 Dear students, in this module, while discussing the origin of sociology, we are going to discuss the contribution of one of the most influential social thinkers of the history of human beings, who is Karl Marx. Karl Marx had a very gigantic impact on not only on sociology and economics, but also almost on all of the social sciences that we are currently studying. Marx was born in 1818 in Germany, Prussia, Germany, and that was a period where when we had a significant flourishing of economic activities through the process of capitalism, capitalism has a typical economic system in which a group of people has means of production and the other group has their own labour to sell means of production, which have resources. They can exploit the proletariat class on the basis of their resources, and they can potentially exploit the working class. Karl Marx observed this entire capitalistic process in a very specific way. He observed the inequality and the policies on an unequal basis. And he made this whole system very understandable in an explanatory way so that Marx believed that capitalism was a system that exploited the workers and created social inequality. He argued that the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class was the driving force of history. When we talk about the current history, typically after the Enlightenment period, when the economic boom came in Europe, we talk about that history. So, Karl Marx thinks that this history is based on inequality. This inequality is the issue of a continuous struggle between the two classes, in which the bourgeois class is continuously exploiting the proletariat or the working class. So, he believed that capitalism would eventually lead to its own downfall and replaced by socialism. As an alternative, Karl Marx proposes the economic system. In capitalism, there is a free-class society, free market, where there is no enforcement, the market itself is channelizing itself, and the commodities produced there are determining their value on the basis of supply and demand. Marx thought that this system is exploitative and inherently it is sawing the seeds of its own destruction. In contrast, Marx proposes a system called socialism, which is considered to be a class-less system, where there is perfect equality, where there is no one to produce, who has means of production, and who has labor. In fact, it will be seen how much it needs to be given to the centralized system. So, his work influenced the development of critical theory and Marxism. Marxism had a big impact on all the perspectives and theories that were coming from Marxism. On top of that, Marx's ideas had a significant impact on the development of sociology and social theory. As you will see later on the next modules, especially the sociological theory, you will feel how big Marx's impact was, because all the thinkers who came after him were not able to get out of this influence, and they started to see things from a critical point of view. So, they continued to be relevant to the study of social inequality and the critique of capitalism. Today, if you look at sociology, we feel that sociology is not only the study of human behavior, but more importantly, sociology is perhaps the study of inequality, and sociology is actually the critique of existing social system.