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At the start of 1950, Joseph McCarthys political future did not look promising. McCarthy had been elected senator from Wisconsin in 1946, after switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and running as a decorated Marine veteran with the nickname Tail Gunner Joe. Even then, he had a reputation as a scofflaw. He had exaggerated his war record. He first ran for Senate (and lost) while he was still in uniform, which was against Army regulations, and he ran his second Senate campaign while he was a sitting judge, a violation of his oath. Questions had been raised about whether he had dodged his taxes and where his campaign funds had come from.

When McCarthy got to Washington, he became known as a tool of business interests, accepting a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for). He plainly had no ethical or ideological compass, and most of his colleagues regarded him as a troublemaker, a loudmouth, and a fellow entirely lacking in senatorial politesse.

So when, in 1950, Lincolns birthday came around, a time of year when the Republican Party traditionally sent its elected officials out to speak at fund-raisers around the country, McCarthy was assigned to venues where it was clearly hoped that he would attract little notice. His first stop was the Ohio County Republican Womens Club, in Wheeling, West Virginia, then a diehard Democratic state.

McCarthy didnt know what he was going to talk about (he never planned very far ahead), so he brought notes for a couple of speeches: one about housing for veterans, and one, consisting mostly of clippings cobbled together by a speechwriter, about Communists in the government. McCarthy had seemingly had very little to do with that second speech, but he decided to go with it.

It is not known exactly what McCarthy said in Wheeling, and he later claimed that he couldnt find his copy of the speech. But a local paper reported him as having waved a piece of paper on which, he said, were the names of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, and soon it was everywhere.

McCarthy had, in fact, no such list. He did not have even a single name. He may have calculated that a dinner speech at a womens club in West Virginia was a safe place to try out the I have in my hand gimmick, and, somewhat to his surprise, it worked. In subsequent appearances on his Lincolns-birthday circuit, he gave the same speech, though the numbers changed. In Reno, the list had fifty-seven names. It didnt matter. He had grabbed the headlines, and that was all he cared about. He would dominate them for the next four and a half years. Wheeling was McCarthys Trump Tower escalator. He tossed a match and started a bonfire.

Larry Tyes purpose in his new biography, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy. Tye draws on some fresh sources, including McCarthys papers, which are deposited at Marquette, his alma mater, and unpublished memoirs by McCarthys wife, Jean, and his longtime aide James Juliana, who served as his chief investigator.

Tye also quotes from transcripts of the executive sessions (that is, hearings closed to the public) of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy essentially hijacked in 1953 and put to the business of exposing Communists in the government.

Tye describes these transcriptsalmost nine thousand pagesas recently unveiled... and never before closely examined. This is a little misleading. The transcripts were released in 2003, and they have been quoted from extensively, notably by Ted Morgan, in Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America.

But they are important. The other senators on McCarthys subcommittee stopped attending the hearings, since McCarthy dominated everything, and so it became his personal star chamber. He could subpoena anyone (Tye says he called five hundred and forty-six witnesses in the year and a half he ran the show), and was answerable to no one. These transcripts give us McCarthy unbound. As for Tyes McCarthy-Trump comparison? He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-throwerand, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single subversive to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.

Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him. You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him.

To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. Tye quotes the pollster George Gallup, in 1954: Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him. His fans liked that he was a bully, and they liked that he scandalized the genteel and the privileged.

McCarthy forced government agencies, by the constant threat of investigations, to second-guess appointments, and to fire people he had smeared just because he had smeared them. He didnt need to prove anything, and he almost never did, because it didnt matter. Your name in McCarthys mouth was the kiss of death. He was a destroyer of careers.

To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.

What distinguished McCarthys claims was their outlandishness. He didnt attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin. Marshall, he said, sat at the center of a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.

