Written by John Lounsbury
Karl Marx was born 203 years ago from May of this year in Trier in the southwestern German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He is still considered one of the most influential economists in history, ranked along with Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, along with a handful of others.
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This video was produced by the German Public Broadcasting organization, Deutsche Welle (DW), in 2018. From the YouTube discussion:
“Even though not everyone accepts his ideas, Marx’s analyses and theories motivated many people to take political action. We meet activists, witnesses and experts – individuals who are able to illuminate Karl Marx’s impact from the Russian revolution until today. Even in the 21st century, two hundred years after his birth, Marx has lost none of his relevance. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe and the end of the Cold War in 1989 and 1990, the sun seemed to be setting on Marx. But during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, when the contradictions of capitalism were once more laid bare, Marx was resurrected as an icon. His theories and ideas are now enjoying something of a renaissance at universities, churches, and conferences, and in mainstream broadcast and print media. The Chinese have even donated a larger-than-life statue of Marx to the city of his birth, Trier. This thought-provoking documentary does not shy away from controversy. As well providing insight into Karl Marx’s life and work, it investigates what appealed to past and present advocates of his philosophies, bringing the story to life with a rich trove of archive material.”
From Wikipedia:
Karl Heinrich Marx (German: [maʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883[13]) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867 – 1883). Marx’s political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. 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 the capitalist mode of production, 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 labour-power in return for wages.[14] Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like previous socioeconomic systems and that those would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class’ development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[15] Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.[16]
The video is 42 minutes long. The audio is in English.
Source: YouTube
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