Alienation and Emancipation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Alienation and Emancipation - Essay Example This thesis was presented in the broad frame of the doctrine of political alienation. The theme of economic alienation was broached in a separate concluding section of the article. Here he offered a trenchant formulation of the idea that the economic life in the 'state of egoism' is a practical religion of money-worship. He gave the religious analogy a special new twist and emphasis by calling the practical religion 'Judaism'. This may have been prompted by Hess' reference to the 'Christian merchants and Jewish Christians'. It capitalized upon the fact that the German term 'Judaism' (Judentum ) had the secondary connotation of 'commerce'. So Marx describes Judaism or commerce as a religion in which money is the god: 'What is the worldly cult of the Jew Huckstering. Who is his worldly god Money. ' And further: 'Money is the jealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money dethrones all the gods of man and turns them into a commodity. Money is the universal, independently constituted value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the world of man and nature, of its own value. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and his being. This alien being rules over him and he worships it.' (Karl Marx's, 1959). Following Hess, Marx conceives the practical religion as a material form of self- alienation corresponding to the spiritual form as analyzed by Feuerbach: 'Selling is the praxis of externalization.