In Capital, Karl Marx expounded the idea that class conflict was the inevitable result of capitalism, and that communism would emerge in industrialized societies when alienated laborers revolted against the tyranny of a society based on the radical inequality inherent in the labor-capital relationship. In order to present his ideas about political economy effectively Marx worked from both ends of the spectrum. He took the broader, macro-level, view of the economic forces that led to capitalism and accounted for its success and the essential nature of its influence in creating bourgeois society, demonstrating the manner in which capital produced the institutional and ideological superstructure of that society. But he also developed the micro-level view of the process of worker alienation which occurred as a result of the frustration of humanity's natural productive impulse in such a system. Thus, in the first parts of Capital Marx writes of the impersonal economic forces that constitute the basis of capitalism. When he comes to discuss the source of the alienation of the proletariat, however, he begins to use individual examples and, at the very least, to speak of the direct effects of the conditions of labor and the misbegotten distribution of wealth and opportunity on the individual worker.
In one sense, of course, Marx takes an even wider macro-level view insofar as his materialist conception sees history as an inevitable progression toward a foregone conclusion. Marx conceived of history as the process of man's self-development which would culminate in communism. Human beings are producers and material production is the primary form of this activity, they are also, by nature, "free conscious producer[s]" who have not yet been able to express themselves freely because production takes place only as the result of "need and greed," driven, in the modern age, by the bourgeois passion for the accumulation of capital (Tucker ...