While we might note that this portrayal of the workers as the
unwitting dupes of a bourgeois conspiracy is hardly edifying,it could be true. Yet even if it is, it doesn’t follow that religion’s
function is a solace, for here it is represented as a
means of control. So we should note that Feuerbach’s thesis
that man invented God is detachable from Marx’s hypothesis
concerning why we have done this. Thus we may conjecture
that something else might explain why we have invented
religion. Perhaps it has something to do with our need to
explain the world around us. Perhaps it answers some other
need that Marx ignored. This is a point we will see made a
number of times in the following pages. It is related to the
keystone idea of Marx’s early writings: that labour, or productive
activity, is man’s primary form of engagement with
the world. This claim will come under further examination
shortly.
Turning now to Marx’s account of alienation and alienated
labour, we must, again, admit that it is very impressive, and
contains much of enduring worth. The exact conditions of
production he describes may now be relatively rare in
Western Europe, but they may be endemic throughout the
developing world. Here I want to raise just two points, which
will be examined in more detail later, in the discussion of
communism. First, although Marx associates alienated labour
with capitalist economic organization, it is less clear that
capitalism really is the problem. For certain aspects of alienated
labour could be a feature of any highly mechanized
production process, whether used under communism or
capitalism.