Marx has written various issues of Philosophy, Economics, Politics and society.

The books, articles, pamphlets

of Marx were written during three decades from the early forties to the early seventies. The important works of
Marx include Critique of Political Economy, The Communist Manifesto, Das Capital. The basic ideologies of
Marxism can be mentioned as follows:
1. Dialectical Materialism
2. Historical Materialism
3. Theory of Alienation
4. Theory of surplus value
5. Class struggle
6. Dictatorship of the proletariat
7. Vision of a communist society

Dialectical materialism:

Karl Marx is obligated to both Hegel and Hobbes for his theory of Dialectical materialism.

Marx took dialectical method from Hegel but reformed it at basic level. While Hegel had applied the dialectics
to explain the material conditions of life, Marx applied the dialectics to elucidate the material conditions of life.
In the process of doing so, he criticized the Hegelian philosophy of dialectical idealism on one hand and the
theory of mechanistic materialism on the other. Marx wrote "May dialectic method" which is not only different
from the Hegelian but is its direct opposite.

In the dialectical materialism of Marx, development within environment help or hinder but neither originating the
evolutionary process nor capable of preventing it from reaching its unavoidable goal. Matter is active and not
passive, and moves by an inner necessity of its nature. We may put it ln another way, Dialectical Materialism of
Marx is more interested in motion than matter, in the vital energy within matter inevitably driving it towards
perfect human society. Engels signified that the dialectical method grasps things and their images, ideas
essentially in their sequence, their movement, their birth and death. According to Marx, every state of history
which falls short of perfection carries within itself the seeds of its own annihilation. Each stage reached in the
march to the classless society.

Marxian Dialectical Materialism developed by Engels has three dimensions.

1. The law of transformation of quantity into quality. It means that qualitative changes lead to qualitative
revolutionary situation.
2. The law of unity of opposites.
3. The law of negation.

Historical materialism:

Historical materialism is the use of the principles of dialectical materialism to the development of society. Marx
applied dialectical materialism to the social world consisting of economic production and exchange. In his
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels has defined historical materialism as a theory which maintains that
the ultimate cause which determines the whole course of human history is the economic development of
society. The whole course of human history in explicated in terms of changes occurring in the mode of
production and exchange. Beginning from primitive communism, the mode of production has passed through
three stages. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism and the consequent division of society into three distinct
classes (Slave- master, self-baron and proletariat-capitalist) and the struggle of these classes against one
another. The most thoughtful statement of Marx's theory of historic materialism is contained in his preamble to
a contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In this work, Marx marked that:
 "The economic structure of society, constituted by its relations of production is the real foundation of society. It
is the basis on which rises a legal and political super structure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. Along with it, the society's relations of production themselves corresponds to, a definite state of
development of its material productive forces. Thus the mode of production of material life determines the
social, political and intellectual life process in general."

Marx expounded that the general relations as well as form of state are to be grasped from the material
conditions of life. As the society's productive forces develop, they clash with the existing relations of
production. This incongruity between forces of production and relations of production divides the society into
different classes. As people become conscious of this conflict they fight it out. The conflict is resolved in favour
of the productive forces and higher relations of production.

Analogous to his dialectical materialism, Marx created his materialistic conception of history out of the Hegelian
system itself which had sought to bridge the gap between the rational and actual concept. Marx borrowed such
concepts as civil society and property from the Hegelian system and set them in a revolutionary relationship to
the concept of the state. Hegel confronts civil society as a sphere of materialism and counterposes it to the
state as sphere of idealism. On the contrary, Marx maintains that relations as well as forms of state are to be
grabbed neither from themselves, nor from the general development of human mind but rather they have their
roots in the material conditions of life. As a consequence, Hegel stated that the real world is only the external
phenomenal form of the idea, while for Marx, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by
human mind and interpreted into forms of thought. In other words, while in the Hegelian scheme, human
consciousness determines social existence in the Marxian scheme. It is the social existence that determines
their consciousness.

