Soc 200 - Karl Marx

Adriana Luca

February 27, 2012

SOC 200

                                     Karl Marx

Growing up in communist Romania in the 70’s and 80’s, deprived of the most basic liberties, as young children we were indoctrinated with communist ideas and schools were used as a platform where with a curriculum strictly controlled, the purpose of educating the youth was to instill in us communist principles.  Karl Marx’s portrait would hang in every classroom and his theories were studied and celebrated in every history book, or literature book, or economics, or any book for that matter. Sociology and Psychology were considered pseudo-sciences under the communist reign and therefore forbidden in schools.

As Romanian history books were altered from the truth, describing only his greatest achievements and never the flaws, for the purpose of this project I was rather intrigued to research Karl Marx – I hated him for so many years - and take a really close look at who he actually was, and how he impacted the study of Sociology. I knew that he established the basis of communist ideology, and I have lived for twenty years through the atrocities committed by his followers, but I never really had the interest ( until now) to understand what influenced and drove him into envisioning and writing his proposals for change.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the German Rhineland (Prussia). He was a philosopher, journalist and economist and even though he produced little that earned him money or recognition during his lifetime, he was obsessed with his work and eventually he was able to accomplish what he always wanted to do: change the world.

A very smart child, he studied law in Bonn and Berlin and wrote his PhD thesis in Philosophy. Upon the completion of his doctorate in 1841, Marx hoped for an academic job but because he was already known as a too radical thinker, he didn’t really have any job prospects.

In his mid-twenties he turned away from Philosophy towards economics and politics when he began opposition activities against the monarch of Prussia who could not understand

that the society was changing. The king would not allow the progress and the democratic reforms that were emerging on the verge of the Industrial Revolution. This was Marx’s first battle, to expose the contradictions between the centuries old monarchy system and the new world as it was arising in the first half of the nineteen century. Because of the massive move from the agricultural base to the industrial one, it was natural –he maintained – that the social change would be inevitable. According to Marx, the government’s sole function was to serve the people, and if that didn’t happened than the government must change, too. He criticized the governments of Europe and their policies of social displacement that promoted a huge stratification of rich and poor (www.wsu.edu).