May 5 is
the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. He was born in
Trier, Germany in 1818. His collaborator and friend Fredrick Engels
said Marx was the first to give socialism, and thereby the whole
labor movement, a scientific foundation. Marx, by most serious
accounts, was one of the great minds of human history; a political
economist, a historian, a philosopher, but also a man of action.
He was
an organizer and leader in the cause of socialism, social justice,
and the modern working class. Inscribed on his headstone in Highgate
Cemetery in London are his words: Philosophers have hitherto only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Engels
wrote that Marx brought about a revolution in the whole conception of
world history. The whole previous view of history was based on the
conception that the ultimate causes of all historical changes are to
be looked for in the changing ideas of human beings, and that of all
historical changes, political changes are the most important and
dominate the whole of history. But the question was not asked as to
whence the ideas come into mens minds and what the driving causes of
the political changes are.
At the
grave site of Marx, after his death on March 17, 1883, Engels said:
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,
so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the
simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that
mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,
before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, et cetera;
that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and
consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given
people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the
state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on
religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light
of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa,
as had hitherto been the case.
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