, this isn’t what they meant. Marx may or may not be correct when it comes to the epistemological cum ontological principle he picked up from Feuerbach. In a strictly Darwinian sense, I suppose the claim “being is prior to thinking” must be true; huge blocks of earth’s natural history consist of microbial, single-celled beings capable of little more than thoughtlessly replicating. The extent to which previous experience or “social being” fixes the bounds of human cognition in general—as austere versions of twentiethcentury behaviorism insisted—is an empirical question at the end of the day. Nevertheless, when taken as a strictly methodological principle, one unalloyed virtue of following Marx’s guideline is that we are compelled to study how human beings are simultaneously the performers [Schausteller] and composers [Verfasser] of historical repertoire (MECW 6: 170/MEW 4: 135; my translation).¹⁶⁶ Reformulated in the vocabulary of contemporary social theory: there may be no agency without structure, but without agency we are left with miraculous, autochthonous structure. ¹⁶⁷ The discursive, genealogical, or rhetorical treatment of “religion” is deeply frustrating because it leaves us so far away from the realities of capital accumulation that we’re left with a shockingly conventional history of ideas. There is always too little mention of the mangled limbs of child “mule scavengers” in Mancunian textile mills, or the willful destruction of the Indian handloom industry, or the broken Black bodies in the Mississippi Delta burdened with growing and baling cotton (e. g., Beckert 2014, Parthasarathi 2010).¹⁶⁸ The choice to prioritize discursive struc-

 This intuition famously reappears in Brumaire: “Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it from their own free will in self-selected [selbstgewählten] conditions—only among those immediately found, given, and handed down” (MECW 11: 103/MEW 8: 115; my translation). On the far-reaching historiographical consequences that follow from treating historical actors as only ever free-ish—especially with respect to antebellum slavery—see Johnson (2003).  I take it that this is all Bourdieu meant when he described habitus as “structured structures predisposed to serve as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the genesis and structuring of practices” (Bourdieu 1977, 72). Roughly translated: human beings are only ever free-ish, but that’s often freedom enough to make a difference.  Following the actual historical circuits of labor, commodity production, and exchange reveals that the taxonomic distinction between a slave-based mode of production and a capitalist mode of production—a contrast that Marx himself seems to accept at various points—is revealed to be a merely conceptual divide. On this contrast as a potential blind spot for Marx, see Johnson (2004). On capitalism as the historical transformation of slavery, see Graeber (2006).

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tures and rhetorical constructions means that most human beings are treated like Sausserian marionettes, organic puppets dancing to the tunes called out by their master categories—at least until properly credentialed academics begin to “problematize” the operative binaries on their behalf. Shortly after receiving his copy of Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions, Marx wrote a letter to Pavel Annenkow that twitches with irritation. It reads like a rough draft of Poverty of Philosophy: the economic forms, under which men produce, consume, exchange, are transitory and historical. With newly acquired productive faculties, men change their mode of production— and with that they change all of the economic relations, which were only the necessary relations of this specific mode of production. This is what M. Proudhon doesn’t understand, much less demonstrate. M. Proudhon, who is unable to follow the real movement of history, has given you a phantasmagoria presumptuous enough to present itself as a dialectical phantasmagoria. There is no need to talk about the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries because his story takes place in the nebulous realm of the imagination and floats high above place and time. In a word, it is old-fashioned Hegelianism [vieillerie hégélienne], it is not history, at least not a profane history—a history of mere mortals—it is a sacred history—a history of ideas. From this perspective, the human being is only the instrument which the Idea or eternal Reason uses to develop itself (MECW 38: 97/MEGA2 III.2: 72; my translation).

It is very odd and, I must confess, terribly disappointing for the category’s genealogists—those latter-day critical critics of “religion”—to usher Marx onto the stage only to present us with sacred histories of rhetorical categories and discursive sites; for them to remain planted in the “nebulous realm” of the academic imagination, where the pungent, profane realities of class and contention are nowhere to be found. Here’s a tip: you know someone has taken a wrong turn when Marx begins to sound like Herr Bruno & Co.

Postscript Class, Contention, and Capital in Eighteenth-Century England Stripped down to the fewest moving parts, this chapter’s goal has been to demonstrate why the genealogists’ version of Begriffsgeschichte tends to over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to “religion.” Consider, for example, the claim that the category emerged around the same time we find capital and labor beginning to square off in the English countryside.¹⁶⁹ Broadly speaking, this is the case— but it is a bit like saying earth is closer to Venus (~56 million miles) than it is to Mars (~181 million miles). This is also true, but it fails to capture the relevant scale. The critical critique of “religion” only looks like a radical, transformational project for those who cannot get past the fact that some folks—for whatever reason—continue to study religion per se. I understand the frustration. But for anyone interested in the real global history of capital—instead of either religion per se or the “religion” category—the genealogists do not have much to offer. Allow me to explain by posing a simple-looking but maddening question: Given that the capitalist world-system is a contingent product of human history—that is, our collective, planetary lives could have turned out otherwise—when and where do we find the best evidence for something like the “transition” to a world increasingly governed by capitalist logic?¹⁷⁰

All Things Must Past In what is perhaps his absolute best stretch of writing—the late chapter from Capital on “The Mystery of Initial [ursprünglich] Accumulation”—Marx identified six-

 My focus on the European context is not, in any way, meant to sideline, discount, or ignore contemporary efforts to de-provincialize the global history of capital. I take it as given, for example, that the great economic “divergence” between the Global North and South—or the Global West and East— during the first quarter-of-the-eighteenth century is best explained by the privileged and violently secured access that European actors, enterprises, and institutions had to overseas resources and labor power (Ince 2018, Pomeranz 2000).  I swaddle transition in scare quotes to denote a degree of ironic distance from the classic, twentieth-century arguments. Like everything else that has to do with Marx and Marxism, the academic literature regarding the “transition debate” is as wide as it is deep. Over the past quartercentury, key contributions to the discussion include: Brenner (2001, 2007), Dimmock (2014), Epstein (2000, 2007), Wickham (2008, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-018

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teenth-century England as the crucible. Note what this implies. Capital accumulation is not an organized or dominated work force in general (pyramid construction in pharaonic Egypt). It is not workers “alienated” from the product of their labor in general (kingships).¹⁷¹ It is not profit-yielding commercial or mercantile activity in general (ancient spice trade).¹⁷² Nor is it surplus extraction or exploitation in general (medieval feudalism). And it is certainly not a “systematic misrecognition” of social reality. What we call capitalism is, for Marx, the collective juridico-political order which emerges in, around, and through the historically discrete capitalist mode of production. He maintained that this arrangement is distinct because, among other things, what were once viewed as the consumable spoils of conquest become sources of revenue-generating capital: The plunder of church property, the fraudulent sale of public or state domains [Staatsdomänen], the theft of the commons [Gemeindeeigentums], the transformation of feudal and clan property into modern private property through usurpation carried out with ruthless terrorism—these were the idyllic methods of initial accumulation [ursprünglich Akkumulation]. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the land into capital, and created the necessary supply of a proletariat that was “free as a bird” [vogelfrei] for urban industry (MECW 35: 723/MEW 23: 760 – 761; my translation).

Capitalism, from this perspective, cannot be understood apart from the class interests and class antagonisms which are constituent features of the capitalist mode of production. This is because the historical origins of capital accumulation are to be found in acts of systemic dispossession rather than the demure virtues of financial abstinence or individual parsimony. ¹⁷³ As Marx memorably observes, if  David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins propose that, within a kingship “the political benefits of material success—the rewards in status and influence—go to the shamans, priests, elders, lineage heads, big-men, chiefs, or kings, who have by ascription or achievement priority of access to these metahuman sources of human prosperity—but not necessarily, or only to a lesser extent, to the hunters, gardeners, or others who did the work. The alienation of the worker from his product was a general condition long before its notoriety in capitalism” (Graeber and Sahlins 2017, 16).  There are, however, social theorists and historians who would rather describe this in terms of merchant, mercantile, or commercial capitalism (e. g., Banaji 2020, François and Lemercier 2021). This is no place to adjudicate the “varieties of capitalism” debate, but Hancké (2009) is a helpful primer.  Like many classical political economists, Nassau Senior (1850) argued that the origin of investment capital is to be found in household savings—which he described, and praised, in terms of moral abstinence. One reason why I break from Anglophone tradition and translate ursprünglich as an “initial” rather than a “primitive” mode of accumulation is that I understand Marx to be attacking the smug, sanitized portrait of capital’s pristine origins in household parsimony or individual thrift. One might argue that, instead of “primitive,” ursprünglich should be taken to mean something like “elementary” along the lines of Durkheim’s formes elementaries—where “elemen-

