as love or religious feeling – let alone ‘explain’ the origins
of subjectivity or consciousness as such.
When Marx and Engels themselves coined the term
‘scientific socialism’ however, it was not this sort of
‘science’ they were thinking of. Nor was their ‘science’ a
crude form of social or economic determinism.
For Marx, such economic ‘determinism’ merely
reflected the capitalist status quo – a society in which the
value of all values, including religious and ethical values,
is measured only by their material and economic value.
As for Marx’s notorious denigration of religion as “the
opium of the masses”, its repeated citation completely
ignores his broader project of rescuing human beings
from all sorts of false gods – principally what he called
the “fetishism of the commodity”, “the monotheism of
money” and the implicit worship of ‘the market’ – with
its invisible yet supposedly benevolent and godlike
‘hidden hand’.
Unlike figures such Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Marx did
not seek political or state power of any sort. He was
simply a brilliant teacher and thinker who offered human
society a deeper knowledge of itself and of the dialectical
laws – the karma – of its own history.
As the spiritual sage of “scientific socialism” aimed at
overcoming crude materialist cultures and philosophies,
he was, implicitly, a priest and prophet of a new ‘socialist
theocracy’. Both Stalin’s ‘Cult of the Personality’ and
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