Funtestiq!  Pictures

Karl Marx, 1818-1883, founder of Marxism and godfather of the world-wide Communist movement.

Born into a German Jewish family that had converted to Christianity, young Marx grew up an atheist and rebel against existing socio-political system.  His subversive activities saw him exile to London.

In 1847, he and his German friend, Friedrich Engels, the son of a factory-owner, authored a little booklet entitled The Communist Manifesto.  A declaration of class war against Capitalism, the Manifesto  would become a bible of sorts for generations of Communists.  Theoretically more significant was his Das Kapital, in which Marx presents his economic analysis of the modern society, and which provided basis of belief behind Communist revolutions in the twentieth century.

The eventual failure of the Soviet Union, however, discredited much of Marx had to say, and his theory, and movement, seems to be on its way off the historical stage, for the time-being at least.  This, of course, took place only after furious ideological conflicts had taken the whole world perilously close to total destruction in a nuclear showdown.