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Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods - The New Yorker

It was 1945. The Russians came in. They stayed for 45 years. Hungary was poor before the war: often referred to as the country of 3 million beggars. After the war, and its devastation, the country was even poorer. Communists seized power in 1948. They gave land to the landless. They nationalised industry. They wanted to create Paradise on Earth. For the many not for the few. For the workers and peasants- for the intelligentsia. Well, not for the old intelligentsia. Those belonging to that elite had not done much for Hungary. They had served Horthy; they had liked Hitler, they had idolised the ideas of the Nazis. The Communists wanted a new intelligentsia which would change the country: new engineers, new teachers, new scientists, new economists.

So how do you go about creating a new intelligentsia, an intelligentsia that the Party can count on? They must come from workers and peasants who will be able to build a new country, a socialist country, full of shiny happy people. How do you do it? Well, you have to start from scratch. It is not as difficult as it sounds. There is bound to be a vast pool of talent, people who missed education when they were of school age but retained the capability to think, to reason, to understand. Among four million eligible people there must be many bright ones. How many? Say one in four hundred? That still means ten thousand people.

Okay, then what? You take a couple of thousand intelligent people, men and women, preferably young, and tell them, that they are privileged, that they can have a year of study to get a school-leaving certificate, that will entitle them to enter any University without an entrance examination. To bolster their confidence they are told that they are the chosen ones, they can do anything. I shall call them SALC (Special A-level Certificate) students.

I come into that picture in 1949 in my second year as an undergraduate at the faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Technical University of Budapest. It was the beginning of October. Several hundred SALC students joined in the first year. They were proud, domineering, fearful, bewildered. The previous record of 320 students in the first year suddenly doubled. There was only one Lecture Room that could accommodate that number of undergraduates.

The Communist Party appealed to the students, particularly to students of the second year in the same faculty. Among others I volunteered. I accepted a woman of advanced years to look after. She was 32, I was 19. Her manners were easy, but her maths was terrible. She could manage fractions but that was all. I couldnt imagine how she could have passed the SALC exam, however easy it may have been. She did not understand algebra; she had only the vaguest notion of what a co-ordinate system was and she was unable to differentiate even the simplest function. The concept of integration was utterly alien to her.

My job was to make sure that she would pass her first year exam in mathematics. I started her off with fractions, to give her confidence. I spent one hour with her every day of the week, excluding Sundays. She was receptive and progress was steady. By next April she was quite competent. By June she was ready to take the exam. I thought with a bit of luck she might get the highest mark (there were five grades, the lowest 1, meaning failed, the highest 5) but reckoned that in the worst case she would get a 4.

She had an oral exam with one of the recently appointed Mathematics Professors. Examinations were public. I sat in a back row. The Professor realised that she was a SALC student. He asked her to go to the blackboard and do a very simple derivation. She did it. He asked her to do a fairly simple differentiation. She did it. It was all over in 6 minutes. He gave her a 3.

Well, in a way, the only important thing was to pass the exam. She passed. She was satisfied. I, on the other hand, was not. In fact, I was pretty annoyed. We had worked hard for 8 months. She could have done all the derivations, given all the proofs required and been able to solve any of the examples coming up in the exam. So why did she not get at least a 4? Because the Professor was a coward. An unprincipled coward. He had been recently appointed to the post and until then had been teaching mathematics in one of the better secondary schools in Budapest. He was catapulted into the Technical University as a Professor of Mathematics based on his early membership of the Communist Party.

I deplored what happened, but I suppose I understood the Professors predicament. It was a public examination. If the audience saw a student knowing very little mathematics, the Professor had no choice but to fail the student. Failing a SALC student would have been a betrayal of his Communist Party membership. It was against the Party line to fail a member of the future intelligentsia. So he balked at taking any risk. He had obviously figured out that it would make no sense for him to ask any difficult questions not even a simple integration. The woman of advanced age, 33 by that time, thanked me and gave me a peck on the cheek. I wished her good luck. The year after I migrated to another faculty. I never saw her again.

