Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

wendy brown

Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long
as he does not revolve about himself.... The immediate task of
philosophy... is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form
now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form.
Marx, Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of
Hegels Philosophy of Right

Secular Predicaments
Three contemporary predicaments have wreaked havoc with the
modernist and especially twentieth-century Western expectation
that secularism would be the future for ever more parts of the
world and would remain a permanent feature of the West.
There is, first, the phenomenon of enormous planetary slums
where, to paraphrase Mike Davis, the politics of proletarian revolution have been replaced by the politics of the holy ghost. Huge enclaves of poor people find sanctuary in religion todayevangelical
Christianity in Latin America, North America, and southern Africa; populist Islam in Asia and North Africa; and a range of local

110

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

religions in regions around the globe. If God died in the cities of

the industrial revolution, Davis writes, he has risen again in the
postindustrial cities of the developing world.1
In addition to the vitality of religion among the worlds most
destitute, there is, second, a broad transnational renaissance for
religion today, one accompanying if not generated by the intensification of capitalisms global reach in recent decades. Rather than
inciting secular revolutions and consciousness, globalization appears to have produced something of its opposite, in which the legitimacy and energy of states as well as national and transnational
political movements (and conflicts) are often bound expressly to
religion. As market rationality penetrates every fiber and crevice of
the planet, religionand the politics animated by itis far from
waning. It is rebounding.
Third, and related, our times feature a sometimes subtle and
sometimes forthright de-secularization in liberal democratic as
well as non-Western states. Against the presumption that secularization is an inexorable and progressive tendency in capitalist
orders generally, and liberal democracies in particular, proudly
secular Euro-Atlantic societies are outing their own religious
predicates as they defend their expressly Christian nature and give
the lie to the notion that secularism entails religious neutrality.
Striking too are the many postcolonial nations rebuffing half a century or more of secular governments for forthrightly theological or
hybrid forms of authority and law.
Each of these predicaments bears detailed historically and geopolitically specific explanations. Together, however, they wreak
havoc with the crude presumptions about secularism and religion
organizing the past century of Western political and historical understanding, presumptions that implicitly forecast a combination
of reason, science, liberal democracy, and the market as dethroning
religious political authority and energies.
Secular Prejudice in Thought
Nietzsche wrote that accurately apprehending the origin and development of morality in the West was inhibited by what he called

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

the democratic prejudice of moderns.2 When we refract the past

through the egalitarian and progressive historiographical conceits
of the present, Nietzsche believed, we fail to understand other tables of values and forgo the chance to understand and reflect on
ourselves through them. Democratic prejudice makes us bad
readers of the past and sacrifices the potential of genealogy to illuminate the workings of power in (and the contingent nature of)
our own moral order of things.
Much Western thought today suffers from a variation on Nietzsches charge, namely, a secular prejudice compromising
our efforts to apprehend the play of religion in thought and the
world, in present and past. Operating from a nest of assumptions
about the religious and the secular, starting with a belief in their
putative opposition, we misapprehend how they were otherwise
conceived even in modernity and thus miss an opportunity for insight into contemporary predicaments of secularism, religion, and
globalization.
The good news is that in some corners of Western intellectual life
this secular prejudice is breaking up under scrutiny by a range
of scholars, including, among others, Talal Asad, William Connolly, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor, Winnifred Sullivan, Peter
Danchin, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Hent de Vries.3 These thinkers
have taught us that modern Western secularism entails more than
a church-state distinction or an a-religious public sphere and order
of thinking. Rather, it takes shape as a form of governmentality
and subject production from which several implications follow.
First, secularism never merely contains religion and is not, cannot be, religiously neutral in organizing society. Rather, secularism
generates a specific model and meaning of religion and generates
particular kinds of religious subjects and practicesfor example, in the Protestant Reformationshaped West, private believers
whose beliefs and worship are hived off from daily economic and
public life. Far from merely sequestering religion, secularism is a
particular way of stipulating, organizing, and producing it. Put another way, more than merely separating church and state, religion
and politics, public and private, secularism generates meanings and
practices on both sides of these divides as well as their relation.

