Karl Marx

Born: 1818

Died: 1883, at the age of 64

Country of origin: Prussia (now in Germany)

Major Books written by Karl Marx:

• "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (1843)
  
• "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845)
  
• "The Poverty of Philosophy" (1846)
  
• "Wage-Labour and Capital" (1847)
  
• "The Communist Manifesto" (1848) (written with Friedrich Engels)
  
• "Theories of Surplus Value" (1862)
  
• "Value, Price and Profit" (1865)
  
• "Das Kapital, Volume 1" (1867) (Volumes II and III were published posthumously by Engels, in 1893 & 1894)
  

Cocktail summary of Karl Marx's main ideas:

Karl Marx was a philosopher with a legacy unlike any other in modern history. Regardless of the academic or economic validity of his ideas, his writings have had perhaps the most wide-ranging political and social impact of any philosopher in centuries. Most of this political impact has been disasterous and the cause of wide-spread suffering, but his ideas go far beyond politics and his impact on the 20th century is indisputable, whether good or bad. Marx died over 30 years before the first of several major Communist revolutions took place, so his life was lived in distinct isolation from most of the practical results of his ideas.

Marx explained most of his ideas by using economic terms, at times sounding more like a banker than a philosopher. The reason for the heavy dose of economics in his writings is that Marx argued that the point of philosophy is not just to understand the world but to change it. And since economic status is the primary force that determines a person's daily life-experience, he argued that the most important task of philosophy was social activism to change the distribution of wealth in society. Real philosophers should work to change the economic balance in society, and apply their abstract ideas to economic terms like "production", "labor", and "distribution". Everything else is secondary.

Marx viewed all of human history through one single theme: Class Struggle. All human interaction, all wars, all religions, all inventions, all Art, all everything has been an aspect of a social class-struggle of one type or another. Take your pick of any event in history, and Marx would have explained it as either an upper class trying to control a lower class or a lower class struggling against an upper class. In this sense, Marx's ideas are pretty straight-forward since they all revolve around one single theme. But he developed a monumental system of economics and social theory around this one basic idea, which served as a blueprint for later revolutionaries to try and re-shape society around a type of enforced altruism.

Marx lived at a time when the effects of the Industrial Revolution had reached it's most dehumanizing influence on factory-workers. This was a time of child-labor, destitute poverty amongst workers in unsanitary factories, and an almost total laisser-faire economic approach by European governments towards industry. The results were very profitable industrial corporations but abjectly poor urban workers who operated unsafe machinery for very little wages. Marx saw the poverty and corporate oppression around him and decided that his mission in life was to identify the social dynamics behind these class-differences and propose a solution that would bring an end to all poverty and all oppression. (Marx was anything but humble).

He built his Philosophy of History around Hegel's idea of the "Dialectic". Hegel decribed all of history as being motivated by the interplay of opposing ideas, with one idea gaining dominance only to be challenged by an opposing idea, which would incorporate some of the other idea's elements into itself and thereby gain new dominance, only to be challenged by yet another idea which would, again, incorporate parts of the opposing idea. Back and forth, like the Yin and the Yang, ideas - "Thesis" and "Antithesis" - battle each other for dominance by absorbing parts of its opposite, all moving linearly towards an ultimate goal - a Synthesis - of all opposites that Hegel called "Absolute Knowledge". This dynamic interplay between opposing forces towards an ultimate union of all opposition was what Hegel called the Dialectic (referring to a "dialog" between opposites), and is the theoretical model that Marx adopted to describe all of history.

Marx saw all of human history as defined by this same kind of dialectic battle between opposing forces, but in his case he considered all of these forces to be that of social classes. He argued that all religious wars, all ethnic battles, all witch-hunts, and all conflicts within human society to be nothing but cover-stories for Class-based conspiracies. He built up a complex theory of the evolution of human society, with Feudalism giving birth to Capitalism, and argued that it was inevitable that Capitalism would eventually be replaced by a social model based on collective ownership of power - Communism, which was his militant brand of Socialism: society as built around local Communes in which all property is collectively owned, not privately. No private property would be allowed.

Socialism didn't originate with Marx. Ever since the revolutions in America in 1776 and in France in 1789, Europe had been abuzz with ideas about how to modify society to guarantee the greatest amount of freedom, justice, and self-determination for the greatest number of people. Since the revolution in France had ultimately failed, philosophers had trouble defining the realistic boundaries within which freedom could be guaranteed without falling into anarchy. The common thread running through most of these ideas was some kind of distribution of power and wealth in Collectives of common citizens, as opposed to being locked up within the traditional elite circles of royalty and the Upper Classes. This model of society defined by the concentration of power in Collectives was loosely defined as Socialism.

Marx used the Dialectic ideas of Hegel to argue that this Socialist model for society was an inevitable stage of social evolution, evolving from Capitalism in the same way that a tadpole inevitably transforms into a frog. But he also argued that this goal could only emerge as a result of struggle. All social advancements, argued Marx, came about as a result of struggle and sacrifice. A peaceful and tranquil society is not an environment that fosters creative advancement, and the dialectic nature of history dictated that the contemporary dictatorship of Capitalism must inevitably be forcefully opposed by the masses of skilled yet poor laborers that Marx called the "Proletariat". (This most famous word in Communism is based on the old Latin word "Proletarius", which was the name of the lowest social Class in Roman society, below the class of "Plebeians", the Commoners).

Marx called the holders of Capital the "Bourgeois" (from an old French word that means "Town Citizen") and this mostly Merchant Class was the main target of his arguments. He argued that Feudal society in the Middle Ages had locked up all power and money in the smallest possible circles, isolated to royalty and a few small upper Classes, leaving the vast majority of society as laboring peasants. Feudalism gradually gave birth to Capitalism, with the emergence of a Merchant class in parallel to the older classes. This caused the tools of power (money) to be distributed a bit more widely than under Feudalism, but the vast majority of society still lived in the lowest Classes. In Marx's contemporary 19th century Europe there were, he argued, 2 forms of lower classes: the rural peasants who still toiled the land, and the skilled workers who knew how to operate Industrial factory machinery, the Proletariat.

