It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence Karl Marx has had upon the world in the last 150 years. Marx was an influential historian, journalist and economist who is widely considered one of the first social scientists, but he is best remembered for advocating socialism, particularly the brand that would take his name. As the father of Marxism, Marx predicted that capitalistic societies, ruled by a dictatorship of the bourgeoise, would eventually give way via class struggles to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and eventually to a more stateless form of communism.Marx certainly wasnt the first to espouse these kinds of political views, but nobody before or since had as much influence in actually bringing about the implementation of their ideas. Working with Friedrich Engels and others, Marx went about authoring a series of works, most notably The Communist Manifesto 1848 and Das Kapital1867-1894, championing his ideas. While Marx laid out the ideological groundwork, many put it into action, leading to the formation of socialist powers in the Soviet Union and China during the first half of the 20th century. Marxs writings and philosophy had an impact on the social sciences and economic theories, but one of his biographers could comfortably and accurately assert that the political history of the 20th century was Marxs legacy. Whether fairly or not, in the West Marx has bcome inextricably linked with some of the totalitarian excesses of the regimes that claimed to espouse his ideology, and for that reason Marx is often associated with some of the negative connotations that come with the Soviets. Nevertheless, few would deny the very decisive impact Marxism had on the global landscape, and the ramifications continue to have a political influence today.
