Video: Who Is Karl Marx?

Ideas have consequences. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. And sometimes catastrophic.

Ideas have consequences.

Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.

And sometimes catastrophic – like the ideas of Karl Marx.

Born in Trier, Germany in 1818, Marx didn’t invent communism. But it was on his ideas that Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union, Mao built communist China, and innumerable other tyrants, from the Kims in North Korea to the Castros in Cuba, built their communist regimes. Ultimately, those regimes and movements calling themselves “Marxist” murdered about 100 million people and enslaved more than a billion.

Marx believed that workers, specifically those who did manual labor, were exploited by capitalists – the people who owned, as Marx put it, “the means of production” (specifically, factories) – but who did very little physical labor themselves.

Only a workers’ revolution, Marx wrote in Das Kapital, could correct this injustice.

What would that revolution look like?

Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, spelled it out point-by-point in The Communist Manifesto. It included the “abolition of property and inheritance” and the “centralization of credit, communication, and transport in the hands of the state.” And a lot more along the same lines.

In other words, the state owns and controls pretty much everything.

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