Marxism

Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis that rests on a materialist reading of historical development, called historical materialism, to explain class relations and social conflict. It originates in the work of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who treated class struggle as the central driving force of historical change. Marxist analysis takes a society's economic mode of production as the foundation of its social, political and intellectual life, and holds that under capitalism the ruling class that owns the means of production exploits the working class, producing alienation, economic crises and escalating class conflict. Marx expected workers' revolutions to overthrow capitalism and establish a socialist mode of production on the way to a classless, stateless society. Later thinkers adapted it into many schools, the most prominent of the twentieth century being Marxism-Leninism, alongside Western Marxism, Marxist humanism and libertarian Marxism.