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money “‘comes into the world with hereditary bloodstains on one cheek,’ then capital comes dripping blood and dirt from every pore, from head to toe” (MECW 35: 748/MEW 23: 788; my translation).¹⁷⁴ Compelling? Yes. Marx’s account exposes, condemns, and relativizes capitalist logic like no other. Accurate? Mixed bag, really. Nevertheless, one reason for sticking with Marx is that—although wage labor per se is not historically unique and working-class immiseration isn’t quite what he anticipated—proletarianization is a historically reliable indicator that capitalist social-property relations have taken root. Market participation per se isn’t enough because it is now clear that —by the mid-fourteenth century—both elite and non-elite populations throughout southern and eastern Germany, the Netherlands, and England were reliably securing resources for their biological and social survival through market-mediated making, buying, and selling. “Until at least the early eighteenth century, wages, whether in kind or coin, were also not determined solely by a ‘free’ labour market,” Shami Ghosh concludes: “It was not until after c. 1750 that the bulk of rural labourers were fully proletarianized with nothing but their labour to sell, and completely exposed to the market without the shelter of annual contracts and payments in kind, including housing” (Ghosh 2016, 269; e. g., Bennett 2010, Dyer 1995, Fox 1996, Ghosh 2015, Kussmaul 1981, Whittle 2000). Marx’s intuition regarding proletarianization and absolute market-dependency still, after all this time, mostly rings true. We just need to correct a few dates and update the map.¹⁷⁵ Marx was among the first to grasp the increasingly bleak logic of a world defined by the absolute dependence on markets to survive. Since market competition tends to be won or lost over price, capitalists try to minimize input costs and maximize productivity in pursuit of profit margins; if they do not, the competition will

tary” refers to the sine qua non of the phenomenon in question. I decided against that option because: (1) Marx could have used elementaren, grundlegund, or wesentlich if that is what he intended; and (2) the structural sense of “elementary” begins to look and behave like “primitive” when used in historical contexts (i. e., earlier forms are routinely described as more elemental or less developed than later versions). On the category’s history, see Nichols (2015), Roberts (2020). On dispossession or expropriation as a structural feature of capital accumulation see Fraser (2016), Harvey (2004).  “The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly,” Honoré de Balzac writes in Pere Goriot (Balzac 2009, 103). Balzac was one of Marx’s favorite authors; when he was putting the finishing touches on Das Kapital, he sent a brief letter to Engels recommending “Le Chef-d’Œuvre Inconnu” and “Melmoth réconcilié” from Comédie Humaine: “They are two little masterpieces, full of delicious [köstlicher] irony” (MECW 42: 348/ MEGA2 III.3: 376; my translation).  In other words, Engels was almost right about the significance his old friend’s discoveries regarding capital’s behavior.

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find a way to consume or destroy them. Workers, in turn, offer up their time, bodies, and skills to employers for a wage; if they are unwilling to accept the terms of the available labor contracts, they are “free” to go homeless, hungry, and desperate; until, that is, these constituencies are willing to work in order to live and care for the people they love in ontologically non-fungible and non-numerical ways. “Put another way,” Charlie Post writes: “the exploiters’ and producers’ access to both means of production and consumption must depend on the exploiters and producers’ ‘holding their place’ in the marketplace” (Post 2013, 80). The double-edged dagger of “competitive constraint” is the lifeblood of capitalism insofar as it transforms market-participation into an existential imperative. As Robert Brenner fashions the point, under these conditions actors are “not only left free to act as they deem best, but also—and most fundamental—rendered dependent upon the market for their inputs, thus subject to competition in production to survive, and therefore compelled on pain of extinction to seek systematically to maximize exchange value through specialization, accumulation and innovation” (Brenner 2001, 173). To oversimplify things for a moment, capitalist logic replaces traditional varieties of “extra-economic” surplus extraction with a simple choice: buy and sell or die. This mixed regime of competitive constraint and market-dependence captures what I take Marx to mean when he describes capital as “the objective body of activity” which stands over-against “the immediate labor capacity” of workers (MECW 29: 209 – 210/MEW 42: 721– 722). It is also what allows someone like Ellen Meiksins Wood to coherently argue that “the economy” is more than an element of a particular rhetorical configuration. The global economy of international production chains and perpetually circulating, transnational capital flows is now a reality for most human beings on the planet. I’m not sure anyone who denies this is worth taking seriously.

Competitive Constraint and Existential Demand I’ve quickly introduced all of this to underscore how the genealogists of “religion” have not, to date at least, successfully anchored the category’s Anglophone origins in the European “transition” to capitalism. For one thing, the chronologies don’t match. Emphasize the fourteenth-century ubiquity of markets, and the relevant sixteenth- to seventeenth-century semantic mutation appears too late (Dyer 1994).¹⁷⁶ Emphasize the proletarianization of the eighteenth-century working

 “By sometime between c.1300 and c.1500,” Ghosh advises, “market exchange had become essential for the biological and social survival and reproduction of all classes of rural society in

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classes and the linguistic innovation appears much too early. Although, to be fair, Fitzgerald is willing to stretch the category’s genealogy across both eras: “For most English-speaking people throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and probably this is true of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well, ‘Religion’ meant Christian truth” (Fitzgerald 2007, 171). But if that is the case, it implies that “religion” may have only come to denote a distinct thing or sphere of life in the latenineteenth or early-twentieth centuries—scrambling the very idea of a significant link to the history of capitalism or a deep, genealogical discontinuity with the premodern past. From my perspective, however, the more fundamental issue is that we know working men and women did not accept these conditions as natural and transparent. Some of this indifference towards plebeian resistance to proletarianization is likely a by-product of the discursive approach itself. By virtue of handcuffing themselves to discourse—the vast “system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences,” as Foucault put it—genealogists never find much evidence for non-elite or non-literate communities resisting from below the category’s imposition from above (Foucault 1972, 23). In fact, genealogists too often write as if figures like Penn, Pufendorf, and Locke invented the category, the early-modern state restructured collective life accordingly, and not one person ever grumbled about the change. ¹⁷⁷ When we take onboard Marx’s claim that the dynamics of class formation and class struggle are constituent features of capitalism, we’re left to conclude that ideological mystification was almost immediate and nearly total. First things first: this paternalistic attitude towards benighted rural laborers comes distastefully close to reproducing the genteel perspective of those living in the Great Country House. We should all know by now that whenever social subordinates appear in history’s “official transcripts” they are either silently smiling, cheerily deferential, or receiving just punishment (Scott 1990). In this textual rendition of social reality, everyone faithfully pursues whatever end they are told to pursue—except for those bad apples who suffer a horrific fate and thereby remind much of southern and eastern Germany as well as in England, and by the early seventeenth century at the very latest, most levels of society were in some manner dependent on the market in order to be able to survive” (Ghosh 2022).  Thompson bristled at the cool condescension of Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, intellectual historians who preferred to operate at the level of elite discourse. He was willing to grant that the men and women who made up the eighteenth-century English “crowd” weren’t proper philosophers or political economists. Nevertheless, Thompson insisted they did “have substantive and knowledgeable arguments about the working of markets, but about actual markets rather than theorized market relations. I am not persuaded that Hont and Ignatieff have read very far in the pamphlets and newspapers—let alone in the crowd relations—where these arguments will be found” (Thompson 1993, 275).

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everyone to stay in line. When viewed from above, that is, plebeian communities are typically objects of scorn, fear, and moralizing discipline rather than rational historical agents pursuing their own ends. Something E.P. Thompson noticed about English historiography is especially relevant in this context. “No-one is more susceptible to the charms of the gentry’s life than the historian of the eighteenth century,” he advised: His major sources are in the archives of the gentry or aristocracy. Perhaps he may even find some of his sources still in the muniments room at an ancient landed seat. The historian can easily identify with his sources: he sees himself riding to hounds, or attending Quarter Sessions, or (if he is less ambitious) he sees himself as at least seated at Parson Woodforde’s groaning table. The “labouring poor” did not leave their workhouses stashed with documents for historians to work over nor do they invite identification with their back-breaking toil. Nevertheless, for the majority of the population the view of life was not that of the gentry. I might phrase it more strongly, but we should attend to the quiet words of M. K. Ashby: “The great house seems to me to have kept its best things to itself, giving, with rare exceptions, neither grace nor leadership to villages, but indeed depressing their manhood and culture” (Thompson 1993, 33).

With respect to the category of “religion,” Thompson’s transferable lesson is that if the only texts which make up the discourse on “religion” are elite texts then, by definition, we are talking about an elite discourse. Put in a slightly different way, if the “system of references to other books, texts, and sentences” which genealogists examine all articulate a specific class project—in the case of figures like Locke and Penn, for example, writers representing the interests of the ascendant merchant and professional classes—it is quite easy to mistake elite preferences for historical reality. Second, and more importantly, this top-down portrait of quiescent, ideologically dominated working classes is demonstrably false. Indeed, mid-eighteenth-century England is an almost ideal place and time for investigating how men and women have resisted the pincer-like intensification of market dependency and expansion of wage labor. ¹⁷⁸ Take the proliferation of “provisioning riots” as a case in point. Harvest failures and increasing food prices were preconditions for this mode of popular action, but they do not tell the whole story. Nor does flatlining agricultural productivity in a time of swelling populations. We must also recognize how demographic growth increased the number of workers and families who exclusively relied on wage labor and markets to survive. Stagnating and even declining

 John Bohstedt, for example, describes this era as “the ‘golden age’ of food riots” (Bohstedt 2010, 105; e. g., Griffin 2020, Wells 1978).

