One of the most neglected aspects of Marx is that he thought that capitalism was an inevitable, natural development of industry. He also thought that it was a s

One of the most neglected aspects of Marx is that he thought that capitalism was an inevitable, natural development of industry. He also thought that it was a system full of contradictions and deduced that those contradictions would eventually cause it to transform into another system, communism. Communism was already a wildly popular movement by the time Marx started writing. What he set out to do was explain why there was a conflict in which one side was called capitalism and another was called communism and how that conflict would play out. Marx's biggest failing was that he did not consider a third possibility: fascism. Such a populist movement was inconceivable to Marx, the epitome of an enlightenment thinker.