Justified True Belief

(●) The exile who taught the modern world to treat religion as a symptom of injustice rather than a claim about God. + On a raw March afternoon in 1883, about eleven people stood at a graveside in Highgate Cemetery in north London while a retired Manchester cotton manufacturer read a short speech over his closest friend. The man in the grave had been stateless for nearly forty years. He had pawned his overcoat often enough that there were weeks he could not leave the house, and he had buried three of his own children in the years when he could not afford a doctor for them. Within seventy years, governments flying his name would rule something close to a third of the human race. Karl Marx is on a Christian apologetics site for one reason above all others. He is the most consequential person who ever argued that religion is not a mistake to be corrected by better evidence but a symptom to be cured by better conditions. Where Ludwig Feuerbach had said that God is a picture of humanity thrown up onto the sky, Marx asked the next question: why do people need such a picture, and what has to change in a life before they can put it down? His answer put the argument about God on a footing no debate about miracles or first causes could reach, and Christians have been answering him ever since, sometimes by fighting him and often by discovering how much of the New Testament they had stopped reading aloud. One fact worth carrying away. The book he is famous for was not famous in his lifetime. The first volume of Capital came out in Hamburg in 1867 in a printing of a thousand copies, and it sold so slowly that Engels, with Marx’s enthusiastic blessing, wrote anonymous reviews of it from several pretended points of view in the hope of starting an argument about it. He died with the second and third volumes still in notebooks, and it fell to Engels to spend the rest of his own life turning them into books.

(●) 1818 AD: Born in Trier to a lawyer who had been baptised so that he could keep practising. + Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, a small Catholic city on the Moselle in the Rhineland, which Prussia had taken over three years earlier. His family had been rabbis for generations on both sides: his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx had been rabbi of Trier, and his uncle held the post while Karl was a boy. His father did not. Heinrich Marx was a successful lawyer and a reader of Voltaire and Kant, and when Prussia enforced the rule shutting Jews out of legal office in its new Rhineland provinces he was baptised a Lutheran, in about 1817, rather than give up his practice. Nobody in the family pretended it was a change of heart, though the mild rational Protestantism he joined was close enough to what he already believed that it cost him nothing to sign. Karl was baptised at six, in August 1824, along with his brothers and sisters. That detail is worth sitting with, because it is the earliest thing in his life that looks like the argument he would later make. Here was religion behaving exactly as he would come to describe it: not a conviction that had persuaded anyone, but a document a man signed because of what he stood to lose.

(●) 1836 AD: Berlin made him a Hegelian, and within seven years the censors had closed both careers he tried. + He was sent to Bonn at seventeen to read law, ran up debts, fought a duel, and was moved by an alarmed father to the University of Berlin in 1836. Before he left he became secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the clever and well-connected daughter of a Prussian baron whose family lived a few streets away and had known the Marxes for years. They would wait seven years to marry. Berlin belonged to the ghost of Hegel, who had died there five years earlier and whose system still set the questions everyone in the philosophy faculty was asking. History, Hegel had taught, is reason slowly coming to understand itself, and every age is a step in that education. Marx fell in with the young men known as the Young Hegelians, who met in a drinking club and pushed their master’s system in a direction he would not have gone. If history is reason working itself out, they asked, what happens when reason turns on the throne and the church? Marx gave up law for philosophy and finished a doctoral thesis comparing the atomism of two ancient Greeks, Democritus and Epicurus, on the question of whether the world is rigidly determined or leaves room for swerve and freedom. He submitted it to Jena rather than Berlin, because Jena would award the degree without an examination, and it came back in April 1841. The chair he wanted never came. His mentor Bruno Bauer was dismissed from Bonn for his writings on the Gospels, and any Prussian university would have judged Marx the same way. So he took up journalism, and in October 1842 became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, a liberal paper backed by Rhineland businessmen. Writing about a new law that made it a crime for peasants to gather fallen wood in the forests they had always used, he found himself, for the first time, arguing about property rather than philosophy. A Prussian order of January 1843 condemned the paper; Marx resigned in March and the last issue appeared at the end of that month. He married Jenny that June, and left for Paris in the autumn.

