The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example). The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.

Accordingly the newspaper was popular with the broad masses of the common working class of the United States. At the same time Marx stressed that capitalism was unstable and prone to periodic crises. No longer a secret society the Communist League wanted to make aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs as the League of the Just had been doing.

Marx is typically cited with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber as one of the three principal architects of modern social science. He argued that under socialism society would be governed by the working class in what he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat" the "workers' state" or "workers' democracy". His ideas played a significant role in the establishment of the social sciences and the development of the socialist movement.