(Note: All emphasis is readers’. These paragraphs
illustrate the real basis of religion. We can conclude ourselves why so many spiritual
Gurus are taking birth every day. With the help of these short paragraphs we
can also conclude the motive of many leaders and “scientists” who are trying their
best to strengthen religious illusion among masses and new generations of the students.
And motive of all this propaganda is very clear: They don’t want people to
adapt a critical view towards their own misery and the society which is based
on the inequality and theft.)
Paragraphs
from “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Karl Marx”:
The
foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not
make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and
self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has
already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man
is the world of man– state,
society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its
logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis
of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against
religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose
spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and
the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against
real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of
the people.
The
abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people
is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up
their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a
condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is,
therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of
which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that
man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so
that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion
disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a
man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will
move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun
which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
It is,
therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of
truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world.
It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of
history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once
the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked.
Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism
of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism
of theology into the criticism of politics.
Paragraphs
from “Estranged Labour – Karl Marx”:
The worker becomes
all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases
in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more
commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct
proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor
produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as
a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces
commodities in general.
So much does the
appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the
worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of
his product, capital.
For
on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the
more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and
against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less
belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into
God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object;
but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater
this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his
labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he
himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only
that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it
exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it
becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has
conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
||XXIII/ Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and in it at theestrangement, the loss of the object, of his product.
The worker can
create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external
world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active,
from which, and by means of which it produces.
In both respects,
therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he
receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and,
secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence.
This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical
subject. The height of this servitude is that it
is only as aworker that he can
maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.
(According to the economic laws the estrangement of the
worker in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the less
he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more
unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes
the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the
worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker;
the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the
more he becomes nature’s slave.)
Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor
by not considering thedirect relationship
between the worker (labor) and production. It is true that labor produces for the
rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces
palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker,
deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the
workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into
a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.
The
life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the
fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal
man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on
which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute
theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural
science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual
nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so
also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human
activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they
appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality
of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature
his inorganicbody – both inasmuch as
nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and
the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself
human body. Man lives on nature
– means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous
interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is
linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a
part of nature.
In
estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his
life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of
the species into a means of individual
life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and
secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life
of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.
For labor, life activity, productive
life itself, appears to man in the first
place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical
existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is
life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character,
is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity
is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to
life.
The
animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish
itself from it. It is its life activity. Man
makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness.
He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he
directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from
animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or
it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that
his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free
activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is
just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity,
his essential being, a mere means to his existence.
In creating
a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work
upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e.,
as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats
itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build
themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal
only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces
one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the
dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free
from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces
only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product
belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his
product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of
the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance
with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the
inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in
accordance with the laws of beauty.
It
is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves
himself to be a species-being. This
production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears
as his work and his reality.
The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s
species-life: for he duplicates himself not
only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and
therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from
man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and
transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic
body, nature, is taken from him.
Similarly,
in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s
species-life a means to his physical existence.
The
consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement
in such a way that species[-life] becomes for him a means.
Man’s
species-being, both nature and his spiritual
species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as
external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.
An immediate consequence of the fact that man is
estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his
species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to
the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the
other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.
In
fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means
that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s
essential nature.
The
estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to
himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man
stands to other men.
Hence
within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in
accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as
a worker.
Let
us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must express
and present itself in real life.
If
the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to
whom, then, does it belong?
To
a being other than myself.
Who
is this being?
The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal
production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and
Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to
the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor. No more
was nature. And what a
contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor and
the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of
industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment
of the product to please these powers. 