(●) 1844 AD: Paris gave him political economy, the sentence about opium, and Friedrich Engels. + Paris in the 1840s was full of exiled Germans, and Marx went there to co-edit a journal for them, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. It managed a single double issue in February 1844 before it collapsed, and that issue carried the essay in which he wrote that religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature and the opium of the people (T1). He also began reading political economy in earnest. That was the nineteenth century’s name for what we now call economics: the study of how a country produces its wealth and who ends up holding it. He worked through Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the French socialists in a set of notebooks he never published. Those notebooks, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, sat unread in an archive until 1932, and when they finally appeared they changed how the twentieth century read him: here was a young man writing not about output and wages but about what a factory does to a person (T4). Then, on 28 August 1844, a young German named Friedrich Engels stopped in Paris on his way home from Manchester and called on him at the Café de la Régence. Engels was the son of a textile manufacturer with mills in Lancashire, and he had spent nearly two years watching what the Industrial Revolution did to the people who worked in it, which he would publish the following year as The Condition of the Working Class in England. The two men talked for ten days and were partners for the rest of Marx’s life. Engels wrote with him, argued with him, corrected his economics, and for decades simply paid his bills out of the profits of the family firm, which is one of the sharper ironies in the history of ideas. In January 1845 the French government expelled Marx at Prussia’s request, and the couple moved to Brussels; he renounced his Prussian citizenship at the end of that year and never held another.

(●) 1848 AD: The Manifesto reached the printer weeks before Europe rose, and the rising failed. + A small group of German exiles called the Communist League asked Marx and Engels to write it a statement of principles. Marx, who was late with everything, was late with this too; the League sent him a sharp letter setting a deadline, and the Manifesto of the Communist Party was printed in London in February 1848, a pamphlet of twenty-three pages in German, unsigned. Paris rose in the same days the pamphlet came off the press, and by spring so had Vienna, Berlin, Milan and half the German states. It had nothing to do with the pamphlet, which almost nobody had read. Marx was expelled from Belgium, went back to Cologne, and poured a small inheritance into a daily paper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which he ran for close to a year at the top of his voice. The revolutions collapsed one after another. The last issue of his paper was printed in red ink in May 1849, he was tried for incitement and acquitted, and then expelled again. He was thirty-one, with a wife, three small children, no country and no money. Paris turned him away within weeks. In August 1849 he crossed to London, which took anybody, expecting to be there a few months.

(●) 1849 AD: London gave him the Reading Room of the British Museum and took three of his children at home. + He stayed thirty-four years. The first of them were spent in two rooms near the top of a house in Dean Street, Soho, with a wife, a growing family and the housekeeper Helene Demuth, sent to them from the Westphalen household in Trier, who stayed for life without wages she could count on. A Prussian police spy who talked his way in reported dust and tobacco smoke everywhere, broken furniture, and manuscripts stacked beside the children’s toys. Three children died there. Heinrich Guido, whom the family called Fawksey because he was born on Guy Fawkes night, died at one in 1850. Franziska died at a year old in 1852, and Jenny had to go out and borrow the money for the coffin. Edgar, called Musch, was eight when he died in 1855, and he was the one Marx never got over; he wrote to Engels that he had endured every sort of bad luck but only now knew what real misfortune was. A daughter, Eleanor, would grow up to be his secretary, help found a union of London gasworkers in 1889, and sit on its national executive for five years. The family lived on Engels’ remittances and on journalism. From 1852 to 1862 Marx was a European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, then the largest-circulation paper in the world, and wrote hundreds of articles on Indian revolt, Crimean strategy, Spanish politics and American slavery, some of them drafted by Engels when Marx was too ill or too far behind. And nearly every day he walked to the Reading Room of the British Museum, sat under the dome from morning until the doors closed, and filled notebook after notebook with the Blue Books, the government reports on factory conditions that give Capital so much of its evidence. One more thing belongs in the record of those Soho years, uncomfortable as it is. A boy, Frederick, was born to Helene Demuth in 1851 and sent out to be raised by another family. That Marx was his father is widely repeated but rests on a single letter written fifteen years after his death, and honest biographers still disagree about it.

