Karl Marx, born on this day in 1818, was a foundational political theorist and journalist associated with the philosophy of Marxism.

Among Marx’s best-known texts are the “The Communist Manifesto” and the three-volume “Das Kapital”, in which he set out to define and explain the behavior of the capitalist mode of production.

Marx’s political and philosophical thought have had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

Marx’s critical theories about society, economics and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production, and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labor power in return for wages.

Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx concluded that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.

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  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    11 hours ago

    Antifungals are starting to get resisted by fungus too. It’s actually a really serious issue, and we don’t really have anything like Vancomycin or antibiotics of last resort for antifungals.

    The Soviets had a loooong research program into bacteriophages that we’re more or less rediscovering. It’s one of those things, in Math you often have to name stuff after the 2nd person to discover it and in Biology apparently you’re the second group to discover it after some soviet scientists lol. Phage therapy could work as bacteria get more resistant to antibiotics - its also not energetically free for them to produce beta-lactamases, they stop eventually even if they retain the plasmid or genes for it.

    But you’re absolutely right that this is a contradiction in healthcare under a profit motive. If research and production is for profit instead of for need - then we’re hooped unless they get some miracle, which is what this late stage of capitalism seems to be pinning it’s hopes on

    • IceWallowCum [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 hours ago

      We’ve had a MDR fungus in one of the ICUs I work at agony-shivering

      Poor dude had to get half his face removed due to it, then it started growing on the other half, too. The only risk factor he had was diabetes, btw

      • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        11 hours ago

        Yeah they cut at the active compound in most antibiotics (antibiotics usually inhibit cell wall formation in bacteria, they can’t handle the osmotic pressure without a cell wall and more or less explode 🤘)