I shall graciously explain Marxism

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“There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

-Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848

Yeah and that


I think the real solution was for the workers to form unions and negotiate better conditions and wages.
It mentions in the communist manifesto that people were already starting to do that.

He is a rather good looking fellow though isn't he

This illustrates the problem with labelling. Labelling civil rights and workers rights campaigns as "communist" or "marxist" would have meant we would all be still working 7 days a week with no holiday pay, women would be at home cooking dinner and black people would still have this guy as their mascot

Yeah it's funny that conservatives were highly suspicious of any worker's unions... because they ended up making communism unnecessary.

To be fair, yesterday I read that the communists setup the international workers union after the failed uprisings in France and Germany. So there was good grounds to be wary.

My wife and I debate the value of unions all the time. Union power in a labour market is somewhat overblown nowadays due to the establishment of labour laws and the ability of staff to negotiate wages.

As with the feminist movement, their heyday has somewhat long passed. Unions still have some role now, otherwise large MNCs would relocate their entire workforces to Mexico, India or the Philippines or replace with automation (the latter two scenarios are inevitable in the long run).

Yeah they were high profile and a hotly debated topic for a while.
It's a shame that they got tarred with the communist brush.

When they don't have that outlet and a dictatorial state is responsible for that situation it's hard to argue more violent options don't become more reasonable.

If the state is going to use force against you for trying to organize it becomes a lot easier to see violent resistance against said state as reasonable and justified. If the state refuses to allow it and the political system makes changing that impossible, violence against that state might be inevitable.

Marxism is simply put, a critique of Capitalism. He was not anti-Capitalist, he tended to view it as systemic and without agency; although he wrote new editions of his work and changed his views over the course of his life. He also thought it would die away and give way to more egalitarian, technically advanced distribution systems, but he was not Socialist like some of his contemporaries and surviving children. Engels was an industrialist, though Marx is never known to have visited a factory.