John Jabez Edwin Mayall. Public domain: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/. Cropped to a 4:5 portrait, resized without upscaling, converted to sRGB and compressed as WebP. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Marx_by_John_Jabez_Edwin_Mayall_1875_-_Restored.png. Full credits: /portraits/credits.html#karl-marx

Karl Marx

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Karl Marx was a German philosopher, journalist and revolutionary whose critique of capitalism reshaped modern politics. Writing with Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and later developing his economic analysis in Capital, he argued that owners of productive assets gained power over people who had to sell their labour. His proposed alternative involved common ownership of the means of production and the eventual overcoming of class divisions. This concerned the organisation of economic power, rather than a simple ban on personal possessions. Marx also understood capitalism as an international system and urged workers to recognise shared interests across national borders. His writings inspired very different socialist and communist movements; they did not provide a detailed blueprint for every institution of the societies later established in his name.