Marx developed historical materialism, the theory that a society's mode of production and resulting class relations drive historical change, and applied it in "Capital" to a systematic critique of capitalism centered on the labor theory of value - capitalists profit by extracting surplus value from workers, who are paid less than the value their labor produces. His early writings analyzed how capitalist production alienates workers from the product of their labor, the activity of work itself, their own human potential, and one another.
Intellectual setting
Marx developed his theory alongside Engels amid the industrialization and revolutionary upheavals of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, writing "The Communist Manifesto" on the eve of the 1848 revolutions and completing his mature economic critique in "Capital" during his decades of exile in London.
Key ideas
Historical materialism
Marx argued that a society's economic "base" - its forces and relations of production - fundamentally shapes its legal, political, and cultural "superstructure," and that history advances through successive modes of production driven by class struggle.
Surplus value and alienation
Marx argued that capitalist profit derives from surplus value - the difference between the value workers produce and the wages they are paid - and that this system alienates workers from their labor's product, the process of production, their own creative capacities, and each other.
Legacy
Marx is one of the most influential thinkers in modern history; Marxism became a foundational framework for twentieth-century revolutionary movements and states as well as for academic sociology, political economy, and critical theory, and his critique of capitalism remains a central reference point in political philosophy today.