MAY 5, 2018, marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the founder of modern, Scientific Socialism and inspiration behind the world-changing Russian Revolution of 1917.

Famously, Marx wrote: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

He and his co-thinker and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, exposed the innermost workings and contradictions of the capitalist system, and its inevitable, recurring oscillations between "boom" and "slump." 

They also outlined the materialist conception of history and the philosophy of dialectical materialism, by which it is not the consciousness of men and women that determines their being; but, on the contrary, their being, or living conditions, that determine their consciousness.

Marx and Engels were not just bookworms and theoreticians.

They were actively involved all their lives in the working class movement, being the guiding lights in the formation of the First Communist International.

They were revolutionaries who saw the working class as the "gravedigger" of the capitalist system all over the world.

Hence their stirring injunction in the renowned "Communist Manifesto" of 1848: "Working men of all countries: Unite." 

Like his greatest followers, Lenin and Trotsky, Marx has been subjected to a landslide of abuse, misrepresentation, distortion, and lies by his ruling class enemies.

Unfortunately for them, ideas that correspond to the material, social, and political needs of society cannot be killed off with propaganda and abuse.

James Roberts, Wallasey.