ABSTRACT
Karl Marx entered socialist politics and developed a revolutionary philosophy that would ultimately influence millions. One of the most important intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx altered the course of philosophy and established a revolutionary movement that would transform the world in the twentieth century. Marxism proved to be one of the most effective ways of approaching revolutionary politics. Marx's vision of a historically inevitable triumph over exploitation fueled the minds of revolutionaries and intellectuals in the West for more than a century. Marxism came to dominate the thinking of the Social Democratic Party in industrial Germany before World War I. It also gained ascendancy, ironically, in precisely those countries that Marx himself considered economically backward and therefore unprepared for revolution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Marxism finally lost the status that had made it the dominant philosophy of revolution of the twentieth century.