Class struggle:

Class struggle is elucidated as the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing
socioeconomic interests and desires between people of different classes. It is the main work of Marxian
political philosophy. Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles." Class struggle pressed society from one stage to the next, in a dialectical process.
In each stage, an ownership class controls the means of production while a lower class provides labour for
production. The two classes come into conflict and that conflict leads to social change.

It is documented in theoretical studies that Marx observed the structure of society in relation to its major
classes, and the struggle between them as the device of change in this structure. His has no equilibrium or
consensus theory. Conflict was not deviational within society's structure, nor were classes' functional elements
maintaining the system. The structure itself was a derivative of and ingredient in the struggle of classes. His
has a conflict view of modem (nineteenth century) society.

Class conflict may emerge in various forms that include direct violence, such as wars fought for resources and
cheap labour, indirect violence, such as deaths from poverty, starvation, illness or unsafe working conditions,
coercion, such as the threat of losing a job or the pulling of an important investment, and ideologically, such as
with books and articles promoting capitalism. Furthermore, political forms of class conflict exist; legally or
illegally lobbying or bribing government leaders for passage of partisan desirable legislation including labour
laws, tax codes, consumer laws, acts of congress or other sanction, injunction or tariff. The conflict can be
direct, as with a lockout intended in destroying a labour union, or indirect, as with an informal slowdown in
production protesting low wages by workers or unfair labour practices by capital.

In general, there are six elements in Marx's view of class conflict.

1. Classes are authority relationships based on property ownership.
2. A class defines groupings of individuals with shared life situations, thus interests.
3. Classes are naturally antagonistic by virtue of their interests.
4. Imminent within modern society is the growth of two antagonistic classes and their struggle, which
eventually absorbs all social relations.
5. Political organization and Power is an instrumentality of class struggle, and reigning ideas are its reflection.
6. Structural change is a consequence of the class struggle.

The exclusive criterion on the basis of which the class of a person is determined is this ownership (or control)
of means of production constitute the bourgeoisie (exploiters) and those who own labour power constitute the
proletariat (exploited). It is apparent that Max explained classes on the basis of twin criteria of a person's place
with mode of production and his consequent position in terms of relations of production.

Marx stated that class conflict is the real dynamic force of human history. In Communist Manifesto (1848),
Marx and Engels wrote that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". In the
capitalist societies, class differentiation is most clear, class consciousness is more developed and class conflict
is more acute. Therefore, capitalism is the concluding point in the historical feature of bourgeois period. Society
as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly falling
each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat. It can be established that According Marx, Class is rooted in social
relations of production, and cannot be mentioned in the first place to relations of distribution and consumption
or their ideological reflections. In considering the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxists are not
concerned with the ideas of individual workers about their position in society so much as with the following
series of categories: relations of production (sale of labour-power, exploitation); conflict of workers and
employers on this basis (economic struggles, trade unions, elementary political battles for economic ends);
conflict at the level of class (economic struggles which merge into the conflict between classes, which is
organised through the political parties and the struggle for state power); the theoretical and practical struggle to
build revolutionary parties of the working class, in conflict with non-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary
tendencies in the class and their reflection inside the revolutionary party.

Marx made a distinction between the objective fact of existence of a class and its subjective awareness about
its being a class, class consciousness. Division of labour is the main source of historical development of
classes and class antagonisms. Through a detailed historical analysis, Marx indicated that no major
resentment disappears unless there emerges a new antagonism.

General bitterness between rich and poor is there but in capitalism, it has been severely polarised into
antagonism between the capitalist and the proletariat. Thus, in capitalism, the emergence of proletariat has a
special consequence. It is not an ancient phenomenon because its suffering, its exploitation and determination
is a pattern for the human conduct. The proletariat can abolish all classes and all class antagonisms by
eliminating itself as a separate classes. In the class struggle, the majority proletariat is successful. Marx and
Engels wrote that "The workers of the world unite. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win".

When evaluating class struggle concept, Marx envisaged the emergence of a classless society, free from
exploitation and suppression. Such class-less society will also be a state less society because with the
vanishing of classes, rationale for the existence of state will disappear.