A post from Kyrgyzstan via KEP ( Kyrgyzstan Express Post ) !
There are two postal authorities in Kyrgyzstan- with each one issuing their stamps. But unlike Bosnia Herzegovina, the postal authorities function through out the country and are not restricted to any particular regions !
Kyrgyzstan is one of the former USSR countries. The country was one of the regions where Marxism and Socialism thrived a few decades ago. So it is natural that the country has issued stamps honouring Karl Marx’s 200th birthday
I had received an enevelope with German Stamp honouring Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary
Marxist ideas were not restricted to Germany or Europe, but spread wide across and found firm base in China and USSR.
Like Hegel, Marx understood history as the story of human labour and struggle. However, whereas for Hegel history was the story of spirit’s self-realization through human conflict, for Marx it was the story of struggles between classes over material or economic interests and resources. In place of Hegel’s philosophical idealism, in other words, Marx developed a materialist or economic theory of history.
Before people can do anything else, he held, they must first produce what they need to survive, which is to say that they are subject to necessity. Freedom for Marx is largely a matter of overcoming necessity. Necessity compels people to labour so that they may survive, and only those who are free from this compulsion will be free to develop their talents and potential. This is why, throughout history, freedom has usually been restricted to members of the ruling class, who use their control of the land and other means of production to exploit the labour of the poor and subservient. The masters in slaveholding societies, the landowning aristocracy in feudal times, and the bourgeoisie who control the wealth in capitalist societies have all enjoyed various degrees of freedom, but they have done so at the expense of the slaves, serfs, and industrial workers, or proletarians, who have provided the necessary labour.
This is a volatile situation, according to Marx, and its inevitable result will be a war that will end all class divisions. Under the pressure of depressions, recessions, and competition for jobs, the workers will become conscious that they form a class, the proletariat, that is oppressed and exploited by their class enemy, the bourgeoisie. Armed with this awareness, they will overthrow the bourgeoisie in a series of spontaneous uprisings, seizing control of factories, mines, railroads, and other means of production, until they have gained control of the government and converted it into a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx and Engels developed a body of ideas which they called scientific socialism, more commonly called Marxism. Marxism comprised a theory of history (Historical Materialism) as well as a political, economic and philosophical theory. His philosophy of “Scientific Socialism” is developed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party(written in 1848 just days before the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848), the Critique of political economy and the Das Kapital (Considered as Bible of Socialism).
I hope I am able to collect the Karl Marx bicentennial stamps of China and Russia too !
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