In The Communist Manifesto (1848), written with Friedrich Engels, and in Capital (volume one, 1867), Karl Marx set out a critique of capitalism centred on class conflict, the exploitation of wage labour and the extraction of surplus value. He argued that capitalism's internal contradictions would drive historical change toward collective ownership. These works gave the emerging socialist and labour movements a systematic theory and a programme. Engels's own study of industrial Manchester documented the squalid living conditions of the urban working class.
Marxist and socialist ideas drove twentieth-century socialist states and labour movements, and through them large programmes of public and social housing and collective urban provision intended to reshape the working-class city.