111

112

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

Second, and related, rather than merely banishing religion from

the public sphere, secularism converts and disseminates religious
imaginaries and modalities of consciousness across the society it
governs. This dissemination reaches from the character of modern
sovereignty (Schmitt),4 to the nature of the statecivil society relation (Marx),5 to the normative orientation and ethos of the subject
(Weber and Foucault).6
Third, many ostensibly secular concepts and formulations,
along with many secular thinkers, are suffused with religious temporalities, narratives, and ordinances. If, for example, Nietzsche
revealed the conceit of a gods-eye view in all aspirations to objectivity, he was also captive to Christianity in range of ways, from
his direct rejections and reversals of Christian precepts to his own
self-appointment as the Antichrist. Or consider Schmitt, who,
while underscoring the theological origin of political sovereignty,
repeats this religious ordination in formulating sovereignty as inherently timeless, eternal, absolute, impersonal, above the law, capable of making and deciding truth. Or there is Marxs materialist historiography, which, while intended to finally render history
human, frames a narrative that begins with an original fall from
grace and ends with redemption and heaven on earth. There are
countless other examples, but the point is simply that religious
consciousness does not fade or die with a secular commitment to
its formal expungement from spheres or practices, including and
above all thinking.
Fourth, desacralization is far from an even or progressive process and is also not equivalent to secularization. Just as forces of
disenchantment may be cross-cut by events of reenchantment, and
just as democratic orders may suffer de-democratization, sacralization is not vanquished from history by the operation of desacralizing forces.7 Moreover, secular displacements or containments of
religion do not inhibit the informal sacralization of processes or
entities. That is, in societies that may understand themselves as
relentlessly secular, commodities, money, status, cultures, nations,
states, and even civilization may be sacralized.
Each of these claims, for which I have offered only the pith,
has a backstory involving a great deal of theoretical and historical

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

detail. There are also many more insights emerging from recent rethinking of the secular and the sacred, ranging from Asads pluralization of formations of the secular, to Masuzawas brilliant genealogy of the nineteenth century orientalist production of world
religions, to Mahmoods insistence that discourses of secularism
do not simply stipulate religions proper location but its definition
and meanings.8 But the four critiques I have identified here open a
reengagement with Marxs thinking about the religiosity of capitalism, a reengagement undertaken in order to draw out Marxs
thought in consideration of the predicaments with which I began:
Why has a resurgence of religion become coextensive with the unprecedented intensification of globalized capitalism? What is the
religiosity inherent in capitalism itself? What sacralizations, and
not only desacralizations, does capitalism elicit and perform, and
what religious impulses does it incite?
Marx
A secular prejudice is prevalent in readings of Marx that cast him
either as relentlessly seculara hater of religion, a social scientist
bent on replacing all mystery with science, a theorist of capitals
secularizing poweror as a messianic thinker whose Messiah was
communism. Such accounts gloss over Marxs profound intellectual formation through his engagement with critiques of religion.
They also eschew the extent to which his early rethinking of Hegel,
Feuerbach, and the Young Hegelians on the relation of religion to
sensuous experience, consciousness, history, and the state produces
heuristics and frames that persist across his work, sometimes in
shadowy and sometimes more overt form.
Another way of putting this: While Marx was no scholar of religion, thought religion was bunk, and was convinced by his studies
of the English working class that urbanization might be the death
knell of formal religious adherence, he did not believe that religion
is automatically displaced by reason and science, or that capitalism
inherently destroys religious belief. Rather, Marx famously develops the Feuerbachian insight that religion is an expression of human alienation, a projection of human capacities onto an imagi-

