This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Marx's account of history does not start from ideas, kings, or the slow refinement of moral consciousness, the way much philosophy of history before him had. It starts from production: how a society organizes the material work of feeding, clothing and housing itself, and who owns the means by which that work gets done. Historical materialism holds that this economic base, not religion, law or philosophy, is the ultimate engine driving historical change, with a society's political and intellectual life rising on top of it as a superstructure shaped by, and largely serving, the interests of whoever controls production. Every economic system, on this account, generates its own characteristic division between those who own the means of production and those who do not, and that division is also always a division of interest, since owners profit from arrangements the propertyless bear the cost of. History becomes, from this angle, a long sequence of such divisions, feudal lords against serfs, and then, in Marx's own century, an industrial bourgeoisie owning factories against a propertyless proletariat selling its labor to survive, with each system eventually undone by the very contradictions its own success generates. Capitalism, in Das Kapital's central argument, is no exception, and Marx thought it the most productive and most self undermining system yet: driven by competition to accumulate, mechanize and concentrate ownership into ever fewer hands, it manufactures, alongside its wealth, an ever larger class with nothing to sell but its labor and, eventually, Marx predicted, the organized capacity to seize the means of production for itself. Whether that prediction has held up is a separate, much argued question; the underlying method, reading a society's politics and ideas as growing out of who controls its productive work rather than the reverse, is Marxism's most durable and most contested claim.