Creepy communist on children

 And when it came to children, Marx was not entirely against the idea that they should in some capacity participate in organized labor.

This was not an atypical position in the socialist movement. Indeed, in the instructions he drafted for delegates to the First International’s 1866 Geneva Congress, we find the following vision for childhood development combined with industrial education:

We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes cooperate in the great work of social production as a progressive, sound, and legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from the age of 9 years, ought to become a productive laborer in the same way that no able-bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz.: to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain but with the hands too.

Marx continued by proposing three different classes of children to fulfill this plan: both sexes from the ages of nine to twelve; those from thirteen to fifteen; and those aged sixteen and seventeen.

https://jacobin.com/2026/09/marx-childhood-labor-education-exploitation