113

114

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

nary Other, a projection that itself signals our unfreedom yet also
limns our inchoate or unconscious awareness of its resolution.9
Marx goes further, of course, combining Feuerbachs insight into
religions generic wellspring with a Hegelian appreciation of the
developmental historical logic of religions, thus seeking to specify
the relation between human life form and religious form.
Already this means that, for Marx, the desacralizing force of
capital (the force he depicts magnificently in the early pages of the
Manifesto) could neither bring an end to religious modalities of
consciousness nor eradicate the conditions for religion itself. This
is the idea we must hold: forces and events of desacralization are
not equivalent to secularism or the end of religion, and desacralization itself is not a linear or unidirectional historical process. Rather, the desacralization of one set of relations or processes in a particular time and place may be rejoined or cross-cut by sacralization
of something else. Thus does Marx speak of money as a visible
divinity (not originating with capitalism but ascending in power
during its reign), a sacralization Jesus also worried about when,
in Matthew, he personified money as Mammon and set it up as a
rival worship object to God.10 Or consider Michael Taussigs account of the emergent devil theology arising in response to the proletarianization of Columbian peasants.11 Or anthropologist Alan
Klimas tracking of numerology cults that sprang up in Bangkok
after neoliberalization devastated the agrarian economy in the late
1980s and the Asian monetary crisis destroyed the urban one in
the 1990s.12 Phillip Goodchild, more broadly, theorizes a range of
secular pieties that take shape under capitalism, from price to
freedom.13
If desacralization is not a one-way process for Marx and is not
equivalent to vanquishing religion, there is no reason for religion
and religious consciousness to disappear in capitalist societies.
Moreover, Marxs Feuerbachian understanding of the basis of religion is at war with the idea that its staying power depends on a
trick of the exploiters or rests in consolation of the poor. Again,
Marx embraced Feuerbachs fundamental conviction that religion
is an inherent emanation of all alienated and unfree social conditions. This emanation differs in its source and sustenance from

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

ideology, which is a cloak for power generated by power itself. By

contrast, religious consciousness expresses the separation of humans from the effects of their own generative capacities and the
subordination of humans by powers (whether in nature or modes
of production) larger than their aggregated selves.
Now it is commonplace to see this Marxthe Marx revising
Feuerbach on species being and religious consciousness, the Marx
of the Early Manuscripts and the Introduction to the Contribution
to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Rightas abandoned or
repudiated by the more sophisticated political economist.14 This is
the view of Marx I am contesting. That this Marx hardly vanishes
from the pages of Das Kapital is nowhere more obvious than in the
discussion of commodity fetishism, to which we now turn.
Commodity Fetishism
Let us remember how Marx makes his turn to the problem of fetishism in Capital: A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing . . . easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties (m, 319). The ironic grimace through which
it is proffered makes it easy to lose sight of the surprising content of this claim. Commodities appear straightforward enough
empirical, secular as it werebut their real nature is metaphysical, religious. This is already an inversion of critical theorys usual
appearance/reality formula: Rather than lifting a religious veil in
search of a material substratum, we must seek out the religious
predicates of a seemingly material object. How does this go?
By his industry, Marx continues, man transforms nature into
things useful to himthus the form of wood . . . is altered by
making a table out of it (m, 320). An idea plus labor yields something usefulfrom wood, a table. But, says Marx, usefulness is utterly beside the point of commodities. Rather,
as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground,
but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head,

115

116

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more
wonderful than table-turning ever was. (m, 320)

The commodity form is thus both transcendent in status and active

in the way that religious deities arecapable of idea-generation
and world-making. Marx is here drawing directly on Feuerbachs
formula for religion: man makes God, who then makes man.
Similarly, although fashioned by man from wood, the table as a
commodity becomes transcendent, evolves ideas from its wooden
brain, stands on its head, and stands reality on its head. Commodities, in this respect, are wholly religious in nature.
But what generates this religion? A commodity, Marx tells us,
is the issue of a specific division of labor generative of relations
among producers and between producers and owners. A commodity comprises the social form of labor at any particular moment
and place. Its value is determined by the socially necessary labortime required to produce it within that particular social form. But
the operation of commodities in the market inherently buries this
relation in favor of a different one, namely, the relative exchange
value among commodities themselves. So it is in departing from
the realm of production to the realm of exchange that the religious
conversion occurs. Marx continues:
[A] commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because
in it the social character of mens labour appears to them as an
objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to . . . their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (m, 320)

Crucially, Marx is not arguing that commodities in the market

merely undergo an ideological cover-up. The enigmatic character
of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities, arises from this form itself. . . . [A] definite social relation
between men assumes . . . the fantastic form of a relation between
things (m, 32021). The nature of capitalist production of commodities and the disjunction between the realm of production and
the realm of exchange together distort their origin, and also make

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

them capable of idea-generation, world-making, table-turning.

Again, such inversion and projection is the essence of religion for
Feuerbach and Marx.
Marx drives this point home with one of his favorite analogies
from the natural world, that between the neurology and physics
of seeing and the relation of the actual to the imagined in the social world:
[T]he products of labour become commodities, social things
whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. . . . In the same way the light from an object
is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic
nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye
itself. But in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object
to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. It
is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things
qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products
of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely
no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations therefrom. (m, 321)

This analogy, and Marxs love of it (he deploys it in the German

Ideology and the Manuscripts as well as in Capital) is already fascinating for being about two different kinds of seeingphysical
and theoretical, or scopic and analytic. In this case, Marx is deploying it to help fathom why we can (physically) see a commodity
without really (analytically) seeing what it is. But a further complication is introduced. Even in physical sight, we fail to perceive visions complex subjective and mediated dimensions: the eyes own
stimulation (the excitement of the optic nerve); the eyes involvement with the brain; the brains tendency to self-deception about
what it is seeing; the brains investment of the object-world with
what are actually internal physiological and cerebral processes. In
short, we dont understand what we are seeing, and we dont readily see the very impossibility of unmediated or transparent seeing, even of ordinary things. This problem is intensified when we
try to apprehend the political economy of commodity production

117

118

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

in the market, where, as Marx puts it, the value-relation between

the products of labour which stamps them as commodities have
absolutely no connexion with their physical properties. . . . [A]
definite social relation between men assumes the fantastic form of
a relation between things (m, 321). So with commodities, we cannot see the object were staring at, let alone understand it or grasp
the subjective and mediated dimensions of our apprehension.
Together, these problems raise the broad question of whether
we ever really see what we think we see, indeed, whether objects in the world are ever what they seem, whether we can ever
avoid mistaking the subjective excitation of our optic nerve for
an objective form of something outside the eye. For Marx, it
raises the more specific question of how to understand a social
relation between men which assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. But again, Marxs answer to this question
is genuinely shocking: For this understanding, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world, that
is, the world where the productions of the human brain appear as
independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation
both with one another and the human race (m, 321).
What just happened here? Marx is not saying that commodity
fetishism is analogous to religion because both are false. Rather, he
is saying that capitalist commodity production inherently generates a specifically religious mystification of powers, objects, things,
and relations, a religious projection of human powers onto nonhuman entities, a religious disavowal of the origin of power and
of the social nature of human production. Moreover, commodities
are neither contingently nor accidentally but necessarily fetishized;
a religious presentation of capitalist social relations is inherent in
capitalist production and intrinsic to capitalist exchange. Put the
other way around, what Marx calls this mystical veil over the
life process of society cannot be shed until there is production by
freely associated men, consciously regulated by them in accordance
with a settled plan (m, 327).
The claim that commodity fetishism requires recourse to the
mist-enveloped regions of the religious world is not strictly a
move to metaphor or analogy. Rather, the commodity is one of the

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

two modern forms in which the systematic separation of humans

from their powers occurs, making commodity fetishism a fundamentally religious element of capitalist society. The commodity
cannot be explained without recourse to religion, it has no nonreligious existence. An essential effect of capitalism, as well as essential to its workings, in commodity fetishism our alienated power
comes to life in deistic form, a coming to life that Marx literalizes
in his account of what commodities conceal and disclose, as
well as his experiments in this section of capital with making commodities speak (m, 324).15
The Christian Secular State
If the commodity is one inherently religious element in capitalism,
what is the other? In On the Jewish Question, Marx famously
argues that the secular state retains a Christian theological structure, spirit, and content, and does so along several lines. First, it
is Christian insofar as it represents itself as the site of freedom,
a religious representation insofar as it attributes a distinctly human experience and practicefreedomto a distant and sovereign
power, the state. Similarly, the sovereignty of man is derived from
the sovereignty of the state, and at the same time, a distinctly human thingsovereigntyis imputed to an imaginary beingGod.
Borrowing directly from Feuerbachs critique of religion, Marx
elaborates:
Religion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion; that is, through an intermediary. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his
religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man
confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom. (m, 32)