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wage rates with respect to the enumerable cost of living were the result (Clark 2007). Still another variable is that, beginning the 1690s, Parliament incentivized the production of grains for export by offering a bounty of 5 shillings a bushel to merchants. The English countryside soon became the Continent’s granary. This balance-of-trade also meant that exporters could exploit high continental prices on top of government subsidies to push up domestic prices. The available evidence indicates that in the riotous years of 1740, 1756 – 1757, and 1766—the year Thomas Malthus was born, coincidentally—the cost of wheat jumped 50 – 80 % above the mean (Bowden 1989, 31). It was now possible for some to grow rich while watching others starve. An anonymous threat to one grain merchant is more articulate than I can ever hope to be: We no [sic] you are an enemy to Farmers, Millers, Mealmen and Bakers and our Trade if it had not bene [sic] for me and another you you son of a bitch you wold [sic] have bene murdurd [sic] long ago by offering your blasted rewards and persecuting Our Trade God dam [sic] you and blast you shall never live to see another harvest (As quoted in Thompson 1993, 210 – 211).

The “bolting” or “dressing” mills which prepared various grades of flour for the market were frequent targets of the crowd’s fury. “Those mechanized sifting machines enabled millers to become large-scale commercial manufacturers and wholesale merchants, supplying urban bakers and trading profitably in quantities of processed flour,” John Bohstedt explains: Rioters in this formative generation attacked bolting mills to stop the production, export and/ or adulteration of flour, and they plundered granaries suspected of “engrossing” (hoarding) for the export and wholesale trades, partly to disable them and partly to procure food. Like Willie Sutton, who robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” mid-eighteenth century rioters trooped to the arteries and nodes of the wholesale trades—mills and granaries, barges and barns, not marketplaces—because “that’s where the food was.” At Newbury (Berks.), men, women and children raided the market place, ripped open sacks, then seized and scattered food from shops, and forced bakers to reduce their prices. Then they trooped to the mills and seized £1,000 worth of corn and meal, while dumping flour into the river to protest against adulterated bread (Bohstedt 2010, 114, 116).¹⁷⁹

The men and women who participated in these uprisings knew all too well that they were risking their necks. They had already measured the probabilities of suc-

 Millers and bakers were often accused—and frequently guilty—of adding fillers like bean or bone meal, chalk, and alum powder to their flours.

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cess and concluded: We’d rather be hanged than starved! (Williams 1976, Rogers 1998).¹⁸⁰ Recovering the history-making powers of common working people was once viewed as part of a politically and academically “radical” agenda (e. g., Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). It is, I suppose, somewhat ironic that the rise of broadly poststructuralist discourse analysis—which tends to work with historical sources written by and published for elites—has more-or-less mirrored the demise of class analysis in the humanities and social sciences. Rephrased in a more pugnacious tone, discourse analysis could only ever displace class analysis because it tends to reproduce class-dependent perspectives in the guise of a subversive “critical theory.” There are many possible explanations for why it now counts as transgressive to treat human beings as mouthpieces so ideologically dominated by discursive structures that creative, rational thought from below is all but impossible.¹⁸¹ The fact that this is what bosses and mid-level managers usually think about those who toil “beneath” them should unsettle everyone as much as it infuriates me.

Conclusion The genealogists warn us that “religion” emerged in specific power conditions. Forgive me for being crude, but I must ask a “vulgar” question: So what? Every single socio-taxonomic category that ever was, or ever will be, is smeared with the human thumbprint of specific power conditions. Immaculate conceptions exist for none but theologians. Some categories are as benign as “neutrons.” Others are as malignant as “savages.” Marx would advise us to move past these filing-clerk worries. It doesn’t matter all that much whether one describes the transhistorical pattern of trafficking in metapersonal authority to regulate collective life as “religion” or a “bug” in human cognition or an aspect of “cosmopolitical economy.” What matters are the material conditions and social relations which are being justified or denounced—the all-too-human projects which are advanced,

 Given the nature of these insurrections, however, it turns out that relatively few participants were arrested and fewer still were hanged: just one encouraging detail from the noble history of what Hobsbawm (1952) liked to call “collective bargaining by riot.”  “Schooled in such a climate, fearful and deprived of any intellectual initiative,” Frank Ellis writes: “Homo Sovieticus could never be more than a mouthpiece for the party’s ideas and slogans, not so much a human being then, as a receptacle to be emptied and filled as party policy dictated” (Ellis 1998, 208). Historical reality in the USSR was more interesting than this portrait of Soviet citizens as mouthpieces with big stomachs and no brains permits (e. g., Tverdohleb 2012, Yurchak 2005).

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frustrated, or defeated—whenever the celestial bosses and metaphysical overlords are invoked to lay down the Cosmic Law.¹⁸² The built-in limitations of the genealogists’ approach to collective life are brutally exposed when we generalize their stance toward “religion” to categories like “wage labor” or “slavery.” Modifying only enough key terms for everything to still make sense, we arrive at something like: The category “slavery” and its essentialized distinction from “wage labor” or “free contract labor,” and other rhetorical constructions, is basic to modern Anglophone thinking about the world. I draw the reader’s attention to the fact that these are English language terms, admittedly with close approximations in some other European languages, but not necessarily in any non-European language. Anglo-American views of the world tend to get confused in the minds of Anglo-Americans for universal and obvious truths that are intuitively inherent in the way things are. These categories have historical origins in specific power conditions in early colonialism, and have become transformed into an Anglo-American mythology that takes on the appearance of intuitively obvious, universal truths (Modified from Fitzgerald 2011, 85; emphasis added).

There is a very long list of very good reasons to reject the claim that slavery is a discursive effect of “slavery,” but I’ll focus on something that Marx himself observed: enslaved human labor was one of the essential axes along which the modern capitalist order emerged (e. g., Johnson 2013).¹⁸³ Globalizing capital, conceived in the abstract, did not need chattel slavery to become hegemonic—but the historical path to “actually existing” capitalism did. “Direct slavery [L’esclavage direct] is as much a fulcrum of our present industrialism as machinery, credit, etc.,” Marx estimated: “Without slavery you have no cot-

 According to the familiar Clausewitzian principle, war is not the opposite of politics but is in fact a political instrument—the continuation of political commerce by other means. I suppose one could call my proposal a Clausewitzian theory of religion: the invocation of metapersonal authorities and forces is “a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.” This is about as much theoretical “nuance” as a strategic study of religion requires.  Here’s another reason. In The Fugitive Blacksmith, James Pennington—a self-emancipated, former slave from Maryland’s Eastern Shore—located the essence of slavery in the chattel principle or the bill of sale principle. “Whatever may be the ill or favoured condition of the slave in the matter of mere personal treatment,” he advised his abolitionist readers: “it is the chattel relation that robs him of his manhood, and transfers his ownership in himself to another” (Pennington 1849, xii; emphasis added). I see no reason to doubt this hard-won insight. As a consequence, I take the category of “slavery” or—in the interests of analytic precision—“antebellum slavery” to isolate the objective social relations and material conditions which obtained when human beings were legally bought and sold as productive assets in the United States prior to the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

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ton, without cotton you have no modern industry. It was slavery that made the colonies valuable. It was the colonies that created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale, industrial machinery” (MECW 38: 102/ MEGA2 III.2: 76; my translation).¹⁸⁴ With Marx clearing the way, we can see how the genealogists of “religion” leave us with little more than sacred tales of ideas, rhetorical constructions, and discursive formations. Sure, some of that stuff mattered. But the history of capitalism is also a ruthlessly profane tale of bodies, factories, crops, and machines built up and torn down for a return on investment. “It follows, therefore, that as capital accumulates, the condition of the worker— whether his payment is high or low—must deteriorate in proportion,” Marx writes in Capital: “The accumulation of wealth at one pole is thus, at the same time, the accumulation of misery, anguishing work [Arbeitsqual], slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole” (MECW 35: 640/MEW 23: 675; my translation). Instead of discourse, Marx would urge us to begin with the iron law of “bourgeois” political economy: capital’s gain is equal to labor’s loss. That is, if one were so inclined as to consult him when reimagining the study of religion after GOFRS.

 This idea also appears in Poverty of Philosophy (MECW 6: 167/MEW 4: 553 – 554). I mention this because there Marx distinguishes between the modern proletariat’s “indirect slavery” and the “direct slavery” of bonded laborers in Brazil and the American South. This distinction does not appear in Capital, published twenty years later—another piece of evidence that indicates Marx rarely worried about the long-term, tectonic grandeur of his thought.

