I.

Introduction

Marxism, social and political theory based on the works of Karl Marx and his followers, associated with the socialist and communist movements.

Marx’s works can be broadly divided into his early philosophical writings (Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844/Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, both written 1844, published 1932, and Die Deutsche Ideologie/The German Ideology, both written 1845-1846, published 1932), his pamphlets (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei/Communist Manifesto, 1848), his analyses of contemporary events (for example, Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon/The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852, and Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich/The Civil War in France, 1871), his mature and fundamental works (Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie/Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859), and, above all, Das Kapital (vol. 1, 1867; vols. 2 and 3 published posthumously in 1885 and 1884 respectively). To summarize, let alone explain, this vast and complex theoretical system in a few paragraphs is impossible. The ramifications of the doctrine have included philosophy, economics, history, politics, art, literary criticism, and most of the social sciences. No theorist has been as analysed and discussed in the 20th century and onward as Karl Marx. The reason behind this attention is far from being purely academic. No comparable modern thinker has had as much impact on political parties and movements. Prior to the collapse of communism in Europe at the end of the Cold War, one third of humanity was under regimes purportedly inspired by Marx’s works.

II.

Early Works

In these early works Marx was still highly influenced by G. W. F. Hegel and Hegel’s more radical followers, the Young Hegelians. The concept of alienation was a central concept to his Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. Human beings are said to be alienated if their practical existence contradicts their human essence. For instance, if they are forced into boring, repetitive, and mind-numbing jobs instead of creative ones. Economic scarcity compels human beings to co-operate and devise ways of organizing production in order to satisfy their needs. On the basis of his reading of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Marx regarded work under capitalism as particularly degrading since the division of labour and the use of machines meant that previously creative work was divided into distinct operations, that human labour became similar to that of machines and, indeed, constantly displaced by the arrival of new machines.

Being compelled to hold on to a dismal situation by the need to earn a living is a further sign of the workers’ alienation since it demonstrates how little control they have over their own life and their own future. The workers are also alienated from what they produce, since the commodity they manufacture is taken away from them and they lose all control over its uses. Thus work under capitalism is unlike that of craft production characteristic of pre-capitalist labour, work that can provide pride to the craftsman. Marx writes in Wage-Labour and Capital (1849) that: “The worker who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc., does he consider his twelve hours spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary life begins for him when this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.”

Marx’s concept of alienation was also central to his views on religion. The continuing popularity of religion in the age of rationalism was not evidence of the enduring appeal of superstitious beliefs—as many of Marx’s radical contemporaries believed—but was regarded by Marx as a response to the pain of being alive, to earthly suffering. The lasting attraction of religion had a material basis in an oppressive environment as is made clear by the passage that immediately precedes the famous aphorism about religion being the opium of the people: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances.” In the same text, Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), he expresses for the first time his belief that the proletariat, that is the industrial working class, was the only truly revolutionary class, a class, he wrote, “that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings…because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general.”

By then Marx was in exile in France and had come into contact with French revolutionaries. He started to move away from philosophy to study the French and British contribution to political economy. His friendship with Friedrich Engels, who had written a vivid denunciation of the consequences of industrialization in Britain (The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844), was an important element in his intellectual evolution.

III.

The Communist Manifesto

With Engels, Marx drafted in 1848 what turned out to be his most widely read work: the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by a small leftist sect of little historical significance known as the Communist League. At that time the meaning of the term “communist” was quite different from that acquired in the 20th century when communism became the official ideology of the Soviet Union. In the mid-19th century communism did not denote a political regime but a somewhat ill-defined and utopian society characterized by communal ownership of the means of production and the absence of political institutions. It was a state of affairs described by Marx in The German Ideology as one where “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic.” It did not entail a centralized state, or the use of repression and political violence.

The Communist Manifesto was a relatively short work of some 12,000 words. It opened with the bombastic claim that: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism”, at a time when the authorities in most of Europe were far more worried by liberal demands for the suffrage, constitutional rights, national independence, or republicanism than by communism. It ended with a memorable rousing call: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” It provided a historical account of developments since the Middle Ages, criticized rival views of communism, and indicated the main reforms to be pursued in the immediate future including a progressive income tax, abolition of the rights of inheritance, state control over some sectors of the economy such as banks and transport, free education, and abolition of child labour.

