I’m indenting my own comments, rather than using the indent for quotes, because I wanted to set them apart.  

Summary
There was, at the time, a campaign for religious freedom for Jews. Bruno Bauer argued against it. Marx replies that it is possible to be emancipated politically but not religiously. He cites America and France where religion was no longer a state concern. Religious ideas are not the product of a Christian state, but a free state. Again citing America as his reference, Marx says the citizen of the free state leads a double life. In his real life in civil or economic society, he is isolated and at war with everyone else trying to defend his private interests. In his imaginary life as a citizen, he is integrated and at one with the world. But only in theory, not in practice. It is this situation which gives rise to religious feelings. Religion, Marx says, is the cry of atomized, alienated man trying to overcome the separation he experiences in everyday life, but only on the level of fantasy. Religious ideas, Marx claims, will finally evaporate when we put an end to the alienation of men and chase away the fear and anxiety caused by the rule of money.  

Text
Marx looks at the role of religion and the state. Christianity is the state religion in Germany. Catholicism is not the state religion in France anymore, but the vast majority of French are Catholics. In the US, there is no official religion at all and the people are free to practice whatever religion. But in the US, Marx finds more religious people, and more devoutly religious people than elsewhere. He then examines the relationship between complete political emancipation and religion. Clearly, religion is flourishing in a completely politically emancipated state such as the US, so the existence of religion doesn’t contradict this. But Marx states that the existence of religion in the state is a defect and so the source of the defect must be in the nature of the state itself.

Political emancipation from religion is not complete emancipation because political emancipation isn’t the complete form of human emancipation.

The state can emancipate itself from religion even if the vast majority of its citizens are religious. But the attitude of the state is really only the attitude of the men that make up the state. So man liberates himself through the medium of the state using political means. Marx says this is a devious way of accomplishing this because the state still presupposes religion in this way. Just as if the state were to say that a citizen’s status with regard to private property, education, rank, etc. were of no account, it acknowledges those things exist in the real life of the citizen by its mention. The emancipated state hasn’t abolished those distinctions, in fact, it presupposes them in order to exist.  

Dave note:
I understand the argument here, but I don’t find it persuasive at all. While certainly, the state’s acknowledgment of those distinctions means those distinctions do exist, acknowledging them doesn’t give the state its reason to exist. I believe that is where Marx is going- he thinks the state will cease to exist when all distinctions are removed in reality.

Marx sees that even the perfected political state represents the state of man’s alienation. He lives in a real civil society full of restrictions, but also in a type of theoretical political society that pretends they aren’t of any importance. In his private life as an individual citizen, he is out for himself, whereas in his political life as a member of the community, he is a part of the whole.

Marx likens this to religion, where man lives here on earth in whatever miserable conditions he lives in, but considers himself as having a spiritual life in heaven that will resolve all the problems.

Of rights, Marx says, quoting the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The privilege of faith is a universal right of man. The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen. Who is this man that is distinct from the citizen? The egoistic man, separated from other men and from the community.”  

Marx goes on to use liberty as an example. What is liberty? The right to do and perform everything that does not harm others. The liberty we are dealing with is that of man as an isolated monad who is withdrawing into himself. It is a right based not on association with man, but based on the separation of man from man.  

Therefore, Marx says, not one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man. Society appears as a framework extraneous to individuals as a limitation of their original freedom. The only bond which holds them together is natural necessity, need, and private interest.  

Dave note:
Clearly, Marx doesn’t like the idea of people having rights. Marx sees men as socially related. Fair enough. But he thinks this social relationship ought to move in some specific direction, which he labels ‘the good of the community’. This social relationship must, in his mind, become the only thing men strive after, otherwise, it’s just man against man. He believes ‘alienation’ from others only happens when we communally move towards the good of all.

The problem has always been two-fold: 1) yes, men are selfish and self-interested. But even if we were to somehow take that away, (and we can’t)… 2) there are differing ideas about what exactly constitutes ‘the communal good’. While it sounds great to say we should all work towards “the common good”, only a fool can’t see that there can only be one vision of what that looks like, and everyone else’s idea of what the community ought to be working towards is going to have to be denied. For all Marx’s attempts at clever argumentation, he is ultimately a man filled with his own importance and hubris, in other words, a fool, to think that such a system can be attempted, and it won’t very quickly be turned into the most oppressive dictatorships imaginable. And that’s exactly what happened when his ideas were turned into a real political system.  

What can I say of a man who, thinking himself the emancipator of men, dreams up a scheme by which millions are enslaved and killed in the name of it. How badly has one man f-d up in understanding human nature to have done such a thing? And while I could chalk up the early Marxists with naivete and ignorance, because they might have believed it would work… those who continue to defend this after having seen the consequences it unleashed on its own people are utterly indefensible. Why would someone still advocate for this????

In feudal society, Marx writes, most individuals were not free, but they belonged to a community and those communities were involved in the political direction.  

The revolution that overthrew this brought rights to individual men, but it also sank them to the level of individual significance. The individual no longer was part of the state as a whole. This ideal state also perfected materialism in man.  

Man was not freed from religion, he gained freedom of religion. He was not freed from private property, he received the freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade, he received the freedom to engage in trade.  

Dave note:
Marx apparently doesn’t like you haven’t freedom of religion, HE thinks it would be better if you were free of religion altogether. HE doesn’t like you having property, HE thinks it would be better if no one had property. HE doesn’t think you should have the freedom to engage in trade, HE doesn’t think there should be a market at all! Marx doesn’t like the fact that YOU can choose for yourself what you want to do because HE thinks HE knows better than you.

To bolster his argument, he throws in some names for individuals that have the temerity to form their own opinions about things: egoistic man, man divorced from the community… This is supposed to clue us in that this is bad and we shouldn’t want it.  

Marx quotes Rousseau:

“Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature, of transforming each individual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he somehow receives his life and his being, of substituting a partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He must take man’s own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones which he can only use with the assistance of others.”

Only, Marx says, when man knocks off being the egoist and becomes a species-being (concerned about the community/others, and not himself), will emancipation be complete.  

Dave note:
Again, the hubris of Rousseau and Marx is off the charts. If you dare, Rousseau writes, to undertake transforming man from individual to community-minded, you will have to take man’s powers away and substitute others for him. If YOU want to change others, YOU will have to take away THEIR powers….

Marx wants to emancipate you from your chains. And he is willing to take your rights away because he believes he knows what is best for you. He’s not asking you, he is telling you what will be best for you. This is the ground on which collective systems are built.  

Now, as a counterpoint, I’ll acknowledge that there is a way in which one might understand this as much less sinister; where one might wish to transform the way humans think about things by showing them and inviting them along. But having read more of Marx than just this, and knowing the history of how Marxism actually played out, the more sinister way is what they were thinking, even if they didn’t consider it so sinister because, you know, they thought they were right and everyone else was wrong.