What Marx said
Karl Marx is often quoted as saying religion is the opium of the masses. It’s often used to suggest religion is false, but he was saying something far more than that. The passage containing that phrase is my go-to one when people tell me ‘But religion makes people happy!‘
What follows, as a quick post, is my translation of it – this is one of the rare times when I’ll wave my Oxford German degree, because I’ve had to translate this text in academic settings.
There are certain differences from how it’s often rendered in English, because I don’t think the force of certain words is always captured. You can read the original German here.
The want of religion is at once an expression of real want and a protestation against real want. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless situations. It is the opium of the people.
The overthrow of religion as the overthrow of the people’s delusional happiness is a demand for real happiness: the demand to give up delusions about their situation is the demand to give up a situation which required those delusions. Criticism of religion, then, is in embryo criticism of the vale of tears of which religion is an apparition.
This criticism has plucked apart the imaginary flowers upon our chains, not so that humanity might bear a disconsolate chain devoid of fantasy, but so that it might throw off its chains and pick flowers filled with life. Criticism of religion disillusions humanity, so that it might think, act and shape its reality like a disillusioned person come to their senses; so that it might revolve around itself and thereby around its own real sun. Religion is merely the delusional sun which revolves around humanity when we do not revolve around ourselves.
Great translation, as far as I can tell (mein Deutsch ist leider schrecklich).
This subject is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it used by U.S religious fundamentalists. I’ll be using this translation (with attribution) the next time the issue comes up.
“Elend” means “misery” (not “want”). Otherwise you seem to be getting the gist of the text. I like the metaphor with the sun.
Typically, yes, but it can also refer to the absence of something important, i.e. destitution, squalor or hardship. I would argue that ‘want’ – not as in desire, but in the now slightly archaic English sense of ‘poverty’ – is the best translation of that in this context, because he’s talking simultaneously about financial/material hardship and emotional hardship.
Okay, then I learnt something new. Thanks for your reply.
More notes on my translation here: http://www.alexgabriel.co.uk/post/28865606699/what-marx-didnt-say-notes-on-translation