Coda A World of Trouble Although this book has focused almost exclusively on Marx, I do not mean to suggest that he is the only figure worth consulting when it comes to making profane sense of the sacred. That sort of glee-club enthusiasm would only return us to a time when someone like Lenin could insist: “Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true” (Lenin 1960d 19: 23). Those days are over. In my judgment, there is no conceptually rich academic study of religion which fails to view Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss as equally canonical figures—even though Marx and Engels would likely grumble about their fluffy, toothless Bourgeoissozialismus (see Gane 2002). With that said, I do think that Marx’s contributions would be especially consequential for the field because he represents a Road Not Taken. GOFRS itself might even be described, in psychoanalytic terms, as originating in a panicked “reaction-formation” to Bolshevism’s naked political libido. The latent hope was that if Marx’s “vulgar materialism” or “crude reductionism” could be discredited when it comes to religion—and his “theory of religion” was merely an extension of his comprehensive theoretical system—then the Red Menace consisted of well-meaning fools and venomous imbeciles. This riff-raff could be shoved aside because they knew not what they said. It was time for the children to sit down, be quiet, and let the grown-ups talk. As evidence for this claim, I offer Daniel Pals as Exhibit A.¹⁸⁵

 Max Weber’s “Spirit” of Capitalism is an inspired work of historical sociology that is too often assigned the grim chore of refuting Marx and Marxism. With Marx, Pals writes, “it seems obvious that religion should always be considered an effect and never identified as a cause. For Weber, that is not so obvious. In human affairs, causal trains do not travel on one-way tracks; explanation is more complicated” (Pals 2015, 144). This appeal to Weber’s appreciation for complexity is a classic appeal to academic nuance. “Nuance is not a virtue of good sociological theory,” Kieran Healy counters: When faced with a problem that is hard to solve, a line of thinking that requires us to commit to some defeasible claim, or a logical dilemma we must bite the bullet on, the nuance-promoting theorist says, “But isn’t it more complicated than that?” or “Isn’t it really both/and?” or “Aren’t these phenomena mutually constitutive?” or “Aren’t you leaving out [something]?” or “How does the theory deal with agency, or structure, or culture, or temporality, or power, or [some other abstract noun]?” This sort of nuance is, I contend, fundamentally antitheoretical. It blocks the process of abstraction on which theory depends, and it inhibits the creative process that makes theorizing a useful activity (Healy 2017, 118 – 119). Here’s to an academic study of religion that kicks its nuance-habit cold turkey. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-019

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In the chapter on Marx from his widely-used textbook, we are presented with the following argument—sketched here in outline, but with direct quotations: 1. “First, as the shaper of communism, he presents us less with a theory of religion than a total system of thought that itself resembles a religion” (Pals 2015, 114). 2. “But among all of Marx’s voluminous writings, it is significant that not one addresses specifically or in systematic fashion the subject of religion . . .Instead of tracing the argument of a single book, as we could with Tylor and Durkheim, we will have to reconstruct Marx’s view of religion mainly from certain early philosophical and social writings, where he addresses the subject most explicitly, and from occasional comments he makes in later books on politics and economics” (Pals 2015, 114). 3. “Marx asserts that belief in a god or gods is an unhappy by-product of the class struggle, something that should not only be dismissed, but dismissed with scorn” (Pals 2015, 126). 4. “Insofar as Marx gives us a theory of religion, how compelling is it? That question is an especially large one in this case … it is very hard to evaluate Marx’s theory of religion without at the same time making judgments about his claims about economy, politics, and society” (Pals 2015, 133). 5. “Whether Christian or not, religion in Marx’s view is an ideology. Like the state, the arts, moral discourse, and certain other intellectual endeavors it belongs to the superstructure of society” (Pals 2015, 134). 6. “A theory is only as strong as its assumptions. Since Marxist thinking reduces religion to economics, we cannot leave it without examining, at least briefly, the general theory of economy and society on which it rests.” (Pals 2015, 135).

I’ve italicized the bits where Pals massages some aspect of Marx’s biographical or intellectual profile to emphasize how one dubious assertion is clipped to another until the trap is set. “Writing just over a decade after Marx’s death, Eugen BöhmBawerk, an Austrian economist, discovered in Capital what he regarded as a ‘massive contradiction’ between its theories of value and the actual facts of capitalist life as we see it,” we are told: as Böhm-Bawerk observes, this labor theory of value is crucial to Marx’s related theory of surplus value; the one cannot be given up without losing the other. But the theory of surplus value is the very pivot on which Marx’s central claim of worker exploitation is made to turn. Without it, his fundamentally moral complaint against capitalism seems weakened, with a problematic result for all that follows from it. In brief, if Marx’s theories of value must be given up, if the footing crumbles, it is hard to see what could remain of the rest of Marxist economic theory. The doctrine of exploitation, the thesis of class struggle, the claims about base and superstructure, and certainly also the theory of religion as a dire, dismal symptom of alienation—all of these become difficult to defend. If Böhm-Bawerk is right, it would seem that the contradiction he notices cannot be dismissed as a side issue. Later Marxists have worked hard to refute this critique or revise Marx, but without notable success (Pals 2015, 137– 138).

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Pals is here alluding to the “transformation problem” in Marxist economic theory —an alleged logical inconsistency at the heart of Marx’s understanding of how the values created in production are converted into prices so that surplus values can be realized as profits (e. g., Seymour 1897). ¹⁸⁶ For now, the specific details of that debate are less important than the lesson Pals intends for us all to draw: since Marx’s “theory” of religion is an expression of his total system of thought—and this entire edifice is undone by a single, massive contradiction—we may confidently disregard what he has to say about religion, politics, and even capitalism itself. Marx is important in principle, but only in principle; a figure significant enough to know something about, but not so significant as to engage or even read all that carefully. If this book achieves nothing else, I hope it means that no one will ever again have to read that Marx constructed a total system of thought empirically frail as religion. *** To a first approximation, epistemic instrumentalists view some—and, in some cases, all—concepts and categories as heuristic tools for expanding our predictive control over, and integrated grasp of, our local environments. Truth is not a function of tightly “corresponding” with or accurately “representing” the World. It is instead a measure of how well a cluster of calculating rules, analytic fictions, dynamic models and the like advance our interests in predicting, shaping, and preserving the world around us. “This does not imply that such ideas, theories, and the like cannot also be truth-apt or even true,” Kyle Stanford cautions: “but simply that we misunderstand or overlook their most important characteristics—including the most important questions to ask about them—if we instead think of them most fundamentally as candidate descriptions of the world that are simply true or false” (Stanford 2016, 318). When it comes to justifying some commitment or prac-

 To borrow a British expression, the way Pals handles this entire subject is not cricket. By peremptorily dismissing every proposed solution to Böhm-Bawerk’s challenge as a failure, he leaves most readers with the impression that Marx’s account of capitalist logic is itself premised upon a logical fallacy. Pals doesn’t even provide a bibliographical note to prompt curious readers to see for themselves. Three things should be kept in mind. First, there are technical solutions more convincing than Pals allows, considers, or mentions by name (e. g., Basu 2021, Morishima and Catephores 1975, Steedman 1977). Second, Fred Mosley argues the whole debate is premised upon a fundamental misinterpretation of what Marx was claiming (Mosley 2016). If Mosely is correct, there isn’t a “contradiction” to discuss—much less one so insoluble that it delivers a coup de grâce. Third, since the “massive contradiction” identified by Böhm-Bawerk allegedly exists between Capital, Volume One and “Volume Three,” there are reasons for thinking everyone has presumed far too much about “Marx’s theory” from the start.

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tice, in other words, there is no better sign that we’re barking up the right tree than pragmatic, instrumental success. With this as a background, recall Terrell Carver’s counsel regarding “German Ideology.” When we read these legendary manuscripts through corrective historical lenses: the tenor of the argumentation is such that extraction of Marx and Engels’ views as “theory” (whether a philosophical one, or a “theory of history”) would be a regression to the very position—excoriated as both “ideological” and typically “German”—that they were at such pains to attack in their renewed critique of the “critical critics.” The nub of the matter was not so much that these “idealist” (and therefore ineffectually “critical”) philosophers were thinking the wrong things because they were thinking the wrong way, but that they were doing politics the wrong way (hence thinking the wrong way) and were thus merely encouraging others to be just as wrong-headed and (so Marx and Engels were arguing) ineffectual (Carver 2015, 715).

Much of Marx’s abiding frustration with the nineteenth-century European Left was provoked by its unwillingness to accept that political struggles—even when fueled by high-minded, estimable principles—are ultimately decided by superior strength. “Justice, Humanity, Freedom, Equality, Solidarity, Autonomy,” he growled in 1849: “these essentially moral categories all sound very nice but prove absolutely nothing when it comes to historical and political questions. Justice, Humanity, Freedom, etc. may demand this or that a thousand times over; but if the thing is impossible then it does not take place and—despite everything—remains an ‘empty fantasy’ [Traumgebilde]” (MECW 10: 365/MEW 6: 273; my translation). Without question, it is good to have right on your side—but that isn’t enough when the defenders of Property, Order, Family, and Religion show up in riot gear to “keep the peace.” In this sense, Marx might be fairly described as a political instrumentalist: the concepts and categories he fashioned were tools meant to provide an integrated grasp of capitalist logic and a strategic feel for its vulnerabilities.¹⁸⁷ His guidelines were only as good—only as true—as they were politically effective. “The privileges of the now governing classes, and the slavery of the working classes,” he writes in the New York Tribune: are equally based on the existing organization of labor, which, of course, will be defended and maintained on the part of the former by all means in their hands, one of these means being the present state machinery. To alter, the existing organization of labor then, and to supplant it

 Political instrumentalism is different from the Leninist accusation of political opportunism— which consists of “class collaboration, repudiation of the proletarian dictatorship, rejection of revolutionary action, obeisance to bourgeois legality, non-confidence in the proletariat, and confidence in the bourgeoisie” (Lenin 1960e 21: 442).

