ABSTRACT
Karl Marx, economist and philosopher, is generally regarded as the founder of modern communism as well as a major influence on socialist theory. He was born in Trier, the son of a lawyer, and studied law and philosophy at Bonn and Berlin. At the heart of Marx's thinking lies an acute sense of the damage done to human life and the human spirit by social and economic conditions, conditions which were not new but which had been exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution. Marx saw the rapid growth of capitalist economy as achieved by exploitation: the exploitation of one social class by another. The method of 'dialectical materialism' typical of later Marxist thought also appears to promise a kind of holism. Marx himself sometimes appears to regret the 'disenchantment' of the world that comes from the increasing gulf between the natural world and humankind: it is this gulf that he believes communism will bridge, this conflict that it will resolve.