Most of the Communist Manifesto, however, was devoted to a celebration of what, on a cursory reading, appeared to be the opponent, namely the industrial bourgeoisie. The merit of capitalism, according to Marx and Engels, was that it “has established the world market” and “given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.” The bourgeoisie is pushed by the imperative need to expand the markets for its products over the whole surface of the globe: “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In so doing, the capitalist bourgeoisie has “given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” In what clearly emerges as the first major statement on globalization, Marx and Engels added that capitalism creates new wants that can be satisfied only by the products of distant lands and climes. “The bourgeoisie”, they continued, thanks to immensely facilitated means of communication, “draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization” and forces them “to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In other words, it creates a world after its own image.” The chief reasons behind Marx’s praise of capitalism was that this was demolishing traditional society and creating one of the chief conditions for communism, namely a society of plenty in which people would be freed from the compulsion of necessity.

IV.

The Mature Writings

Marx was laying the foundation for his view of the evolution of society, what he called the materialist conception of history or historical materialism. The key passage where such view was expressed was in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He explained that the relations of production men enter into are the real basis of society. These relations are independent of their will and conditions social, political, and intellectual life: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Over this foundation, or base, rises a legal, political, and ideological superstructure that ensures the continuing reproduction of the economic relations. Each historical epoch is characterized by a specific mode of production to which corresponds a particular system of power and, consequently, a ruling class in constant open or hidden conflict with an oppressed class. Thus feudal society is dominated by a feudal mode of production in which the class of landlords extracts a surplus from a rural population bound to the land. This requires also a political and ideological system that holds the serfs in the belief that no other mode of existence is possible. The transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred when the forces of production (labour power and the actual means of production such as machines) could no longer develop within existing relations of production—that is the relations between classes.

For example, capitalist market relations started to develop within feudal society. Eventually feudal relations acted as fetters on the capitalist growth. Capitalism needed an expanding working class but feudalism maintained traditional legal and ideological arrangements that tied serfs to the soil. Capitalism also needed institutional and legal arrangements that would favour its own advance. When an alternative to the feudal social order is both conceivable and possible, a period of social revolution begins paving the way for the development of a capitalist economic structure and a corresponding superstructure. In Marx’s view, the history of humanity has progressed from primitive communism to slave society, then to feudalism, before reaching the present capitalist stage. In turn capitalism paves the way for communism, a society in which there are no classes, no private property, and hence no legal and political superstructure.

The strong deterministic element implicit in this view of history was the basis of subsequent disputes among Marxists. It was reinforced in Marx’s preface to the first edition of the first volume of Das Kapital where he wrote that: “The country that is more developed industrially shows the image of its future to the less developed.” In reality this theory of historical stages remains barely sketched in Marx’s subsequent works, since his main efforts went into analysing capitalist society rather than the mechanism of its collapse or the formation of a socialist or communist society.

Das Kapital should be regarded as a work in progress since Marx only succeeded in seeing the first volume to publication; the other two volumes were unfinished and published after his death. Most of the first volume is devoted to the discussion of the central concepts of capitalism.

In capitalism the fundamental relation, the wage relation, is based on a contract between juridically equal parties: the owners of capital (capitalists) pay the workers (the proletariat) wages in return for an agreed number of working hours. This apparently “fair” contract disguises a real inequality: the capitalists “cheat” the workers by appropriating far more than they pay out in wages and other necessary production costs. This special and statistically unquantifiable appropriation, or “surplus value”, gives the owners of capital great wealth and control over the economic development of society. They thus appropriate not simply wealth but also power. A complex political superstructure, consisting of laws and ideologies of various types, regulates and reinforces these social relations. In effect, by being in charge of the surplus that results from accumulation, capitalists can determine the overall direction of society. However, they cannot do as they please: the commodities produced by capitalism must possess “use-value”, otherwise they would not find buyers, but they must also have exchange-value—they are not needed for the capitalist’s own consumption but only to be exchanged for money. Thus capitalist production is primarily production for exchange and not for needs.

Competition drives inefficient capitalists into bankruptcy and leads to concentration and monopolies. Markets, however, are constantly expanded while techniques of production and forms of exchange are ceaselessly revolutionized. Crises are central to capitalism. Capitalists are driven to try to increase the length of the working day, its intensity, or the productivity of labour to counter the historic tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Workers, if appropriately organized, will offer resistance. Capitalists try to enlarge their markets while paying their workers as little as possible. Yet if they all succeeded, workers’ consumption and consequently their demands for goods would decrease, markets would shrink, and capitalism would enter into a crisis. Crises, however, are part and parcel of capitalist development, a kind of regulatory mechanism that enables the further growth and concentration of capital: “One capitalist always kills many.” Capitalism, moreover, also brings many benefits such as co-operation in the work process, the practical uses of science and, as Marx wrote in the concluding section of Das Kapital, “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime”, something Marx regarded as a positive development.

V.

Marx and Politics

Marx also regularly applied himself to analysing all the major questions and events of his day, from British colonial expansion in Asia to the American Civil War, from the seizure of power in France by Louis Bonaparte in December 1851 and his subsequent self-proclamation as Emperor Napoleon III, to the Paris Commune of 1871. He wrote pamphlets, contributed to newspapers, and was in correspondence with the radical intelligentsia throughout Europe. As Marx never produced a classic political treatise, much of this work was used by his followers to delineate a theory of politics. Thus The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Napoleon provided elements for a Marxist analysis of a 20th-century phenomenon, namely fascism and military dictatorship, by suggesting that when the oppressed classes are not strong enough to overcome the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is no longer able to rule by the “normal” exercise of democratic power, a dictatorship will emerge to deprive the working classes of their basic rights.

In The Civil War in France, written shortly after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, he hailed the revolutionary government of Paris as the first case of the exercise of working class power and suggested that society should be organized in a largely decentralized way with communes to be established to manage their common affairs and send delegates to a national assembly for “the few but important functions which still would remain for a central government.”

Finally in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, the programme agreed in 1875 by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Marx returned to the question of how a communist society should be organized. The operating principle was to be “to each according to his needs”, a principle superior to that required in the first stage of constructing communism, that of socialism, “to each according to the work performed.”

VI.

Reception and Interpretations

Marx’s complex and at times obscure writings allowed for disparate interpretations, hence the success of a simplified account of “scientific socialism”, such as Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892), which was far more widely read in the socialist movement than the far more complex theories embodied in Das Kapital. Before 1914 the dominant orthodoxy was that propounded by the best-organized socialist party of the time, the German SPD, and by its leading thinker, Karl Kautsky, who stressed the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse. The task of socialists, according to this reading, was that of consolidating the strength of the revolutionary movement and obtaining reforms and social improvements for the working class. With the passage of time, the growth of capitalism would eliminate all classes except for a small class of capitalists and a huge proletariat. Strictly speaking the “revolutionary party” did not make a revolution—it waited for one to occur.

Eduard Bernstein, the leading revisionist of Marxism, argued against Kautsky’s fatalistic view of historical development by pointing out that some of the predictions imputed to Marx had not occurred, in particular that the middle classes, far from disappearing, were expanding, and that capitalism had succeeded in weathering major crises. In his view, Marxists should become less obsessed with the “final goal” of socialism and more with reforms that would more or less imperceptibly alter capitalism by giving more power to democratic institutions. His opponents pointed out that the middle classes which were expanding were not the craft producers, the artisans, and the shopkeepers described by Marx, but the white collar workers who were dependent on large-scale capital as much as the industrial working class. They also pointed out that Bernstein had failed to distinguish between “the final capitalist crisis”, which had obviously not yet occurred, and the business or trade cycles (also explained by Marx) that were an inevitable part of the constant reorganization of capitalism.

In Russia, Marxism was initially developed by Georgy Plekhanov, in opposition to the narodniki, the Russian populist movement (including its terrorist wing) who believed that Russia could skip the stage of capitalism. Some of the early Russian Marxists, dubbed “legal Marxists”, held on to a particularly deterministic version of the doctrine, going as far as to claim that, since there could be no transition to socialism before Russia had become a fully capitalist state, it was the duty of Marxists to fight to establish capitalism, a view which, as we have seen, has some basis in Marx’s writings. When the first Russian Revolution broke out in March 1917, Vladimir Lenin, once a follower of Plekhanov, declared that Russia’s bourgeois revolution had now taken place and that it was possible to move rapidly towards the socialist phase. This was the theoretical justification for the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917.

