ABSTRACT
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in an elegant townhouse in Trier in the Rhine province of Prussia. Marxism has become a quasi-religion, with its slogans, symbols, red banners, hymns, party fellowship, apostles, martyrs, bible, and definitive truth. In developing a Marxist approach to economics, he created his own vocabulary: surplus value, reproduction, bourgeoisie and proletarians, historical materialism, vulgar economy, monopoly capitalism, and so on. He fancied himself a poet, translated Greek plays, and filled his notebooks with dark tragedies and romantic poetry. Marx was apparently taken in by the pseudoscience of phrenology, the practice of examining a person's skull to determine his or her character, developed during the early 1800s by two German physicians. There was no stability in capitalism. Marx emphasized both the boom and the bust nature of the capitalist system, and that its ultimate demise was inevitable.
