Marxism

Introduction

Marxism is the philosophical and political tradition founded by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) that takes the analysis of historical material conditions, class structure, and the social relations of economic production as the foundation of social theory and political practice. The tradition is distinguished from German Idealism (from which it emerged) by its materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectic and its commitment to the practical transformation of the social conditions of human existence rather than their merely theoretical comprehension.

The tradition produced one of the major bodies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical and political work and shaped the political history of the twentieth century. Within philosophy it has been continuously consequential: the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the mature Marx of Capital, the various twentieth-century Marxisms (Soviet, Western, the New Left), and the contemporary engagement (analytic Marxism, post-Marxism, the revival in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) constitute a continuous tradition of philosophical work.

Founding moment

Founded by Marx and Engels in the late 1840s through several collaborative works. The German Ideology (composed 1845–46, not published until 1932) gave the first statement of historical materialism; the Communist Manifesto (1848) gave the compressed political articulation; the Class Struggles in France (1850) and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) gave the first historical analyses applying the framework.

The systematic articulation came through Marx's work in the British Museum in the 1850s and 1860s, producing the Grundrisse (composed 1857–58, published 1939–41), the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and the first volume of Capital (1867). The second and third volumes of Capital were edited from Marx's manuscripts by Engels after Marx's death and published in 1885 and 1894.

The intellectual context was the Young Hegelian movement of the 1840s, in which Marx and Engels participated. The Theses on Feuerbach (composed 1845, published 1888) gave the break with the Young Hegelian framework: philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Core doctrines

Marxism is a family of related positions rather than a single doctrine, but the shared commitments are substantial.

1. Historical materialism. The development of human society is driven by the development of the material productive forces and the social relations of production. The cultural, political, and ideological superstructure reflects the material base, though the relations between base and superstructure are dialectical rather than mechanical.
2. Class struggle as the engine of history. historical change is driven by conflicts between classes whose interests are structurally opposed by their respective positions in the relations of production. The Communist Manifesto's opening (the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles) gives the compressed statement.
3. The labor theory of value. The value of commodities is constituted by the socially necessary labor time required for their production. The Marxian analysis of capitalism turns on the relation between this labor value and the surplus value extracted by capital from labor.
4. Alienation. Under capitalist relations of production, workers are alienated from their labor activity, from the products of their labor, from their species-being, and from relations with other human beings. The recovery of unalienated human existence requires the transformation of the relations of production.
5. Ideology as false consciousness. cultural and political phenomena function (often unconsciously) to legitimize the existing relations of production and to obscure their historical and contingent character. The work of critical analysis is to expose this ideological function.
6. Revolution as the mode of fundamental change. The transition from one mode of production to another (slavery to feudalism, feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to socialism) is achieved through revolutionary transformation rather than through reform within the existing framework.
7. The dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional phase. The Marxian framework envisions a transitional period in which the workers' state holds political power against counter-revolutionary forces, before the withering away of the state in the communist phase.

Major figures

• Karl Marx (1818–1883) — the founder; the author of Capital and the body of theoretical and political work.
• Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) — Marx's collaborator and the editor of Capital's posthumous volumes; original work on the philosophy of nature, the family, and Marxist theory.
• Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) — the Second International theorist.
• Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) — the Bolshevik leader and theorist; works on imperialism, the state, and revolutionary practice.
• Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) — the German-Polish theorist of revolutionary spontaneity and the critique of imperialism.
• Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) — the Bolshevik leader and theorist of permanent revolution.
• Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) — the Italian theorist of hegemony and cultural Marxism; the Prison Notebooks.
• György Lukács (1885–1971) — the Hungarian theorist of reification and totality; History and Class Consciousness (1923).
• Karl Korsch (1886–1961) — the German theorist of philosophy and Marxism.
• Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) — the Frankfurt School theorist; negative dialectics.
• Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) — the Frankfurt School director; critical theory.
• Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) — the Marxist theorist of culture, history, and the work of art.
• Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) — the Marxist theorist of one-dimensional society and the New Left.
• Louis Althusser (1918–1990) — the French structuralist Marxist; reading of Marx through the epistemological break.
• G.A. Cohen (1941–2009) — the analytic Marxist; Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978).
• David Harvey (1935–) — the contemporary Marxist geographer and theorist.

Major texts

• Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (composed 1844, published 1932); Theses on Feuerbach (1845); The German Ideology (with Engels, composed 1845–46, published 1932); The Communist Manifesto (with Engels, 1848); The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); Grundrisse (composed 1857–58, published 1939–41); A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Capital (Volume I 1867; Volumes II and III posthumous, 1885 and 1894).
• Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845); Anti-Dühring (1878); The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
• Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902); Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916); The State and Revolution (1917).
• Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923).
• Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (composed 1929–35, published posthumously).
• Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
• Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936); On the Concept of History (1940).
• Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955); One-Dimensional Man (1964).
• Althusser, For Marx (1965); Reading Capital (with Étienne Balibar, 1965).

Internal tensions and rival schools

The major internal tension within Marxism, dating from the late nineteenth century onward, was between orthodox Marxism (which maintained the original Marxian framework as a comprehensive scientific theory) and various revisionist positions (which modified the framework in various directions). The Second International dispute between Karl Kautsky's orthodoxy and Eduard Bernstein's revisionism (Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism, 1899) structured the early-twentieth-century debate.

The dispute between Soviet Marxism (codified in the Stalinist period as dialectical materialism or diamat) and Western Marxism (developed by Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School) structured the mid-twentieth-century tradition. The Western Marxist tradition recovered the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (published 1932) and emphasized the cultural, philosophical, and humanist dimensions of Marxism against the economic-deterministic Soviet codification.

