Marx, Karl (1818–1883)

Abstract

Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and economic inequality and his appeal for social justice have inspired leftwing political parties, labor movements, and insurgencies worldwide. His ideas have often been fused with local political cultures and interpreted and employed in diverse ways. His call for global revolution and totemic status among communists has made him a very controversial thinker. In wealthy capitalist countries, he has been mostly an oppositional reference point. For much of the twentieth century, most western sociologists viewed him as an ideologue, marginal to their discipline. During the later 1960s and 1970s, however, sociological interest in Marx increased, spurred by anticolonialist uprisings, student activism, leftist politics, and increased awareness of gaps and unaddressed problems in the disciplinary mainstream. In North American sociology, a new generation of theorists portrayed him as a founder of “conflict theory” or “critical sociology” and, together with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, one in the troika of modern social theory's and sociology's founders. Later critics held that this canon was too narrow and Eurocentric and that the postmodern cultural shift, the new social movements (e.g., women's, racial and ethnic, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT]), and the collapse of communism rendered Marx irrelevant. Others countered that later twentieth‐century globalization and deregulated neoliberal capitalism made him more relevant than ever.