Marxism

Perhaps no other modern idea has spread as quickly and as widely as the sociopolitical ideas of [Page 754]the 19th-century thinker Karl Marx (1818–1883). Any concept that draws on the discourse of Marx's teaching is considered Marxism. More specifically, Marxism entails a critique of the political economy from a proletarian point of view, where seemingly natural underpinnings of inequality can be interpreted through the concepts of exploitation, alienation, and profit seeking. Although the globalization of Marxism was largely a late-19th-century and 20th-century phenomenon, the impact of this type of ideological reasoning has served to create enormous changes in the world's economic systems and poses challenges to the social structures developed through the capitalist mode of production. The ideas within Marxism have incited wars, transformed ways ...