Bonus Sample: Marx’s “Atheism” vs. the Capitalist Religion of Everyday Life

Conspirituality

Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker

Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Science

4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Listen to the full episode Matthew explores Marx’s “opium of the people” passage by placing it back into the philosophical and political project it came from. Marx was not attacking religion in some essential way, but criticizing the conditions that make religion necessary as a consolation. The problem is not faith itself, but the suffering — inequality, exploitation, alienation — that gives rise to the instinct for spiritual escape. Marx’s atheism was not a New Atheist-type negation but a theological critique — a way of revealing how capitalism itself can displace Christianity as a religion of profit, rent, and wages. According to liberation theologian Enrique Dussel, Marx frames money as a jealous god, capital as the Antichrist, and private property as original sin. No wonder he is eternally hated. Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
0:13.0	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.
0:25.0	It's likely you've heard that before.
0:27.8	But here's the rest of it.
0:30.7	The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people
0:35.7	is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them
0:41.7	to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition
0:47.9	that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo, the criticism of that veil of tears, of which religion is the halo.
1:01.5	Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation,
1:14.2	but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
1:19.5	The criticism of religion disillusions man,
1:23.7	so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality,
1:27.4	like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses,
1:32.3	so that he will move around himself as his own true son.
1:38.4	It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other world of truth has has vanished to establish the truth of this world.
1:49.2	It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms
1:59.6	once the holy form of human self-estrangement in its unholy forms, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has
2:03.9	been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of
2:11.9	religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
2:22.1	So that's Karl Marx in 1843 from the introduction to a book he never completed.
2:28.9	It was called, or it was supposed to be called, a contribution to the critique of Hegel's
2:33.5	philosophy of right.
	...

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