This last Class was even worse off than the peasants, Marx argued, since their only negotiable commodity was their skill. A peasant at least worked on something that he could attach some ownership to. He toiled the land and grew food that he could eat, with the rest going to the landowner for trade. The Proletariat factory worker was totally alienated from his product: he toiled away for 15-hour days on machinery that made products that he would never own and never use. This concept of "alienation" would be repeated throughout Marx's writings as the most glaring symptom of the abuses of Capitalism. This alienation co-existed with a life of abject poverty, lack of justice, and oppression of all types from a small class of Capitalists on the vast majority of citizens who had no choice but to accept the status quo.

Marx proposed a solution to these social ills that he called "Communism", which was a form of Socialism. But he argued that the solution could not be implemented within the established social order. Capitalism was beyond redemption and required the total removal and replacement with a new system - a violent revolution - in order to free society to evolve according to its predetermined goal towards Socialism. After a Communist revolution, this social evolution would occur in a series of stages, eventually leading to the natural "withering away" of the State and of Religion, producing a classless society in which all poverty and all oppression was a thing of the past.

These were some of the features of this new classless society:


• The abolition of all private property. Marx argued that the desire for privately-held possessions was one of the roots of evil within Capitalism and was the main source of oppression of the lower Classes. The desire to aquire and protect private property was the main source of greed and caused the majority of social abuses and injustice in the world. If the very concept of private property was removed from society, Marx argued, then the motive would disappear and in its place would emerge a collective effort to work together for the common good. Altruism would naturally emerge from the ashes of greed.
  
  
• The abolition of Religion. Marx argued that the Proletariat Class had no choice but to seek an escape from their misery in the form of alcohol and religion. Religion, he argued, was like the opium that workers would smoke in opium-dens in order to put themselves into a state of stupor and false serenity, blocking out the painful reality of their lives. "Religion is the Opium of the People!" is one of his most famous expressions. With the creation of a classless society there would no longer be any need for the "false hopes" of religion, and it would die out on its own within the perfect state of Communist Socialism.
  
  
• Central Planning. After the armed revolution, Marx argued, society would need to be guided through a series of stages towards the goal of Socialism. This would require the seizing of all private corporations and "nationalizing" them, putting their ownership into the hands of the common people. All banks would need to be consolidated into a central national bank that would control all rates and all transactions. All landed estates would be seized and distributed to the people. All farms would be seized from their owners and joined into collective farms and have their planting and harvesting decisons made from a central committee, to ensure that they all followed the supposedly most productive practices. The Communist revolution required leaders from the class of Intellectuals, who existed outside of the conflict between Capitalist and Proletariat, since they could supposedly see the bigger picture more clearly, and these people would lead the people to the promised land of Socialism.

During Marx's lifetime there were several attempts to introduce Socialism, particularly in the European revolutions of 1848 and in the short-lived French Commune of 1871. But they didn't use Marx's particular brand of Socialism as their guide and they all failed. Marx argued that they weren't extreme enough and that they failed mainly due to their unwillingness to totally and violently uproot the entire status quo. Meek revolutionaries would never make good Communists, Marx sniffed.

The irony of Marx's ideas was that he was confident that they would occur first in the "advanced" economies of Europe, since it was here that Capitalism was most deeply-rooted and its effects most strongly evident. But true Communist revolutions never happened in Europe. They instead occured in countries that still practiced forms of Feudalism. Russia and China, in particular, were still little-changed from the Feudalist societies of the Middle Ages and Capitalism was very young there. The Communist Revolutionaries in these countries decided that the ills of Capitalism could be bypassed, or at least minimized, by taking a short-cut straight to Communist Socialism. The Western economies that Marx was referring to never underwent his predicted Communist revolutions, but instead adopted various levels of Socialst-inspired "safety nets" that guaranteed varying amounts of protection from poverty or injustice in their countries. But the inevitability of social evolution that Marx belived in was wrong. So the story of Marx's legacy is not a story of Western Europe and America, as he predicted, but is instead a story of mostly non-Western countries.

Karl Marx praised & criticized:

• Karl Marx has had more defenders and more critics than perhaps any other philosopher in history. His defenders have consisted of the true-believers who sincerely believed that his ideas could be used to transform the world into a utopian society, free of all poverty and oppression. The original, stated motivation for him and Engels was seeing the abject poverty of workers during the Industrial Revolution, so their basic mission was perhaps motivated by an initial sense of altruism. But since most revolutions simply create power-vacuums which are usually filled by power-hungry tyrants, their ideology has been either naive at best or simply evil at worst.
  
  During the height of the Cold War there were many who argued that the oppression and purges of the Soviet Union were simply symptoms of a "work in progress", ironing out the kinks on the way to a permanent utopia. Give it enough time and the oppression would end on its own, and an advanced Socialism would emerge out of the violent oppression. These defenders are less common in the 21st century, now that the Communism of Marx has been pretty much cast aside as a serious model for society on a large scale, with a few lingering exceptions. But the true-beleivers are still out there, hoping for a return to the past.
  
  Marx and Engel's idea of Dialectic Materialism have been used by many people to search for a common theme through a wide variety of subjects, from Politics to Sociology, Psychology, and the Arts. The idea of conflicting forces struggling against each other in a back-and-forth power-play, with this conflict giving birth to a new solution built out of a union of opposites, has appealed to many intellectuals who have looked for a template against which to make sense out of the confusion and chaos of many disciplines. Viewing all of these topics through the lens of Class-struggle has created a tidy explanation for a whole range of confusing intellectual problems. Marx, for many, has served the role of a house-cleaner in a room full of messy ideas.
  
  More often though, Marx's ideas have been used by opportunists who have used the chaos of a Communist revolution to seize power for themselves and inflict even more oppression and poverty on the masses than the power-base they replaced. Communism has more often served the purposes of a banana-republic dictator whose only goal is to seize power, and the words of Marx have served little more purpose than a banner to hide behind.
  
  Marx's critics are too many to number, but their main arguments against him follow certain consistent themes. The main argument against him in the post-Cold War era is the collapse of the Eastern European Communist regimes in the late 1980's, most significantly Russia. If even Russia has cast aside its former Communist ideals then Marxism is clearly an ideology that is no longer relevant.
  