By then, Lenin had added to the Marxist doctrine three significant texts, all of which became part of the Marxist canon only after his death. In What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin dealt with the principles of revolutionary organization, claiming that the working class could not spontaneously reach a socialist consciousness but that this had to be instilled by a centralized party or professional revolutionaries. The second theory was that of imperialism, developed during World War I. His Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) attributed the causes of the war to the capitalist competition between states for new global markets and the emergence of world monopolies. One of the consequences of this was that communists should support “backward” (i.e. non-capitalist) nations—like Russia, the weakest link in the imperialist chain—resisting imperial exploitation. Finally, his State and Revolution (1917) envisaged simplified bureaucratic and libertarian structures for the future socialist state in stark contrast to the actual Soviet state that later emerged during the Russian Civil War.

After Lenin’s death in 1924 his intellectual heritage was appropriated and disputed by his numerous followers, particularly Stalin and Trotsky. His scattered writings, essentially a response to tactical and strategic needs rather than theoretical ones, were partly systematized and incorporated in a new doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. Under Stalin and his successors, the authoritarian traits of the Soviet Union, already developing during the Russian Civil War against the supporters of the former Tsarist regime, grew to such an extent that Marxism became a kind of secular state religion. Under the label of “dialectical materialism”, a philosophical formula popularized by Engels and others, Marxism came to be regarded as a science on a par with the natural sciences, rather than a tool of analysis requiring constant updating.

As a result many of the subsequent developments of Marxism occurred outside the Soviet Union. Between the two world wars the leaders of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, in particular Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, developed a theory of “slow revolution” that would become the central strategic concept of so-called Austro-Marxism. Each successive measures of a socialist government must not only achieve a more equitable distribution, but also improve production; no aspect of the capitalist system of production should be destroyed without establishing at the same time a socialist organization which can produce goods at least as effectively.

In Italy during the 1930s the communist leader Antonio Gramsci, incarcerated by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, reflected on the defeat of the left in his Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1948-1951). His starting point was that social and political organization in Western societies was far more complex and sophisticated than it had been in Tsarist Russia. The solid civil society and advanced state that was characteristic of the West could not be taken over with a “war of movement”, as he called a Bolshevik-style revolution, but required a much longer and complex strategy (“a war of position”) aimed at achieving hegemony. Hegemony is defined as a new kind of consensus constructed largely by political and intellectual forces. Gramsci used his main categories to analyse the development of American capitalism (“Fordism”) in terms of the absence of a feudal past and of the classes associated with it. Gramsci’s works achieved considerable influence in the inter-war period, not only in his native Italy where Palmiro Togliatti, his successor at the head of the Italian Communist Party, pioneered a distinctive non-Soviet “national road to socialism”, but in places as different as Japan, Latin America, and the United States.

In the years following the Russian Revolution the majority of socialist parties refused to accept Lenin’s guidance and embrace communism, but they remained committed to Marxism. By the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, even this ideological commitment became less important and was eventually discarded, notably by the German SPD at their Congress of Bad Godesberg in 1959. Marxism, however, remained a state doctrine in the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s death in 1953, and inspired various national liberation movements in the former colonies, in Latin America, and above all in China where, suitably modified by Mao Zedong, it became the guiding ideology of the country after the communists took over in 1949.

In the West, and particularly in continental Europe, Marxism kept its appeal particularly in academic circles. It gave powerful intellectual backing to the moral outrage arising from the purported iniquities of capitalism and to the hope that a system that ought to disintegrate would eventually do so. The theory was sophisticated enough to appeal to the scholarly minded while being amenable to modification and developments. Most of the post-war European and North American Marxists have been highly critical of the Soviet Union.

