by Jane Instance
During my time in highschool, I regarded Karl Marx, co-author of “The Communist Manifesto” as a failed economic theorist whose grand idea of a Western revolution where the workers would seize control of the means of production somehow failed to come about. To my mind, Communism brought nothing but economic ruin to those countries behind the ‘iron curtain’ and to call someone a “Marxist” was to suggest that they were a passionate but misguided fanatic, with a possible penchant for little black hats and Mao Tse Tung pyjama shirts.
What I didn’t realise was that the Marxist cause had been taken on and revamped by a whole new group of theorists, otherwise known as Radical Feminists, and that Karl Marx’s social teachings were alive and well in universities and government departments throughout the West. (More…)