Sixteen years later when I became a Fellow in Engineering at Brasenose College, Oxford, I tried to introduce a similar system. (Student mentorship by other students, rather than Communism.) I kept on asking my best students whether they were willing to look after weaker students, to help them when the need arose, particularly between tutorials. In two decades I succeeded only once. He was a believer. He did it as his Christian duty. Of all those who refused to accept my plea, only one deigned to explain why. He belonged to the third generation of Brasenose men. His grandfather donated to the College a magnificent silver bowl often displayed at the High Table. He said, Sorry, I just cant take this on. No way. I like your tutorials and you obviously know your stuff. But you were never an undergrad here. You dont know how busy an Oxford undergrad is, you dont know how much I have on. Yes, Im decent in engineering but other things matter to me too: sport and women. I play lacrosse for the University, and as for women, youve already seen me with several girls this year. I would have to make time to take on this lame duck of yours. And why would I do that?

So what is the moral (morality?) of the story? There are several, possibly contradictory. Some Professors in Hungary had already been corrupted by 1950. The main idea was to serve the Party. If the Party wanted SALC students to pass, then it was the duty of the Professor to act accordingly. How about the moral stance of my lacrosse playing womaniser? He made his point. He wanted to enjoy life. There was nothing wrong with that. After all, Carpe Diem was not invented in the 20th century.

But let me go back to another, more interesting question. Are we to condemn the mass production of SALC students on the grounds that it is a clear example of social engineering for the benefit of a dictatorial regime? I am not sure. At the time I was proud of the role I played, and I am still proud. If you make it possible for someone to realise his/her potential, does that put you on higher moral ground? Whether it is social engineering or not, is immaterial. Surely, helping someone consistently for months on end, without being paid, must leave you standing on high moral ground. Mustnt it?

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Communism, social engineering, corruption and moral superiority - TheArticle

Gerald Smith, Special to the Press & Sun-Bulletin Published 8:00 p.m. ET June 19, 2020

Danielle Claudia, also known as the Underground Baker, has been doing special COVID Cake Deliveries since mid-April. Wochit

It was the end of World War II, and thousands upon thousands of American troops were returning to their homes across the country.During the United States efforts from 1941 to 1945, millions of service men and women participated in the conflict.

In Broome County, more than 18,000 residents fought as part of the war.

As those returning veterans came back to their communities, they found a world greatly changed from the one that they had left to defend.Jobs had changed, societys mores had changed, and to these veterans, many found solace as members of their communitys American Legion posts.These posts offered a place to gather, to find camaraderie a place where the members of the group, and the members of the community valued the veterans' service to our country.

One of the recruiting posters for the Community Party in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.(Photo: Provided)

Immediately after the end of World War II, the membership of the American Legion went up.At that same time, the alliance that had pushed Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to work with Joseph Stalin had fallen apart.The rise of the communist influence over the war-ridden portions of Europe, the purges of Stalin against his own people, and the climb to power of Mao Zedong in China, gave fear to that beliefs hold over this country.By the arrival of John Foster Dulles and the creation of the Domino Theory, the fear of communism was codified.That fear permeated many aspects of society culminating in the fear-mongering of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's.

Prior to that, though, there was a conflict within our own community.At the end of May 1947, four men were arrested on misdemeanor charges in the village of Johnson City for handing out pamphlets without a permit. Those pamphlets encouraged people to join the Community Party in the country.One of those men was Robert C. Johnston a member of the First Ward American Legion Post 1254, located at 1 Grace St. in Binghamton.

The result of that arrest set in motion a series of events.Members of the American Legion post in the city were upset over a number of issues most of which revolved around both Johnstons arrest and his membership in the Community Party.On June 19, 1947, the post held a trial over the possible expulsion of Johnston as a member.The posts prosecutor was member Frederick Vavra, but Johnston did not acknowledge the legality of the proceeding.

Robert C. Johnston, left, and Irving Weisman, director of the Southern Tier Community Party in 1947.(Photo: Press archives)

While Johnston did not have his own attorney, he did bring one to the proceeding.That attorney was Alfred L. Tanz a New York City attorney who was representing Sidney Reiter, who was a member of a New York City American Legion post who had been expelled due to his membership in the Community Party. While Tanz was not recognized as having any legal authority over the issue in Binghamton, the post recognized that the New York Citys court suit would reflect on the decision over Johnston.