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by a new one, you want power – social and political power – power not only of resisting, but also of attacking; and to acquire that power you want to organize yourselves as an army possessed of that moral and physical strength which will enable it to meet the friendly hosts (MECW 13: 51).

Marx was convinced that the fulcrum of every successful working-class struggle was political organization rather than theoretical knowledge. Or, to the extent that theoretical knowledge was necessary, theorizing was not an end-in-itself. Richard Rorty once surmised that the tell-tale difference between the academic and non-academic Left, “is the difference between the people who read books like Thomas Geoghegan’s Which Side Are You On?—a brilliant explanation of how unions get busted—and people who read Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (Rorty 1998, 78). One group finishes its book and has a working sense of the discouraging past and a few things to keep an eye out for going forward. The other can explain how Western society has experienced a “crisis of historicity,” but has absolutely no idea what to do about it. It is only among the latter bunch of detached, cosmopolitan spectators, “these sheep who take themselves for wolves,” that academic theorizing itself becomes a supposedly consequential form of critical praxis (MECW 5: 23/MEGA2 I.5: 3; my translation). Everyone else just sees a grimly verbose, and comically out-of-touch, species of self-regard. A bit more sharply, one must be an idealist of one variety or another to believe that “deauthorizing” this or that category is an audacious, potentially revolutionary act. At an 1850 meeting of the Communist League’s Central Authority, Marx openly worried that within their fold: the Manifesto’s materialist perspective has given way to idealism. Instead of real conditions, they emphasize the will as the main concern for a revolution. We say to the workers: “You have 15, 20, 50 years of civil war to change the situation and prepare yourselves to rule.” They say: We must seize power now or retire to our beds. Democrats have abused the concept of “the People.” Socialists now turn “the Proletariat” into an empty phrase. According to them, we should announce that the petit bourgeois are the real proletarians. We should represent the lower-middle class rather than the proletariat. We should replace the actual revolutionary process with empty revolutionary phrases (MECW 10: 626/MEGA2 I.10: 578; my translation).

He returned to these sorts of “vulgar” political lessons again and again in the years that followed: organizational discipline is more important than individual daring; political struggles are won by the strength of the weak, not the weakness of the strong; the revolutionary will is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for constructing a post-capitalist order. “If superficial knowledge is still occasionally necessary in theology,” he and Engels concluded, “empty phraseology finds its full application in the democratic movement, where hollow but resonant declarations

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and sweet nothings make both the intellect itself and insight into the real situation superfluous” (MECW 11: 243/MEGA2 I.11: 236; my translation). For all of these reasons, I believe Marx is far better imagined today as a committed anti-theorist—or, at the very least, as an anti-academic deeply skeptical about what happens when the professoriate sits down to theorize about social worlds.¹⁸⁸ *** Some version of Marx’s anti-academic instrumentalism informs my own sense that neither the old-fashioned study of religion as religion, nor the upstart genealogy of “religion,” are working models for a scholarly enterprise worth having in the twenty-first century. That neither version of “actually existing” Religious Studies is all that promising should be cause for alarm because there are undeniable signs— at least in the United States—that the field is in serious trouble. One indicator of the field’s dire health is the dramatic decline of undergraduate enrollments in Religion/Religious Studies courses—at both public and private four-year institutions. Another is the rapidly plummeting number of undergraduate majors (e. g., Hu 2018). “From their peak in 2013 the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in the academic study of religion fell 31 %, from 5,012 to 3,479 degrees, in just five years,” a recent study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences judges: “This was the largest decline in 28 years of available data for the discipline, and brought the number of conferred degrees down to levels last seen in the late 1990s” (Patterson and Townsend 2021). In an era of “academic prioritization,” when an academic unit’s contributions to the university’s core mission must be quantifiable, these numbers should get everyone’s attention. The statistics are bleak, but a couple of caveats should be kept in mind. First, the Liberal Arts and Humanities appear to be in a death spiral at fouryear institutions.¹⁸⁹ In 2018, for instance, the number of bachelor’s degrees earned in the traditional Humanities fell to a mere 4.4 % of total undergraduate degrees— the smallest percentage since reliable records of these sorts of things begin (c. 1949). This diminutive campus footprint may also help to explain why university administrators have started eliminating stand-alone Departments of Religion (e. g., Hallenbeck 2020). An inter-departmental department is one department too many.

 The largely implicit rationale for Marx’s suspicion of academics is, as far I can tell, roughly homologous with Bourdieu’s explicit theorizing about the social production of Homo academicus (e. g., Bourdieu 1990, 1998, 2000).  The traditional Liberal Arts and Humanities don’t seem to be going away completely in the United States. Rather, they are increasingly taught as elements of the AP curriculum in high school or the terminal AA degree at the community-college level.

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Second, the absolute number of Religion/Religious Studies majors in the U.S. has never been all that robust. To get a sense of the divide, in 2015 the distribution of completed bachelor’s degrees among the traditional Humanities was: 45,127 in English/Literature; 43,599 in General Humanities/Liberal Studies; 28,137 in History; 6,853 in Philosophy; 4,244 in Religion/Religious Studies; and 1,281 in Classics/Classical Studies (AMACAD 2019). Of course, this also means that—a bit like the regressive consequences of a “flat” income tax—a 31 % decline in Religion/Religious Studies degrees is far more consequential than it would be for English or History. Macro-level data are never perfect guides for what happens at specific institutions. With that said, it wasn’t shocking to learn the University of Vermont was dissolving both its Religion and Classics departments for: (a) the precipitous reduction in student enrollments; and (b) an inability to retain at least 25 majors year-over-year (Foerg 2021). If demand creates its own supply, as Keynesian macro-economists maintain, then the opposite may be true as well—at least on college campuses. Without effective demand, it is difficult to make a compelling case for investing increasingly scarce university resources in “underperforming” units. The numbers don’t add up. These two, merely discouraging facts begin to look rather more menacing when we factor in a few more known knowns and known unknowns. We know, for example, that at the same time the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred by the field fell 31 %, overall college enrollment dropped 15 % (c. 2011– 2021). We also know that starting in 2025 universities will begin negotiating a “demographic cliff ” that is expected to reduce university enrollments by at least another 15 % (e. g., Grawe 2021, Kline 2019, Pavlov and Katsamakas 2020). If the previous pattern holds, it implies another 31 % decline in Religion/Religious Studies degrees conferred in the very near future. Additionally, we know that—owing to a fall in the birthrate during the COVID-19 pandemic—colleges will likely confront another demographic cliff sometime in the late 2030s or early 2040s (Schroeder 2021). We do not know how many non-elite institutions will survive these demographic trends, but some observers predict that as many as half will have no choice but to permanently close (e. g., Caskey 2018). Nor do we have any idea how structural shifts in labor markets, the climate crisis, technological innovations, and the debtheavy cost of a college education will transform the general academic landscape. In one way or another, it seems safe to say that the Cold War University is being dismantled thirty years or so after the Cold War itself came to an end (e. g., Baldwin 2021, Benjamin and Ferguson 2020, Donoghue 2008, Ginsberg 2011, Lowen 1997). Confronting the unpleasant fact that the academic study of religion is now shedding students is imperative. As I have argued, there is a sense in which the inherited justifications for the enterprise—from the hard Right to the sentimen-

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tal Left—were so tightly bound to a specific geo-political arrangement that the field experienced an identity crisis when the Red Menace vanished. That is, it wasn’t long after the “Sputnik Moment” (c. 1957) that outfits like the Danforth Foundation and Lilly Endowment first began granting to summon Religion/Religious Studies departments into existence across the United States (e. g., Imhoff 2016, McCutcheon 2004). To a first approximation, the academic study of religion in the West was intended to provide an on-campus, humanist bulwark against the spread of “Godless Communism” from the East. And for a moment, it flourished (e. g., Dolezalová, Martin, and Papoušek 2001, Hart 1999). Nevertheless, once neoliberal policies began reshaping the OECD world—and the rest of the planet with it—the overdetermined conditions which initially made these academic units seem like crucial, fundable endeavors began to disappear. The Reagan Revolution was many things. It was not, however, especially kind to the “privatized, syncretistic, psycho-spiritual experimentalism” that characterized some pockets of transatlantic life in the 1960s and 1970s. The last shoe dropped when the Wall came down. By the end of the twentieth century, the field’s context of justification had drifted so far away from its initial context of discovery that they sat on either side of a spreading continental rift. If nothing else, the twenty-first century patterns of flagging enrollments, disappearing majors, and mothballed departments suggest Carl Raschke (1986) was on to something when he noticed—around the same time that the Number 4 reactor core in Chernobyl began melting—that the field’s operative assumptions were being washed away. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now possible to see how the field— forged in the same Cold War crucible as the contemporary university itself—has been desperately trying to identify an academic raison d’être since the Soviet Union’s dissolution (c. 1991). For instance, the sui generis debates which basically defined the field’s “cutting edge” in the mid- to late1990s now look like early symptoms of fatigue. Indeed, some of the most interesting work to come out of the field over the last quarter-century helps to explain why the academic study of religion has apparently run out of steam. Take the so-called cognitive science of religion. Cognitive theorists propose that it is a root-and-branch mistake to treat religion as if it were a distinct, well-defined phenomenon like facial recognition or spatial reasoning. The neurocognitive systems that generate our intuitions about contagion, for example, appear to be relatively distinct from those which produce our folk psychological understanding of minds. “Instead of a religious mind, what we have found is a whole frustration of invisible hands,” Pascal Boyer reckons: One of these guides human attention toward some possible conceptual combinations; another enhances recall of some of these; yet another process makes concepts of agents far easier to acquire if they imply strategic agency, connections to morality, etc. The invisible hand of mul-

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tiple inferential systems in the mind produces all sorts of connections between these concepts and salient occurrences in people’s lives (Boyer 2001, 330).

From this perspective, it makes about as much sense to talk about the cognitive science of religion as it does the cognitive science of hobbies—the given categories are too ill-defined, and the phenomena too loosely connected, to permit a progressive empirical study to get very far off the ground. This is remarkable because the genealogists of “religion” essentially agree. They, too, argue that religion is not a particular kind of experience, a distinct way of thinking, or a discrete set of practices. It is instead the stuff of an otherwise prosaic life—a feast with friends and family; a collection of inter-generational ceremonies; a conspiracy theory about covert agents with malign intent; a regime of rules and rulers we are expected to obey —that has been set apart and surrounded with prohibitions for merely local, which is to say political, reasons. Put simply, it now seems clear that there is literally no “thing” for an academic study of religion to examine. Gary Lease sounded the alarm regarding the emptiness dwelling at the field’s heart early and well: “There cannot be a ‘history of religion’ for the simple reason that there is no religion: rather, such a history can only trace how and why a culture or epoch allows certain experiences to count as ‘religion’ while excluding others” (Lease 1994, 472). Since then, the putative thing around which the field was first organized has been anxiously kept together with duct tape, sweat, and hope. “Why study religion? The answers are familiar,” Kathryn Lofton writes: because we have; because we should; because it is the natural evolution of the Enlightenment; because we must deconstruct imperialism; because it is fascinating; because it connects the history of humanity in common patterns of behavior; because it drives men to suicide bombing; because it is beautiful; because it is ugly; because it is the highest form; because it articulates our basest needs; and because if we don’t do it, they will. It is easy to find scholars of religion defending the importance of the study of religion under any of these principled positions. Yet enthusiasm about these reasons is diffuse, assailed by wariness of a category (religion) and of a category of an academic field (Religious Studies) (Lofton 2012, 252).

I can’t help but hear in this a begrudging confession: the academic study of religion is institutionally and intellectually exhausted. The enterprise has fallen apart; the center no longer holds (Yeats 2010, 260).¹⁹⁰ As evidence for this dispiriting claim,

 The field is not alone in this respect. Frederic Vandenberghe and Stephan Fuchs contend that Sociology has also become a zombie enterprise given that “the field has, for quite some time now, been losing its substance, core, and identity, rendering it hollow and shallow” (Vandenberghe and Fuchs 2019, 138).

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consider Craig Martin’s programmatic thesis regarding the field’s future: “The academic study of religion need not require the word ‘religion’ to have a referent” (Martin 2015, 300). Thus far, I am unable to identify an academic unit on a single university campus which explicitly claims to not study that which gives the cluster its name. Sounds like the working definition of a redundant department, to be frank.¹⁹¹ *** If the academic study of religion is lucky enough to punch through the heavy weather heading its way, I believe that something akin to Marx’s principled hostility to idealism will need to be at the center of things. With his guideline at its heart, this enterprise would focus on the sorts of factional socio-political interests which have been “categorically reframed” by the actors themselves: preferring to talk about durable inequalities rather than religious intolerance; opportunity hoarding instead of religious hatred; the con-man’s bullshit instead of the academic’s ideology or discourse. After all, to echo Marx in Brumaire, who among us denies that articles of faith, cosmological prejudices, and ceremonial practices help to bind some communities together and pick others apart? But why should anyone focus on these things per se? Why on earth does it matter that someone, somewhere, at some time tells someone else “you came from the underworld or you were formed by the copulation of these two deities” (Tweed 2006, 74 – 75)? That stuff deserves our critical attention, I propose, because these totally outlandish, yet clearly, somehow, intuitively plausible metapersonal agents and forces are routinely invoked to justify, comprehend, or denounce a political economy which enslaves some and enriches others. It is one of the primary means by which human beings become aware of some socially relevant conflict and then, collectively, proceed to fight it out. In an 1855 article that reads like an early piece of gonzo journalism, Marx discusses a massive demonstration in Hyde Park to decry a proposed “Sunday trading bill.” The legislation would have made it all but impossible for workers and their families to do anything other than attend church services on their one day off (Anonymous 1856). The reason why this stand-off regarding the Sabbath merits attention, Marx advised his readers, is principally due to the fact “that in England the anti-clerical struggle takes on the same character as any serious struggle—the character of a class struggle of the poor against the rich, of the people against the  Maurice Bloch notes, in a similar spirit, that the “incoherent fragmentation, in any and every direction, so long as it will find favour with funding bodies and seems relevant to the concerns of the moment, makes the existence of anthropology departments as working units difficult to justify” (Bloch 2005, 2).

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aristocracy, the ‘lower’ ranks against their ‘superiors’” (MECW 15: 303 – 304/MEW 11: 323 – 324; my translation). Religion mattered in this case because class mattered—because, as Marx noted in the Paris notebooks, gods, ghosts, and spirits have never been the only lords of labor demanding a surplus from workers upon pain of death. Ultimately, Feuerbach was correct: if religion is “about” anything at all, it is about being human. But so was Marx when he highlighted something that Feuerbach missed: that being human always means collective life which always means political existence which, since the early-eighteenth century or so, has increasingly entailed capitalist social-property relations. And all of that, that whole sequence of thoughts—and the sweeping geo-political history it implies—begins with Friedrich Engels in Manchester, thinking something like: I wonder if Feuerbach’s critique of abstraction applies to the “Political Economy” books I’ve been reading. Given what the contemporary neurocognitive sciences suggest about the human mind, religion—in the sense of human beings bossing each other around in the name of metapersonal authority—isn’t going anywhere. So, why not use that fact as an opportunity to construct a thickly comparative study of capital’s globalizing history and its fraught human consequences—with “religion” as the local bandwidth used to discover the contentious politics and class struggles that are created whenever wage labor, market dependency, and mass dispossession from the land collide (e. g., Byler 2022, Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, Levien 2018, Sahlins 1988). Wasn’t something like that what Durkheim and Mauss were doing prior to World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution, and the rise of militant anti-Marxism? Why can’t a rebooted version of that progressive research program represent what the academic study of religion might yet become? For a very long time now, I’ve thought that Bruce Lincoln got things just about right: our duty as scholars is to prioritize the social and material worlds in which religious beliefs circulate rather than “follow the supposedly higher path that remains within the heavenly worlds these beliefs describe” (Lincoln 1991, 124). The pressing academic challenge is to explain how it is that imaginary gods and spirits—which have no causal force in the real world because they do not exist— have often made a real, material difference in the all-too-human history of capitalism. In principle, Plekhanov’s marxistische Religionswissenschaft might have eventually assumed this institutional form if the twentieth century had turned out differently. At the same time, it shouldn’t matter all that much if “religion” is used to organize this research or not. That is a merely clerical consideration. The relevant, mundane patterns of collective life—the give-and-go, tit-for-tat nature of contentious politics and collective violence in the midst of capital accumulation—should be the scholar’s primary empirical focus going forward. If the category obstructs this enterprise as much as the critical critics allege—if “religion” is less useful

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than “riot” and as worthless as “terrorist”—then junk it and start talking in terms of “galactic polities” or cosmopolitical economy.™ Like anything else, critical self-reflection eventually yields diminishing returns; after a while it is almost indistinguishable from ordinary narcissism.¹⁹² Marx is especially relevant for the sort of enterprise I’m proposing because it means examining, in ever more places and spaces and languages and times and detail, “the real conditions for capital’s dominion over labor” (MECW 34: 466/ Marx 1970, 88; my translation). It may turn out that central bank activity during the COVID crisis will mark the start of something approaching a post-capitalist future. People who know how markets work think it is far more likely that: “we’re in the process of moving to a system where a large part of the allocation of resources is not left to markets anymore; an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital” (Dittli 2022). If this is anywhere close to the tack we are sailing, we ignore Marx at our analytic peril. Yet, it will be a wasted opportunity if we cling to the hand-me-down-Marx left for us by twentieth-century Marxists. The Marx worth reading in the twenty-first century is neither an academic nor a philosopher nor a theorist. He is instead the radical democrat or militant republican who championed the French Revolution’s virtues of liberté, égalité, fraternité. He is the socialist provocateur who—in his report to the fourth congress of the IWA—denounced textile-capitalists in Basle who refused to treat their workers as anything more than embodied labor power: Finding their protestations in vain, 104 out of 172 weavers left the workshop without, however, believing in their definite dismissal, since master and men were bound by written contract to give a fourteen days’ notice to quit. On their return the next morning they found the factory surrounded by gendarmes, keeping off the yesterday’s rebels, with whom all their comrades now made common cause. Being thus suddenly thrown out of work, the weavers with their families were simultaneously ejected from the cottages they rented from their employers, who, into the bargain, sent circular letters round to the shopkeepers to debar the houseless ones from all credit for victuals. The struggle, once begun, lasted from the 9th of November 1868, to the spring of 1869. The limits of our report do not allow us to enter upon its details. It suffices to state that it originated in a capricious and spiteful act of capitalist despotism, in a cruel lock-out, which led to strikes, from time to time interrupted by compromises, again and again broken on the part of the masters, and that it culminated in the vain attempt of the Basle “High and Honourable State Council” to intimidate the working people by military measures and a quasi-state of siege (MECW 21: 69 – 70).

