Karl Marx is the last of the great classical political economists, a school of thinkers who developed a theory of the economy as a social form which organizes production, distribution, exchange and consumption. Marx was interested in the historical development of all kinds of economic systems, but he is best known for his theory of capitalism. Contrary to previous political economists, Marx argues that capitalism is a unique historical development. It could only come into being when a new concept of private property emerges, and more pertinently, in an institutional system that permits productive resources—capital—to be owned as private property. Everyone needs to be able to access productive resources, like land for agriculture. If the means of production are owned as private property, it also necessarily means that most people are denied access to what they once could enjoy to make a living. In that sense, Marx argues, capitalism is the outcome of a social revolution in which a new class—the bourgeoisie, or owners of capital—overturn an older class systems. Likewise, Marx says, capitalism is based on a new class division within society and creates conditions for a new class conflict. Capitalism sows “the seeds of its own destruction” (Marx and Engels 1850), and would eventually give way to a new system called socialism.
Marx in anthropology
Marx was not an anthropologist, and had no conception of anthropology as it exists today. He was in many ways a typical 19th century social thinker. He was radical in some ways, but still committed to the dominant ethnocentrism of his society, and especially the premise that all societies fall at different points on the same scale between primitive and civilized. Nonetheless his theory of capitalism has had an important and lasting influence on anthropology along with the other social sciences. For instance, anthropologists often turn to his idea of the commodity form, both to understand some kinds of cross-cultural encounters brought about by colonialism and globalization, and as a foil to their own theories of consumption.
References
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. 1850. “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by Marx and Engels”. London, March. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm.