Some of the questions addressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are:

Essentially Marxist cultural theory asks the question: under what conditions is our material life produced? These are not subjective but objective conditions. There are clear cut observable conditions under which we work. For instance, all of us do labour regardless of the stage in the hierarchy of any institution or system. We work and by doing so we produce or reproduce our material life. The work we do enables us to live a certain kind of life at a certain level. Thus, it points to the root question - What are the conditions that form the basis of all of our productive activity? not just today in contemporary times but since historical times, over the years and centuries and how mankind has arranged his labour and the production of all the material things that we use.