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Karl Marx, born on this day in 1818, was a foundational political theorist and journalist associated with the philosophy of Marxism.

Among Marx's best-known texts are the "The Communist Manifesto" and the three-volume "Das Kapital", in which he set out to define and explain the behavior of the capitalist mode of production.

Marx's political and philosophical thought have had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production, and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labor power in return for wages.

Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx concluded that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.

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920 comments

  • I was never a huge fan of Coke, Fanta or McDonald's, but since I started boycotting them I have realized how much I don't like them. I don't miss them at all, and I don't know what keeps drawing people back to that crap

  • Great-aunt is over and spreading extremely obviously fake stories about people from American reality TV shows and celebrities being killed by other famous people and them all having bodies found in secret basements. Which I'm assuming are from AI YT channels.

  • The contradictions are sharpening and the Imperial Core ever more fascistic and autocanniballistic. The silver lining is that at least folk punk is making a comeback. 🪕

  • I have a little old baby truck for supposedly making my life easier with projects, but I went like 7 months without starting it and driving it around (a long story), so the less than 1 year old battery died. like full drain. I spent the entire morning looking up the various hardware I can buy/use to remedy this specific situation (multi stage charger, 10A) as well as prevent it in the future (2-3A maintainer).

    my current place doesn't have a garage or a car port or even a goddamn outlet on the porch, so I guess I'm charging this thing inside the house now that I've pulled the battery out. if I keep the windows open, that's well ventilated right?

    this is so America car brained, but one day I just want to have a really simple shed that has like 3 bays worth of space, all my tools neatly organized, power outlets, wifi, a little dumpy computer I can easily watch videos on, and all the bullshit so I can just mostly fix my own dumbass problems without turning my living space into a chaos dungeon.

  • I work/study/do research in healthcare and I've been recently thinking about how much of modern medicine/healthcare is based on the guarantee of antibiotics working properly. On the other hand, there are more and more resistant bacteria floating around the communities, ie. outside the ICU where they usually come from.

    Antibiotic resistance and development is yet another barrier that capitalism fundamentally cannot overcome, regardless of how many reforms you make. Research for new drugs take a long time and is very expensive. Along with this, the correct way of using antibiotics is avoiding overuse or just reducing the use in general, specially of new drugs that bacteria can't resist yet. That means that companies can't expect to make a profit out of any new drug that they develop, since trying to use them as little as possible is the rational way.

    In other words, the profit motive is unable to create new antibiotics in the manner that the world needs right now, let alone in the much worse future. If we lose antibiotics, modern medicine mostly comes to a halt. For example, say goodbye to surgeries and also to your little niece that got an ear infection that every kid gets at least once. Tooth extractions becomes a very high risk procedure, too.

  • We finally got the capitol at my job consolidated. Or in other words, I don't have to drive from place to place anymore and I can bike to work again.

    It's been wonderful.

  • Had a dream Nintendo Switch released an emulator for a console I never heard of. And on this console was some kinda' Ranger X-like game 2D run 'n gun thing where you had a bunch of different characters and pods you could choose between and customize and you and the pod could combine or partially combine, for different weapon configurations and stuff, it was awesome. It also had like Ace Attorney-like cutscenes between stages.

    I thought, "the people must know of this game" and was showing it off at some get together. My sister and a woman who was like Amy Ryan but with brown hair and short and tan came up and I was showing her too. I gave her the Switch and she kept bending it without breaking the screen to "get a better grip" and she gave me vibes like she wasn't super stable or wanting to hear someone tell her what to do so I tried being chill about it but I also didn't want her breaking my Switch. My sister got mad at me for some reason and took a fee steps away and wouldn't talk, neither would the Amy Ryan-lookalike, though she was still playing the game extremely suboptimally. She wasn't even using the transformation mechanic.

    And during it a puffy stray cat came by and sat on my shoulder. We were sitting on an old, sunken-in couch until they left with just me with the Switch and the cat on my shoulder. I called out to them but they wouldn't come back from the crowd of people, asking what I did wrong.

    Then I woke up.

  • I'm at my city's annual hanami event and for some fucking reason for a good while there was just what sounded like generic movie trailer music blaring from the festival ground, who booked this shit

    Edit: there is now Japanese music, sanity has been restored

  • Jesus Christ I just got jump scared by my neighbor irl lmao. In my kitchen there is a window that faces there house and they also have a window at there kitchen so I accidently made eye contact with one of them at fucking 1 am and I really hope I didn;t scare them as badly as they scared me lmao

  • Question for the people that are actually not afraid of talking to others. How should I ask people if they want to hang out? I haven't seen some friends in almost 7 months and I want to see them again. Should I just ask them if they want to get lunch or dinner somewhere? Thats what I think I might do tomorrow if I don't get so scared of talking

  • Was at partner's family's house for taco dinner and they were offering crunchy shells... uncooked.

    Is this why so many people hate crunchy taco shells? Because they're eating chewy, gummy-ass uncooked shells??

  • I have a really dumb question, one which I assume has been answered somewhere before, so feel free to either link me to that answer or copy and paste it here.

    Whenever the subject of Substack comes up -- like when someone I follows links to their Substack page -- someone always mentions that "Substack supports Nazis". I don't usually read things on Substack and I haven't written anything on it, so it never became a dilemma for me, but what are people referring to when they say this? Do they actively support Nazis financially, while suppressing non-Nazis? Or is it that they allow Nazis to use their site instead of actively removing them? Do their policies, or the enforcement of their policies, disproportionately favour fascists?

    As long as I'm asking, what are people using as an alternative to Substack?

  • i think this is what people in kenya feel like when the US is about to invade somewhere. something terrible might happen that will affect us all. i have no fucking clue what can be done about it.

  • @Lussy@hexbear.net talked with my old neighbor who just got back to the island after a NYC trip and she was talking about how she hadn't eaten rice in a week. Asked her why she didn't try eating Chinese, sushi, Indian food, or anything that should've been available over there. "Nah, a mi no me gusta la comida rara" ??? Why even travel?

  • Damn, Michael Porter Jr. doing all that with one shoulder. It'd be cool if his politics weren't terrible.

  • Turned on the radio today like some freak and hear an ad for a hardware store 2 towns over, they selling guns now. I know it shouldn't be shocking living in

    where you can get one at walmart but it did phase me a bit.

    I look forward to the collapse of this cursed land just sucks I have to live through it/my spite means I'm gonna enjoy seeing it burn.

  • Can't handle the smarm of the last Remember Shuffle episode. How is the movie-exclusive alliteration speech by V more "dumb guy's smart guy" coded than quoting Shakespeare? It's about the same. If anything, just quoting something else perceived as smart is the lazier way to do it.

    I prefer the comic too, but V For Vendetta is better than 300, dudes.

  • Every time there's police violence or overreach or corruption or just plain old harrasment, you hear the chorus "it's just a few bad apples." Mother fucker, what is the saying about a few bad apples in a bunch. Is it "a few bad apples does nothing to the bunch actually" do we keep a spoiled bunch. Why has did it enter as an idiom to say a few bad apples for thin blue line types when cops do something horrible

  • I’m sorry for my last comment I just want to promote peace and love I was just ordering food in support of peace ✌️ I’m very worried with the conflict

920 comments