Originally published: MAY 28, 2026

Introduction

1. Fixing The Bow

The bow the writers of the CSHC seek to aim — rightly so — at leftist re-interpreters of Hindu texts is flawed. In their words, “When Marx called religion ‘the opium of the masses,’ he meant religious ideas sedate the working class, making them accept suffering as divine will rather than recognizing exploitation.”

I hate to be put into the position of trying to defend or explain Marx, but that is not what he was saying.

Here is the full passage from the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1844), written by Karl Marx as an introduction to an unpublished manuscript and published in Marx’s journal, Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher (italics in original):

“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 aromais religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expressionof 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.”

It is rather clear from reading this passage with awareness of the greater context behind it (a critique of Hegel, whose philosophy of dialectics Marx claimed to have raised from its upside-down, spirtualistic orientation and set right-side up, reoriented towards a materialist dialectic) that Marx actually credits religion with giving humans a sense of dignity, albeit external to themselves, and offering the masses a means of pain relief as well as a legitimate expression of and succor from pain, although these are abstracted from (his conception of) reality, whose necessity will be dissolved as soon as the material conditions under which the faithful suffer also disappear. If we read further into the text this becomes all the more apparent:

“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.”

And, while his language is universalist in tone, Marx was, I think, more focused on the conditions of the bourgeois, industrial capitalist civilization of which he was a part. It also mirrors the historical ubiquity of opium itself, however. Andrew McKinnon, a sociologist of religion and senior lecturer on sociology at the University of Aberdeen, says in the footnotes of his piece in the journal Critical Sociology, ‘Reading “Opium of the People”: Expression, Protest and the Dialectics of Religion’ (2005) that the primary point of context in this article analyzing Marx’s idea of opium was 19th Century Britain because:

“Britain is important for a number of reasons. First, our understanding of opium comes from later moments in the history of opium there (the movement to ban opium emerged here). Secondly, throughout the 19th Century, Britain played a central role in the production and distribution of opium on a global scale, it was also an important producer of Opium meanings, consumed throughout the rest of the continent (Butel 1995). Finally, when Marx (and Engels) discuss opium, most of their discussions deal with the English context.” (p. 16-17)

And in Britain, at that time, opium in the form of laudanum was widely available for sale, both legally and otherwise, and present in many homes — a clear parallel to the ubiquity of religiosity in that society. Furthermore, as McKinnon points out, opium had many legitimate, medicinal uses for which it was sold at that time — uses for which even Marx availed himself of the substance — pain relief, yes, but also the only prescription for fatigue, depression, sleeplessness, rheumatism, women’s ailments, fevers, diabetes, pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis, diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera (p. 18). Even if opium didn’t actually heal one of these illnesses, it nevertheless allowed one to deal with the pain they caused and keep on living.

McKinnon also notes that there was another polarity to the connotation opium held in the minds of 19th Century Britons, namely that of economic imperialism as this was when the ‘Opium Wars’ took place. At the same time, several of the literati indulged in its recreational use and even produced conspicuously self-reflective works regarding it. He sums it up best when he says:

“Opium had a complex history in the 19th century, and yet when we, early 21st century readers encounter “opium of the people,” we read it in a straightforward, literal, (and uniformly negative) manner that is alien to his time. In other words, we read opium as people who have learned to think about opium in a world after the prohibitions against opium use have become naturalized. By drawing a parallel between religion and opium, Marx alludes to all of the mid-19th century connotations that opium would have had for his readers. Any reading of “Towards a Critique” must deal with the complexity and ambivalence of this metaphor.” (p. 21)

The “dialectic logic” with which Marx treats religion — at once an “expression of” and “protest against” real suffering is shown in their synchronicity and in a relation of mutual influence, even if one of these sides has been predominant historically (p. 24). As such, McKinnon argues, Marx’s use of the term opium should be seen as the final step in the dialectic between expression and protest, comparing opium as a historical product arising from the capitalist economic process and commoditization of religion as the feudal medieval world order receded (again, in Western and Northern Europe).

What the authors of the CSHC article speak of — the framing of religious narratives and ordinances as mere power plays — is what McKinnon would lump under “traditional Marxian analyses of religion” (p. 29). As such, they cannot be faulted for this idea, as it is an all too common one, even among leftists. This, McKinnon argues, is an abstract theory of religion, however, divorced from the material conditions in which religions operate in the world. What the authors of the CSHC article are talking about, I think, is a later development which seems to have been less of a focus in the writings of Marx himself (especially when one takes into consideration the fact that the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher was co-published with another thinker with whom he later had a disagreement, which contributed to there only ever being one issue ever published) than in those of his readers many decades hence. In particular, it is the critical theorists or those whom some might call ‘Cultural Marxists’ that are most likely to analyze religion in this way, with strongly cynical exegeses.

From what I know, at least in the Western academic tradition, especially in America, the academic left shifted from critiquing material phenomena to critiquing culture, possibly as a result of the sidelining of continental philosophy in universities, as David McKerracher of Theory Underground suggests in his recent piece ‘Socioanalyzing Analytic Philosophy’ (April 29, 2026), which led thinkers in that tradition to migrate into the humanities, where, in later generations, that philosophical blood would thin and harden into shibboleths of jargon. As McKerracher puts it:

“Critical theory, which began in Frankfurt with Adorno and Horkheimer doing rigorous work on the culture industry, became in American literature and gender-studies departments a loose grab-bag of jargon serving whatever identitarian project was fashionable. The vocabulary survived and the discipline did not. Nobody was holding these students to the standards Adorno held himself to. The jargon became a credential, and the credential became a political weapon.”

Still, as McKinnon said, this seems to be a common line of thought across traditional ‘Marxians’ as well, so it may well be that the Indian literati that the CSHC authors mention — Ranganayakamma, Neelakantan, Sawant, Kane, Patel, Divakaruni, Kumari — consider themselves orthodx Marxists or some other stripe of leftist. Without a deep dive into their backgrounds and biographies it’s hard to tell.