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19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx, the founder and primary theorist of Marxism, viewed religion as "the soul of soulless conditions" or the "opium of the people". According to Marx, religion in this world of exploitation is an expression of distress and at the same time it is also a protest against the real distress.
According to Leon, Marx's essay uses the framing that one "must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary: the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the 'real Jew', that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role".
In the first instance, Kim replies that a person is "mistaken" if they believe Marx's proposition regarding "opium of the people" can be applied in all instances, explaining that if a religion "prays for dealing out divine punishment to Japan and blessing the Korean nation" then it is a "patriotic religion" and its believers are patriots. [11]
Marx argued that understanding the origins of religious belief were not enough in moving towards its elimination; instead declaring that it was the underlying social and economic structure which gave rise to religious belief and that it was a transformation of this which was a necessary precondition to the elimination of religion. [5]
Marxist cultural analysis has commonly considered the industrialization, mass-production, and mechanical reproduction of culture by the "culture industry" as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect which reifies the self-conception of the individual. [2] [5]
Marx, however, was sceptical of utopian socialists and did not aim to describe an ideal future. He was a materialist who eschewed idealism, in opposition to liberal, Enlightenment thought. Marx likely thought that human nature exists, according to Eagleton, who writes that socialism would not require altruism from each citizen, only a ...
Indeed, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses, namely the study of law, religion and the state, the study of natural philosophy ...
Agreeing to co-author the foreword, they divided up the other sections. Engels finished his assigned chapters before leaving Paris. Marx had the larger share of work, and he completed it by the end of November 1844. Marx would draw from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, on which he had been working the spring and summer of 1844.