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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  • Having to speak in coded language about basically every topic is starting to get really mentally burdensome. Marxism is great for becoming a moral agent and being conscious of yourself and the world, but it’s extremely lonely when you can see what the problem someone has and can’t guide them to the truth because they’ll either ignore you, misunderstand the point or superficially pretend to understand it, or attack you in some form.