The German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary whose analysis of capitalism as a system of class exploitation — developed in Capital, the Communist Manifesto, and decades of political journalism — became the theoretical foundation of socialist and communist movements worldwide, inspired revolutions that shaped the 20th century, and remains the most systematic critique of capitalism ever produced.
Marx predicted that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers — that the working class, immiserated by industrial capitalism, would eventually overthrow it. He was wrong about the timing, wrong about the mechanism, and wrong about what would come after. But his analysis of how capitalism works — the labor theory of value, surplus value, commodity fetishism, the tendency toward concentration — remains the most rigorous critique of market economies ever produced. Understanding the modern world without Marx is like navigating without a map that's partly wrong: still the most useful thing available.