and Ireland to developing urban centers. As these urban centers or cities evolved using industry as the economic backbone for the population, a large number of factory workers were accumulated to operate the machinery in horrid conditions. These workers, which would be termed as the peasantry under a feudal system, were now the working class or proletariat. They entered cities with hopes of bettering their lives and survival. Though revolution never took place in England during this period, it allowed Marx to study industrialization, urbanization and imperialism. The theory of Marxism has three basic concepts: historic materialism, forces of production and relations of production. Historic materialism is defined as a society's past performance and present capabilities of satisfying the basic means of life. Humankind's basic needs of eating, drinking and shelter need to be met properly. The forces of production (technology, capital, the infrastructure of society, etc.) are important for the simple fact of who ever controls them controls the society. The last aspect of Marxism, the relations of production, deals directly with the relationships between classes of people (the aristocracy, the middle-class and the working class).2 Marxism includes a predictive analysis of socio-economic structures. Using history, logic and the dynamic nature of humankind as guidelines, Carl Marx attempts to map out a sequence of events which will eventually lead to utopia (anarchy). In his work, Das Capital, Marx details the six steps. These steps are primitive socialism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism and then anarchy. The evolution of the English economic system during the 16th and 17th centuries points to a shift from feudalism to capitalism. This shift is exemplified by the enclosures. The landlords began to fence their property in the common land areas. The "commons" were large plots of grazing and farmable lands that were ...