The dispute between humanist Marxism (developed in the post-1956 New Left context) and structuralist Marxism (developed by Althusser and his French students) structured the post-war debate. Althusser's epistemological break thesis (that the mature Marx of Capital broke with the humanist categories of the early manuscripts) divided the tradition.

The great external rivals were liberal political philosophy (through Locke, Mill, and the twentieth-century liberalism), social democracy (which reformed Marxian categories into electoral and reformist politics), conservative political philosophy (through Burke and the twentieth-century critics), and post-Marxist developments (especially the Laclau-Mouffe articulation in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985, which modified Marxian categories in post-structuralist directions).

Legacy

Marxism's legacy operates along multiple distinct trajectories.

Within political history, the influence on the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century (the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the decolonization movements, the revolutionary movements across Latin America and Africa) was transformative. The twentieth-century history of socialist states shaped the geopolitical and economic structure of the era.

Within philosophy, the Western Marxist tradition shaped twentieth-century continental philosophy. The Frankfurt School's critical theory (developed through Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and continued through Habermas's post-Marxist development) shaped the sociology of knowledge, the philosophy of culture, and the twentieth-century engagement with the relations of theory and practice. The French Marxist tradition through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, and the post-Marxist developments shaped continental philosophy.

Within academic disciplines, Marxist or Marx-influenced work has shaped sociology (through Weber's engagement, through the Frankfurt School, through C. Wright Mills, through contemporary work), anthropology (through post-war Marxist anthropology), historiography (especially through E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and the British Marxist historian tradition), literary criticism (through Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton), and portions of geography (David Harvey), economics (the heterodox tradition through Joan Robinson, Paul Sweezy, and others), and political science.

The post-2008 financial crisis context revived interest in Marxian analysis of capitalism and crisis. The work of David Harvey, Wolfgang Streeck, Thomas Piketty (whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2013, deliberately invokes Marx without being strictly Marxist), Nancy Fraser, and the revival of Marxian economics and political theory continues the tradition.

Internal debates within the tradition

The defining intramural dispute is the humanist–structuralist controversy over the interpretation of Marx's body of work. The humanist reading (developed through the recovery of the early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, defended by Erich Fromm, the New Left, and portions of Western Marxism) treats categories of alienation, species-being, and the recovery of unalienated human existence as central to Marx's framework. The structuralist reading (developed by Althusser) treats the mature Marx of Capital as having broken with the humanist categories of the early work and as having developed a scientific theory of modes of production that is independent of humanist anthropology.

A second sustained debate concerned the relation between the economic base and the political-cultural superstructure. The orthodox Marxist reading treats the superstructure as determined by the base; the Western Marxist tradition emphasizes the relative autonomy of the superstructure and the dialectical relations between base and superstructure. The Gramscian concept of hegemony gives the framework within which the political-cultural relations are conceptualized.

Third, the relation between Marxist theory and revolutionary practice has been continuously contested. The Leninist tradition emphasizes the necessity of a vanguard party with theoretical clarity to lead the revolutionary struggle; the Luxemburgist tradition emphasizes the spontaneity of working-class self-activity; the Western Marxist tradition emphasizes the role of consciousness and cultural transformation alongside political-economic transformation.

Fourth, the question of the labor theory of value has been continuously debated. The neoclassical economics tradition rejected the labor theory of value in favor of marginal utility theory in the late nineteenth century; the Marxian tradition has defended and modified the labor theory through twentieth-century debate (especially through Bortkiewicz, Sraffa, the Cambridge controversies of the 1960s, and the contemporary debates).

Fifth, the question of the nature of twentieth-century socialist societies (especially the Soviet Union and China) has been continuously contested. Trotskyist analyses treated the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state; state-capitalist analyses (Tony Cliff, Raya Dunayevskaya) treated it as a form of capitalism; new-class analyses (Milovan Đilas, the Yugoslav tradition) treated it as a new form of class society. The dispute shaped the political and theoretical history of twentieth-century Marxism.

Texts and transmission

Marx's corpus has been edited through several projects. The Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) edition published by Dietz Verlag in East Berlin (39 volumes, 1956–68, with supplementary volumes) is the standard German edition. The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), originally begun by David Riazanov at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the late 1920s and restarted in the 1970s, is the complete critical edition, projected at over 100 volumes and in progress through the International Marx-Engels Foundation. The Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW) edition in English (50 volumes, 1975–2004, Lawrence & Wishart / International Publishers / Progress Publishers) is the standard English edition.

The translation history of Capital is itself substantial. The first English translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (under Engels's editorial supervision) appeared in 1887; the Ben Fowkes translation (Penguin, 1976) replaced it as the standard. The new translation of Capital Volume I by Paul Reitter (Princeton, 2024) returns to the original 1872–75 French edition that Marx himself revised.

The institutional transmission of Marxism has been through multiple channels. The twentieth-century communist parties transmitted official Marxisms (codified in the Soviet diamat and the various national variants); the New Left of the 1960s recovered the early Marx and the Western Marxist tradition; the academic Marxism of the late twentieth century developed through journals such as New Left Review, Historical Materialism, Monthly Review, Rethinking Marxism, Capital and Class, and the work of the various academic Marxist publishers (especially Verso, Pluto, and Haymarket).

The philosophical and political tradition founded by Marx and Engels that takes the analysis of historical material conditions, class structure, and economic production as the foundation of social theory and political practice.