"Bow Down Before the One You Serve"

In the “Very Short Introduction to Marx” there’s a good bit of background information on Ludwig Feuerbach and his 1841 book “The Essence of Christianity.” After looking through some of it it’s pretty obvious that Marx used it as a jumping off point for a lot of his own early ideas. Feuerbach takes Hegel’s dialectical method and weaponizes it in his attack on religion. He states that religion is the reason that humans become alienated. Essentially, human beings project their own essence (in a pure form) onto a deity and then distinctly separate it from the tangible world, alienating the best qualities of humanity from itself. The “Very Short Introduction to Marx” points out that while several Young Hegelians pinpointed alienation as a serious problem, Marx shifts its underlying cause from religion to money, specifically capitalism. This gives me an excuse to write a blog and make the title Nine Inch Nails lyrics.
Two of the most pervasive and highly exalted concepts in the Western world are money and religion. I think the similarities are based on the fact that humans basically worship both of these things. In worshiping either God or money I think humans put so much meaning, emphasis, and significance on such an external source that they necessarily debase their own humanity, at least to some extent. The process of alienation that Feuerbach attributes to money seems easily applicable to money with little change. Humans make money the object of their desire, the means to an end of a successful and happy existence (except in this life, not the next) and accordingly attach many important qualities onto this concept that is separate from themselves.
However, Marx asserts that the difference between the two is that religion alienates through apotheosis and worship while money alienates the proletariat more indirectly, through the estrangement of labor. I don’t think the act of labor is as alienating as the concept of money to begin with. In any case, the alienation caused by labor is still stemming from the tree of capitalism in the first place. The worship of money inherent in a capitalist system ultimately leads to a situation that necessitates estranged labor. I think this neatly parallels Marx’s similar musing about religion in the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “the call to abandon their illusions is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions” (54). My qualm with Marx here is a causation issue. Sure, labor does indeed alienate, but I think it’s a symptom, not the disease.