Karl Marx was born in Germany
but spent much of his professional life in London, working
and writing in collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Two of
Marx and Engels’s most influential treatises are Das Kapial and The Communist Manifesto. Das Kapital, a massive
multivolume work published in 1867, 1885, and 1894, is
critical of the capitalist system and predicts its defeat by
a more humane and more cooperative economic system:socialism.
The Communist Manifesto is a 23-page pamphlet that was issued in 1848 and has since been translated
into more than 30 languages . The Manifesto includes these famous lines: “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a whole world to gain. Workers of all countries, unite.”
Marx sought to analyze and explain conflict, the major
force that drives social change. The character of conflict
is shaped directly and profoundly by the means of production, the resources (land, tools, equipment, factories,
transportation, and labor) essential to the production and
distribution of goods and services. Marx viewed every historical period as characterized by a system of production
that gave rise to specific types of confrontation between
an exploiting class and an exploited class. For Marx, class
conflict was the vehicle that propelled people from one
historical epoch to another.
From Marx’s perspective, the Industrial Revolution
was accompanied by the rise of two distinct classes, creating a fundamental divide: the bourgeoisie, the owners of
the means of production, and the proletariat, those individuals who must sell their labor to the bourgeoisie.
