Marxism
Marxism explains history as the struggle of classes over material production, and aims at a classless society in which exploitation and alienation are ended.
Marxism is the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, developed in the nineteenth century. It reads history through material conditions — how societies produce their goods — and treats ideas and laws as growing from that economic base.
Ultimate Reality
Reality is material, and it develops through contradiction and struggle, a process called dialectical materialism. No God or spiritual realm directs events; history is made by human labor within material limits, and a society's thought is shaped by how it produces.
The Human Condition
The human problem is alienation under class society: workers are cut off from their products, from meaningful work, from one another, and from their potential. Capitalism, in this analysis, exploits the working class (the proletariat) for owners' profit (the bourgeoisie), and the injustice is systemic.
Knowledge and Truth
Ideas must be judged by their social function. The ruling ideas of an age serve its ruling class; claims to eternal truth, religion included, are ideology — stories that keep the oppressed quiet. Real knowledge analyzes material conditions and tests theory in practice.
Right and Wrong
Morality is not eternal; each society generates morals that protect it. What counts as right is what serves the emancipation of the oppressed and a classless society. Religion's heavenly promises are criticized as an opiate reconciling people to earthly misery.
Human Destiny
Human destiny is historical, not otherworldly: through revolution the proletariat overthrows capitalism; society is reshaped, the state withers away, and a classless order emerges where people give according to ability and receive according to need. Death has no religious significance; the individual's hope is humanity's future.
The Conversation
Christians should hear the justice in this critique: Scripture condemns exploiting workers, and Marx saw real evils in industrial capitalism. We differ over diagnosis and cure: the deepest problem is sin, not only property, and we distrust paradise built by force — justice, yes; a godless utopia, no.