Basic Premises M arxism is essentially an economic interpretation of history based primarily on the works of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. Marx was a revolutionary who focused his efforts on understanding capitalism to overthrow it. Both of these men were influenced by Louis Henry Morgan and his model of social evolution. Morgan proposed that societies moved from more primitive to more civilized stages of development. The modes of production form the base or infrastructure of a society.
Class struggle is the prime mover for such a system to advance stages.
It is inevitable that change will occur and that the classes will realign themselves, but the ruling class have a vested interest in maintaining their power and will seek to resist such change, though futilely in the long run, by whatever means they can, especially through elaboration of mystification in the ideology, which results in the false conciousness of the lower class. Social evolution can be slowed, but not stopped. Points of Reaction Marxist anthropology came about through the works of Marx and Engels and their followers. It developed as a critique and alternative to the domination of Euro-American capitolism and Eurocentric views in the social sciences. Marx is the most successful social scientist of all time.