Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)
Karl Marx
Quote on commodity fetishism: [In] the religious world[,] the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and enter into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities[.] --Das Kapital, 1867, Karl Marx
Contemporaries: Richard Wagner - J. Sheridan Le Fanu - Gustave Courbet - John Ruskin - Herman Melville - Jacques Offenbach John Ruskin - Charles Baudelaire - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Gustave Flaubert - Matthew Arnold - Jean-Léon Gérôme
Biography
Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) was an influential political philosopher and social theorist. Although Marx addressed many issues in his career as a journalist and philosopher, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class conflict, summed up in his assertion that, "The interests of capitalists and wage-laborers are diametrically opposed to each other." --http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_MarxCapitalism [...]
Marx coined the term capitalism.Brussels
Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years.Further reading
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The Communist Manifesto () - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels [Amazon.com]
"A spectre is haunting Europe," Karl Marx and Frederic Engels wrote in 1848, "the spectre of Communism." This new edition of The Communist Manifesto, commemorating the 150th anniversary of its publication, includes an introduction by renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm which reminds us of the document's continued relevance. Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism and its deleterious effect on all aspects of life, from the increasing rift between the classes to the destruction of the nuclear family, has proven remarkably prescient. Their spectre, manifested in the Manifesto's vivid prose, continues to haunt the capitalist world, lingering as a ghostly apparition even after the collapse of those governments which claimed to be enacting its principles. --amazon editorial -
Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels [Amazon.com]
The Capital, written in three volumes by Karl Marx himself and, after his death, by his friend Friedrich Engels, and totalling some 3.000 pages, is the work of a man who surpassed all established standards of his time in what regards the multifaceted knowledge he acquired in many fields and, more important, trough the influence it had over millions of peoples troughout the world, whatever their position in the social spectrum. Of the monumental book and of its author it could be said that not a single human being in the years to come, wherever he/she lived, would escape (for better or for worse) unscathed from what is written in the book.For it inaugurated a new era in the relationship between men of all social conditions in the whole world and in years to come. It is the book where all the reasons for the downfall of capitalism in the end of the XIX century are pinpointed with a precise and polemical style, trademarks of the German author, and where, for the very first time in the story of History, historical movements are treated coherently as the necessary (deterministic) events of the social movements of humankind since the beginning of civilization, something called historical or dialectical determinism by the author, who borrowed and inverted many concepts from the German philosopher Hegel.
Notwhithstanding the importance of the book to West and East culture, this is not an easy book to read, given the intricacy of the subjects treated and also its lenght. For me the most attractive feature of the book is the disdain Marx had for anyone who did not agree with him, unabashedly fighting against Political Economists and Historians of all ideological collors. Despite all the rabid polemic, what remains after almost 150 years of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital is the collapse of the communist world and the strenght of Capitalism, who learned the lessons of survival better than its ideological counterpart. --ferraz9 via amazon.com