Marx and Marxism

In the mid-1840s Marx and Engels wrote that capitalist globalization was transforming the international states-system. They believed that conflict and competition between nation-states had yet to come to an end, but the main fault-line in the future would revolve around the divisions between the two dominant social classes: the national bourgeoisie in each country and an increasingly international proletariat. The outline of a new social experiment based on the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity was already contained within the most advanced political movements of the industrial working class. Through revolutionary action, the international proletariat would embed those ideals in a form of global cooperation that would free all human beings from poverty, exploitation and oppression (Marx and Engels 1977).