Marxism Philosophy

• Marxist philosophy can be broken down into three parts.
  
  First, that history is defined by class struggles, the rich versus the poor.
  
  Second, that capitalism is controlled by only a few (the rich) and that the many (the poor workers) produce more than is necessary to support an unbalanced system.
  
  Third, since the workers do not have any control over the capitalist society in which they must live, they should rise up and take political power for themselves from the rich.
  
  

Beginning

• Friedrich Engels
  
  German-born philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pioneered Marxism in the mid 1800s. Marx himself came from a middle-class family. He did, however, join many labor unions and radical political parties in his youth, including the Communist League.
  
  

The Communist Manifesto

• Perhaps the best-known book about Marxism is The Communist Manifesto. It was written by Marx and Engels for the Communist League. The book outlines the group's intentions and explains Marxist theories of history and revolution.
  
  The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848.
  
  

European Revolutions

• After the publication of The Communist Manifesto, revolutions popped up all over Europe, including one in Marx and Engels' native Germany and one in Afghanistan.
  
  Friedrich Engels wrote about the Afghanistan revolution.
  
  Many other revolutions followed more than 50 years later.
  
  Russia was overthrown by the revolutionaries lead by Lenin, and later lead by Stalin. The USSR, which absorbed a number of Eastern European countries, was the largest communist threat to the United States during the Cold War.
  
  Spain also had a failed communist revolution in the 1930s.
  
  

Marxism Beyond Europe

• By the 20th century, Marxism had spread across the world. Countries all over Central and South America had revolutions, which replaced their old governments with new communist ones. Asia also had a large number of countries revolt, including China, Korea and Vietnam.
  
  The Vietnam War started because the U.S. was trying to stop the spread of communism.
  
  

Marxism Today

• Today, only a few communist countries remain, Cuba and China among them. However, the socialist ideas that Marxism presented have taken root in many other countries' policies, such as public health care in Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan.