Karl Marx is widely considered to be one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Born in Germany in 1818, he dedicated himself to exploring the social and political implications of economics, culminating in the publication of two major works: The Communist Manifesto and Capital (Das Kapital). The pair of texts that form the foundation of Marxist thought, which examines the relationships between private ownership of the means of production and economic and social inequality. Marx was deeply critical of capitalism, and his critique extended to the system's politics, values, ideologies and class divisions.

Marx's thoughts and philosophy stemming from the dialectical method, which he developed in collaboration with his lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. In essence, dialectical analysis seeks to deconstruct a system through dialogue and synthesis of opposing ideas. By re-contextualizing various elements of an argument and “outsmarting” it, so to speak, Marx was able to produce an accurate yet shockingly blunt assessment of the capitalist system.

For Marx, capitalism was a symphony of exploited labor and a false way of life, and he sought to replace it with a system based on shared values, collective ownership, and equal production. Nowadays, Marxism is no longer widely accepted. Some of its tenets have been adopted into the mainstream; globalisation, for example, has been a challenge to strict Marxist ideological models of production, and has created autonomous labour markets in the developing world.

At the same time, with globalisation has come greater economic inequalities, the explosion in corporate power, and threats to democracy, leading many to ask the same questions that Marx asked in the nineteenth century: Who benefits from capitalism? How can it be changed? In this sense, Marx's work remains as relevant to this day as ever before.