Karl Marx Impact On Society

As time passes, people come and go. Although the majority are forgotten, a handful of luminaries live on through remembrance of what they did while on Earth. Karl Marx is one of these people that have had enormous impact on the way we live today. As a revolutionary, Karl Marx, whose works and ideas were influenced by an increasingly capitalist society, has left a great impact on modern thought and society.
To understand the ideas of Karl Marx, one must understand marxism and capitalism. Marxism can be defined as the belief that society 's classes are the cause for struggle and a result of capitalism; that if capitalism and social classes were destroyed, everyone would be happier. Although it as political and economic motives, many refer to Marxism as a living philosophy. Marxists believe that capitalism, an economic and political system that is controlled by the private sector for personal profit rather than by the state, can only successfully operate under the conditions that the lower class is taken …show more content…
His close friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels was having similar thoughts and they decided to pair up to analyze capitalism versus socialism (Hammon). Together, they took a trip to Paris which, according to Marx’s biographer, Francis Wheen, was “absolutely swarming with utopian communists, anarchists, Christian socialists, poets, philosophers; it was a hotbed of new thinking” (Wheen). On this trip, Engels and Marx thoroughly studied socialism in France, as well as the mindset of the French people. They both found the country to be progressive and innovative and generally had a really great time. Marx was especially impressed with those who were working specifically on the development of socialism, claiming that “whenever [one] see[s] French socialist workers gathered together: the brotherhood of humanity is not a mere phrase with them, but a truth… the nobility which bursts forth from these toil-worn men”