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Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, representing his greatest intellectual achievement. His theories and ideas, and their subsequent development, are collectively known as Marxism, and have exerted enormous influence on intellectual, economic, and political history.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for widespread consumption the core historical materialist idea that, as stated in the text's opening words, "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published against the backdrop of the Revolutions of 1848 and their subsequent repression across Europe, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, historian, political theorist, critic of political economy, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist, and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie was a German daily newspaper, published by Karl Marx in Cologne between 1 June 1848 and 19 May 1849. It is recognised by historians as one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. The paper was regarded by its editors and readers as the successor of an earlier Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, also edited for a time by Karl Marx, which had been suppressed by state censorship over five years earlier.
"The Civil War in France" is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx, as an official statement of the General Council of the International on the character and significance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune.
Carl Heinrich Pfänder was a German portrait painter and revolutionary who was part of the circle of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London.
Stephen Born was a German typesetter and revolutionary. As a founder of the General German Workers' Brotherhood, he created the first national trade union organization in the German workers' movement.
August Hermann Ewerbeck, known by his middle name of Hermann, was a pioneer socialist political activist, writer, and translator. A physician by vocation and a German by birth, Ewerbeck is best remembered as an early political associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as a leader of the Parisian communities of the utopian socialist organization, League of the Just, and as the translator of the French writings of Étienne Cabet and Ludwig Feuerbach into German.
August Gebert was born in Mecklenburg, Germany and was a joiner by profession. He became a member of the Communist League while living in Switzerland. He continued to participate in the Communist League when he moved to London in 1850. There he became a part of the sectarian Willich-Schapper group within the Communist League, which is known for expelling Marx and Engels. In London he was the chair of the CABV Whitechapel branch.
Peter Nothjung was a tailor in Cologne, Germany, where he joined the Cologne Workers' Association. Nothjung also became a member of the Communist League. As such, he served as an emissary between the Cologne Workers Association and the Central Authority of the Communist League. Nothjung later was accused by Prussian authorities of traitorous activities and became one of defendants in the "Cologne Communist Trial" in 1852.
Adolph Joseph Maria Bermbach was a German lawyer and revolutionary who worked in Cologne. Bermbach, a member of the Communist League, was a correspondent of Karl Marx and kept him abreast of anti-communist trials in Cologne after Marx had moved to London. Bermbach also was a witness for the defence at that the Cologne Communist Trial. He studied legal science in Bonn from 1841 to 1844. Later he worked as a notary.
Hal Draper was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.
The German Workers Educational Association (GWEA) was a London-based organisation of radical German political émigrés established in 1840 by Karl Schapper and his associates. The organisation served during its initial years as the "above-ground" arm of the underground League of the Just and later as a mass organisation of the Communist League. The organisation continued to exist for more than 75 years, eventually terminating in 1917 due to the internment of Germans in Great Britain due to World War I.
Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine, and tradition within socialism that stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary to bring about structural changes in society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for transitioning from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as a seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class and its interests.
In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat holds state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and institutes elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership. During this phase, the administrative organizational structure of the party is to be largely determined by the need for it to govern firmly and wield state power to prevent counterrevolution and to facilitate the transition to a lasting communist society.
The political slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is one of the rallying cries from The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation of this phrase is also inscribed on Marx's tombstone. The essence of the slogan is that members of the working classes throughout the world should cooperate to defeat capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict.
The Communist League was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper, and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial.
The "Theses on Feuerbach" are eleven short philosophical notes written by Karl Marx as a basic outline for the first chapter of the book The German Ideology in 1845. Like the book for which they were written, the theses were never published in Marx's lifetime, seeing print for the first time in 1888 as an appendix to a pamphlet by his co-thinker Friedrich Engels. The document is best remembered for its epigrammatic 11th and final thesis, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it", which is engraved on Marx's tomb.
Karl Friedrich Schapper was a German socialist and labour leader. He was one of the pioneers of the labour movement in Germany and an early associate of Wilhelm Weitling and Karl Marx.
The League of the Just or League of Justice was a Christian communist international revolutionary organization. It was founded in 1836 by branching off from its ancestor, the League of Outlaws, which had formed in Paris in 1834. The League of the Just was largely composed of German emigrant artisans.
References
- ↑ Biographical note contained in the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 10 (International Publishers: New York, 1978) pp. 725-726.
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