 Bourdieu distinguished between a disciplined, scholastic sense of reflexivity—the programmatic need to objectivize the objectivizers—and intellectual amour propre. “I deliberately constructed this notion to destroy intellectual narcissism,” he confessed (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 193). If only he’d been more successful.

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This, I maintain, is the Marx who still matters. The writer who, by 1869, had spent the past twenty years of his life as a political refugee, but still cared enough to draw up an administrative summary regarding the socialist movement’s vitality —in his recently acquired English, after three of his children lay dead in London, and the indifferent reception of Das Kapital was slowly killing him. The Marx worth consulting is the man who, in 1873, was saddened by the fruitless Cantonal rebellion—but thought the working-class uprising in Spain might “prove useful if its leaders have been taught by dearly bought experience to emancipate themselves from highflown but hollow French phraseology and to apply themselves to the study of the real conditions of the movement” (MECW 44: 551). This Marx would sneer at a latter-day French Marxiste who insists: The epistemological problem posed by Marx’s radical modification of Political Economy can be expressed as follows: by means of what concept is it possible to think the new type of determination which has just been identified as the determination of the phenomena of a given region by the structure of that region? More generally, by means of what concept, or what set of concepts, is it possible to think the determination of the elements of a structure, and the structural relations between those elements, and all the effects of those relations, by the effectivity of that structure? And a fortiori, by means of what concept or what set of concepts is it possible to think the determination of a subordinate structure by a dominant structure; In other words, how is it possible to define the concept of a structural causality? (Althusser 1996, 205 – 206).

That may be the germane epistemological problem—an abstract, academic question to the nth degree—but I’m betting Marx could not contain his laughter at the suggestion that smart politics means isolating the concepts needed to think the determination of a structure. ¹⁹³ As far as I can tell, this is exactly what Marx meant by those “university recipes” which boil the critical life out of socialism (MECW 45: 413/MEW 34: 412). “If there is a ‘Marxism’ of the contemporary world which Marx or Engels would have recognized instantly as an idealism,” E.P. Thompson rightly cautioned: “Althusserian structuralism is this. The category has attained to a primacy over its material referent; the conceptual structure hangs above and dominates social being” (Thompson 2008, 13). Althusser’s epistemological radicalism is seductive on campus or at a conference, but it wears out fast in a sordid world of side-hustles and bullshit jobs. ***

 Bourdieu facetiously complimented Althusser once for his unique “talents as a political strategist, especially in blocking the initiatives of non-communist students” at the École Normale Supérieure (Bourdieu 2008, 87– 88).

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The rudimentary outlines of what I have in mind—a politically attuned, materially grounded, and above-all-else strategically oriented study of religion during the “Capitalocene”—are already there in Grottanelli and Lincoln’s diagnosis of the field’s squandered potential. That is, I believe Marx is one of the unnamed political activists who “refused to treat religion as an isolated Ding an sich” (Grottanelli and Lincoln 1998, 312).¹⁹⁴ If I’m correct, they were right to include Marx but mistaken to bury the lede. Perhaps scholars will have an opportunity to get their hands dirty, to unbury Marx and build an academic study of religion worth having in the twenty-first century. And maybe, just maybe, by highlighting social relations and material conditions rather than universes of meaning and discursive formations, this enterprise could help us prepare for the world our Great God Capital will create next—out of the sunken remains of this one; out of the petrochemical sludge; out of the warm and sterile seas; out of nothing. Ex nihilo. Maybe Marx was a “militant atheist” after all.

 Chapters Four and Five are meant to justify including Engels and Plekhanov in this group as well.

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Index abstract labor 16, 77–80, 88 f. agape 103, 110 f., 121–124, 181 Althusser, Louis 15, 89, 97, 253 American Academy of Religion (AAR) 178, 189 anarchism 82, 128, 135–137, 142–145, 147 Anderson, Benedict 217 Anderson, Perry 97, 218 artificial intelligence 68 f. Asad, Talal 203 Astuti, Rita 186 Bakunin, Mikhail 33, 135–137 Balzac, Honoré de 51, 233 Bauer, Bruno 19 f., 26 f., 29, 32 Bentham, Jeremy 21 f. Berlin, Isaiah 16 Berlin Doktorklub 26 f., 65 Bernstein, Eduard 133, 228 Blackburn, Simon 9 Blackstone, William 218 Blake, William 106 Blanc, Louis 51, 109–111, 121 f., 128 Blanqui, Auguste 48, 112 f., 142, 229 Bloch, Maurice 186, 250 Blyth, Mark 179, 205 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen 242 f. Bohstedt, John 187, 236 f. Bolsheviks 161–167, 170, 199, 241 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon 36, 39, 48, 149 Bourdieu, Pierre 133 f., 174, 223, 229, 246, 252 f. Boyer, George 31 Boyer, Pascal 248 Brenner, Robert 101, 234 Buddhism 2, 117, 177, 179 f., 182, 203 Bukharin, Nikolai 163 Burke, Edmund 53, 94, 104, 110 Burns, Mary 31, 44 Cantwell Smith, Wilfred 203 Carlyle, Thomas 5, 28, 106 f., 227 Carver, Terrell 18, 20, 22, 102, 130, 135, 244 categorical redefinition 186, 190 f., 193, 197 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111065540-021

category mistake 216 Chibber, Vivek 220 Christianity 5, 65, 82, 96, 102 f., 111, 113 f., 117, 199, 203 Clark, T.J. 11 class – analysis, decline of 220, 222 – in Marx 224 f. class struggle 60, 76, 97, 118, 120 f., 123, 132, 134 f., 140, 144 f., 153 Cleaver, Eldridge 222 Codreanu, Corneliu 200 Cold War 12, 97, 177, 180, 200 f., 247 f. Connell, R.W. 12 contentious politics 183–185, 187, 189, 193, 196, 208 cosmopolitical economy 185, 238, 252 Darwin, Charles 4, 155, 172 f., 188, 227 de Bonald, Louis 105 de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros 215 de Chateaubriand, François-René 105 de Maistre, Joseph 104, 122 de Saint-Simon, Henri 108 DeLong, Brad 109 Dennett, Daniel 20, 69, 179 Derrida, Jacques 2, 208, 221 Descola, Philippe 157 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher 28 Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung 5, 18 Deutscher, Isaac 135 Diem, Ngo Dinh 181 Don Quixote 216 Douglas, Mary 1, 67 Duc, Thich Quang 181 f. Durkheim, Émile 1, 4, 11, 110, 157, 232, 241 f., 251 Eliade, Mircea 11, 196, 200–202, 208 Engels, Friedrich (biography) – education 102 – in Brussels 31 – in Manchester 29 f., 37, 40, 42, 64, 251

Index

Engels, Friedrich (key works) – Anti-Dühring 114 – Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft 143 – Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy 116 – Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State 133 – The Condition of the Working Class in England 64, 99 – Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationaloekonomie 64, 67, 71, 73 Engler, Steven 213 Evola, Julius 199 false consciousness – ideology as 95, 117 fascism 199 f. Fawksey (Heinrich Guido Marx) 36 Feuerbach, Ludwig 19, 61, 65–71, 74–77, 81– 84, 86, 88, 93, 100, 117, 123 f., 158, 192, 229, 251 Finley, Moses 216 First International Workingmen’s Association 33 Fitzgerald, Timothy 90, 207 f., 213, 216, 227 f., 235 food riots 33, 184, 187, 236 Foucault, Michel 209, 235 Fourier, Charles 108–110 Franco-Prussian War 10, 47 f. Franziska ( Jenny Eveline Frances Marx) 37 f. French Revolution (1789) 6, 91, 102 f., 113, 252 French Revolution (1848) 34, 91, 103, 112, 122 Freud, Sigmund 2, 97 Gaiser, Adam 191 Gandhi, Mohandas 124 Geertz, Clifford 1 Geoghegan, Thomas 245 gesellschaftliches Produktions Verhältnis production relations Ghosh, Shami 138, 233 f. Giddens, Anthony 98 Girard, René 2 Gitlin, Todd 221 Glassie, Henry 185