(●) 1864 AD: He was handed the leadership of an international workers’ movement, and finished the one volume of his masterwork he would live to see. + On 28 September 1864 a crowded meeting of English and French trade unionists at St Martin’s Hall in London founded the International Working Men’s Association. Marx went as a spectator, sat silent on the platform, and came away asked to draft its founding address. He spent the next eight years steering it, drafting its statements, and fighting for control of it with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a fight that ended at the Hague congress of 1872 and left the body wrecked. All through those years of committee rooms and congresses, the book was coming. It had been coming since he was twenty-six. He signed a contract for a critique of political economy with a Darmstadt publisher in February 1845, missed every date after it, and rewrote the thing through carbuncles, which are boils deep enough to make sitting a trial, along with insomnia and a liver that never forgave London. Then, on 16 August 1867, at two in the morning, he wrote to Engels that the last sheet was corrected, and that he owed it to Engels alone that the thing had been possible at all. Das Kapital, volume one, was published in Hamburg that September. Reviews were few and sales were slow, and the German professors met it, as Marx complained, with silence. The Russian translation of 1872 was the first into any other language, passed by the Tsar’s censor on the ground that hardly anyone would read it. He worked on the later volumes for the rest of his life and never assembled them.

(●) 1883 AD: He died fifteen months after his wife, and about eleven people came to the grave. + Jenny died of cancer in December 1881, after thirty-eight years of a marriage that had cost her a title, a country and most of her children. Marx was too ill to attend the funeral. Their eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, died in Paris in January 1883, and he had two months left. On 14 March 1883 Engels called at the house in Maitland Park Road and found him in his armchair, asleep and gone, at sixty-four. He was buried three days later in his wife’s grave at Highgate Cemetery, in a plot then almost hidden. Engels gave the address in English and said that as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx had discovered the law of development of human history. Accounts of the day put the mourners at about eleven. Engels spent the next eleven years reading his friend’s handwriting. He assembled volume two of Capital from the notebooks in 1885 and volume three, a far harder job, in 1894, and died the following year. The bulk of what the twentieth century knew as Marxism was published after Marx was dead, most of it edited by the man who had paid for it.

What He Taught

(T1) Religion is a painkiller for a wound in the world, and the wound is what needs treating. + Imagine a man who comes home from a shift that has ruined his back and takes something for the pain so that he can sleep and do it again tomorrow. The drug is not a lie. It genuinely helps, and you would not blame him for taking it. But if you love him, you do not want him better supplied with it. You want the shift changed. That is the whole of Marx on religion, and it is worth noticing how little of it is the sneer people expect. In 1844 he took over Feuerbach’s claim that God is human nature projected onto the heavens, and complained that Feuerbach had stopped too soon. Fine, said Marx, but ask why the projection happens. People do not invent a Father in heaven out of idle error; they invent him because they are orphaned here. Religion is the sigh of a creature under pressure, the warmth people manufacture in a world that gives them none, and to that extent it is a protest against real suffering as well as an acceptance of it. Two consequences follow, and both are hard. First, arguing people out of faith is useless, because you would be arguing with a symptom; the criticism of religion had been finished in Germany, he thought, and the next job was the criticism of the conditions that keep religion necessary. Second, religion is on the wrong side in the meantime, because a heaven that pays out later makes a wage that never rises bearable now. Marx expected that when the conditions changed, faith would fall away by itself, the way a man off the night shift stops needing the pill.

