Karl Marx
...German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx believed that the downfall of capitalism was inevitable, and that it would be replaced by communism:
Karl Marx
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. [1]
Karl Marx
However, Marx also wrote in The German Ideology (1845) that:
Karl Marx
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Karl Marx
In this text, he opposed himself to the conception of communism as a future state of society, to consider it rather as the negativity at work in the present moment: communism is the negativity that rejects the current order of things, that is, capitalism.
While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx's own thought to the popular, "Marxist" interpretations of it during...
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