The German economist, Karl Marx, who TIME magazine named as its “Person of the Millennium” at the beginning of this century was born on May 5, 1818.
On his birth anniversary, many writers from around the world have paid tribute to the man who energised socialist thought in the world. His works inspired Vladmir Lenin and Frederick Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto. Lenin later led a Communist revolution that overthrew the government in his country, the then Soviet Union.
Wikipedia’s entry on Marx is another book.
It says of him: “Marx’s theories about society, economics and politics—collectively understood as Marxism—hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages.[8] Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism.”
Marx died on March 14, 1883, at age 64.
