Hegel/Marx

[Richard Fiero]

Aarnoud Rommens wrote:
>So marx is hegel's farce. So?
. . .
Not quite. The young Marx is worth reading in depth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Hegelians
Another Young Hegelian, Karl Marx, was at first 
sympathetic with this strategy of attacking 
Christianity to undermine the Prussian 
establishment, but later formed divergent ideas 
and broke with the Young Hegelians, attacking 
their views in works such as The German Ideology. 
Marx concluded that religion is not the basis of 
the establishment's power, but rather ownership 
of capital — processes that employ technologies, 
land, money and especially human labor-power to 
create surplus-value [5]  — lie at the heart of 
the establishment's power. Marx (and Engels) 
considered religion as a component of the 
ideological superstructure of societies, and a 
pre-rational mode of thought, which nonetheless 
was wielded by ruling elites to obscure social 
relationships including the true basis of 
political power. In this latter sense, he 
described religion as "the opium of the people."