Karl Marx's Social Class

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Karl Marx was an innovative German economist and philosopher. He was also the founder of the “Communist movement”. Marx was writing in contradiction of a backdrop of a huge industrial change. Newly industrialised cities were expanding and overcrowding, and most of the working class were living in excessive poverty. Marx looked at history as the “story of class struggles” in which the troubled fight against their dictators. Marx always thought that the success of one class would allow for the future freedom of the rest of society. Marx viewed three separate unfolding process of history. Firstly, in ancient and mediaeval society the people with plenty of land and money had controlled the slaves and the poorest of the plebeians and labourers. The second was as new technologies were brought to light and all the market forces became stronger, everything changed. The middle classes gained a lot of wealth and power from taking part in trade and manufacture which challenged the authority of the current rulers at this time. This stage brought about a whole new struggle between the bourgeoisie…show more content…
This social class goes back as far as ancient Rome, when the proletariat were poor freemen with no land who were forced out of the labour market by the rapid growth of slavery and became “parasites” on the economy. Karl Marx used this term to discuss the topic of the social class of wage earners who only took part in industrial production. Marx’s theory predicted an intermediate phase between the elimination of capitalism and the founding of communism and during this time a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would overpower any conflict of the socialist revolution by the bourgeoisie, terminate the social relations of production in the class system, and also create a whole new society which would label people as being classless (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proletariat, Tuesday7th October at
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