Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a German philosopher and critic of capitalism. Together with Friedrich Engels, he founded Marxism. He was born in Trier on May 5, 1818, and died in London on March 14, 1883. Of his best-known work is Das Kapital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867, the other two volumes were published posthumously by Friedrich Engels (1885, 1894). On May 11, 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Train of a Thousand” landed at Marsala in western Sicily, on the 15^th of May the forces  were victorious against the far superior Neapolitan forces at the Battle of Calatafimi (Segesta). For the occasion Karl Marx published an editorial on Sicily in the New York Daily Tribune. In it he wrote, among other things: “Throughout the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered so terribly from slavery, from foreign conquests and oppressions, and none have struggled so irrepressibly for emancipation as Sicily and the Sicilians.”