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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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1K comments

  • Last night I dreamt that I went to a nude beach in Portugal and some American lady yelled at me for having my butt out

  • TV and movie sound departments be like

    I will make all of the dialogue too quiet to hear and then when the audience increases the volume I will blow out their ear drums! How delightfully devilish!

  • Every season of Survivor I hope for the contestants to vote off Jeff Probst because his challenges exist only to divide the tribe and create conflict.

  • Ever made yourself sleepy playing some music? I was so happy to work on some songs and started getting drowsy in the middle of them.

  • I browse the subreddit mechanicadvice and it satisfies the urge to go "yup... it's probably just the radiator/alternator/spark plugs" I feel. I know a fair bit though by the time I see something it's already been answered so I don't feel like repeating the same comment/advice anyway.

  • Miserable existential crisis all day long. Felt like I had a fever but I don't. I wonder if it's related to starting bupropion at all.

  • Saitō Kōhei is right β€” Marx (and thus Marxists, until Saitō arrived) was completely wrong to assert "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the development of the productive forces."

    How did Engels let this get published in 1848? Right, he was a Stalinist.

  • I was never a huge fan of Coke, Fanta or McDonald's, but since I started boycotting them I have realized how much I don't like them. I don't miss them at all, and I don't know what keeps drawing people back to that crap

  • The contradictions are sharpening and the Imperial Core ever more fascistic and autocanniballistic. The silver lining is that at least folk punk is making a comeback. πŸͺ•

  • Saitō Kōhei is right β€” Marx (and thus Marxists, until Saitō arrived) was completely wrong to assert "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the development of the productive forces."

  • I have a little old baby truck for supposedly making my life easier with projects, but I went like 7 months without starting it and driving it around (a long story), so the less than 1 year old battery died. like full drain. I spent the entire morning looking up the various hardware I can buy/use to remedy this specific situation (multi stage charger, 10A) as well as prevent it in the future (2-3A maintainer).

    my current place doesn't have a garage or a car port or even a goddamn outlet on the porch, so I guess I'm charging this thing inside the house now that I've pulled the battery out. if I keep the windows open, that's well ventilated right?

    this is so America car brained, but one day I just want to have a really simple shed that has like 3 bays worth of space, all my tools neatly organized, power outlets, wifi, a little dumpy computer I can easily watch videos on, and all the bullshit so I can just mostly fix my own dumbass problems without turning my living space into a chaos dungeon.

  • Great-aunt is over and spreading extremely obviously fake stories about people from American reality TV shows and celebrities being killed by other famous people and them all having bodies found in secret basements. Which I'm assuming are from AI YT channels.

  • 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.

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