Karl Marx's Core Criticism of Capitalism
             Karl Marx was born in Trier in the German Rhineland in 1818 (Kemerling 2006). He earned a doctorate in Jena in 1841, where he wrote on the materialism and atheism of Greek atomists. Later moving to Koln, he founded and edited a radical newspaper entitled Rheinische Zeitung. His participation in forbidden political movements prevented him from working as a journalist in Paris and Brussels to improve his living to support his growing family. Finally, he settled in London in 1849 and lived in poverty while studying and developing his economic and political thought and theories (Kemerling).
             From the start, Marx believed that reality has a material or economic, rather than an abstract or idealistic, base (Kemerling 2006). He thought that philosophy itself should have a practical use to change the world. He set forth his core economic analysis in his Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, which argued that the conditions of industrial societies would invariably separate or alienate workers from their own labor. He also opposed the lingering influence of religion over politics and suggested a revolutionary restructuring of European society. He explained his economic theories in his work, Das Capital, published in 1867-95, and Theory of Surplus Value, published in 1862. He and his colleague Friedrich Engles later wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 to precipitate social revolution. Communist Manifesto describes the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, explains the difference of Communism from other socialist movements, contains a list of social reforms, and moves workers to unite and revote against existing regimes (Kemerling).
             Marx's historical materialism, his theory of history, holds that forms of society rise and fall as they proceed and then impede the development of human productive power (Woolf 2003). He saw the historical process as going th...