Revolutionary socialism

• Who were pivotal in setting out the foundations of socialist thought?

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• Influential texts produced by Marx and Engels

  The Communist Manifesto and ”Das Kapital”
• In their written works, Marx and Engels outlined a historical materialist view of society, proposing that history inevitably transitions through a number of stages of economic development. According to this, society inevitably progressed from feudalism to capitalism and would ultimately transition from capitalism to communism through a proletarian (working class) revolution
• Marx and Engels argued that inherent to capitalism was class oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie which created deep inequalities and suppressed the inherently collaborative and social nature of humans.
• Eventually, this oppression would lead to the proletariat to seize control of the state and economy in a violent revolution
• After seizing control, they argued that the working class would and should fundamentally change society. There would be workers’ control of the society and state, there would be a commitment tot collectivism, common humanity and equality rather than individualism. Capitalism would be abolished, as would the class exploitation that was inherent to it
• Eventually, after a brief of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat‘, the state would ‘wither away’ and the final stage of society would be reached. This would be a classless, stateless society, where the means of production are communally owned and all forms of exploitation and inequality were eliminated. This was known as communism