It is a matter of common observation that economic conditions in a country have great influence on political activities and relations. Aristotle was the first political thinker to show how wealth and poverty affected political events and caused revolutions in the State. Many other thinkers have also said that political troubles and disputes are due to economic interests and conflicts. But it was “Karl Marx (1818-1883), who first explained these causes in a systematic and scientific manner.
He said that political conflicts are not due to differences in beliefs or ideology, but due to the clash of economic interests of the haves and have-nots i.e. of the rich and poor classes. He writes, “Men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter along this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” Friedrich Engel’s, friend and collaborator of Karl Marx, puts it more expressly as thus: “The ultimate cause of all social change and political revolutions are to be sought, not in the minds of men, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange; they are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the period concerned.”
This was the Marxist economic approach to politics, which became the basis of the socialist and communist movements. It has led to the socialist revolutions in Soviet Russia, Communist China and other countries of the world in the twentieth century.