Karl Marx said that history is a continuous clash between conflicting ideas and forces.
• Believed that conflict – especially class conflict – is needed to produce social change and a better society. Uses history
as his empirical evidence.
• People make their own history, but not exactly how they please.
o Class conflict is the struggle between the capitalist class (bourgeoisie who own or control the means of
production) and the working class (proletariat who must sell their labor because they have no other means to
earn a livelihood).
o There is no social mobility – whatever class you are born into, is the class you remain in.
o The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas.
• Economics is the underlying force in social change.
• Alienation is a feeling of powerlessness and estrangement form other people and from oneself. Man at work is
alienated for the object he produces, for the process of production, from himself, and from the community of his
fellows. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence, the essence dominates him and he worships it.
• Sociology should not just be studied but also changed, because the status quo (that existing state of society) involved
the oppression of most of the population by a small group of wealthy people.
• Communist Manifesto (with Engles)
• Das Kapital