Perhaps the smallest extent of the influence of Karl Marx had been the formation of the Marxist sociological perspective, the impact that Marx has had within the world of politics is so massive that it has changed the course the history, and placed Marx amongst the greatest thinkers that humanity has ever produced. Marx was preoccupied with charting and predicting the social history of mankind, more specifically, identifying the circumstances that would herald the downfall of the capitalist system. In order to better understand the consequences of his work, and the modern or Neo-Marxist perspective, which is not unwittingly servile to his theory, it is important to be acquainted with the key ideas that Marx produced.

The basic assumption from which Marx started is that all human activity stems from the need to ensure survival; therefore without the acquisition of food and shelter no other activity is possible. Marx believed that the structure of society mirrors this relationship, the means by which any society produces goods, or as Marx put it the 'base' shapes the institutions and relationships or 'superstructure' of that society. In feudal society, farming is the chief means of production, the economic base. The lords own that land and allow the serfs to farm it in return for a portion of what they produce. The economy of feudal society places lords dominant and the serfs subservient, the rest of society, the superstructure reflects this position, the legal system obliges the serfs into the military service of the lords and the church justifies their exploitation.

Marx termed such a relationship between the base and superstructure, a mode of production, or epoch. Marx categorized four main epochs, and predicted a fifth, they are; primitive communism, ancient society, feudalism, capitalism and communism. Aside from primitive communism, because there is no surplus from production, and his picture of a perfect society, communism, each epoch is characterized by exploitation; masters exploit slaves, lords exploit serfs and in capitalism the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat. In each case, for Marx, this exploitation leads to class conflict and the eventual replacement of that mode of production for the next, Marx believed that after the downfall of capitalism the next epoch was to be his utopian communism.

They key facet to Marx's theory is that class conflict leads to revolutionary change. Class conflict occurs when contradictions become

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