Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. Marx addressed a wide range of political as well as social issues; he is most famous for his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx believed that capitalism will be displaced by communism, a classless society after a transitional period of radical socialism during which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.[1][2]
Often called the father of communism, Marx was both a scholar and a political activist. He argued that his analysis of capitalism revealed that the contradictions within capitalism would bring about its own end, giving way to communism:
| “ | 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. | ” |
| — (The Communist Manifesto)[3] |
On the other hand, Marx wrote that capitalism would end through the organized actions of an international working class: "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." (from The German Ideology)
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 to "Marxism" is a point of controversy. Marxism remains influential and controversial in academic and political circles. In his book "Marx's 'Das Kapital'" (2006), biographer Francis Wheen reiterates David McLellan's observation that since Marxism had not triumphed in the West, "it had not been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded by government controls."
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