His best-known works are: The Communist Manifesto  and his magnum opus,  Das Kapital .  His political and philosophical thought had an enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history, creating a school of social theory. He believed that human history could be reduced to a single formula, based on his insight into what motivates us. It can be summarized in his famous phrase: ” The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

His first important point is that, until him, people thought about things centered on individual heroes and leaders, or generally accepted ideas.  He introduced the idea that true protagonism lay with the classes.

Unlike the philosophers who preceded him, who tried to understand or interpret the world,  he wanted to change the world , an emphasis shared by Engels, who co-authored the  Communist Manifesto with him .  This pamphlet aims to explain the values ​​and political plans of communism, a belief system proposed by a group of radical German socialists. In short, the Manifesto argues that there are only two classes in direct conflict:  the bourgeoisie, owners of capital, and the proletariat , the working class. For him, the system of artisans had been replaced by manufacturing. For Marx, the bourgeoisie had no value other than ” money, ” and personal value became  ” exchange value . ”   He explores this in his ” surplus value ,” where he interprets that moral, religious, and even sentimental values ​​had been forgotten and that everyone from scientists and lawyers to priests had become wage earners, all replaced by ” blatant, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation .” He attributed this to the ” irrational freedom ”  introduced by free trade .  

The only solution to this state of affairs was to transform all means of economic production, such as land, raw materials, tools, and factories, into  common property ,   hence his famous phrase, ” From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Marxist dialectics  stems  from ideas he drew from Hegel, who described reality not as a  state of affairs (thesis)  but as a process of continuous change containing within itself an  internal conflict (antithesis) . He believed, like Hegel, that we are forbidden to know or feel how things in the world truly are, but only know and feel how they appear to us. For Hegel, the mind, or spirit, in its historical journey, through countless dialectical cycles, would progress towards a state of absolute harmony, the  Geist .  Marx differs from Hegel here, because instead of a journey, he wants  real change, here and now,  and instead of Hegel’s Geist, he believed that, at the end of the process, in the perfect society, everyone would work harmoniously towards the well-being of a greater whole .  

What interests and excites me about him is this: In the thick volumes of Das Kapital, he meticulously elaborates on the formation of classes, describing how, in earlier times, human beings, once solely responsible for producing everything they consumed, came to depend on one another, giving rise to a form of “bargaining.” This led to a specialization of each activity, which then came to define people, dictating where and how they would live. This also imposed with whom this society would harmonize and with whom it would clash. Hence the class conflict, which Marx divided into four major stages. He also elaborated that politics, laws, art, religions, and philosophies, or “superstructures,” developed to serve the values ​​and interests of the dominant class, and the ruler was prevented from altering events, but could only promote them. He calls this  Zeitgeist,  or spirit of the age, which would be governed by an absolute spirit that had developed over time as described above. For Marx, no one leaves their mark; the era defines people. From Feuerbach, he concluded that  religion is intellectually false  and contributes to human misery, because we create gods in our own image from an amalgam of virtues, an invention that is a dream and has nothing to do with the real world. Since religion rescues our “self,” which is despised and alienated by the system described above, the best thing is to end religion so that consciousness can emerge. He also discussed his Marxist utopia, political power, and what the path to revolution, which he argued was inevitable, would be like.  

Technology, specially connected with computing, such as Artificial Intelligence, acts exactly in shaking down the value of labor.

The central problem of the Marxist model is the assumption that the value of a product is equal to the work effort necessary for its production. Marx took this mistake from classical economists, who have not noticed its paradoxical implications and the clash of theory on the value of work with reality.

What would Marx see?

Marx would not focus on the material of the lunchbox. He would ask:

• Who carries the lunchbox?
• For whom does this person work?
• Who appropriates the value produced?

For Marx, the lunchbox symbolizes:

The condition of the wage laborer.

The change in material represents:

• technological evolution,
• the advancement of productive forces,
• industrial modernization.

But the central structure remains:

The worker continues to sell his labor power.

So, for Marx, the sculpture would be saying:

✔️ Capitalism changes form
✔️ Technology evolves
❌ But the relationship of exploitation persists

He would argue that the artwork exposes the permanence of the economic structure beneath surface modernization.
Obviously wrong as was the artist who did the artwork, because it does not show the clash of value of work in the timeline involved with reality.

---