See

277

Good Old-Fashioned Religious Studies (GOFRS) 177, 184, 188, 192 f., 197 f., 202 f. Graeber, David 2, 67, 183, 192, 196, 206, 232 Grottanelli, Cristiano 198, 254 Haddad, Fanar 187 Harvey, David 217 Haugland, John 177 Healy, Kieran 241 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 26, 28, 39, 62, 65, 101 f., 151, 205 Heidegger, Martin 68 f. Heinrich, Michael 16 Hinduism 6, 180, 182, 191, 194, 201, 203 Hobsbawm, Eric 56, 103, 149, 238 Hofstee, Willem 200 Holy Trinity (Social Theory) 1 f., 11 Hume, David 114, 116, 130 f., 156, 172, 177 Hungry Forties 31, 33 Hyndman, Henry 126 idealism – genealogy as 219 – Marx’s critique of 214, 245, 250, 254 – traditional 215 ideology – category of 77, 88, 91, 228, 250 – dominant 89 f., 228 – in Althusser 89 – in Engels 96, 116 f. – in Fitzgerald 90, 213, 227 – in Marx 91–93, 95, 99 – in Marxism 97, 163, 171, 190 – in Pals 242 inflation 33, 53, 161, 236 initial accumulation 146, 232 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) 45, 47 f., 57, 126, 252 intersectionality 187, 221, 224 intuition pump 71, 76, 86, 100 inversion – de Maistre on 104 – Feuerbach on 61, 65 f., 71 – Marx on 64, 74, 76, 80 f., 84–86 Iraq 187 Islam 117, 177, 179, 187, 194, 203

278

Index

Jameson, Frederic 245 journées de (22-26 June, 1848)

7, 91, 122

Kant, Immanuel 90, 210, 221 Kautsky, Karl 96, 129, 133 f., 151 Keynes, John Maynard 177 Kierkegaard, Søren 186, 193 King Louis-Philippe 30, 33, 122 Komlosy, Andrea 72 Kotkin, Stephen 166 Lafargue, Paul 126, 133 Lassalle, Ferdinand 40, 43 Lease, Gary 249 Lefebvre, Henri 62 f. Lenchen (Helene Demuth) 30, 34, 36–38, 51 Lenin 135, 159, 161–166, 168, 171, 241, 244 Leske, C.W. 29, 31 f. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 4, 101, 157, 190 Lih, Lars 101 Lincoln, Bruce 1, 5, 7, 10, 192 f., 198, 208, 251, 254 Locke, John 203, 206, 221, 235 f. Lofton, Kathryn 249 Louër, Laurence 187 Lukács, György 62, 97, 171 lumpenproletariat – Cleaver on 222 – Engels on 124, 222 – Marx on 222 Luther, Martin 73–75 Luxemburg, Rosa 97, 171 Mack, Burton 1 Mahmoud, Saba 203 Malthus, Thomas 52–55, 57, 63, 74, 204, 237 Mann, Geoff 153 Marcuse, Herbert 61, 63, 97 Martin, Craig 227, 250 Marx, Heinrich (KM’s father) 25 f. Marx, Jenny Caroline (KM’s first daughter) 29, 50 f. Marx, Jenny von Westphalen (KM’s wife) 25– 30, 33–37, 39 f., 49, 51 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (key works) – “German Ideology” 18–20, 88, 92, 95, 135, 215

– The Holy Family 3, 29, 214 – “Volume Three,” Capital (1894) 56, 243, 127 f. – “Volume Two,” Capital (1885) 127 f. Marx, Karl (biography) – criminal charges 13, 35 – early life 25 – education 25–27 – in Brussels 30 f., 33, 56 – in Köln 34 f. – in London 36 f., 39 f., 45, 49, 51 – in Paris 28–30, 34, 36 – journalism 27–29, 34 – personal finances 36 f., 39, 41, 102 – personal health 38, 47, 49 f. Marx, Karl (key works) – Capital 4, 8, 21, 32, 45, 47, 49, 77, 86, 146, 225 f., 231, 240, 243 – “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” (Paris manuscripts) 3, 61 f., 65, 71, 74, 77, 135, 251 – Herr Vogt 17 f., 44 – 1861 – 1863 manuscripts 56, 85, 93, 132, 212, 226, 42, 78, 81, 138, 211 ((bitte entsprechend den Zahlen einordnen)) – 1857 – 1858 manuscripts (“Grundrisse”) 210 – The Civil War in France 10, 48, 92, 118 – The Class Struggles in France 91, 93 – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 39, 91, 137, 139, 148, 151, 161, 189, 229, 250 – The Manifesto of the Communist Party 17, 33, 45, 98, 109, 135, 137, 141, 144, 222, 225, 245 – The Poverty of Philosophy 10, 32, 56, 92, 137 f., 192, 209, 230 – Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie 44 f., 92, 137, 139, 141, 145, 250 Matory, J. Lorand 12 Mauss, Marcel 241 McCutcheon, Russell 2, 208 McKay, Iain 10 McLellan, David 19 metapersonal 2, 4, 119 f., 159, 170, 183–185, 189, 238 Mill, James 6, 63 Mill, John Stuart 54, 205 Mills, C. Wright 1 Mills, Charles 222

Index

Minsky, Hyman 109 Mocko, Anne 200 modes of production 171, 185, 218 Mosley, Fred 243 Musch (Charles Louis Henri Edgar Marx) 40 Musto, Marcello 62

279

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 10 f., 31 f., 48, 92, 128, 192, 209–212, 230 Pufendorf, Samuel 206, 235 32,

National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis) 7, 170, 199 Neue Rheinische Zeitung 34 f., 56, 77, 127, 213 Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung—Politisch-ökonomische Revue 8, 36 New Economic Policy (NEP) 164, 169 New York Tribune 39, 60, 101, 123, 244 Northern Ireland 185–187 October Revolution (1917) 161 f., 169 opportunity hoarding 181 Orsi, Robert 194–196 Owen, Robert 108–111, 121 Paine, Thomas 13, 85, 116 Pals, Daniel 1, 241–243 Paris Commune (1871) 11, 48, 112, 151 Pashukanis, Evgeny 118 peasants – Engels on 151 f., 155 – European 35, 75, 138 – Marx on 48, 148 – Russian 136 f., 147 f., 166, 168 Penn, William 205 f., 235 f. Pennington, James 239 personification – Engels on 115, 131 – Marx on 85, 131 f. Plekhanov, Georgiĭ 133–140, 142–149, 151, 153–159, 171 f., 174, 188, 251 production relations 92, 138–140, 144, 147 productive forces 2, 12 f., 80, 84–86, 120, 132, 138–142, 144 f., 147, 153, 156, 158, 210 Produktionskräft See productive forces Produktionsverhältnisse see production relations proletarianization 1, 95, 118, 233–235 Prothero, Stephen 179 f., 183

Rainborough, Thomas 218 Raschke, Carl 200 f., 248 Rawls, John 222 Reed, Adolph Jr. 223 f. religious literacy 178–180, 183, 203 republicanism – eighteenth-century 109, 111 – nineteenth-century 7, 34, 48, 91, 112, 206, 210, 252 Rheinische Zeitung 27, 29, 34 Ricardo, David 2, 37, 43, 52, 54 f., 57, 62 f., 78, 90, 93, 102, 132, 209 f. Robinson, Cedric 74, 118, 222 Rojahn, Jürgen 63 Rorty, Richard 245 Rosenberg, Alex 173 Rosenhagen, Ulrich 178 Ruge, Arnold 28 Russian Civil War 162–164 Russian Orthodox Church 161, 167, 169 Ryle, Gilbert 216 Sahlins, Marshall 2, 184, 188, 232 Sartre, Jean-Paul 97, 186 Schmidt, Johann Caspar See Stirner, Max Scott, James 9, 235 Second French Republic (1848 – 1852) 36, 91, 122, 219 Second International 96 f., 133 f., 161 Sellars, Wilfred 20 Senior, Nassau 232 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph 76 Simmel, Georg 251 slavery – Bernstein on 228 – Blanqui on 113 – category of 212, 215, 219, 239 – Engels on 189 – Marx on 6, 21, 64, 123, 227, 239 f., 244 – Robinson on 118 – the chattel principle 239 Smart, Ninian 177

280

Index

Smith, Adam 37, 52, 58, 63, 73–75, 77 f., 94, 105, 107, 132 social relations of production 141, 158 Sorge, Adolph 96, 127 Soviet Union (USSR) 62, 136, 162, 164 f., 167, 169, 238 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) 96, 107, 129 Spengler, Oskar 199 Stalin, Joseph 165–170 Stedman Jones, Gareth 15, 44 Stevens, Wallace 100 Stirner, Max 19 f., 81–84, 192 strikes, labor 55 f., 58, 60, 123, 253 Sveriges Riksbank Prize 53, 58 Tambiah, Stanley 185 Taussig, Michael 1 Thompson, E.P. 188, 235 f., 254 Tilly, Charles 185 f., 189 f., 203, 207 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 129 Torrens, Robert 52 Toscano, Alberto 2 totemism 156–158

Tribe, Keith 42, 63 Trotsky, Leon 153 Tweed, Thomas 195 f., 201 f. Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich

See Lenin

Vietnam 180–182, 187 Vogt, Karl 17, 22 Vorwärts 9, 30 Waardenburg, Jacques 1 Wach, Joachim 11 wage-price spiral See inflation wage rate – Classical political economy 52–54 – Marx’s critique of 55–58, 86 Wallace-Wells, David 71 Wark, McKenzie 97 Weber, Max 1 f., 11, 140, 174, 251 Williams, Raymond 59 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 103, 218, 234 Wright, Erik Olin 220 Zasulich, Vera

135, 137, 149 f.