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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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944 comments

  • I work/study/do research in healthcare and I've been recently thinking about how much of modern medicine/healthcare is based on the guarantee of antibiotics working properly. On the other hand, there are more and more resistant bacteria floating around the communities, ie. outside the ICU where they usually come from.

    Antibiotic resistance and development is yet another barrier that capitalism fundamentally cannot overcome, regardless of how many reforms you make. Research for new drugs take a long time and is very expensive. Along with this, the correct way of using antibiotics is avoiding overuse or just reducing the use in general, specially of new drugs that bacteria can't resist yet. That means that companies can't expect to make a profit out of any new drug that they develop, since trying to use them as little as possible is the rational way.

    In other words, the profit motive is unable to create new antibiotics in the manner that the world needs right now, let alone in the much worse future. If we lose antibiotics, modern medicine mostly comes to a halt. For example, say goodbye to surgeries and also to your little niece that got an ear infection that every kid gets at least once. Tooth extractions becomes a very high risk procedure, too.

944 comments