Karl Marx

 The theory of historical materialism and the Communist Manifesto was developed in the later 1840s while Marx was in political exile in Brussels and London. From 1850s onwards, he developed the labour theory of value.

The 4 degrees of alienation 

Marx identified capitalism as one outstanding feature of society that he argued was responsible for a dramatic increase in the extent and dept of alienation currently experienced. Capitalism is an economic system in which commodities are mass produced for sale to consumers at a price that is greater than the cost of making them. Marx felt that the conditions of employment used by capitalist employers, indeed the whole of the division of labour and its ideology, caused alienation by placing unacceptable limitations on the capacity of social actors to express their creative potential in true cooperation with others.

• Products. As Marx puts it, the products of labour confront the worker ‘as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. (Work) appears as a loss of reality for the worker as estrangement, as alienation’.
• Act of production. In capitalist economies people have no choice bit to work for wages in order to meet their basic needs.
• Common purpose. The social and cooperative dimension is taken away from social actors.
• Loss of humanity. In the Victorian society in which Marx was writing it is not uncommon for people to work more than 12 or even 14 hours a day. Alienated labour in capitalist society manipulates a worker’s basic powers of creative and cooperative energy so that he can no longer achieve any true expression of his species-beingness and humanity. He becomes isolated from his inner-self.

Marx’s theory of historical materialism- explanation for the emergence of industrial capitalism itself. 

For Marx and Engels, industrial capitalism emerges as the point in history when agriculture ceases to be the main source of livelihood and is replaced by manufacturing. As working life becomes less dominated by agriculture and more by manufacture and commodity production, there is a corresponding and inevitable shift in working relationships.

• Means and relations of production. Over time, people become better and better at organising their ways of working. This increases the efficiency of work and creates opportunities for developing new ways of working and different kinds of productive process. Hence the shift of one mode of production (feudal to a capitalist one) are brought on by advances in techniques and the division of labour.
• Imagination. Sheer inventiveness of human beings and their natural capacity for creative imagination especially in realm of laboratory sciences brought about innovations in industrial application, ushering in new, more efficient modes of production.

The capitalist revolution 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Very few people in the capitalist mode of production owns the mean of production and it is inevitable that the class of non-owners is bound to increase. As far as Marx and Engels are concerned, the industrial working class which was destined to become by far the largest class in society was destined to become the dominant class of the future. The simple message that Marx and Engels want to get across in The Communist Manifesto is that, as surely as night follows day, the capitalist mode of production is about to be replaced by a socialist pr communist mode of production. Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world who he has called up by his spells, For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule.