Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1978 - 10 Pfennig

Important Personalities, Edition 1978 To commemorate important personalities, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic issues seven special postage stamps. No special First Day Cover Special cancellation from 18 July to 17 September 1978 10 Pfennig value: JOSEPH DIETZGEN (9 December 1828 to 15 April 1888) Joseph Dietzgen was born the son of a tanner master in Blankenberg (Sieg) and died in Chicago. From 1845 to 1849 he went into the tanner's apprenticeship of his father's workshop and began to study autodidactic literature, economics and philosophy. Under the influence of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Dietzgen enthusiastically advocated the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848-49. 1864-1868 he worked as a technical director of a government tannery in St. Petersburg. 1869 to 1883 he worked as a tanner in Siegburg (Rhineland). In the summer of 1868 Dietzgen began his versatile propagandistic activity in the German workers' movement with a review of the "capital" of Karl Marx. When the first revolutionary party of the German working class was founded in Eisenach with the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1869, Dietzgen's main philosophical work, written in St. Petersburg, appeared: The Essence of Human Cognitive Work. Presented by a manual worker ". Dietzgen had written contact with Karl Marx and informed him about his first two works. Marx visited Dietzgen personally in Siegburg and left a strong impression on him. Since 1869 he was a member of the Social Democratic Labor Party and co-founder of a section of the International Workers Association in Siegburg. Dietzgen contributed to the development of scientific epistemology, the dialectical conception of nature, the moral theory of the working class and the critique of religion. In numerous essays for press organs of the German and American workers 'movement - so in the "people's state", "forward", and in the "Chicago workers' newspaper" he propagated and defended the basic ideas of the historical materialism of Marx's economic doctrine and scientific socialism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Franz Mehring have highly esteemed the theoretical and propagandistic achievements of the workers' philosophers, who were pervaded by passionate sympathy for the struggling proletariat.