  Other criticisms target his arguments that in the absence of any profit-motive there will emerge a natural altruism within society at large: when a brain-surgeon makes no more money than a cab-driver then everyone will naturally work together for the common good without greed. This is clearly naive and the reality was that it produced a malaise and inertia that severely limited any progress in Communist countries. It's somewhat similar to the laisser-faire idea of extreme forms of Capitalism, which argue that if Government leaves Industry alone and limits taxes to almost zero that the rich will generate their own collective altruism and feed the poor and help the underpriveleged on their own. Instead, the effect of this opposite argument is an attitude amongst the super-rich that charity begins at home and since "greed is good" that they have no responsibility for the lazy.
  
  Far from Marx's predictions that Capitalism was on life-support, it has proven to be very resilient and has incorporated several of his objections to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. Marxism has had the effect of forcing Capitalism to make some concessions to social responsibility, such as placing the safety-net of Welfare under itself to varying degrees. Many also argue that the very freedom from oppression that Marx was striving for is best guaranteed through Capitalism. The distributed nature of Capitalism, where greed is allowed to operate unfettered (within certain limits), the lack of central planning, and global Free Trade creates more opportunity for escaping poverty than having one central authority make these decisions for a nation. Modern analogies to the Internet and Chaos Theory serve as arguements for letting a distributed, apparently chaotic system stablize into its own natural equilibrium, with the State serving the role of a referee, primarilly making sure that everyone follows the rules of the game.
  
  Another obvious target of criticism has been Marx's arguments for the abolition of private property and the nationalization of industry, in order to redistribute the wealth "more fairly" among the common man. Many have argued that this is simply a long-winded way of saying "stealing". Slice it however you want, "nationalization" is nothing more than state-sponsored theft.
  
  Marx's arguments for the central planning of all facets of an economy is an object of scorn for most modern economists. If all farms in a country are ordered to grow one type of crop, for instance, and that crop fails then the entire farming industry fails on a massive scale. But if farms are allowed to make their own planting decisions, and one farmer decides to try and grow a new crop that ends up failing, then only that one farm fails. Or if it succeeds, then other farms can try it as well. A distributed economy where local autonomy is maintained can much better absorb failure and succes then one planned from a center.
  
  His attacks on Religion have been another large source of criticism. Since Marx was addressing the issues of poverty and oppression and justice in the context of supposedly Christian European nations turning a blind eye to these very issues, some have argued that Marxism should be viewed as something of a "Christian heresy". The Christian Church is supposedly concerned with poverty and oppression and justice, and if the Church had ignored these issues during the Industrial Revolution then they share some blame for letting it spiral out of control and give birth to an alternate source of salvation.
  
  Finally, Marx viewed economic power as consisting of 2 primary forces in his era: the holders of Capital versus the skilled factory workers. However, he didn't anticipiate the dramatic advances in technology and automation, so that in the 21st century much of the work formally done by factory workers are now done by machines. The proletariat masses no longer exist to the same extent that they did in the mid 19th century. Today the division of labor is even more layered than it was in Marx's time and the 2-tiered model of society is no longer accurate.
  
  Marx's view of a Classless society free of poverty and oppression was a utopian vision that has inspired many a crusader and revolutionary but, as with most utopian dreamers, it was a far cry from reality. Yet his Dialectic approach to explaining History is still alive and well in many universities.
  
  

Notable Facts about Karl Marx:

• Religious affiliation:
  Karl Marx was born Jewish into a family with a long lineage of Rabbis, but he was raised as a Protestant, as a result of his father having converted from Judaism to Lutheran Christianity in order to secure his job as a lawyer under the current Prussian laws. However, by his teenage years Karl turned his back on religion entirely and came to consider it as one of the root causes of human suffering.
  
  Karl wasn't just a disinterested Atheist - he made it his goal in life to stamp out religion forever and replace it with Communism, a cause he argued for with almost religious fervor. He once famously said:
  
  
  "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."
  
  There have been attempts by some followers of Marx to incorporate religious beliefs into Marxist theory but this has always failed since Marxism is itself almost its own religion. Atheism lies at the core of Marx's ideas and Karl saw it as his mission in life to stamp out any trace of any and all religions forever.
  
  
• Marx's ideas have affected modern politics like no other philosopher before or after him. He argued that his ideas applied to the next stages of modern, Western economies and that these stages were inevitible, like stages of biological evolution. But every attempt at implementing them politically over the past 100 years or so have occured in countries where primitive, feudal-style economics existed, not modern ones.
  
  Experts on Marx's ideas are often referred to as "scientists". They take his ideas very seriously and study them in much the same way that a physicist studies mathematics, since Marxism is considered an inevitable stage of social evolution that must simply be understood, not defended or criticized. It is as pre-ordained as the orbit of the moon, the Marxist scientists will argue. (This is less common in the 21st century, but they're still out there).
  
  His ideas assumed a basic human altruism that would emerge after the ills of society were fixed. But this has never happened, and countries that have tried to implement his ideas have only unleashed misery and destruction on unprecedented scales. There is not a single success-story regarding any country using Marx as their primary social and economic guide. Some aspects of Socialism have been implemented in various Western countries, but these have always coexisted with free-wheeling Capitalism, forming a sort of safety-net under modern Capitalist practices.
  
  
• Karl Marx was not known for being a serious student in his university years. By his own admission, he spent much of this time drinking and singing songs in beer-halls, instead of studying. He once spent a day in jail for public drunkeness. Presumably beer-songs were one of the neccesary dialectic steps on the path to Communism.
  
  
• While a student, Karl once fought a duel over a lady's favors, ending up with a wound on one of his eyebrows.
  
  
• Marx got his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Jena, which is where he submitted his dissertation due to its more lax academic standards. He was rightly concerned that the University in Berlin would never have accepted his rabble-rousing ideas.
  
  
• Marx was heavily influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly his Materialism and his defence of Atheism. Since the name "Feuerbach" literally means "River of Fire", many have said that the ideas of Feuerbach are the river of fire that leads to Marx. Generally speaking, Feuerbach argued that all religious ideas are nothing more than projections of the human mind on an imaginary spiritual realm. A study of religion simply reveals things about human psychology, not any real God. This idea appealed to Karl and he used it as his intellectual launching-pad.
  
  
• Marx was an admirer of Charles Darwin, and he considered himself to have found the same kind of evolutionary laws in Social structures that Darwin had found in Biology, with Feudalism evolving into Capitalism being similar to an arm evolving into a wing. He even asked Darwin if he could dedicate the English translation of "Das Kapital" to him, but Chuck declined.
  