(Q) "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." + Source: Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, 1844 (Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 3). Published in the one issue the Paris journal managed. The sentence immediately before it is the one usually left out: religious suffering, Marx says, is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against it. In 1844 opium was a legal, ordinary painkiller sold over the counter, which is closer to what he meant than the modern word suggests (T1).

(T2) What a society believes is set by how it makes its living, not the other way round. + Hegel had taught that history is the unfolding of Spirit, that ideas are the engine and events the exhaust. Marx said he had found the machine standing on its head and set it back on its feet. Begin instead with the plainest facts about a society: what it eats, how it grows or makes it, who owns the fields and the machines, and who has nothing to sell but their own hours. He called the sum of those facts the base, and everything built on top of it, the laws, the politics, the art, the philosophy and the religion, the superstructure. The claim is that the base shapes the superstructure. A society of feudal lords and serfs produces a theology of divine right and fixed stations; a society of factory owners and wage earners produces a philosophy of free contracts between equals, which is a fine description of a market and a poor description of a man who must take the wage offered or starve. The word Marx used for a belief that presents one class’s interest as everybody’s common sense was ideology, a French coinage a generation older than him to which he gave the meaning it now carries. The whole picture, base and superstructure together, later went under the name the materialist conception of history. Materialist there has nothing to do with wanting a bigger house. It means only that the explaining starts from the material facts of how people feed, clothe and house themselves and works upward to their ideas, rather than starting with the ideas and working down to everything else. This is the idea with the longest reach, and it is not obviously wrong. Anyone who has watched a doctrine become convenient at exactly the moment it became profitable knows the phenomenon he is naming. The question Christians press is how far it goes. If every conviction is the echo of an economic position, then so is this one, and Marx has sawn through the branch he is sitting on. He was aware of the problem and never fully answered it.

(Q) "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness." + Source: Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface, 1859 (N. I. Stone translation, 1904). The clearest single page Marx ever wrote about his own method, drafted as a preface to a book few people finished. It is where the base and the superstructure raised on it are set out in one paragraph (T2).

(T3) All written history is the record of a struggle between the class that owns and the class that works. + Open a normal history of Rome and you get emperors. Marx said look instead at who was doing the harvesting and who was keeping the harvest, and you will find that the arrangement has changed shape several times without ever changing its nature: master and slave, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, and now the two classes his own century had produced. Those two he named with words that have never quite settled into English. The bourgeoisie are the people who own the means of production, meaning the factories, the mines, the land and the capital; the proletariat are the people who own none of it and live by selling their labour by the hour. His argument was that this pairing is not a permanent fact of nature but a stage, like the ones before it, and that it carries the seed of its own ending: competition drives owners to concentrate industry into fewer and larger firms, which gathers the workers into larger and larger crowds who can see each other, learn from each other, and organise. He expected the change to come first in the most industrial countries, England or Germany, and to come by the workers taking the means of production into common ownership. It is worth being honest about how that prediction fared. The revolutions that flew his flag happened in agrarian Russia and China rather than industrial Britain. In the countries he actually wrote about, wages rose and unions won, and immiseration, the steady grinding of the workers down into deeper and deeper poverty that he expected the system to produce, did not arrive on schedule.

(Q) "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." + Source: Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, section I, 1848 (Samuel Moore translation of 1888, made under Engels’ supervision). The first sentence of the argument proper, after the opening about a spectre haunting Europe. Engels later added a footnote exempting prehistoric societies, which he thought had held land in common before any of this began (T3).

