The Five Stages Of Karl Marx As A Conflict Theory

On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep -- but for ever. -Friedrich Engels Karl Marx was born 5 May, 1818 in Trier, the Rhine Province of Prussia and was the oldest of nine children. His parents, Henriette and Heinrich Marx were both Jewish, with his father being an affluent lawyer and a descendant of Talmudic Rabbis. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the Rhineland was once again under Prussian control resulting in increased nationalism and rampant antisemitism. His eventually distanced himself from his Jewish faith, changed the family name from

Marxism is a what’s known as a Conflict Theory and tries to explain where society has come from and where it will end up. Marxism works on the basis of human history that comes about in 5 stages. The first stage is the Primitive or Communal stage where everybody worked together to survive. The second stage is the Slave stage where the strong eventually took over the land enslaving people for personal gains. The third stage is the Feudal stage, where you see the wealthy aristocrats using indentured servants to work the land, they are commonly known as peasants. This is also about the time religion comes into play, something Marx believes is just to help control the masses. Superseding the Feudal stage is the Capitalist stage, a democracy where a vast majority are workers that are being paid wages to perform a job they dislike by

I am sure everyone just about everyone has heard since they day you were born that everybody, despite your race, religion or class, will be able to achieve success if you fall in line with the rest of society and work hard, this is also know as the American Dream. “The bitter irony, Marx says, is that most of the people who suffer under capitalism have been conditioned by it to support a system that favors the rich, dreaming of the day when they, too, will be rich enough to benefit from it. Yet the laws determining who is allowed to own what, and who gets to keep what, are written by those who already own. Education is controlled by that same class, so even the most deprived children grow up believing in free enterprise and “fair competition” only to be condemned to lives of poverty,—or at least constant financial anxiety.” (Archetypes of Wisdom: e9 pg 376). Consequential we are constantly bombarded with propaganda from the time we are born until the day we die, co-opting us to believe in a system that promises us the illusion of wealth and