  
• Despite Marx's personal admiration of Darwin, Marx's ideas are often described as a reaction to Darwin's ideas as they came to be expanded by others. Darwin's ideas of Natural Selection, in which the strong out-live the weak and nature is thus "pruned" of weaker genes, were extended by others to apply to human society in general. These so-called "Social Darwinists" argued that questions about wealth and poverty and morality are a waste of time, since the rich in any society are simply the equivalent of the lion in the jungle - the strong - and the poor are simply the equivalent of the weak animals in the jungle, and poverty is thus a result of the pruning effect of Natural Selection in a social context.
  
  Since there is no morality in the jungle, there should be no questions of morality when talking about poverty in human society. No one judges the lion as immoral for killing weak animals, so no one should judge the rich as immoral and should not encourage them to worry about the poor, since that would just upset the natural flow of Social Darwinism.
  
  In contrast to this idea, which was widely preached amongst the 19th century "moneyed classes" in Europe and America, Marxism argued for a sort of enforced morality in which humanity should rise above its biology. (This is one way in which Communism often sounds like a new religion). Instead of looking to the jungle as a model for society, Marxism argued that social evolution can and should be be manipulated and steered in a more noble direction, towards social equality and cooperation. Basically, the lions of the jungle should care for the weaker animals, not eat them. And if some lions don't agree, they should be forced to do so by more enlightened lions.
  
  As applied to "Darwinist" ideas, Marxists argued that Capitalism is simply a stage in the larger evolution of society. And this stage should be surpassed to the next stage, Socialism. But the Social Darwinists argued that Capitalism isn't a stage, but is itself the fundamental engine of social evolution. Capitalism equals Social evolution, they argued. But the Marxists replied that Capitalism equals a mere rung on the ladder of social evolution.
  
  Of course, the pure Marxist vision has never worked in any social applications, so Social Darwinism and its "might makes right" approach to social morality has seen a resurgence in the 21st century, feeling vindicated by the failure of Marxism's efforts at enforced morality. So Chuck's followers are feeling pretty smug these days, while Karl's follower's are busilly working to try and re-package their ideology for the modern era, searching for a middle ground between the two extreme views of society.
  
  
• Like any true philosopher, Marx never really worked for a living. He spent most of his time reading, writing, publishing Communist propaganda, and organizing factory-workers into Unions. He occasionally worked as a journalist, including for the New York Tribune as a foreign correspondant in London, but this was sporadic. He once applied for a job in a railway office, but he was rejected due to his illegible handwriting. He was only able to provide for his family financially via the donations of fellow Communists back in his native Prussia/Germany, and the consistent handouts from his best buddy Engels, who had enough money to dole out from his textile factories that he ran. But even with this form of welfare, 3 of his own children died of disease due to Karl not having enough money to buy medicine for them.
  
  
• Marx spent a lot of time being kicked out of countries. He was unwelcome in his native Prussia due to his hobby of organizing labor-unions and spreading Communist propaganda, so he moved to Paris. After spending a few years there, Prussia convinced France to kick him out, so he moved to Brussels, but it wasn't long before he was booted out of there as well. During the Revolutions of 1848 he moved back to Prussia and began publishing a Communist newspaper called "The New Rhenish Gazette" with Friedrich Engels. But he was soon charged with inciting an armed rebellion and was tried in court, but he was aquitted by the jury. But he was booted out of the country anyway once more, which is when he decided to move to London, in 1849, where he spent the last 34 years of his life and wrote some of his more notorious books, like The Communist Manifesto. Few other philosophers were as unwelcome as Karl, being seen as little more than an unemployed trouble-maker with a giant beard. (Although, many modern philosophers easily fit the same label...)
  
  
• Karl Marx died at the age of 64, of an un-named respiratory problem in London while sitting in an arm-chair, to be discovered by Engels. Marx had spent several years in despondancy following the deaths of his wife and eldest daughter. He was buried in London's Highgate Cemetary, and on his tomb are written these words, "Workers of all lands, unite."
  
  
  

Quotes:

• "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism."
  
  
• "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
  
  
• "The workers have nothing but their chains to lose in this. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"
  
  
• "In a higher phase of Communist society, only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
  
  
• "Religion is the sign of the oppressed. It is the opium of the people."
  
  
• "My object in life is to de-throne God and destroy Capitalism."
  
  
• "The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
  
  
• "In bourgeois society, Capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."
  
  
• "Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."
  
  
• "Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list - the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation."
  
  
• "The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism."
  
  
• "Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation."
  
  

Marxists in the orbit of Marx:

Since Marx's ideas have created a very wide "ism" - Marxism - there have been many people during his lifetime and after who developed his ideas or took them in entirely different directions. Thus Marxism has many other names associated with it besides Karl, some almost better-known than Karl Marx himself.

These are some of the more famous names who have been associated with Marx's legacy:

• Friedrich Engels
  
• Vladimir Lenin
  
• Joseph Stalin
  
• Leon Trotsky
  
• Mao Zedong
  
• Fidel Castro & Che Guevara
  
• Ho Chi Minh
  
• Pol Pot
  
• The Frankfurt School
  
  
  
  
  • Friedrich Engels.
    
    
    Engels was basically Marx's enabler, supporting his smart but penniless friend Karl. Marx was dirt-poor and never held a real job during his life, beyond working as a journalist sporadically. Engels was an Industrialist who ran textile-mills and had an ample supply of Bourgeois money to use to support Marx, while Marx spent his free time criticising Bourgeois values. Marx basically bit the hand that fed him, and Engels was happy to be bit.
    
    Engels had become deeply disturbed by the extreme poverty of the workers who toiled in his family-owned mills, and he decided that the very Capitalist enterprises he profited from should be replaced with Socialism. He found in Marx the source of Philosophical justification for ideas he felt were right, but for which he lacked the intellectual discipline to spell out in great detail. Together with Marx he wrote some of the more popularly accessible books on Communism, like the Communist Manifesto.
    
    He was also responsible for spelling out the arguments of so-called Dialectic Materialism, which was a method of explaining ideas, which used Hegel's idea that history follows a pre-determined path, which cannot not be changed. Engels and his buddy Karl argued that the pre-determined destination of all of human history was Socialism. Dialectic Materialism explained this future goal, but this goal could not be stopped. History's march towards Socialism was fixed in stone, a law of nature like gravity, he argued. He saw himself as a scientist who has discovered a law of nature: like Newton discovered and explained the law of gravity, Engels had discovered and explained the law of Socialism. Engles was never accused of being humble...!
    
    Engels outlived Marx by 12 years, publishing his buddy's massive collections of notes and scribblings after his death. Engels died of cancer in 1895 at the age of 74.
    
    
    
    
  • Vladimir Lenin.
    
    
    Lenin was the first person to truly put Marx's ideas to the test on a massive scale, leading the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917 and proclaiming the creation of the world's first "Worker State", 34 years after Marx's death. The new "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (USSR) was supposedly simply the collection of local Soviets throughout Russia all working together for the common good. The word "Soviet" refered to the local council that governed the community according to Communist principles. Sort of the equivalent of "Town Hall", with the Soviet Union theoretically being simply the collection of these town halls, with Lenin serving as their humble "General Secretary".
    
    The Russian revolution was carried out by the so-called Bolsheviks, with the word "Bolshevik" referring simply to the majority faction within the Russian Communist party, as opposed to the "Mensheviks" which was the minority faction. Thus the words Bolshevik and Proletariat ("worker") are sometimes confused, since the former often considered themselves identical with the latter.
    
    Lenin had become a true believer in Marx's ideas while living in Europe. Many years earlier his older brother had been executed back in Russia for trying to assassinate the Tsar (Tsar Alexander III). But instead of following in his brother's footsteps he decided that his brother's effort was a waste of time, since killing a monarch didn't change the underlying system - the dead monarch would just be replaced with another monarch, and oppression would continue. He decided that the better approach was to somehow change the underlying system. He later found an architect for that change in the writings of Marx.
    
    He spent many years in Europe organizing underground Communist activities and inciting factory workers to strike against their employers. After years of only modest success, his fellow revolutionaries back in Russia took advantage of the chaos of World War I to topple the rule of the Russian Czar and create a truly centrally-planned state in which private property and religion were outlawed. Lenin returned home, smuggled on a train passing through Germany, ironically at the behest of the German monarchy, who was hoping that the trouble-makers would cause more trouble for their Russian enemies. (In reality, they later ended up with a solution that was worse than the original problem...)
    
    Lenin built on Marx's ideas and elaborated on the multiple stages that a Communist society would go through on its way to Socialist perfection. He argued for a total overthrow of the established order, quelling the suggestions of some of his fellow Communists that their goals could be reached through social reforms rather than violent revolution. He also enforced a ban on such frivolous pursuits like Modern Art. The Russian Communists considered any Abstract Art as nothing but a distraction from the realites of life, and therefore only sanctioned Art that was realistic, particularly Art that portrayed people working on Communist projects. Paintings of farmers harvesting wheat was a safe subject, but surrealist paintings were not to be tolerated.
    
    His name wasn't really Lenin. His real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He, along with many other of his fellow Communist outlaws, changed his name prior to the Russian Revolution in order to try to avoid capture while on the run. He chose the name "Lenin", supposedly after the Russian river Lena. He never explained why he chose this name.
    
    Lenin died of a series of strokes in 1924 at the age of 53. With him died the naive optimism of the Communist ideal, which was soon crushed under the iron fist of his successor, Joseph Stalin.
    
    
    
    
  • Joseph Stalin.
    
    
    Stalin represented the inevitable result of the naive optimism of Communism. Far from believing in the utopian ideals of Karl Marx, Stalin saw Communism as an opportunity for seizing power and purging Russia of all his enemies, and anyone who looked at him crossly. Stalin was responsible for massive deaths in Russia, in the vicinity of 60 million people killed as a result of being sent to the "Gulag" prisons in Siberia or as a result of his rural "social engineering" fiascos.
    
    Stalin believed that rural life had the effect of putting to sleep a people's intellect, so he forced the evacuation of thousands of rural villages into bleak, urban concrete housing projects, with the stated goal of bringing the people into the modern world. He also forced thousands of farms to abandon their traditional agricultural practices and to plant & harvest according to decisions reached centrally in Moscow. Anyone who disagreed were denied their basic needs, causing "forced famines" across vast stretches of Russia that caused starvation on immense scales.
    
    "Stalinism" has come to mean absolute rule with an iron fist against the PR of Marxist, Socialist promises for a utopian future, yet in reality being nothing more than a power-grab. Stalin built the strength of the Politburo (the word is a combination of the words "Political" and "Bureau") into a monument of central planning and iron-fisted control, and has become synonymous with endlessly-layered bureaucracy.
    
    His name also wasn't really Stalin. His real name was Joseph Dzughashvili and he was half-Kurdish on his father's side. He changed his name many times while operating underground prior to the 1917 Communist revolution, finally settled on the name "Stalin", which means "Man of Steel", referring more to the concept of Industrialization rather than the Comic Book character of the same name.
    
    Stalin died of a stroke after an all-night party in 1953, at the age of 73.
    
    
    
    
  • Leon Trotsky.
    
    
    Leon Trotsky was an ally of Lenin and was responsible for the creation and initial command of the Red Army and much of its notorious violence during the Civil War in Russia following the Communist Revolution. He was also responsinsible for the creation of much of the process of imprisoning political opponents in Siberia. Yet he has always had the reputation of being the purist amongst Communist pragmatists. He criticised the Communist regime for not going far enough in the revolution, arguing for a so-called "Permanent Revolution", where the Communist revolution jumped straight from Capitalism to the final stage of Socialism without delay, including exporting the revolution to other countries. Whereas his colleagues argued for going through a series of stages towards Socialism, and in one country only - Russia - for the time-being. His opinions were not welcome and, following the death of Lenin and loosing out in the power-struggle with Stalin, he was expelled from Russia.
    
    The term "Trotskyite" became a blanket-term for anyone accused of being more revolutionary than the Revolutionary government. Anyone who accused Moscow of not moving fast enough to the next stage of Socialism, or wasn't following Marx and Lenin correctly, was branded a "Trotskyite" and usually met an unpleasant end.
    