(T4) A man made to work for a wage is made poorer by his own work, and the thing he makes stands over him as a stranger. + A carpenter who builds a chair for his own kitchen sees himself in it for the next forty years. Put the same man on a line fitting one spindle to one chair back every eleven seconds, for a wage set by somebody else, and the chairs pile up as somebody else’s property while he goes home with nothing of himself in any of them. Marx called this alienation, or estrangement: work, which ought to be the activity in which a human being is most himself, turned into the thing he is least himself in and must escape at the end of the shift. He counted the estrangement in four directions in the Paris notebooks of 1844. The worker is estranged from the product, which belongs to another the moment it exists; from the working itself, which he does under compulsion and would flee if he could; from what Marx called our species-being, the human capacity to make and shape the world freely, which is exactly what is being rented by the hour; and from other people, because the arrangement sets everyone in competition with everyone else. Twenty years later he put a price on it. In Capital he argued that a worker paid a full day’s wage produces more value in the day than the wage covers, and that the difference, which he called surplus value, is where profit comes from. Whatever one makes of the economics, and professional economists have argued about it for a century and a half, the moral picture underneath is what has kept people reading: a system that treats a person’s hours as a raw material, and grows by taking more of them.

(Q) "The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things." + Source: Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, First Manuscript, "Estranged Labour" (Martin Milligan translation, 1959). Written at twenty-six, in a notebook that stayed unpublished until 1932. The sentences around it say the same thing three ways: the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, and becomes a cheaper commodity the more commodities he makes (T4).

(T5) Philosophy has spent its history explaining the world, and its business now is to change it. + In the spring of 1845, in Brussels, Marx jotted eleven short notes to himself about Feuerbach in a notebook and never published them. Engels found them after his death, tidied them slightly and printed them in 1888. The last of the eleven is one sentence long and is carved on the tomb at Highgate. Its point is not that thinking is worthless. It is that a philosophy which only interprets leaves everything where it found it, and that Marx no longer wanted to belong to that trade. He had watched the Young Hegelians fight ferociously over the correct account of Christianity while the Rhineland peasants he had written about were being prosecuted for picking up sticks, and he had concluded that a criticism which changes nothing has misunderstood its own job. The consequence is that Marxism is not offered as one theory among others to be weighed at leisure. It is offered as a programme, with a party, a movement and a task, and it asks to be judged by what it does. That is a genuine strength, and it is also where the trouble starts, because a theory that identifies truth with what advances the cause has quietly given itself permission to stop being tested by anything outside the cause.

(Q) "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." + Source: Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI, written 1845 (W. Lough translation of Marx’s notebook text, Progress Publishers). Eleven sentences on a page of a notebook, written for nobody. Engels printed a lightly edited version in 1888, in which the line runs "the point, however, is to change it", and it is that version the Highgate monument carries below the bust, under the closing words of the Manifesto across the top of the plinth (T5).

(Q) "Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests." + Source: Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, section I, 1848 (Samuel Moore translation of 1888). The him is the modern labourer, who by this point in the argument has been stripped of property, of any family life the respectable classes would recognise, and of country. What is left of the creed he was raised in, Marx says, is a set of somebody else’s interests wearing the clothes of duty. That is the charge, and every Christian reply since has had to meet it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He forced the churches to say out loud what they believed about wages, and in 1891 two of them did. + The first Christian answers came from men who had seen the same factories. In England, in the same year as the Manifesto, F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and the lawyer J. M. Ludlow began the movement that Maurice would name Christian Socialism two years later, arguing that competition is not a law of nature and that the church had no business preaching contentment to the hungry. They were not reading Marx, who was unknown to them; they were reading the same conditions. The year that mattered was 1891. In Rome, Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, a letter addressed to the bishops and through them to the whole Catholic Church, which is what Rome means by an encyclical, and the document that founded modern Catholic social teaching. It does something more interesting than condemnation. It rejects the socialist remedy and defends private property, and then it turns and says that a wage sufficient to keep a frugal worker and his family is a matter of natural justice rather than of the employer’s generosity, that workers may form associations, and that the rich who withhold it are guilty before God. In Amsterdam that same year, the Dutch theologian and future prime minister Abraham Kuyper opened the Christian Social Congress with an address on the problem of poverty in which he told his own conservative constituency that the socialists had understood something the church had forgotten, and that Christ, like the prophets before him and the apostles after him, had taken his stand against the powerful and with the oppressed. Both documents exist because of the pressure the socialist movement had put on the question, and nobody had put it there harder than Marx. Neither of them takes his answer.

(†) Twentieth-century theologians borrowed his diagnosis and refused his cure, and the church has argued ever since about where the line falls. + Karl Barth, on most accounts the greatest Protestant theologian of the century, spent ten years as a village pastor in Safenwil in Switzerland, took the side of the mill workers in his parish so publicly that the manufacturers wanted him gone, joined the Swiss Social Democratic Party in 1915, and was known as the red pastor of Safenwil. His theology went the other way from Marx’s, insisting that God is not an extension of anything human and cannot be explained by our circumstances, but he never pretended the workers’ complaint was unfounded. Barth was not the only one to take the complaint seriously and still refuse the philosophy underneath it. In America, Reinhold Niebuhr used the class analysis hard in Moral Man and Immoral Society in 1932, arguing that groups are more selfish than the individuals in them and that moral appeals alone will not move a class off its interests, and then broke with the Marxists over their confidence that human nature would improve once ownership changed. In England, Archbishop William Temple wrote Christianity and Social Order in 1942, a sixpenny wartime paperback that sold about 139,000 copies and argued that the church may state principles for an economy while leaving the technical means to those who know them. The sharpest engagement came from Latin America. Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, published in Peru in 1971, used Marxist social analysis as a tool for reading a continent of poverty in the light of the Exodus and the prophets. Rome answered twice in the 1980s, warning in Libertatis Nuntius that borrowing the analysis tends to bring the whole atheistic system in with it, and then in Libertatis Conscientia affirming that the liberation of the poor is genuinely a gospel concern. That exchange is the shape of the whole Christian reception of Marx in miniature: the question taken seriously, the answer declined.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the image of God, the human heart, and a hope that history cannot manufacture. + Marx is owed an honest hearing on the point where he is right. Scripture is not neutral about a rich man who keeps back a labourer’s pay: "Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts" (James 5:4). Amos wanted justice to roll down like waters (Amos 5:24), the first believers in Jerusalem held everything in common (Acts 4:32), and the love of money is called a root of all kinds of evils (1 Timothy 6:10). Where the church has preached patience to the exploited and called it piety, Marx read it correctly. Four things he taught, in his own writing, the gospel cannot follow. - What a human being is. For Marx a person is essentially a producer, and what we are is a summary of how we work; change the arrangements of production and you change the human being. Scripture starts somewhere else: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). Worth and identity are conferred before anyone works at all, which is why a person who cannot work has lost nothing of what makes them a person. - Where the trouble comes from. His diagnosis puts the fault in the system, so that the cure is a rearrangement of ownership. Jesus locates it further in: "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness" (Mark 7:21–22). Greed is not only a feature of an arrangement; it survives the arrangement, which is why every new ownership class in history has needed watching as badly as the last one. - The abolition of religion. He did not offer atheism as a conclusion to be argued but as the premise everything else stands on. In 1844 he called the abolition of religion the demand for the people’s real happiness, and the Manifesto promises that the communist revolution will involve the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. Take that seriously and morality has nothing left above the movement to measure it by, which leaves it no way of telling its own friends they have gone wrong. - The shape of hope. The classless society is a promise that history will produce its own healing if the process is allowed to finish, and it asks of the people alive now the sacrifices that any such promise asks. Christian hope points outside history for the thing that history cannot make: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). No change in ownership raises the dead, and the three children Marx buried in Soho are the reason that matters. There is one more, and it is the objection he never disarmed. If what people think is set by the class they belong to, that verdict applies to the man delivering it, and the theory eats itself. A comfortable exile writing in the British Museum, kept by a factory owner’s profits, has no exemption from his own rule.