ABSTRACT
There was renewed interest in Marxist theory during the 2008 economic crisis affecting Western societies. There are aspects about Marxist thinking that deserve to be looked at that makes it applicability to current problems questionable. Karl Marx took the idea of the dialectic from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and made it applicable to the material world. The basic unit of analysis for Marx was the way in which a society organized itself to provide for its material needs. A society can only be understood by analyzing its basic mode of production, its economic system that structures how goods and services are produced in that society. The ultimate standard of value for Marx and common to all other measures of value is the labor that goes into producing particular commodities, the energy and effort that are expended in making them. In orthodox Marxist theory the state is part of the "superstructure" and is derived from the requirements of the "economic base".