    Trotsky's name wasn't really Trotsky. His real name was Lev Bronstein. He changed his name to the Polish name "Trotsky" while on the run prior to the Russian Revolution, naming himself after one of his jailers from his prison in Odessa in order to confuse authorities.
    
    After being expelled from Russia Trotsky spent several years moving around various countries in Europe, eventually ending up in Norway. However, in 1935 the Norwegian government deported him to the nominally-Socialist country Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life. 5 years later, in 1940, he was murdered by a Soviet agent who plunged an ice-axe into his head, as retribution for his continued criticism of the Russian revolution and its mismanagement by Stalin. He was 60 years old and he is buried in the town of Coyoacan, Mexico.
    
    
    
    
  • Mao Zedong (aka Mao Tse-Tung, aka Chairman Mao).
    
    
    Mao Zedong was the Communist leader of China for over 25 years, from its creation in 1949 to his death in 1976. He created his own brand of Marxism, with a vision for China as a Communist economy of agriculture and steel-production, as opposed to Russia's vision of Industrialization. He saw himself as the true interpreter of Marx for all Communists, and despite an initial alliance with Russia in the early 1950's, his ego led to a split between the Chinese Communists and the Russian Communists, much to the Capitalist West's relief.
    
    Mao had fought in the Chinese Civil War and led Chinese armies during World War II, then after defeating the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, he declared the People's Republic of China that same year, with himself as its leader. One of his unique contributions to Communism was the so-called "Mao Suit", which was a form of clothing which supposedly emphasized the classles nature of Communism, by looking identical on everyone who wore it: dull, grey, and boring, yet distinctive.
    
    Only 2 years after taking power, Mao's Commmunist army fought American soldiers in Korea, backing the break-away North Korean Communist government, while the Americans backed the South Korean Western-style government. Mao fought the Americans for 3 years, with the war eventually ending in a stalemate, with only a cease-fire resulting. Technically the war is still an active one, with the border between the 2 Koreas remaining the most heavily-militarized region in the world, as of 2005. The war was viewed as a smashing success in China and elevated Mao's stature as a defender of Communism against Western Capitalism.
    
    In 1958 he launched his economic plan called "The Great Leap Forward", which was a program of Collectivism that attempted to centrally plan all farming in the country and encouraged peasants to engage in steel production. But this ended in absolute disaster, with the result being famine, useless and amateurish steel products, and deaths from starvation in the millions.
    
    In 1966, after the rift with Russia and internal power-struggles, Mao launched his second big idea, the Cultural Revolution, which was partly motivated by attempts by some of his colleagues to marginalize him, due to the economic disasters he had initiated. The Cultural Revolution was a social program in which he encouraged all young Chinese to vocally challenge all authority and create a modern China, free of the relics of the past. He rallied the Chinese youth by ordering them to "Bombard the headquarters!", meaning to distrust the established Communist leaders (except for himself). Masses of students formed the so-called "Red Guard", which were basically militias for Mao, who conducted local tribunals that either executed anyone they deemed out of style, or sent them to so-called "re-education camps" where they could be taught the error of their non-Marxist ways.
    
    Mao published a book of his thoughts and observations on Marxism which he called "Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung", but which was commonly called the "Little Red Book". This was carried by anyone who wanted to survive within the Communist ranks, and it was written in a form of short saying and aphorisms, similar to the sayings of Confucius, lending Mao an almost religious aura. The Chinese Cultural Revolution lasted for only about 3 years, with Mao announcing its conclusion in 1969, and it was marked by a lot of violence and fear and destruction of China's cultural heritage, but little actual change in Chinese standard of living occured. It was basically Mao's successul attempt to go around his detractors and give power to the man on the street who viewed him as almost a modern Confucius.
    
    His unique brand of Marxism was appropriately called "Maoism", in which he considered the rural peasants as the true Marxist revolutionaries, as opposed to Lenin in Russia who had focused on the Proletariat factory-workers as the true revolutionaries. Whereas Russia stressed the Industrialization of their country, and destroyed countless rural villages in order to move the inhabitants to modern concrete housing-projects in order to force urbanization, Mao stressed the development of rural living and modified farming practices, but still within the traditional rural setting. Mao's Communism was meant to be an agrarian utopia, not the glorified factory-workers of Lenin.
    
    One of Mao's legacies was the so-called "Cult of Mao", in which he built up a cult of personality around himself, with thousands of posters of his face going up all over China, glorifying the "Long March" military retreat during the Chinese Civil War, and his self-proclaimed genius in packaging Marx's ideas for the needs of the Chinese. Few were the Chinese households that didn't have a framed picture of the beloved Mao prominantly displayed.
    
    Despite the fact that Mao has long been dead, there still are Maoist guerillas fighting in places like the Phillipines, Nepal, and South America in the 21st Century, still hoping to export his purist form of peasant-focused Marxism to the modern world, even though China itself has significantly diluted it from its original form.
    
    Mao died of a heart attack in 1976, at the age of 82. Following his death, his wife was one of the so-called "Gang of Four" who tried to take over power after his death, rallying behind extreme Leftist Communist ideology. Yet they lost out to the Reformers, and in the 21st Century China is nominally still a Communist country, but one which practices a very aggressive form of Capitalism.
    
    
    
    
  • Fidel Castro & Che Guevara.
    
    
    There have been many small-time Communist revolutions since the time of Lenin, with "banana republic" dictators overthrowing their governments with slogans of Socialist salvation, only to end up practicing as much, if not worse, oppression than the power they replaced, never delivering on any of their Socialist promises. The revolution in Cuba was one such revolution in a relatively small country, but since it was in the United States' "back yard" in the Caribbean it had far more serious consequences then, say, the attempted Communist revolution in Angola.
    
    Fidel Castro was a lawyer who led the overthrow of the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Over the next 2 years he gradually declared the country the first true Communist nation in the Western Hemisphere, which it has remained into the 21st Century. His government survived the botched US "Bay of Pigs" invasion in 1961 and has since followed the example of Lenin and nationalized most industry in Cuba and implemented such Socialist programs as universal health care and free education. He has ruled the country with an iron fist, following the lead of Stalin in his style of government. He has been a thorn in the side of the United States ever since, and under his rule Cuba has suffered severe economic stagnation, which Castro has consistently blamed on the US trade embargo against Cuba.
    
