Marxism. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Materialistic understanding of history
In the philosophical and social thought of the 19th and 20th centuries, a special and significant place is occupied by the concept created in the mid-19th century by Karl Marx and subsequently developed by many other Marxist theorists. Due to the fact that the provisions of Marxism served as an ideological platform for the communist movement and many revolutionary uprisings around the world, the most significant of which were undoubtedly the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which brought the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin to power, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong, Marxism in its various versions has had the most serious impact on the historical destinies of many countries, but with the collapse of the USSR this influence has been steadily declining. In theoretical terms, however, Marxism was and remains one of the leading social concepts, which in many ways determined the appearance of modern social science. In the history of philosophy, Marxism appears as the heir and at the same time the antipode of Hegel’s idealism, which turned Hegel’s thought “upside down”, i.e. gave philosophy a critical social orientation and transformed theoretical criticism into a tool serving the goals of revolutionary social transformations.