Marx is not arguing that attributions (of divinity to God and of

freedom to the state) are ideological, hence false, but that these
attributions (projections in Feuerbachs analysis) are an expression of a specific form of our unfreedom. This form comports with
secularized Christianity, Christianity disavowed and yet absorbed
into political authority and structuring political life.

119

120

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

In this essay, Marx also discerns the Christianity of the bourgeois state in its division of human existence and representation
into two orders, state and economy, which Marx identifies respectively with heaven and earth, celestial and terrestrial life. The
state is otherworldly insofar as it regards all its subjects as free and
equal, but this regard requires abstracting them from real earthly
life, just as the Christian image of souls in heaven does. The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven
in relation to earth. . . . [H]ere man is the imaginary member of
an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and
infused with an unreal universality (m, 34).
For Marx, these points taken together reveal the political state as
Christian, and political consciousness as religious, even when both
are thoroughly secularized. The state is composed of mans alienated powers, and it figures a Christian political imaginary that abstracts from our everyday lives. The state iterates a Christian theology of consciousness and legitimates itself through a belief structure
that depends upon constituting itself as the source of sovereignty
and making every man an imaginary sovereign. Thus does Marx
identify both state and individual sovereignty as resting on a religious emanation and distortion; political democracy is founded in a
Christian theological stance in which freedom and sovereignty are
posited in an ideal way against their material negation.
Conclusion
It is thus important to underscore the difference between ideology and religion in Marxs thought, a difference between, on the
one hand, reflection of the world from the perspective of the ruling class where subordination and stratification are naturalized
or erased, and, on the other, alienation and unfreedom across the
board where mans alienated powers are attributed to and conferred upon sovereign Others. If Marx provided less elaboration
of each and less calibration of their relation than we might wish,
the distinction itself remains indispensable for understanding his
work and perhaps for understanding the relation of religion and
capital today. Marx never surrenders the Feuerbachian notion that

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

religion issues from and expresses our alienation, that it is a lived

form of this alienation in unfree societies. He takes this insight everywhere and makes it do work Feuerbach never dreamed of. This
is in part because Marx more than Feuerbach appreciated how religion can take secular social and political forms, whether in dissemination of its structure and spirit across state and civil society,
in providing the hinge between capitalist production and exchange
in commodity fetishism, or in its sacralization of money, which is
identified in the Manuscripts as the alienated ability of mankind.
At the same time, Marx differentiates between forces of desacralization and the vanquishing of religion and religiosity: for
Marx, capitalism does the former but not the latter. In this, he
contributes to one of our crucial political-intellectual tasks today,
namely, to fathom how desacralization and religion coexist, how
religion thrives amid capitalism and how its revival is possibly even
a response to its desacralizing force.
But do the state and the commodity remain primary locations of
estranged human powers and attributed divinity in the twenty-first
century? The answer to this must vary across global positions and
culture. Certainly neither has vanishedanxiety about the waning sovereignty of the state amid forces of globalization appears
in a range of theological political formations, and the magic of the
commodity is hardly diminishing in the era of the I-Everything,
even as finance capital has clearly spun its own spectacular religious order, multiplying hidden hands and other invisible deities
as derivatives. Moreover, neoliberal rationality deifies the market
itself in unprecedented ways and for unprecedented domains of
human existence. That said, clearly there are other ways today in
which religion responds to the super-saturation of the planet with
capitalist social relations and values, providing both horizon and
meaning in an ever more unhorizoned and meaning-eviscerated
human habitat. Thinkers across the political spectrum today promulgate religions provision of depth, purpose, and moral compass
in a soulless landscape.16 From the Freudians we are also reminded
that religion offers a protective imaginarywhether in the form
of absolute authority or apocalyptic end times. For Freud himself,
the persistence of religion amid science and reasonhe did not