    As of 2007, Castro is 81 years old and is still in power, although is rarely seen in public due to ill health. He sometimes publishes articles in his state-run newspaper, Granma.
    
    One of Castro's cohorts in the revolution was a medical doctor from Argentina named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, otherwise known as Che Guevara, or simple "Che". He was one of Castro's guerilla fighters and after the revolution was assigned to various government posts, but he quickly grew bored. (Revolutionaries don't like desk-jobs). So he left Cuba in 1965 to export the Revolution to other countries. He went to the Congo in Africa to stir things up there, then went to South America to do likewise.
    
    While in Bolivia in 1967 to try and organize some grass-roots Communism, he was captured by the Bolivian army in a remote village and was killed, at the age of 39. His body was not found for almost 30 years, when his skeleton was unearthed in a remote field in 1997 in rural Bolivia. His body was returned to Cuba where he was buried with full military honors.
    
    His purist legacy has long been rallied to by Third World Socialist revolutionaries, and his romanticized image lives on forever on T-shirts sold at tourist-traps around the world - an ironic legacy to a Socialist purist, whose face helps serve the purpose of small-time Capitalists world-wide...!
    
    
    
    
  • Ho Chi Minh (aka B·c Ho, "Uncle Ho").
    
    
    Ho Chi Minh was one of many anti-Colonial revolutionaries in Asia after World War II, in his case fighting for the independence of Vietnam from the French, who ran most of Indochina as a vast colony at the time. He is significant because he was the idealogical, Communist leader of North Vietnam, fighting the Americans in South Vietnam for 14 years, with America eventually giving up and leaving without victory. Since North Vietnam was heavily supported by the Soviet Union during the war there, Minh's fight for Vietnamese independence served as a type of stage for the Cold War adversaries - America and the Soviet Union - to fight each other by proxy, not battling each other directly, but by using the Vietnamese Civil War as a way of engaging each other indirectly.
    
    He was born in 1890 in Indochina and was named Nguyen Sinh Cung. Like most Communist revolutionaries, and like many rock-stars, he changed his name: "Ho Chi Minh" means "He Who Enlightens". While living in Europe as a young adult, he discovered Marxism while working as a cook in London in 1915. He spent several years living in France, stirring up Communist activism as a vehicle for the cause of independence for Indochina, which he publicised by petitioning the World War I peace-conferences in Versailles, though unsuccessfully. After the Communist Revolution in Russia he visited Moscow in the 1920's, where he adopted many of Lenin's interpretations of Marxism but, like Mao Zedong in China, he felt that the true source of Socialist revolution lay not in Lenin's Proletariat factory-workers but in the rural peasants, those at the lowest of all social Classes.
    
    After running around the world for many years, on the lam from the various colonial powers due to his Communist activities, he made his way back to Indochina, after a brief stay in China in 1938 with his mentor Mao Zedong. In 1945, after Japan had invaded everything in Southeast Asia and had wreaked havoc on the French colonialists, who were having their own problems with the Germans back in Europe, he saw his opportunity within the chaos. After the United States defeated the Japanese at the end of World War II, Minh moved his band of guerillas, the "Viet Minh", into Vietnam and marched into the city of Hanoi and declared Vietnam an independent, Communist nation.
    
    However, he forgot to ask the French if they minded loosing their colony. They did mind, very much, and the result was a newly liberated and confident France sending soldiers into Vietnam to try and restore some French order to the area. After some wheeling and dealing and signing some unsatisfactory treaties, war broke out and Minh fled to the north of Vietnam and began fighting a guerilla war against the French.
    
    Minh spent the 1950's travelling around to different countries trying to organize peace conferences. The result was a lull in the fighting, with the country formally partitioned into 2 regions, north and south, in 1954 when the French withdrew from the area, with elections planned for eventual unification. But South Vietnam was more industrial than the agrarian north, and they had other plans. They later convinced the Americans to send them "advisors", who began having trouble with a new band of North Vietnamese guerillas called the "Vietcong". This turned into a big mess and America soon found itself "advising" South Vietnam in the form of a full-fledged war against the North. The rest is history.
    
    Ho Chi Minh represented a new type of Marxist leader, who used the Socialism of Marx as a vehicle for throwing off the yolk of European Colonial rule in the Third World. This was somewhat different from the role Marxism played in Russia and China, which were already established countries that the revolutionaries tried to re-create. The regions of Indochina that later became independent countries were still colonies after World War II, and gaining independence was their top priority, and they saw Communism as the best vehicle to achieve this goal.
    
    Minh died of diabetes in 1969, at the age of 79, not seeing the end result of the Civil War in Vietnam. With the withdrawal of the Americans and the fall of Saigon in 1975, North Vietnam annexed the South and achived their goal of national unification, in the form of a Communist nation. The city of Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, in honor of their idealogical leader. Vietnam remains a Communist country in the 21st century but, like China, has adopted agressive forms of Capitalism.
    
    
    
    
  • Pol Pot.
    
    
    Whereas Vietnam was an ally of the Soviet Union, Cambodia (aka "Kampuchea") was an ally of Communist China. Pol Pot was the Communist leader of Cambodia for only about 4 years, from 1975 - 1979, but his bizarre form of Marxism was perhaps the most devastating version of Karl Marx's ideas ever to have been unleashed on a population, producing destruction and suffering on a massive scale. Marx's ideas as processed through the brain of Pol Pot became a form of Communist psychosis.
    
    Pol Pot was born in French Indochina, named Saloth Sar. (Like almost all Communist revolutionaries, he later changed his name. He never explained what "Pol Pot" meant). He discovered Communism as a young adult living in Paris, studing Radio Engineering. He later returned to Indochina and joined the Viet Minh in the 1950's, who were fighting the French for independence. When he discovered that they were only interested in Vietnamese indepedence, and not other areas of Indochina, he left them and formed his own band of guerillas to fight for an indepedent Cambodia. He called his group the Khmer Rouge, which is French for the "Red Khmer", with Khmer referring to the main ethnic group in Cambodia, and the Red referring to Communism.
    
    Pol Pot had dreamed up a version of Marxism based on the Chinese Maoist glorification of peasant workers and the value of an agrarian economy. But Pol Pot took these ideas much further and decided that in order to rebuild society from scratch one had to abandon all technology and all tools, and evacuate all towns and cities and move into the forests and live like wild animals, forming only local communal collectives that farmed literally by hand. No tools of any kind were to be used by anyone. He basically called for a return to the Stone Age, returning to square-one in human history in order to rebuild the world according to Marxist principles.
    
