What is Marxism?
Marxism is the body of political and economic theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, holding that history moves through stages driven by conflict over ownership of the means of production, ending in socialism and, ultimately, a stateless, classless communism.
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Core tenets
- Historical materialism
- Holds that a society's economic structure, specifically who owns the means of production, is the primary force shaping its politics, culture, and institutions, rather than ideas acting independently of material conditions.
- Class struggle
- History is understood as driven by conflict between economic classes with opposed interests, most centrally the class that owns productive property and the class that must sell its labor to survive.
- Surplus value
- Holds that under capitalism, workers produce more value than they are paid in wages, and that this surplus is captured by the owners of capital as profit.
- Revolutionary transition
- Holds that the transition from capitalism to socialism, and eventually communism, occurs through the working class taking political power, rather than through gradual reform alone.
How it works in practice
Marxism functions both as an analytical framework for understanding economic history and as the theoretical basis for a range of political movements and states.
- Class analysis
- Used as an analytical tool to examine any society's structure by identifying its economic classes and their relationship to the means of production.
- Historical staging
- Describes history as moving through stages, commonly feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism, each defined by its dominant mode of production.
- Party organization
- Twentieth-century Marxist movements typically organized around a political party understood as representing the working class's interests in the transition to socialism.
Common variants
- Classical Marxism
- The original theory developed by Marx and Engels themselves, prior to later reinterpretations by subsequent political movements.
- Marxism-Leninism
- Lenin's development of Marxist theory to justify a vanguard party leading a revolution in a largely agrarian country, rather than the industrialized society Marx assumed.
- Western Marxism
- A twentieth-century academic tradition that applied Marxist analysis to culture, ideology, and philosophy, often with less direct connection to a specific revolutionary political program.
- Trotskyism
- Associated with Leon Trotsky, emphasizes permanent, international revolution and offers a critique of the bureaucratic direction the Soviet Union took under Stalin.
What it is often confused with
Marxism is a body of theory and analysis; communism and socialism are the stages and systems that theory describes. The three terms are related but not interchangeable.
Criticisms and debates
Criticism of Marxism spans economic, philosophical, and historical objections.
Austrian and neoclassical economics
Rejects the labor theory of value underlying the surplus-value claim, arguing that value is instead determined by subjective preferences expressed through prices, not by labor time embodied in a good.
Response: Marxist economists respond that the labor theory of value is meant to explain the source of profit and the dynamics of capital accumulation across an economy as a whole, a different question than how any single price is set.
Popper's falsifiability critique
Philosopher Karl Popper argued that Marxist historical predictions were unfalsifiable, framed so that any outcome could be retroactively explained as confirming the theory, which he held disqualified it as science.
Response: Marxist theorists respond that historical materialism is a framework for analysis rather than a set of specific testable predictions, a defense some philosophers of science accept and others still dispute.
Historical critique
Points to the authoritarian outcomes of twentieth-century states built explicitly on Marxist theory as evidence of a flaw in the theory itself, not merely its implementation.
Response: Some Marxist and socialist thinkers agree Leninist implementation departed from Marx's own assumptions, particularly Marx's expectation that revolution would occur first in advanced industrial economies, and argue the authoritarian outcomes reflect that specific departure rather than the theory as such.
Historical examples
- Marx and Engels' collaboration, 1840s to 1883
- The foundational period in which the core texts of Marxist theory, including the Manifesto of the Communist Party and Capital, were written.
- Frankfurt School, 1920s onward
- A group of theorists who developed Western Marxism, applying Marxist analysis to culture and ideology rather than focusing primarily on revolutionary political organizing.
Sources
- 1.Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. 1867.
- 2.Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
- 3.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Karl Marx.
- 4.Encyclopaedia Britannica. Marxism.