Marx’s main philosophical and economic concern was labour – the way in which humankind worked to adapt its environment. Throughout history, Marx argued, human labour had operated under different types of political control. First there had been primitive communism, where everything was held in common. Then there was slave society, where labourers were owned by a master. Then feudalism, where they were technically free but worked on their lord’s land. And finally capitalism, where they worked for a wage using machinery owned by their employer. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society,’ Marx
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