ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the basic model for understanding human societies as articulated by Karl Marx in his extensive scholarly writings. Many pundits have questioned whether the works of Karl Marx have relevance anymore after the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union and its state-run central-planning system. The designer of the Soviet system was neither Marx nor Lenin. Unfortunately for Marx’s reputation, the Soviet Union, Mao Tse-Tung’s China, and other self-identified communist countries have claimed descendance from Marx. Marx’s lifetime spanned the height of the Industrial Revolution in England. Marx shared with many other intellectuals and social activists an abhorrence of these terrible conditions endured by the workers in industrial capitalism. Marx’s sweeping view of human history compacts all of human history into only five major modes of production: primitive communism, ancient civilizations, feudalism, capitalism, and communism. According to Marx, with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe moved on to the next mode of production, feudalism.
