Karl Marx

Essay by samm9887High School, 12th gradeA+, February 2005

download word file, 2 pages 4.3 2 reviews

Downloaded 83 times

A famous propagandist and theoretician, Karl Marx, was both a social thinker and a political leader during the 1800's. Marx is one of the most influential socialist thinkers to appear in the 19th century. Marx's theories of socialism made a great impact on the middle management and labor classes in the 19th century. Socialism is a philosophy of social organization by which the major incomes of production and distribution are controlled by the community as a whole. In Marxist beliefs, socialism is considered an intermediate stage in the unavoidable change of capitalism into communism. A socialist society is visualized as being characterized by the dictatorship of the working class and the existence of fairness.

Capitalism to Karl Marx is unfair and unequal. The working class and the laborers during the 1800's were at the bottom and were the poorest, even though they worked the most. Captains of Industry were of course on the top and the most powerful.

Capitalism was a socio-economic system characterized by private initiative and the private ownership of factors of production. In such a system individuals have the right to own and use wealth to earn income and to sell and purchase labor for wages. Furthermore, capitalism is predicated on a relative absence of governmental control of the economy. Marx argued that under capitalism, workers were denied their rightful share of profit. The difference between the value of workers' wages and the value of their work as sold was pocketed by members of the capitalist class who according to Marx, made off with far more than a justifiable portion of the sale place.

Karl Marx believed that Socialism would change many things. Marx saw the struggles by industrial and agricultural workers, and how they operated according to principles of unity and unlike capitalism, Socialism would...