The decision of the posts trial was to expel Johnston, who immediately wanted to appeal the decision to the State Department of the American Legion.Tanz reiterated to the group that he was not a member of the Communist Party, but there to defend the right of Americans to join the party if they so choose.In addition to this drama, the local branch of the Community Party was also in the First Ward, and the Legion post began a secondary group to protect Americanism.That group wanted the Community Party to move away from the First Ward.

The final answer to this dilemma arrived on July 2 of that same year.In New York City, Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Schreiber refused to order an injunction against the ouster of Reiter.In his statement, Schreiber denied Reiters assertion that communism was a political party.He stated that it was a subversive philosophy having for its objective the overthrow of entire constitutional structure.

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The ouster of Reiter and the courts decision also sealed the ouster of Robert Johnston in Binghamton.

Whether that same decision would be made in todays world is difficult to determine.Sixty years later, the world is a far different place.

But it is a fascinating thought to ponder.

Gerald Smith is a former Broome County historian. Email him at historysmiths@stny.rr.com.

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Spanning Time: How a controversy over communism in 1947 rocked Broome County - Pressconnects

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleThe Genius of Karl Marx

Karl Marx, was of average height and powerful build, with his fiery eyes with which one could tell at the first glance that, he was a man of genius and energy. His intellectual superiority exercised an irresistible force on his surroundings. Marx was a cynical, disorderly, often idle, but capable of great bursts of sustained work. The outsized personality of Marx would win people over.

Along with his close comrade, Friedrich Engels, in one of the most famous intellectual partnerships in history, Marx brought different skills to bear on a project, very much grounded in its time and place, the development of the ideas of those men, and how they responded to and synthesized many contemporary concerns, including progress, science, evolution, materialism, and history.

Learn more about the most influential economic thinkers in history.

The context, out of which communism arose as a system of ideas, involved three different elements; French political revolution, British industrial revolution, and German philosophical evolution.

From 1789, the French Revolution ushered in a new age in politics, the era of ideological mass politics. That revolution, its radicalism radiating from Paris, haunted socialist and communist thinkers afterward because they were headed in the right direction and then went wrong. It was a model for how to make a revolution and a cautionary tale. Its legacies were the quest for political utopia and political mass murder, then, turning into a dictatorship.

The French Revolution got steadily more radical after it erupted in Paris in 1789. First, revolutionaries broke with feudal privileges, to enshrine liberty, equality, and fraternity. Then radicals deposed the king, executed him, and suspecting treason against the revolution, they identified socalled enemies of the people and sent them to their deaths, in the Reign of Terror, from 17931794.

Learn more about why Marx never envisioned communism taking root in an agrarian society.

A new society was under construction, with Christianity abolished and a new calendar created. Appeals to defend the Fatherland and patriotism showed the growth of nationalism. The revolutionary regime became so radical to arrest revolutionaries as insufficiently devoted. One of them declared, The Revolution is a mother that eats her children.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

The radical leaders were arrested and replaced by a more conservative leadership, which was soon deposed by a young military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoleon made himself dictator then emperor and presided over years of constant war in his bid to control Europe.

Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. Many were still attached to utopian hopes of making a new society, sought peaceful, cooperative, voluntary means of association rather than force.

Turning away from revolutionary violence, such socialists, as they called themselves, hoped that their utopias could be realized without killing, but by demonstrating new forms of association. Those ideas enjoyed popularity and by 1835, the word socialism had become current in Britain and France.

Further experiments followed in creating an intentional community. Those included the model factories of Robert Owen, the Welsh manufacturer, and his settlement in the United States, New Harmony in Indiana, which only lasted for two years. The followers of the French thinker Henri de SaintSimon also dreamed of a cooperative society owning all wealth, tools, and land in common.

Learn more about the major questions that shape economic systems.

Another French thinker, Charles Fourier, a clerk in Lyon, spent much time, dreaming up new principles of organizing people, who were essentially motivated by 12 main passions, announcing a plan for a new unit of society called the Phalanstery, a blend of the phalanx, a classical Greek military formation, and monastery, to be set in an agricultural setting. The inhabitants would cycle through jobs, romantic partners, and in general, experience work as charming variety. Fourier was convinced that setting up even one of those phalansteries would be world-changing. He also believed that the oceans would turn to lemonade and lions and whales would be tamed and put to work, so as to spare human labor.

In France, some followers of Fourier tried to establish communities along the lines he envisioned, but in the New World, his experiment proliferated. In the 1840s and 1850s, nearly 30 Fourierist colonies were established in the United States. Among those who found Fouriers ideas attractive was PierreJoseph Proudhon, who denounced central control and organization and instead called for free communes that would be loosely associated, called mutualist anarchism. He declared that property was theft.

An age of many communal experiments, where some preached and practiced, free love, breaking with traditional structures of marriage and family. Such communities proliferated in the United States, which earlier had religious communities, like the Shakers and Amish. In the 19th century, an estimated 178 socialist communities existed in the United States. Those experiments were usually shortlived, but many sprang up and continued to do so. One famous hippie commune was The Farm, founded in 1971 in Summertown, in southern middle Tennessee, still going today with 200 members.

In describing their communism, Marx and Engels, later poured scorn on the ineffectiveness of the earlier socialists, deriding them as merely utopian, definitely not a compliment, although sometimes Marx and Engels were generous and admitted that it was at an early stage of the development of the truly revolutionary ideas.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shared similar ideas about socialism and communism and theirs was one of the most famous intellectual partnerships in history. Both brought different skills to bear on a project, very much grounded in its time and place, the development of the ideas including progress, science, evolution, materialism, and history.

French thinker, Charles Fourier, is known for dreaming up new principles of organizing people, announcing a plan for a new unit of society called the Phalanstery, a blend of the phalanx, a classical Greek military formation, and monastery, to be set in an agricultural setting. He also believed that the oceans would turn to lemonade and lions and whales would be tamed and put to work, so as to spare human labor.

Charles Fourier, a French thinker, is from Lyon, France.

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Marx, Engels, and the Rise of Communism - The Great Courses Daily News

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleMarxs Understanding of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution first roared to life in Great Britain. The world was being visibly and dramatically changed by science and technology, and this made Marx and Engels eager for a theory which would not just describe the human society in a static way, but instead would describe it as it changed, and predict where the future was headed. In a way, to understand the history that was not random and contingent, but rather had a larger meaning and a logic of its own.

From the 18th through the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had consequences as profound as political revolutions. The process involved not only the growing industry and technology but also new ways of organizing work and disciplines, useful to the new factory environment. Its effects were uneven, beginning first in northwestern Europe, i.e., Britain, Belgium, France, then spreading through the European continent and to the United States, and then on to the rest of the world. As the socalled workshop of the world, Britain was the first to take off industrially.

Industrialization had important consequences for society and politics, remaking physical landscapes in Europe and other parts of the globe, and disrupting traditional ways of life. Engineers were the new heroes of the age, and their triumphs were seen everywhere; the Crystal Palace in London, the Suez Canal, the American Transcontinental Railroad.

Learn more about the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Industrialization also changed the social order. The aristocracy and peasants were still around but less important. The new middle class, the bourgeoisie, arose in the cities and towns and also an industrial working class. At the extreme edge of survival, lived a class of miserable poor and unemployed, denounced as dangerous or criminal classes. The first stages of industrialization were wrenching, with intense exploitation of workers being forced into the new disciplines of factory work and its relentless pace of productivity.

In search of markets and resources, Europes powers engaged in overseas imperialism, which brought industrialization to other lands, wiping out Indian textiles, and forcing China to accept the trade-in opium so that Britain could buy tea. That was the second element of the Industrial Revolution.

