Marx’s use of the Bible is honestly really interesting. Expect to see more of it through Capital (and even more the earlier in his writings you go). It is inarguably the single largest literary, theoretical and philosophical inspiration Marx has throughout his life. Marx’s library contained at least one copy of the Bible when he died, so it’s also likely that it (like Hegel) was something he came back to time and time again.

Some more Marx-Bible facts:

In his early articles for the Rheinische Zeitung he refers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to both himself and other journalists as prophets and false prophets.

He closes his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” with a quote from the Bible identifying himself with Ezekiel.

He taught his daughters about Jesus as “the carpenter who the rich men killed”, reciting his own version of the story himself.

According to the memoirs of German socialist Max Beer (who met Eleanor Marx), Marx rarely had much to say about religion in her memory except, when her mother and sister started going to Mr. Bradlaugh’s secular Sunday services. This led Karl Marx to dissuade his wife and daughter from going there. Beer quotes Eleanor as saying: “[Karl Marx] told mother that edification or satisfaction of her metaphysical needs she would find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in Mr. Bradlaugh’s shallow reasonings”.

Some Jewish socialists have actually claimed him for the Jewish prophetic tradition, for example Abraham Shiplacoff’s speech in the 1910s said (originally in Yiddish):

Marx was a prophet, no less so than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. With honest conviction and courage he proclaimed the economic liberation of humanity. He appealed to the workers of the world and inspired them with his conviction that they are destined to fulfill the great task of abolishing poverty, thus putting an end to wars between nations and classes, and, in doing so, realize the great thousands-year-old dream of human brotherhood.

Marx’s constant references made me curious so I looked into it, and the Bible has a shocking number of condemnations of poverty/oppression and outright critiques of markets, class, urban/rural divide, and so forth. The commodity-fetishism section from last chapter is especially neat because Marx secularises prophetic condemnations of idol worship, even using the same phrases (e.g. “work of their hands”).

If Marx was writing today, Capital would include stuff like “If by means of increased productivity the socially necessary labor needed to produce a pair of jeans is halved, then the value of those jeans also falls by half, as if Thanos had snapped his fingers at it.”

Marx wrote about religion and especially Christianity a lot in the 1840s. Mostly about how it is an alienated form that dominates over the people whose minds produced it. Sound similar to commodity fetishism?

This footnote excerpt from ch1 is relevant to the money discussion in ch3. Marx was not a fan of utopian socialist proposals of labor money, or alternative money that avoids the pitfalls of abstract labor by counting directly as social labor. Eg. if you work for 1 hour you get a 1-labor-hour token.

”It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character [of money] impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together.”

He’s dunking on Christians with their own book.