190th Anniversary of Marx’s Birth

Monday, May 5, 2008

“And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove:

1. that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production [See: Historical Materialism]

2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

3. that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

Karl Marx
Letter to Weydemeyer
March 5, 1852

Karl Mars was born today 190 years ago in the Prussian city of Trier to a Jewish family that had earlier converted to Protestantism in order to get ahead in Prussian society.