    Cambodia became independent without his involvement, forming a monarchy. But with the American bombing of the Cambodian borders to flush out Vietcong troops, the mood of the Cambodian people swung towards the Communists and viewed Pol Pot as the natural leader to stand up to foreign aggression. When the Americans withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 the Vietcong left Cambodia, but Pol Pot continued to fight the Cambodian government, with support from Communist China, who supported him due to his love of Mao and his rejection of Soviet influence. (The Vietnamese were pro-Soviet, whereas Pol Pot cast his lot with the Chinese, and therefore got the backing of America, who was a friend of any enemy of the Soviets). In 1975 the Cambodian government collapsed and the Khmer Rouge took over the country, and placed Pol Pot in charge.
    
    He then proceded to unleash his Stone Age version of Marxism on the Cambodian people, literally emptying out all Cambodian cities and villages, marching millions of people into the jungles and forcing them to farm with their bare hands. All technology was banned, including all forms of media like radio or television, even reading-glasses, with the slightest infraction being cause for execution or unspeakable torture. Untold numbers of people died due to disease and exhaustion. Pol Pot ordered anyone killed who had any type of higher education or who worked in any kind of professional sector. He wanted Cambodia to consist of nothing but illiterate Stone Age tillers of the ground, using no tools and no technology, following the lead of Pol Pot into the bright utopia of a non-technological Socialist future. The Khmer Rouge were notorious for documenting their inhuman tortures via photographs and lengthy journals. They apparently did not care how history would judge them.
    
    One result of Pol Pot's endless executions and tortures was the virtual eradication of all adult males in Cambodia. In the 21st century, Cambodia is a country of mostly the very old or the very young. So few middle-aged people, particularly men, survived the 4-year scourge of the Khmer Rouge that Cambodia has a huge age-gap in the middle, which will only be filled as the young continue to age.
    
    Pol Pot fell from power 4 years later when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, due to Pol Pot provoking the Vietnamese over territorial disputes, and also because Pol Pot was an unlikely ally of both the Chinese and the Americans, neither of whom the Vietnamese got along with. They toppled him from the government and chased him into the jungles where he resumed his guerilla war for the next 20 years. For years, the Americans contined to support Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ignoring his horrendous crimes, for little other reason than because he opposed the Soviet Union.
    
    Pol Pot died in 1998, at the age of 72. The stated cause of death was a heart attack, but he was still living in the jungles of Cambodia, still leading his small remaining group of Khmer Rouge guerillas 20 years after being forced from power, so the details of his death were never clear. In the weeks before his death he had been arrested by his own soliders for ordering the execution of his long-time right-hand man. He was placed under house-arrest, but was moved around the jungle for several days while fleeing a new round of fighting with government forces. He supposedly died of a heart attack during this last flight through the jungles, and his body was quickly burned. It was rumored that his inert body raised his arm and fist in a last gesture of defiance as the flames consumed him, which was a poetic end to a Maoist-Marxist true-believer and one of the most evil criminals of the 20th century.
    
    Ironically, his final recorded words were spoken to a Cambodian journalist who interviewed him a few weeks before his death. He said, "The blood does not reach my brain. It hurts every day." That pretty much said it all.
    
    
    
    
  • The Frankfurt School.
    
    
    While Marxism has usually been practiced as a political discipline, it has also been used as a form of academic analysis. The ideas of Marx regarding Class-based power-struggles, guided by Dialectic Materialism, have been used as a sort of filter through which to analyze other academic realms of culture, like the Arts, Psychology, Sociology, and the Media. Using Marxism as an academic discipline is most commonly associated with the so-called Frankfurt School, which consisted of a small group of philosophers who worked at the Institue for Social Research, in Frankfurt Germany (thus the name "Frankfurt School"), founded in 1923.
    
    Some of the more famous people associated with the Frankfurt School have been Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and J¸rgen Habermas. The observations of these writers form a branch of philosophy collectively called "Critical Theory", and has been largely responsible for the association of Marxism as a doctrinal foundation in many Western Universities for much of the past 50+ years. When Philosophy is taught at modern Universities it is very often taught according to the principles of many of these writers.
    
    Most of the thinkers from the Frankfurt School have adopted the idea of Dialectics as defined by Hegel and developed by Marx, and applied it to specific subjects for analysis, viewing a particular subject as going through cyles of struggle and conflict and building a resolution from opposing forces. A common thread that runs throughout much of their writings is criticism of modern Capitalism but at the same time a rejection of Soviet-styled Communism. Despite their association with Marxism, the Frankfurt School has always been critical of Marx's arguments that Class-based struggles are deterministic and inevitable. They much prefer a more fluid approach that values the signifigance of human choice. Colonialism was long a common target for critique, as well as arguing that the Englightenment has long since run out of steam and that the modern intellectual world is officially in a "post" era.
    
    The Frankfurt school has also been very focused on symbols and language in modern culture, contributing heavily to areas of philosophy such as Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, and Art theory. For instance, these writers have rejected the divisions of High Art from Low Art and arguing that there is no objective meaning to Art as such, with its meaning and signifigance always being socially conditioned. The ideas of Existentialism have been heavily used in such subjects as Psychology, particulary in the writings of Erich Fromm.
    
    Several writers from this tradition became something of a spiritual authority for the Counter-Culture of the 1960's protest era, with writers such as Herbert Marcuse defining many of the ideas adopted by the so-called New Left of the era, since he stressed the importance of challenging all assumptions and all authority figures.
    
    Critical Theory is very interested in things such as "Grand Narratives", which encompass things such as prevailing "mythologies" of nations, religious teachings, morals, and assumptions underlying cultural expectations. Critical Theory is also often associated with Postmodernism and writers outside of the direct association with the Frankfurt School, such as Charles Jencks arguing that the era of Modernism officially ended at 3:32 PM on July 15, 1972, when a notorious modernist-style housing complex was demolished!
    
    The Frankfurt School's association with Marxism isn't always accurate, since it forms more of a spring-board from which its writers covered other fields far and wide, but they are an example of how widely Marx's ideas have been digested across the political and academic spectrum.