The third element was a German philosophical revolution. While France revolted and Britain industrialized, Germany was already famed for its profound scholarship, thought, and Romantic literature. Especially, the impact of the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was huge who proposed history with a direction and transcendent meaning. Hegel constructed a philosophy of idealism, saw ideas as primary causes in history, struggling to come into existence, with the ultimate aim of realizing human freedom.

Learn more about the revolutionary messages in the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

In Hegels scheme, a dialectical process as a dynamic series of clashes moved history forward. An existing social state called the thesis encountered opposing forces, the antithesis. The result of their collision was a new state, synthesis, a higher resolution of this earlier conflict. In that age of growing nationalism, Hegel tended to identify the Prussian state and Prussian bureaucracy with the realization of the ultimate principle of freedom. But some of his followers set off in other directions, which were radical rather than conservative. Other disciples of Hegel, called the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach, moved on to demolish Christianity with this argument of historical change.

The ideas of two thinkers addressed elements of political revolution, industrialization, and philosophical transformation. The revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels rocked society and affected the lives of millions. Their intellectual partnership had been one of the most important relationships ever. In their partnership, Marx was the dominant personality.

There was a psychological key to understanding what Marx was about, who saw himself as a heroic martyr. Above all, Marx was a member of a new group that had appeared in society as intellectuals, proclaiming their devotion to ideas and humanity.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in western Germany in a Jewish family in Trier, a part of the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a successful lawyer and had converted to Christianity to escape the discrimination against Jews.

Marx fell in love with Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a baron, and was engaged. First attending the University of Bonn, on the Rhine River, he did a lot of drinking there, had some brawls, and even fought a duel. Then, pulling himself together, he transferred to Berlin University, where he breathed in deeply the great impact of Hegels philosophy.

Marx earned his doctorate in 1842, with a dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy, married Jenny von Westphalen, and was to become a professor. But because of his radicalism and atheism, Marx was unable to get a job. Also playing a role was his careless personal appearance, his sloppy writing, his inability to meet deadlines, his love of quarrels, and his personality that focused on dominating others around him. Marx turned to journalism, and by 1842 was editor of the radical Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. Only months later, the paper was shut down at the insistence of the conservative Prussian government. In 1843, Marx and his family moved to Paris, the refuge of exiles and expatriates.

Learn more about the violent upheaval of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Marxs future partner, Friedrich Engels, was a total contrast. Born in 1820 in Barmen in the Rhineland, he came from a wealthy German commercial family of factory owners. He was an odd candidate to be a socialist, as his father was a fundamentalist, Christian.

But as he deepened his socialist beliefs, his father supported him. Engels was handsome, a people person, generous, productive, and lucid in his writing. He had a personality that drew others to him, very different from Marxs abrasive qualities. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor said Engels had talent where Marx had genius.

Like Marx, Engels attended the University of Berlin, and there converted to socialism. When Engels first came to see Marx while passing through Cologne in 1842, he met with a chilly reception. Engels moved to England, where he worked at the family factory in Manchester, observing the condition of the workers. In 1845, he published his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels did not marry but had a secret longterm relationship with a workingclass Irishwoman, Mary Burns. When Engels met Marx for the second time in 1844 in Paris, they really hit it off and the two wrote out their ideas in The Communist Manifesto, which they had finished drafting by 1847.

Marx-Engels theory, based on human society which is static, describes it as it changes, and predicts where the future was headed. The two wrote out their ideas in The Communist Manifesto, which they had finished drafting by 1847.

In Hegels scheme, a dialectical process as a dynamic series of clashes moved history forward. A given existing social state called the thesis encountered opposing forces, the antithesis. The result of their collision was a new state, synthesis, a higher resolution of this earlier conflict. In that age of growing nationalism, Hegel tended to identify the Prussian state and Prussian bureaucracy with the realization of the ultimate principle of freedom.

The ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels addressed all the elements of political revolution, industrialization, and philosophical transformation. The revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels rocked society and affected the lives of millions. Their intellectual partnership had been one of the most important relationships ever.

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Marx and Engels: Creating a Partnership for the Rise of Communism - The Great Courses Daily News