Marx:Dare to question! | Readers Write

All I knew about Karl Marx before I found we'd be studying him in sociology class were two words – communism and Das Kapital. Before that, Karl Marx was just another "dead white guy" with a bushy beard that covered most of his face. As we went on with the course, the big words kept piling up – alienation, bourgeoisie, proletariat and class consciousness. In time, he became the key to the other side of the fairytale that functionalism had created and had dominated so far. Nevertheless, his own theories were as overwhelming, as fairytale-like as those of his contemporaries. I may not agree with his philosophy but simply his challenge to the status quo struck something in me, an innate need to question.

Karl Marx is one of the most influential people to come out of the 19th cent ury. He was an economist, philosopher and a revolutionary and his philosophy helped bring about a lot of change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. It helped unite the peasants and bring on the French Revolution; it influenced Lenin, Stalin, Mao and closer to home, Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Baburam Bhattarai. Marx did not only want to make theories about the world, but he wanted to change it. And change he did. The power of his theory rung throughout the centuries, in George Orwell's Animal Farm, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, and the somewhat-Marxist parties that followed. And although his theories have been objected to much criticism, they still persist. Marx dared to show the aristocrats in the worst light possible when they were a class to be pleased, and in his lifetime he left nothing unsaid – his last words sum it all up – "go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

Marx taught me to look at things from an unconventional point of view. Everything I knew and understood till that point involved a blind acceptance to to all that I had been told. Religion, family, education, were all things that I had naively accepted as a matter of course. The fact that Marx saw religion as something created by people that served as "the opiate of the masses" was a completely new idea to me. I hadn't so much as thought of it that way. Lots of people just pass through life without ever questioning what they're doing. To me ignorance is not bliss, its deprivation. If you never question the things you do – and fail to see it from a different perspective, however horrid your life may seem, at least, you know that you're not lying to yourself.

As I began uncovering Marx's theory, the world as I knew it, collapsed before me. The fairytale that I had once been blinded by had disappeared. At first, I didn't like the fact that I was looking at things critically, but now I'm glad.