In Marx’s usage, proletarians were people who had nothing to sell but their labor and were the lowest class in society.ĭue to relentless competition and low wages, the proletariat was constantly growing, as the bourgeoisie got smaller, with once prosperous people dropping down into the proletariat. The etymology of the term ‘proletarian’, which Marx used, was derived from the classical Latin proles-offspring. A new working class, the so‐called proletariat confronted the owning class, the bourgeoisie. Mankind had reached the penultimate stage of history, Capitalism. In the Middle Ages, feudalism was ready to fade, the new ascendant middle classes had played a progressive role, and the French Revolution was an example of their rising to power. First, an original stage of primitive communism before property existed, then came an ‘Asiatic mode,’ which was public slavery, yoked to the state and then, in classical antiquity, private slavery. Clashes through the dialectic process, the society passed historically through phases of different modes of production. Marx and Engels stated that the history of all hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles. Learn more about the rise of brutal ideological regimes that promised total solutions. Marx and Engels stated that certain exceptional individuals could rise above their class origins to survey and influence the historical process as a whole. Marxism offered something different and scientific: it presented a tableau of human history, a dramatic narrative of progress, with roles played by the toiling masses and economic forces like industry.

For Marx, religion was feeble as a transparent illusion, an ‘opiate of the masses’ to distract them from their misery.

There could be no just law as such, but only a legal system protecting the interests of the ruling class. Hence his doctrine was based on historical or dialectical materialism, seeing human reality as at base economy. Overturning Hegel’s ‘idealism’, Marx stated that the basis of reality did not lay in ideas, but matter. Hegel’s idealism was overturned by Marx who believed that the basis of reality did not lay in ideas, but matter.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx