University:
Tyler Junior College
Course:
HIST 1301 | History
Academic year:

2024
Views:

492

Pages:

2
Author:

Dave D.

COLONIZATION AND ECONOMIC EXPANSION HIST 1301 | History Marxism Karl Marx was a revolutionary and very contentious thinker. He was raised as the prosperous lawyer's son and was baptised into the Evangelical Church at the age of six. He was born in 1818 in Trier, in what is now Germany. When he was a young man, a lecturer at the University of Berlin exposed him to Georg Hegel's philosophy when he was studying law there. Marx immediately adopted Hegel's utopian theory of universal history, which postulated that freedom is being achieved through a series of wars throughout the world. Following his graduation, he worked as a writer and journalist. Together with Friedrich Engels, Marx cowrote The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848. The two made the claim that "class struggles are the history of all society up to this point" in the book. Marxism is the term for their theory, which holds that comprehending the class struggle between the ruling class and the working class is essential to understanding society. Apart from delineating their historical perspective, Marx and Engels postulated that the public, rather than private entities or individuals, would ultimately supplant contemporary economic frameworks with socialism. They saw socialism to be a stage in the process of moving from capitalism's private ownership to communism's totalitarian society. Their demand for the violent overthrow of existing societies was accepted by many communists worldwide as a declaration of war against capitalism. The excesses of capitalism, which frequently exploited workers, served as an inspiration for the ideas of communism. Marx's 1867 book Das Kapital is among the most often mentioned works on politics and economics in history. Marx maintained in Das Kapital that the primary motivation of the bourgeoisie, a social class that possessed the means of production, was the desire to take advantage of labour. He believed that the proletariat, or workers, received pay from employers that were significantly less than the value of their labour. The extra value created by wage earners was then retained by them, a practice Marx claimed was unjust to the workers. Employers bought political power and more resources with their earnings in order to ensure that the affluent would be favoured by the law rather than the working class. When the affluent used their expanding economic and political clout to the point that workers were left helpless and impoverished, they proved unfit to govern. The capitalist system would eventually fall apart, giving the working class back control of society.