Happy Birthday Karl Marx!

204 years old today

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, Germany. In addition to having one of the most spectacular beards of all time, he was also one of the greatest thinkers of history. Though he would be the first to admit that he did not do this on his own, but was a product of the material conditions of his time.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. - Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

While Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, and all the English historians up to 1850 are the proof that it was being striven for, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and that indeed it had to be discovered. - Engels to Borgius, January 5, 1894

This is not to discredit Marx for his discoveries, for they were great, but to note that if it had not been Marx, it would have been another - perhaps later and in a different manner, but historical materialism was ready to be discovered.

In 2013, Scientific American reported that Karl Marx was the most influential scientist of all time. This should not be surprising as Marx contributed greatly to economics, philosophy, sociology, and history. He contributed to these fields with the theory of surplus value, dialectical materialism, conflict theory, and historical materialism, just to name a few. His magnum opus, Capital , remains the single greatest analysis of the capitalist system today.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or 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, etc.; 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.

But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries. - Engels, Speech at Marx Graveside

Today we should honor his contributions and continue to study his work, as much of it still applies today. In spite of over 150 years of trying, capitalists have never been able to refute the core principles of the science of Marxism. Happy birthday to comrade Marx, he was a real one.