121

122

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

theorize the desacralizing power of capitalpertained to its roots

in affect rather than belief: figures of divine power emerge from
the unconscious memory of infantile helplessnessabsolute dependence on a parent experienced as at once protective and terrifyingly powerful.17 How we must crave such figures today, when a
range of earthly forces appear too big and too wild for anyone or
anything to capture or direct.
Mahmood and kindred critics of Western secular prejudice
would say that the problem with all these accounts of contemporary religiosity is that they founder on the ultimate secular conceit
that religion is a wholly human concoction, that it is not True, that
there is only earthly life, not God or gods. It is testimony to how
ensnared in the secular prejudice I remain that I part ways with
these critics here. With Marx, Feuerbach, Freud, and Nietzsche, I
can only conceive human worlds of meaning as human-made, of
religion as a symptom of our earthly experiences of finitude and of
our yearning for a future we despair of bringing into being.
Acknowledgments

This article is the original English version of Wie skular ist Marx
Kapital? in Nach Marx: Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis, ed. Daniel
Loick and Rahel Jaeggi (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013).
Notes
1. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, New Left Review 26 (MarchApril
2004): 94.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967), 28.
3. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), hereafter cited as fs; William Connolly, Why I
Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999); Peter Danchin (with Saba Mahmood), The Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Genealogies, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 1 (forthcoming, 2014); Hent de Vries and
Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in
a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006);
Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham

Brown: Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

4.

5.
6.

7.
8.
9.

10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

University Press, 2008); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World

Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), hereafter cited as iwr; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), hereafter cited as pp; Saba Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation, Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006), hereafter cited as she;
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), hereafter
cited as sa.
See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept
of Sovereignty, trans George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005); and Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George
Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007).
Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York:
Norton, 1976), 319. Hereafter cited as m.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (Mineola ny: Dover, 2003); and Michel Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978
1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
See fs, iwr, pp, and she.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, trans. A. Loose (Amherst ny: Prometheus Books, 2004); and Ludwig Feuerbach, The
Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (Amherst ny: Prometheus
Books, 1989).
Matthew 6:1924.
Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
Alan Klima, Ghosts and Numbers, American Anthropologist 113
(2011): 65859.
Phillip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion (New York: Routledge,
2002).
If Althussers critique of the early humanist Marx emblematizes the
strongest version of this reading, it is recapitulated by many nonAlthusserian readers of Marx. Taylors account of Marx on secularism in sa is but one example. See Louis Althusser, For Marx (New
York: Penguin, 1969).

123

124

qui parle 23:1 special dossier

15. At a certain point in this discussion, Marx turns from consideration

of this informal religiosity of the commodity to the specific fit of capitalism with Christianity, a fit already adumbrated in On the Jewish
Question. Here, in a paragraph that opens with a Feuerbachian reminder that the religious world is but the reflex of the real world,
Marx argues that capital comports perfectly with Christianitys cultus of abstract manthis in contrast to earlier and more primitive religions, from Judaism to Greek panthiesm to paganism, which
express a more direct subjugation of man by God and Nature (m,
32627). Spying the humanism, that is, the literal elevation of man,
in Christianity, Marx joins Feuerbach in appreciating its religious
reflection of a human-centered universe of production and exchange.
Religious humanism, of course, is both abstract and otherworldly
in its celebration of man, a formulation that allows us to segue into
brief consideration of other religious dimension of capitalist societies, namely, their organization of sovereignty through the state.
16. See sa; Stephen H. Shiffrin, The Religious Left and Church-State Relations (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009); Irving Kristol,
Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 1978); Michael
Lerner, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in
an Age of Cynicism (New York: Perseus Books, 1997); and Michael
Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the
Religious Right (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
17. Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1989).