How does Karl Marx relate to World War 2?

Answer 1

Karl Marx could be considered the intellectual and philosophical leader of the Russian Revolution. Although he had died long before the revolution it was his ideas (along with Friedrich Engels) that sparked the political movements to overthrow the capitalist and autocratic government that was in place in 1917. His ideas on the evils of capitalism, the need to overthrow it in favor of socialism and the eventual conversion of socialism into communism led many to believe that the forms of government in place in many industrialized countries had to be replaced.

These Marxist thoughts led to the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) whose members advocated the overthrow of capitalism in favor of socialism. One faction of this party was the Bolshevik Party led by Vladimir Lenin. When the first Russian Revolution occurred in February 1917, the Marxist RSDLP and other anti government parties, socialist and non-socialists) banded together to form the capitalist based Provisional Government. But by that time in Russia, the workers, soldiers and peasants were not content to remain under a capitalist system. Lenin used Marxist ideologies to convince the people that a Marxist system led by him and the Bolsheviks would be better than a capitalist system led by the ministers of the former government. Using Marxist Propaganda, Lenin engineered the Bolshevik/Communist Revolution in October 1917.

Answer 2

Karl Marx's ideas on capitalism and class struggle inspired socialist and communist movements that emerged during and after World War I. While Marx himself did not directly relate to World War II, his ideology influenced the ideologies and policies of various countries involved in the war, including the Soviet Union, which played a crucial role in the conflict.

Answer 3

Wikipedia

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) was a German[1] philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas are credited as the foundation of modern communism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction.[2] Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialismwould, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a transitional period called the "Dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy" .[3][4] In section one of The Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process:

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.[5]

Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change. He argued that the structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to socialism:

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. -(The Communist Manifesto)[5]

On the other hand, Marx argued that socio-economic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. He argued that capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."[6]

While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science

Answer 4

The only connection that Karl Marx has to World War II is that the Soviet Union, one of the major allies in the war, was a Communist country, based of an interpretation of Karl Marx's work: The Communist Manifesto. Other than this, Karl Marx has nothing to do with World War II; he was long dead by that point.