ABSTRACT
Karl Marx lived and wrote during what he understood to be the most momentous social transformation in the history of humanity-the emergence of capitalist modernity. Marx was one of the first social theorists to analyze systematically the capitalist mode of production and to see it as constituting a modern world radically different from all previous social forms. Marx noted that although capitalism produced a massive rupture in the fabric of history, knowledge of the origins and nature of the new social system transforming the entire globe was occluded. This was the result of the sheer novelty and complexity of the wage and market system, of the oppressiveness of its effects on human beings, and of an ideology that obscures underlying social relations, presenting the movement of commodities and the hegemony of exchange value as if governed by natural laws.
