Being himself one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Italy, ( CPI ), his theories had, in turn, been strongly influenced by the German social thinker Karl Marx, and have their ideological roots grounded in Marxist theory of false consciousness and capitalist exploitation.

Marx himself had talked about the " materialist conception of history ", which was later referred to as " historical materialism " by Engels.

Marx himself took care to indicate that he was only proposing a guideline to historical research ( Leitfaden or Auffassung ), and was not providing any substantive " theory of history " or " grand philosophy of history ", let alone a " master-key to history ".

But having abandoned abstract philosophical speculation in his youth, Marx himself showed great reluctance during the rest of his life about offering any generalities or universal truths about human existence or human history.

Marx himself expresses deep critical concerns with this historicist tendency in his Theses on Feuerbach:

Interested in its ideas but repelled by some of its methods, he could never bring himself to accept Karl Marx ’ s writings as revealed scripture.

Marx identified himself as an atheist.

However in 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government agreed to shut down Vorwärts !, and furthermore, Marx himself was expelled from France by the interior minister François Guizot.

Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organising, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism.

However, Marx famously asserted in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that " philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways ; the point however is to change it ", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world.

Lenin was an advocate of the socio-political theory of Marxism, first developed by the German sociologists Karl Marx ( 1818 – 1883 ) and Friedrich Engels ( 1820 – 1895 ) in the mid-19th century, and Li's articles helped bring an understanding of Marxism to the Chinese revolutionary movement, even though he failed to fully understand it himself.

Marx saw himself as doing morally neutral sociology and economic theory for the sake of human development.

The ideology was Marxism-Leninism ; this reflected the fact that Stalin himself was not a Communist theoretician, in contrast to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, and that he prided himself on maintaining the legacy of Lenin as a founding father for the Soviet Union and the future Communist world.

Marx himself argued that it was the goal of the proletariat itself to displace the capitalist system with socialism, changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist society in which: ".. the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

His parents were both teachers and activists in a rural area of ANC strength, and Mbeki describes himself as " born into the struggle "; a portrait of Karl Marx sat on the family mantelpiece, and a portrait of Mohandas Gandhi was on the wall.

Mazzini, in turn, described Marx as " a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind " and declared that " Despite the communist egalitarianism which preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party, admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition.

Marx himself, was expelled from Paris by French authorities on February 3, 1845 and settled in Brussels, Belgium with his wife and one daughter.

Little more is known, as Engels destroyed over 1, 500 letters between himself and Marx after the latter's death so as to conceal the details of their secretive lifestyle.

When Louis Bonaparte carried out a coup against the French government and made himself president for life on December 2, 1851, Marx and Engels, like many people, were shocked.

The German political theorist and sociologist Karl Marx ( 1818 – 1883 ) was the primary founder of Marxism, although he himself wrote little about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with his published works instead largely focusing on analysing and criticising capitalist society.

Harpo himself did a reprise of this scene, dressed in his usual costume, with Lucille Ball also donning the fright wig and trench coat, in the I Love Lucy episode " Lucy and Harpo Marx ".

Fukuyama himself identifies on some level with Marx, but identifies most strongly with the German philosopher Hegel, by way of Alexandre Kojève.

Chico Marx playing cards with himself.

Much as Karl Marx drew radical implications from the ideas of the conservative Hegel, Nearing took the economic logic of his department head, Simon Patten, and made radical inferences about wealth and the distribution of income that his mentor had himself hesitated to draw.

Marx explicitly developed the notion of critique into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach, " Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways ; the point is to change it.

Although the modern term " creative destruction " is not used explicitly by Marx, it is largely derived from his analyses, particularly in the work of Werner Sombart ( whom Engels described as the only German professor who understood Marx's Capital ), and of Joseph Schumpeter, who discussed at length the origin of the idea in Marx's work ( see below ).

Originally, as Marx explicitly notes, commercial trade emerged at the boundaries of economic communities based on a non-capitalist mode of production, and it is only when commerce begins to dominate and regulate the bulk of production itself, that it becomes clearer that the ultimate source, or substance, of all surplus-value is really surplus-labour.

Nevertheless, it seems undeniable that all the major classical economics and Marx explicitly rejected the labor theory of price ().

In the preface to the 1882 Russian Edition of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly raised the issues Trotsky would later develop:

In a draft included in the Grundrisse manuscripts, which inspired the starting point of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital, Marx explicitly states that:

Teaching related to the social economy draws explicitly from the works of Robert Owen, Proudhon and Karl Marx with works by Bourdieu and Putnam informing the debate over social capital and its relationship to the competitive advantage of mutuals.

They regarded this to be the explicitly stated and true interpretation of Marx ( See own admission in Friedrich Engels, Socialism — Utopian and Scientific, pg 54 ).

Surplus product ( German: Mehrprodukt ) is an economic concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy.

While Marx used the concept of the law of value in his works Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Theories of Surplus Value and Das Kapital, he did not explicitly formalise its full meaning in a mathematical sense, and therefore how it should be exactly defined remains to some extent a controversial topic in Marxian economics.

This more complex debate cannot be dealt with in this article ; it may be noted only that newly industrializing countries to a large extent imitated technical methods used in industrialized countries, and that Marx can hardly be held responsible for all the things done in his name-he had explicitly referred to problems of environmental despoilation quite a number of times, including in Das Kapital.

Marx and Engels explicitly denied that in reality total product-value would be equal to the total of production prices ( see prices of production ).

Marx stated explicitly that price relationships can be such, that they do not reflect the true value relationship at all.

However, Marx himself explicitly denied in chapter 49 of the third volume of Das Kapital that such an exact mathematical identity actually applies ; subsequently, Frederick Engels also denied it explicitly, in a letter to Conrad Schmidt dated March 12, 1895.

As mentioned, Marx never explicitly summarised his definition of capitalism, beyond some suggestive comments in manuscripts which he did not publish himself.

Marx accordingly made, explicitly or implicitly 10 distinctions relevant to defining productive labour in a capitalist mode of production:

Whilst Marx, working in the Hegelian tradition, rejected Comtean sociological positivism, in attempting to develop a science of society he nevertheless came to be recognised as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning.

For platformist anarcho-communist Wayne Price " Today ’ s proposals for Parecon, in which workers are rewarded for the intensity and duration of their labor in a cooperative economy, would fit into Bakunin ’ s or Marx ’ s concept of a transitory, beginning, phase, of a free society ... Kropotkin rejected the two-phase approach of the Marxists and the anarchist-collectivists.

In contrast with Karl Marx and his adherents, Lassalle rejected the idea that the state was a class-based power structure with the function of preserving existing class relations and destined to " wither away " in a future classless society.

Hence, Marx rejected the positive role of state put forth by Hegel.

Marx rejected this type of thinking and termed it false consciousness, explanations of social problems as the shortcomings of individuals rather than the flaws of society.

Karl Marx rejected Comtean positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society based on historical materialism, becoming recognised as a founding figure of sociology posthumously.

Marx and Engels rejected nationalism as a whole, believing " the working class have no country ".

Another important work was Critique of Herbert Marcuse: The one-dimensional man in class society, in which Mattick forcefully rejected Marcuse's thesis that the proletariat, as Marx understood it, had become a mythological concept in advanced capitalist society.

Cultural materialism incorporated and refined Marx's categories of superstructure and base ; Harris modified and amplified such core Marxist concepts as means of production and exploitation, but Harris rejected two key aspects of Marxist thought: the dialectic, which Harris attributed to an intellectual vogue of Marx ’ s time ; and, unity of theory and practice, which Harris regarded as an inappropriate and damaging stance for social scientists.

The New Philosophers rejected what they saw as the power-worship of the Left, a tradition which they traced back to at least Hegel and Marx.

Karl Marx died before the establishment of formal social science but nonetheless fiercely rejected Comtean sociological positivism ( despite himself attempting to establish a historical materialist ' science of society ').

His book on Marx was rejected by Marxists, who were harshly criticized, as well as by those who refused to see in Marx a philosopher and who reduced him to an ideologue responsible from Marxism.

Justice, good sense, honesty, and the honor of the International brazenly rejected, its very existence endangered – all this the better to establish the dictatorship of Mr. Marx.