Marxism
A body of social, economic, and political thought developed from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century. At its core is a materialist analysis of history in which class conflict — between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labour — drives social change. Marxism predicts that capitalism's internal contradictions will eventually give way to socialism and then a stateless, classless communism. Beyond its political programme, Marxism has been enormously influential as a lens of literary and cultural criticism, reading texts as expressions of, or struggles against, the material conditions and class structures that produced them.