Critical View of Religion of Karl Marx - Essay Example

The second idea that I love about Karl Marx is his idea on human history and class conflict. Karl Marx claimed that in the history of human beings, every historical epoch is marked by two classes of people, i.e. the bourgeois and the proletariats. The bourgeois is the rich and the owners of the means of production. The proletariats on the other hand are the poor people who provide labor to the bourgeois. Karl Marx said that besides the bourgeois being the owners of the means of production, they also constitute the ruling class, political power, and authority reside with them. Carl Marx claimed that because of this glaring inequality between these two classes of people, conflict is bound to arise in such a society (Lawhead, 512-514). This is because the proletariat will always feel short-changed and as a result, they will strive to overthrow the bourgeois from power so that they would also have an opportunity to be rich and to own the means of production. The bourgeois on the other hand will strive to ward off the resistance of the proletariat and this will lead to a lot of class struggle between the two unequal classes. Karl Marx went on to argue that as the history of man has clearly shown, the proletariat at some point succeeds in taking over the power and the means of production. But once the proletariats take over power, they in turn become bourgeois and start mistreating the former bourgeois who are now the proletariat. The new proletariats will in turn start protesting against the bourgeois and this will lead to a new conflict in an attempt to overthrow the bourgeois from the reins of power. This process will continue on and on, in a dialectic way, till when will come such a time when classes in society will be completely abolished, i.e., when all the people in a society will be able to communally own the means of production. This kind of society will be a socialist or a communist society.

Karl Marx believed that through this theory of class struggle, he had explained the history of humanity and the law behind the history. Karl Marx was strongly convinced that without equal distribution of resources in a society, conflict is bound to arise. For Karl Marx, the material is the ultimate reality and the history of human beings can be explained as a constant and dialectic struggle for material resources. Karl Marx envisioned a time when there will be equality in the distribution of resources and when the means of production of society will be communally owned. He envisioned a time when the resources of a country will be divided not according to one’s ability but according to one’s needs. But this is not possible in a capitalist society; it is possible only in a socialist or communist society. This is because, in a capitalist society, the distribution of resources is not based on one’s needs, but rather on one’s ability to acquire the resources.

I love this idea of Karl Marx because a critical look at the many conflicts in our societies and the world at large can be attributed to class struggle. Our capitalist economies have created a wide economic gulf between the rich and the poor, and this inequality has caused a lot of conflict between the rich people, the bourgeois, and the poor people who provide labor for the rich.

I find the ideas of Karl Marx quite relevant today. This is because firstly, Karl Marx’s criticism of religion can be applied today to criticize some religious practices in our lifetime. For instance, instead of religion helping people to overcome the daily challenges that they are going through in life, many religions are focusing on life after death while ignoring the daily challenges that people are going through in life. Religion is still being used as the opiate of the masses. Secondly, Karl Marx’s analysis of the history of humanity and the class struggle can still be used to analyze the many conflicts in our modern society. Many struggles in our societies are precipitated by the inequality between the rich and the poor. These two facts show that Karl Marx’s ideas are timeless and can be applied to any society at given any time.