Karl Marx was a German “philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary” and he was also considered to be “the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century”(Kreis, S.,2000). He was influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Hegel, Descartes and Kant. From these three, he was particularly fond of Hegel whose concepts he developed. The most important concept “borrowed” from Hegel but developed in a different way was the “dialectic” that he changed from the philosophical and idealist way in which Hegel presented it, into something more realistic. So, this is how dialectic materialism appeared, a concept related to those two classes that exist in every society, one that exploits and one that gets exploited. Furthermore, Marx created, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, the concept of “Marxism” which involves ideas such as: the class struggle, the inequalities on the labour market, alienation, exploitation and so on. Each idea mentioned before is very relevant for the study of human rights because, as it will be shown further on, many of them come into conflict with what human rights mean. Marx and Engels wrote, in 1848, a work called “The Communist Manifesto”, in …show more content…
This idea of “subordination” of the proletariat representatives to the capitalists contravenes also to the idea of equality mentioned above, because the right to be equal is seen to be one of the most fundamental rights of all human beings. Callinicos illustrated this so-called “dispossession” of workers over their labour by the means of an example provided by Marx in his book called “Capital”: “the often brutal process of dispossessing peasant of their land”(Callinicos, A., 2007,