- At the time of Karl Marx’s schooling, one of the biggest and most influential German philosophers of the day and age was G. W. F. Hegel. In fact he was so influential that at the time most people were either Hegelian or anti-Hegelian. Marx, who at the time was a Hegelian, was studying G. W. F. Through this he derived the crucial concept of alienation, which can be described as the feeling that workers in a capitalistic society feel when they feel separated from their products of labor because even though they put in the labor for the product, the factory owners, or bourgeoisie, take the majority of the income, which in turn results in this feeling of alienation. Although perhaps one of his biggest notion that Marx took from Hegel was the ongoing struggle of Dialectical Materialism. Basically this is the idea that in every situation and moment there is a thesis, or viewpoint, and an anti-thesis, or opposing argument. And through time we as human beings possess the ability to find a common solution for these issues that result in a much more agreed upon synthesis, which is just the new thesis or argument. But as everything in the world goes, over time somebody will come up with a new anti-thesis for the synthesis which now becomes a new thesis, and once again we will work it out to find a synthesis. This process goes on to repeat itself over and over throughout history. From this Marx was able to alter the Dialectical Materialism into Marxian Dialectics, which separates the middle class from the working class. And also discovers that the biggest difference between them being that Marx stated that the anti-thesis is actually contained in the thesis. Another thing that the Dialectical Materialism gave to Marx was what he called “The five epochs of history”. This is the history of our struggles as humans finally being put into order and classified. The first is the primitive conflict. After that and for many years afterwards came the conflict of slavery. The third epoch Marx describes as Feudal. What has just become famous in the past hundred years and what is still with us today is the next struggle which is capitalism. And the final epoch in which Marx believes everybody can live happily and enjoy all the little things in life is Communism.
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