Michel Henry (1922-2002), French phenomenological thinker committed to Christ, in his two volume work on Marx wrote: “Marx is one of the most important Christian thinkers in the West.” It is perhaps a shocking statement, but he has reasons for his conclusion. We easily think that the whole of Marxian system is created by Marx. Marx has not created a system of philosophy, but only fragmentary thoughts. He was a visionary with a very moral perspective on the social reality. We must re-read Marx without Marxism but also re-read Christianity.

First of all, Marx was not on objective seeker of the truth of the world. His every attempt was to overcome alienation of the worker from himself by illusions. The urge to private property itself is the attempt to capitalist alienation. He differs from Feuerbach and keeps the way of German idealism, maintaining the way of subjectivity and consciousness and its inherent process. Marx is pivoted on the subject and his consciousness and his notion of insight involves poetic imagination and theoretical reading.

Marx separates real labour from abstract labour. Labour refers to the direct experience of toiling and sweating, getting tired, hungry, and thirsty. First and foremost, labour is subjective. It is a concept that does not mean anything, but ‘to feel one-self’, which is what life is all about. All of life is subjective. So too are life experiences. Life is a force, a productive force, not because labouring away life is productive, but because it brings forth itself: life creates itself. Living labour is self-generative: producing itself by labour and perceiving itself. Labour is the manifestation of life itself: not of the life of something else, a product, but of itself. Originally then, labour is physical and personal. As far as labour is living, individual and real, it is nothing but an enduring effort. On a more practical level, we can imagine the labourer carrying out even the simplest of tasks with undivided attention and love, but in that case it must be unpaid labour: the labour of a child.

This kind of labour is therefore not included in the economy for the benefit of the capitalist. The point is not so much that we need to revert to some initial type of labour—a live, joyous kind of labour, but that any economy presupposes such live labour. If this is the point both Marx and Henry propagate, it will radically alter our image of Marx: he is no longer primarily an economic or political reformer, but criticises the economics of his day to uncover the initial immanent domain of life. Marx gets around to developing a pointed theory of economics. Henry believes that the later Marx always presupposes that economy is subject to living labour. Indeed, life withdraws when faced with conceptualisation. Conceptualising life will immediately alienate it from experience. When re-reading Marx, Henry is taking the famous German Ideology based phrase seriously: ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.’

The relation between religion and life is transcendental, or according to Marx, ‘Religious suffering is at the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.’ However, Christianity also emphasizes reality, real Life. It is in this perspective that Marx speaks highly of Luther: ‘ Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction.’ He freed man from outer religiosity, because he made religiosity of the inner man.’ Here, the transformation of devotion, which always presupposes a phenomenological distance to the spiritual domain of conviction, is crucial. Christianity’s ethical ideals – love of others, solidarity, generosity, justice, and so on – simply must be realised. So Christianity is seen by Henry as truly a Marxist praxis in two senses of the word. First, there is no ideology that must be put into practice and second, life manifests itself in human performances. Ultimately, Christianity is the performance of invisible life.

Michel Henry’s writings take a new course towards Marxism: a new Marxism that welcomes Christianity’s objection against alienation as an ally. But let us not underestimate him: Henry also radically and unorthodoxly re-evaluated Christianity in a way un-thought-of in Christian tradition and theology. Christianity is neither a collection of external rituals nor a series of dogmas, but a religion that is basically characterized by illusory externalisation. Like Marxism, Christianity actually teaches that self-manifestation precedes every mode of externalisation. Marx, who was claimed as theirs by the communists for all the wrong reasons, writes about the basis of humanity, which is about life rather than about items of a political agenda. In I am the truth Marx is called, Henry wrote, ‘one of the greatest thinkers of all times.’ Communism and capitalism are therefore ‘two figures of death.’ In this respect, Henry adopts Marx´ atheism, which he feels does not actually destroy Christianity, but rather shows that life cannot be understood through religion as something that is transcendental, externalised and imaginary from the very beginning.