Marxism

• Marxism is an analytical framework based on the writings of 19th century German philosopher, economist, and sociologist Karl Marx and political philosopher and social scientist Friedrich Engels. It holds that human society is built primarily on economic relations between classes and that political and social structures are built around these relations.

• One's class is defined by one's relationship to production—who owns capital, who works it for a wage? Marxism analyzes social changes and developments as the product of conflicting classes changing the structure of the economy. Modern capitalism as the result of the bourgeoisie, the current capital-owning class, having wrested control of the economy away from the aristocracy, or the feudal owning-class. Bourgeois democracy follows as political structures adapt.

• The primary class conflict in capitalism is between the capital-owning class (the bourgeoisie) and the working-class (the proletariat). Marx argued that the proletariat would seize control of the economy and society, in a stage he described as socialism. In Marxist analysis, every state is the "dictatorship" of the economically dominant class. The socialist stage is therefore the "dictatorship of the proletariat," in which the workers will reorganize the economy until there are no longer any classes.

• Without a class that needs to enforce its dominance over others, Marxists believe that the state will wither away and the final stage, communism, will be reached. These socialist revolutions will happen when capitalism reaches its final stages of development and becomes consumed by its own contradictions.

Socialism

• Socialism is an economy in which productive property (factories, farms, workshops) is controlled socially. This can mean direct workers' control, or community ownership, or state control on behalf of the people. There are a great deal of socialist ideologies. Broad categories include democratic socialism, Marxism, and anarchism.

Communism

• Communism is a classless, stateless society in which productive property is commonly owned and economic distribution is operated on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." It also refers to a group of ideologies which hold this form of social organization as their end goal.

• The most significant form of communism is Marxism, and the 20th century was characterized by a number of Marxist-Leninist states. Anarchist communism is also historically significant, though has not been nearly as popular as the various forms of Marxist communism since the late-19th and early-20th centuries, except in select countries or localities.

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