The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

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.