Karl Marx

Karl Marx Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary whose critique of capitalism and theory of historical materialism — developed with Friedrich Engels in works including The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867) — became the intellectual foundation of socialist and communist political movements worldwide. His analysis of class struggle, surplus value, and alienated labor transformed economics, sociology, history, and political theory. Marxism, in its many variants, shaped the political landscape of the 20th century more than any other single intellectual tradition.