The spread of Marxism among the intelligentsia was facilitated by the enforced exile of many Marxists after the rise of Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe between the wars, including the scholars based at the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung (“Institute for Social Research”). The leading lights of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, first sought refuge in Britain, then in the US, before returning to Germany after World War II. They opened up Marxism to other fields, notably psychoanalysis, sociology, literature, and music, pioneering the use of “critical theory”. Another member of the school, Herbert Marcuse stayed in the US where he examined how consensus was achieved in an advanced capitalist society in his Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), a text that was highly influential in the student movement of the 1960s. Walter Benjamin, also close to the Frankfurt School, developed analyses on culture and the arts, notably the famous The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács used Marx’s ideas on alienation in his History and Class Consciousness (1923) and pioneered a Marxist analysis of literature in defence of the realist tradition in the novel in his The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1960s and 1970s Horkheimer’s successor as director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Jürgen Habermas, reformulated critical theory to deal with issues such as the public sphere, technology and capitalism, legitimation crises, and communication.

In France, Jean-Paul Sartre, the most influential French public intellectual of the post-war era, had initially examined the question of personal freedom, choice, and personal responsibility in his Being and Nothingness (1943); later, in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he reformulated the problem from a Marxist perspective.

In the 1960s and 1970s Marxism continued to be one of the most important currents of thought in European academic circles, reaching its peak in France when Louis Althusser and his school developed a close “structuralist” reading of Marx’s Das Kapital.

Little was done to develop a Marxist economic analysis since the German socialist Rudolf Hilferding had written Finance Capital (1910) until the 1950s and 1960s when the American economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy introduced elements of Keynesianism into Marxism in their book Monopoly Capitalism (1966). They defined the new stage of capitalism as one in which novel techniques of economic management are developed to absorb the surplus produced and thereby maintain growth. These techniques include military expenditures, as well as “wasteful” consumption. To the extent that the revolutionary potential of the working class is eliminated or reduced by such increased prosperity and employment, the potential for anti-capitalist activity will move to the developing world. Work such as this contributed to the formulation of Marxist views on dependency, peripheral capitalism, and neo-colonialism particularly in Latin America, India, and the Middle East.

Much of the greatest impact of Marxism since the early 1960s has been in the universities, above all in the English-speaking world where, paradoxically, communist parties have been of less importance than elsewhere. The majority of the contributors and readers of the most important and long-lasting Marxist journals in the world, the London-based New Left Review and the New York-based Monthly Review, are academics based in the US, Britain, Australia, and Canada. This contrasts with the period prior to World War II when political activists and leaders, such as Lenin and Gramsci, and continental theorists were in the forefront of the development of Marxism.

Marxism has also significantly contributed to historical studies. Marxist historians have tended to investigate broad historical processes, particularly revolutionary or near-revolutionary events such as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the role of the bourgeoisie, the development of the working class, class formation and the power structure, the function of dissenting ideas, and the development of the welfare state. It has also directly or indirectly influenced the social history, feminism, and colonial and cultural studies.

In France, Marxist historians produced what are now classic, if disputed, accounts of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre, with his The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), established a landmark in the development of today’s “history from below”. Ernest Labrousse (1895-1988) produced a massive study of the economic crisis that led to the French Revolution, while Albert Soboul (1914-1982) published in 1962 what was for long the standard text, The French Revolution 1787-1799 (English translation 1975). Marxism has also influenced the most important French school of history, the Annales School, which, like Marxism, tries to cut across discipline and offer a “total” view of history.

In Britain, the Communist Party Historians’ Group, which flourished from 1946 until the early 1950s, produced some of the leading British historians of our time, notably Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 1946), E. P. Thompson (the enormously influential The Making of the English Working Class, 1963), Christopher Hill (author of major studies on the intellectual origins of the English Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, and Puritanism), and Eric Hobsbawm (his trilogy on “the long 19th century” of 1789-1914, and The Age of Extremes, 1994, devoted to the “short 20th century” of 1914-1989). In the US, Marxist historians such as Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974) have produced important studies on slave society, while the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Britain has been given a new interpretation by Robert Brenner in a set of wide-ranging studies.

Marxism, increasingly detached from immediate practical politics—since there are now hardly any explicitly Marxist political parties anywhere in the world—is likely to continue to be used, alongside other approaches, in the study of society.