I have not read Karl (politics was a self ingested poison for me).
I have reproduced (only a part) one of my contemporaries writing here.
I agree religion (politics in Sri-Lanka) opium for ordinary people!
Dear Karl Marx
Your trenchant descriptions of capitalist
accumulation and your critical penetration into its practice were based
on and ignited by your original and radical theses. I hope you have
not forgotten them because we haven't. Let me remind you the most
poignant and accredited few.
1. Society does not consist of
individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations
within which these individuals stand.
2. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
3.
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones,. They are the
real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under
which they live, both those which they find already existing and those
produced by their activity.
4. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
5.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but,
on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness.
6. Religion is the opium of people.
All
your statements quoted here are undoubtedly original and very thought
provoking but I wish to end this letter with an observation you made
when you were a just 17 year old youth.
'' If a person works
only for himself, and ignores this great goal assigned to him, "he can
perhaps be a famous scholar, a great wise man, a distinguished poet–
but never a complete, genuinely great man." ‘(Reflections of a Youth on
the Choice of an Occupation).
You are being offered with
felicitations like these because you lived your life until your death
in 1883 according to the statement you made at the age of seventeen,
which had a big impact on my life too.
Desmond [Mallikarachchi
