In his analysis of the movement of history, Marx predicted the breakdown of capitalism ( as a result of class struggle and the falling rate of profit ), and the establishment in time of a communist society in which class-based human conflict would be overcome.

" Accordingly, some observers, including Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted that there soon would be a Russo-Turkish War.

However, Marx and Engels predicted that any such Russo-Turkish War would necessarily become a European War.

Marx correctly predicted that over time, inequality would grow but he also believed that this would mean growing impoverishment of the growing worker class, increasingly exploited by the capitalists.

In the course of developing the Russian application of Marxism, the pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism ( 1916 ) presented Lenin ’ s analysis of an economic development predicted by Karl Marx: that capitalism would become a global financial system, wherein advanced industrial countries export financial capital to their colonial countries, to finance the exploitation of their natural resources and the labour of the native populations.

As a matter of political pragmatism, Lenin reversed Marx's order of economics over politics, allowing for a political revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries rather than a spontaneous establishment of socialist institutions led by a spontaneous uprising of the working class as predicted by Karl Marx.

Other writers, while admitting the distance between Marx and Engels and Stalin, are less charitable, noting for example that the anarchist Bakunin predicted the oppressive potential of their ideas.

Periodic crises in capitalism formed the basis of the theory of Karl Marx, who further claimed that these crises were increasing in severity and, on the basis of which, he predicted a communist revolution.

Its thinkers were particularly influenced by the failure of the working-class revolution in Western Europe ( precisely where Marx had predicted that a communist revolution would take place ) and by the rise of Nazism in such an economically and technologically advanced nation as Germany.

This prediction helped to stimulate the socialist movement, which in some countries slowed the development that Marx had predicted.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not the revolution of the most advanced capitalist societies predicted by Karl Marx.

Whether the rate of profit in capitalism has, as Marx predicted, tended to fall is a subject of debate.

Contrary to what Karl Marx had predicted, capitalism had become stronger in the last third of the 19th century.

In Western Europe, the working class had become poorer, rather than becoming politically progressive, thinking people ; hence, the workers and their trade unions, although they had continued to militate for better wages and working conditions, had failed to develop a revolutionary class consciousness, as predicted by Marx.

There has been a lengthy theoretical and statistical dispute among economists about whether the organic composition of capital really does tend to, or has to rise historically, as Marx predicted, or, to put it differently, whether in aggregate technological progress has a " labor-saving bias ", and causes the average profit rate to decline.

* Stateless communism, which Karl Marx predicted would follow capitalism and socialism

Historically, Karl Marx predicted that the petite bourgeoisie were to lose in the course of economic development ; in the event, they were to become the political mainstay of Fascism, which political reaction was their terroristic response to the inevitable loss of power ( economic, political, social ) to the haute bourgeoisie.

Dressen himself appeared on the Groucho Marx quiz program, You Bet Your Life and predicted that the Senators would finish in the first division ( 4th place ).

Contrary to what Marx had predicted, capitalism had strengthened itself over the last third of the 19th century.

In the latter study, Orowan developed the writings of the 14th century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun to forecast a supposed eventual failure of market demand similar to that claimed by Karl Marx.

Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labour is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew.

In one example, references to Marx drastically decreased in Polish sociology after the fall of the revolutionary socialist governments, and two major research institutions which advocated the Marxist approach to sociology were closed.

I, like many other socialists, greeted the fall of the Soviet model with unqualified rejoicing ; and I don't doubt that Karl Marx would have been celebrating.

Socialist critics of Lasalle and of the alleged iron law of wages, such as Karl Marx, argued that although there was a tendency for wages to fall to subsistence levels, there were also tendencies which worked in opposing directions.

In Volume III, Part III of Das Kapital, Marx presents a theory of crisis which is solidly grounded in the contradictions he sees in the realm of capitalist production: the Tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

But this represents only a tendency, Marx argues, because the fall of the rate of profit can be offset by counteracting influences.

For the lower echelon, Smith recognised the intellectually erosive effect that the otherwise beneficial division of labour can have on workers, what Marx, though he mainly opposes Smith, later named " alienation ,"; therefore, Smith warns of the consequence of government failing to fulfill its proper role, which is to preserve against the innate tendency of human society to fall apart.

Karl Marx developed a version of the law of diminishing returns in his theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, described in Volume III of Capital.

The track " Ein Gespenst geht um " ( A Ghost Haunts ), an oblique political commentary which drew on a quotation by Karl Marx about political change in the air ( although the ghost here haunted a Mitropa restaurant rather than Europa ), and the song seemed somewhat prescient in light of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November that year.

Karl Marx feared that the capitalist system would eventually lead to wages only sufficient for subsistence due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The negative influence of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall on business income could, Marx argued, be overcome in the long run only by organizing production and sales on a larger and larger scale, or by technological revolutions which reduced the cost of raw materials and fixed equipment.

The term capitalism gradually spread throughout the Western world in the 19th and 20th centuries largely through the writings of Karl Marx.

In the 19th century, Marx described feudalism as the economic situation coming before the rise of capitalism.

The main modes of production Marx identified generally include primitive communism or tribal society ( a prehistoric stage ), ancient society, feudalism, and capitalism.

Marcuse ’ s analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl Marx ’ s main concepts: Objectification, which under capitalism becomes Alienation.

Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans ; that the objects produced by laborers became alienated and thus ultimately dehumanized them to functional objects.

Along with believing in the inevitability of socialism and communism, Marx actively fought for the former's implementation, arguing that both social theorists and underprivileged people should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change.

Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organising, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism.

Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers ' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data.

Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value ( influenced by Thomas Hodgskin ) and his conception of surplus value and exploitation, which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.

On one hand, Marx, in the 19th century's deepest critique of the dehumanising aspects of this system, noted that defining features of capitalism include alienation, exploitation, and recurring, cyclical depressions leading to mass unemployment ; on the other hand capitalism is also characterised by " revolutionizing, industrializing and universalizing qualities of development, growth and progressivity " ( by which Marx meant industrialisation, urbanisation, technological progress, increased productivity and growth, rationality and scientific revolution ), that are responsible for progress.

Marx considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly improved the means of production, more so than any other class in history, and was responsible for the overthrow of feudalism and its transition to capitalism.

At the same time, Marx stressed that capitalism was unstable, and prone to periodic crises.

In section one of The Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process:

Marx believed that those structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to socialism, or a post-capitalistic, communist society:

Marx argued in The German Ideology that capitalism will end through the organised actions of an international working class:

Marx is often criticised for expecting a wave of socialist revolutions, originating in the most highly industrialised countries, to overturn capitalism.

However, in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, Greek government debt crisis, 2008 – 2012 Spanish financial crisis and European sovereign debt crisis, thinkers such as Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, and David McNally have given renewed impetus to the debate on whether Marx was right that capitalism inherently tends towards crisis ( which Marx discussed as the " contradictions of capital ").

Marx uses his LTV to derive his theory of exploitation under capitalism.