Karl Marx, 'will you ever make anyone happy?'

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 Karl Marx once said 'every day my wife wishes that she and the children were in their graves.'
'Will you ever be able to impart happiness to those around you' lamented a despairing father/

So, a difficult man to live with but most people with towering intellects are and here was the man who brought about the successor to Christianity,  He invented a form of social Darwinism confident of the scientific laws that would propel Capitalism towards its inevitable destruction. Yes communism was waiting in the wings and soon the Socialist utopian legacy would be fulfilled

Yes, here was a a successor to Christianity for until now all had been duped 
 into thinking God crated man  and ruled by that projection instead of the reverse.

But was Marx a covert humanist for he was appealing to the seething masses on the brink of insurrection

Whatever, through Marx we were to witness and extrodinary era in the development of the human sciences.  For Marx had a predilection for systematic inquiry that created a post Christain revolution.
Yet one has to de theologise Marx, yet we can learn from his just as can continue to learn from Aristotle or Machiavelli without having to become Aristotelians or Machiavellians,’ or Foucault or Derrida without 
becoming Foucaldians or Derrideans.

With Marx came the  conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking. As the years passed, he came to see Marx as more than a creature of his context. The details of Marx’s life were not what mattered. It was ‘the reality of Marxism’ – workers discovering their collective identity as a proletariat locked in fatal conflict with capitalism – that brought Marx into the 20th century. He was the father of ‘a philosophy that had become the world’

He was a systematic thinker who wanted to reconstruct social totalities, not take sides in forgotten battles between the oppressed and their oppressors. He was drawn to the New Left Review crowd because they, like him, recognised that ‘we were witnessing an extraordinary period in the development of the human sciences’ – in anthropology, linguistics and psychoanalysis – that demanded a response from historians. Theoretical sophistication, analytical precision and rigorous quantification could furnish the building blocks for a new historical science.

But was there a religious dimension to Marx's socialism. Every political movement has its rituals and hierarchies, and every ideology has its vision of a better tomorrow. Utopianism isn’t restricted to Marxism; it is an essential feature of modern politics. ‘The Marx celebrated from the 1890s and beyond was the theorist of the universality of capitalism and its inevitable global downfall,’ . Meanwhile, today’s young leftists who just nearly elected that lapsed woodwork teacher to rule the UK (phew that was a close call) are more concerned with the manifest failures of the status quo than with secular salvation.

ght