Karl Marx, born on this day in 1818, was a foundational political theorist and journalist associated with the philosophy of Marxism.
Among Marx's best-known texts are the "The Communist Manifesto" and the three-volume "Das Kapital", in which he set out to define and explain the behavior of the capitalist mode of production.
Marx's political and philosophical thought have had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class conflict. 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 labor power in return for wages.
Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx concluded that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.
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I like much of his foreign policy (except wrt China). USSR wasn't just one person, no country is.
I think criticising the soviets for their China policy during this period is ludicrous, given that the Chinese position was to support the opposite of whatever the soviets did even if that meant supporting fascists, the US (But I repeat myself) or total lunatics. Should the USSR have applied to join the safari club? Should the USSR join the Chinese in shipping weapons to anticommunist guerillas fighting soviet aligned governments?
Edit: But my point was more that so much of what gets celebrated about the USSR happened under his direction or at least with his consent, not actually that he's without flaws or that he shouldn't be criticised.