What is Marxism?
Marxism is a body of social, economic and political ideas based on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is both a way of analyzing society and a political program. As analysis, it explains history through changes in how people produce goods and through conflict between social classes. As a program, it argues that workers should replace capitalism with a society where the means of production are owned in common. Marxism has shaped many later movements, from social democracy to the communist parties of the twentieth century, and it remains influential in academic fields such as sociology, history and economics.
Core beliefs
- Historical materialism: the way a society produces goods shapes its laws, politics and ideas.
- History moves through class struggle between groups with opposed economic interests.
- Under capitalism, workers produce more value than they receive in wages, and owners keep the surplus.
- Capitalism tends toward crises, concentration of wealth and the alienation of workers from their work.
- Workers have a shared interest across national borders.
- A socialist transition should lead to a classless society in which the state eventually withers away.
History
Marx and Engels developed their ideas in the 1840s, drawing on German philosophy, especially Hegel, on British political economy, and on French socialism. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 set out their political goals, and Marx's Capital, whose first volume appeared in 1867, presented his critique of capitalist economics. After Marx died in 1883, Engels edited his later work and helped spread his ideas through the growing socialist parties of Europe. Thinkers such as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg debated how and when a socialist transition would happen. In the twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs each developed Marxism in different directions.
Variants
Marxism split into many schools. Orthodox Marxism, associated with the Second International, expected socialism to grow out of mature capitalism, often through parliamentary parties. Marxism-Leninism added the idea of a disciplined vanguard party and became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and other states. Trotskyism and Maoism developed from that tradition. Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School and Gramsci, focused more on culture, ideology and consciousness. Later academic currents, such as analytical Marxism, tried to restate Marxist claims using the tools of modern economics and philosophy.
Criticisms
Economists in the liberal and free-market tradition argue that the labor theory of value is mistaken and that central planning cannot process the information that prices carry. Critics on the right and many liberals point out that states which called themselves Marxist became one-party systems with limited civil liberties. Some critics on the left, including anarchists, argue that Marxism places too much trust in state power during the transition. Philosophers such as Karl Popper argued that Marxist predictions were framed in ways that made them hard to test.
In practice
Marxist ideas influenced the labor movement, the early social democratic parties of Europe, and the revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, although those governments adapted Marxism in their own ways. In democracies, Marxist analysis shaped debates about working hours, trade unions and public ownership. Today Marxism is less common as a governing doctrine, but its concepts, such as class, alienation and ideology, are widely used in social science and cultural criticism.