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Spiritual_Jaguar4685 t1_j28o3t9 wrote

Great synopsis by u/dogmeatjones25

I'll just add that Marx lived in the mid-1800s, in Germany, and was very influenced by the Industrial Revolution and economics and politics of his day. His theory shouldn't be taken as "all Communism" any more than the Founding Fathers of the United States should be equated to "all Democracy".

His ideas though, which you can better call "Marxism" or "Marxist Communism" where the germ that grew into 20th century into things like Leninism, Stalinism, and the communism we saw in Soviet Russia and modern day China. It's not fair to say that modern day China is "Marxist" or to equate things like Socialism or Soviet Russia to Marx either.

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grumblingduke t1_j28yz6x wrote

> I'll just add that Marx lived in the mid-1800s, in Germany,

Worth noting that in his 20s he was exiled from Prussia at the request of the Russian monarchy (for his articles critical of them), lived in Paris from 1843-1845 until the Prussian Government got him expelled from France and had his radial German-language (but Paris-based) newspaper shut down. He lived in Brussels until 1848, when he was expelled on allegations that he had helped fund Belgian workers planning a revolution, and he bounced between a post-revolution France and Cologne, until he was kicked out of both, moving to London in 1849, aged 30, where he lived until his death.

Marx's most famous works (Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto) were both written in London.

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