Marx’s fundamental subject of inquiry was the economic basis of nineteenth-century European society. At the core of Marx’s conception of capitalism are the dual concepts of infrastructure and superstructure. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ([1859] in Elster 1986:187), Marx argued that “[t]he sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and which correspond to definite forms of social consciousness.” In other texts (e. g., The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852] 1964), Marx places greater emphasis upon the dialectic between the economic base of society and the superstructure. However, while Marx does note the possibility of the superstructure conditioning the economic foundation, his writings on religion were generally more unidirectional (Elster 1986:504-510).
The class that has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.
The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations. (The German Ideology [1845-1846] 1998 in Elster 1986:302)
In a strict Marxist framework, religion is superstructural, and therefore secondary. By this view, religion only served to legitimize elite power and domination. While Marx was consistent in his belief that religious ideology developed from the material realities of social relations, his writings are often contradictory about the mechanisms for the emergence and development of the ideologies. In The German Ideology ([1845-1846] 1998), he sees ideology as forced upon the working classes. In other writings (e. g., the introduction to A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [1844] 1970), Marx argues that the working class generates religious ideology as a means of coping with their subordinate social position. In either case, Marx saw religion, particularly Christianity, as supporting the interests of the elite, legitimizing their privileged status. After Marx’s death, in 1893, Engels coined the term false consciousness to describe the ideology of capitalism.
The concept of false consciousness was refined and extended in the early twentieth century in the work of Gramsci (2011), Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007), and other Frankfurt School scholars who sought to explain how modern capitalism had become more entrenched, rather than less, in the twentieth century. These scholars saw false consciousness (reconceived as hegemony by Gramsci) as a powerful force that naturalized the ideology of the elite among the working class. To some degree, the work of Gramsci, Adorno, and other neo-Marxists demonstrated that ideology was stronger and more determinative than Marx had realized. Rather than viewing religion as derived from of the economic conditions of society, neo-Marxists recognized that religion could create and preserve economic realities.
The continued centrality of the Marxist and especially neo-Marxist views of religion in subsequent theoretical approaches cannot be overstated. For example, Bloch (1989:45) states that ritual is “the exercise of a particular form of power. . . [that makes] a power situation appear a fact in the nature of the world.” Similarly, much of the literature on practice theory emphasizes the ways that rituals promote the development of relationships of power (Bell 1992; Comaroff 1985; Ortner 1989). Bell (1997:82, italics in original), in a summary of practice theory, argues that “rather than ritual as the vehicle for the expression of authority, practice theorists tend to explore how ritual is a vehicle for the construction of relationships of authority and submission.”
World History
