marx's theories a about society, economics and politics the collective understanding of which is known as Marxism hold that human societies progress through class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for production. states, Marx believed, were run on behalf of the ruling class and in their interest while representing it as the common interest of all, and he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism