Introduction
Marxism is the political, economic, and philosophical tradition derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, offering systematic critique of capitalism and theory of revolutionary social transformation. Emerging in the mid-19th century amidst industrial capitalism’s rapid expansion, Marxism analyzes capitalism as historically specific system based on exploitation of wage labor, driven by internal contradictions that generate both recurring crises and potential for revolutionary transformation toward socialism and communism.
Marxism’s central insights include: (1) historical materialism—social organization and consciousness are shaped by material conditions of production; (2) class struggle—history is driven by conflicts between classes with antagonistic interests; (3) surplus value—capitalists exploit workers by appropriating value created beyond wages; (4) alienation—capitalism estranges workers from their labor, products, and human essence; (5) ideology—dominant ideas serve ruling-class interests; and (6) dialectics—reality develops through contradictions and their resolutions.
Since Marx’s death (1883), Marxism has evolved into diverse, often competing traditions: classical Marxism (Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov), revolutionary Marxism (Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg), Western Marxism (Lukács, Gramsci, Frankfurt School), structural Marxism (Althusser), autonomist Marxism, analytical Marxism, and numerous Marxist feminisms, anti-racist Marxisms, and postcolonial Marxisms. Despite this diversity, all Marxist traditions share commitment to understanding capitalism systematically, recognizing its exploitative character, and working toward its revolutionary transformation.
Understanding Marxism is essential for critical theory. Even thinkers who reject Marx’s conclusions engage his conceptual innovations. Nearly every article on this wiki—from hegemony to racial capitalism, from reification to platform capitalism—builds on, extends, or critically engages Marxist analysis.
Historical Development
Origins: The 1840s-1860s
Marxism emerged from Marx and Engels’s intellectual and political work in 1840s Europe. After meeting in Paris (1844), they collaborated on works establishing Marxist foundations: The German Ideology (1845-46) articulated historical materialism; The Communist Manifesto (1848) provided revolutionary program analyzing capitalism’s dynamics and predicting its global expansion; Capital Volume 1 (1867) systematically analyzed capitalist production.
This early period established Marxism as:
- Scientific socialism: Grounding socialism in analysis of capitalism’s actual dynamics rather than utopian ideals
- Historical materialism: Explaining social change through material production’s evolution
- Revolutionary theory: Linking theoretical analysis to working-class political organization
The Second International (1889-1914)
After Marx’s death, the Second International coordinated socialist parties internationally. This period saw Marxism’s spread across Europe, development of mass socialist parties (particularly German SPD), and theoretical consolidation by Engels, Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov, and others.
Orthodox Marxism emerged as dominant interpretation:
- Economic determinism: Base determines superstructure; socialism follows inevitably from capitalism’s contradictions
- Evolutionary socialism: Democratic transition through parliamentary politics
- Scientific certainty: Marxism as science discovering historical laws
Revisionist debates: Eduard Bernstein challenged orthodoxy, arguing capitalism stabilized rather than intensifying contradictions, advocating gradual reforms over revolution. Rosa Luxemburg and others defended revolutionary Marxism while developing new analyses (imperialism, spontaneity, mass strikes).
The Russian Revolution and Leninism (1917-1924)
Vladimir Lenin transformed Marxism through theoretical innovations and revolutionary practice. The Bolshevik Revolution (1917) proved Marxism’s practical-political dimension, establishing first socialist state while generating fierce debates about revolutionary strategy, party organization, and transitional politics.
Leninist innovations:
- Vanguard party: Disciplined revolutionary organization of professional revolutionaries
- Imperialism: Analyzing capitalism’s global expansion and uneven development
- Revolutionary defeatism: Turning imperialist war into civil war
- Democratic centralism: Organizational principle combining internal debate with external unity
Leninism’s ambiguous legacy includes both inspiring global liberation movements and justifying authoritarian party-state structures suppressing democracy and dissent.
Western Marxism (1920s-1960s)
Disappointment over Western European revolutions’ failures and horror at Soviet authoritarianism generated Western Marxism—emphasizing culture, consciousness, and philosophy over economics and party politics.
Key figures and innovations:
Georg Lukács (History and Class Consciousness, 1923): Developed reification concept, emphasized totality and class consciousness, defended Hegelian dialectical method.
Antonio Gramsci (Prison Notebooks, 1929-1935): Analyzed hegemony—cultural leadership manufacturing consent. Emphasized civil society, organic intellectuals, and war of position.
Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin): Developed critical theory integrating Marx, Freud, and philosophy. Analyzed culture industry, instrumental reason, and administered society.
Western Marxism shifted focus from economic base to cultural superstructure, from party organization to philosophical critique, from optimistic revolutionism to pessimistic cultural diagnosis. Critics charged it abandoned working-class politics for academic philosophy.
Structural Marxism (1960s-1970s)
Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism, influenced by structuralism and psychoanalysis, challenged humanist Marxism. Key claims:
- Epistemological break: Mature Marx rejected early humanism for scientific analysis
- Theoretical anti-humanism: No human essence or subject outside ideology
- Relative autonomy: Economic base doesn’t mechanically determine superstructure; levels have relative autonomy
- Ideological State Apparatuses: Analyzing how capitalism reproduces itself through ideology
Althusserian Marxism influenced poststructuralism, ideology theory, and cultural studies while generating fierce debates about determinism, agency, and politics.
Marxist Feminism (1970s-present)
Feminist scholars extended Marxism to analyze gender exploitation:
- Social reproduction theory: Capitalism depends on unwaged domestic labor (Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser)
- Wages for Housework: Demanding recognition and compensation for reproductive labor
- Patriarchy and capitalism: Analyzing how gender and class systems interlock
- Intersectional Marxism: Integrating race, gender, and class analysis
Autonomist Marxism (1960s-present)
Italian Autonomism (Operaismo) emphasized workers’ autonomous power:
- Workers’ struggles drive history; capital responds reactively
- Refusal of work forces capitalist innovation
- Social factory: Capitalism colonizes all life beyond workplace
- Composition analysis: Understanding working class’s changing structure
Figures include Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Silvia Federici. Influenced contemporary movements, precarity analysis, and post-work politics.
Analytical Marxism (1980s-2000s)
G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, and others reconstructed Marxism using analytical philosophy and rational choice theory:
- Rigorous logical analysis
- Microfoundations for macro claims
- Abandoning dialectics and Hegelian method
- Game-theoretic models of exploitation
Critics argued this evacuated Marxism’s critical and revolutionary content.
Postcolonial and Anti-Racist Marxisms (1970s-present)
Scholars challenged Eurocentrism while extending Marxist analysis:
- Racial capitalism (Cedric Robinson): Capitalism is inherently racial, not class plus race
- Dependency theory: Analyzing global capitalism’s uneven development
- Anti-colonial Marxism: Fanon, Cabral, Mariátegui connecting Marxism to decolonization
- Black Marxism: Angela Davis, CLR James, Stuart Hall integrating race and class
Core Concepts
Historical Materialism
The philosophical foundation: consciousness doesn’t determine social being; social being determines consciousness. How societies produce material necessities shapes their legal, political, and intellectual life.
Base and superstructure: Economic base (forces and relations of production) conditions political/legal superstructure and corresponding consciousness. Yet superstructure has “relative autonomy”—affecting base while ultimately shaped by it.
Historical stages: Societies progress through modes of production (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism) driven by contradictions between productive forces and relations of production.
Class Struggle
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Each mode of production generates fundamental class antagonism (master/slave, lord/serf, bourgeoisie/proletariat) whose conflicts drive historical transformation.
Under capitalism: bourgeoisie owns means of production; proletariat owns only labor-power. This antagonism generates conflicts over wages, working conditions, and ultimately system transformation.
Surplus Value and Exploitation
Capitalism’s secret: capitalists purchase labor-power at its value (cost of reproduction) but extract labor exceeding that value. This surplus value is profit’s source—not unfair exchange but exploitation built into wage labor’s structure.
Labor theory of value: Commodities’ value derives from socially necessary labor-time. Capitalists appropriate surplus value through ownership of means of production.
Alienation
Under capitalism, workers are alienated from:
- Products of labor (owned by capitalists)
- Labor process itself (controlled by capital)
- Species-being (creative human essence reduced to wage slavery)
- Other humans (competitive rather than cooperative relations)
Ideology and False Consciousness
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Dominant ideology naturalizes capitalism, making exploitation appear as fair exchange, hierarchy as merit, and capitalism as eternal.
False consciousness: Workers misrecognize their interests, accepting ideas contrary to their class position. Overcoming this requires developing class consciousness through organization and struggle.
Revolution and Communism
Capitalism’s contradictions (overproduction, falling profit rate, class struggle) generate crises making revolution possible. Socialist revolution establishes workers’ control of production, eventually leading to communism: classless, stateless society where “free development of each is condition for free development of all.”
Major Debates
Reform vs. Revolution
Can capitalism be gradually reformed into socialism (Bernstein, social democracy) or does transformation require revolutionary rupture (Lenin, Luxemburg)?
Economic Determinism
How much do economic structures determine culture, politics, and consciousness? Orthodox Marxism emphasized determinism; Western Marxism emphasized relative autonomy.
The State
Is the state merely ruling-class instrument (instrumentalist view) or does it have relative autonomy (Poulantzas)? Can workers use the state for transformation or must it be smashed (Lenin)?
Class and Identity
How do race, gender, sexuality, and nation relate to class? Are they:
- Derivative from class (orthodox economism)
- Autonomous systems intersecting with class (dual/triple systems theory)
- Mutually constitutive (intersectionality, racial capitalism)
The Revolutionary Subject
Is the industrial proletariat uniquely revolutionary (orthodox view), or can other classes/groups (students, colonized peoples, precarious workers, multitude) be revolutionary subjects?
Contemporary Relevance
Platform Capitalism and Digital Labor
Platform capitalism vindicates Marx’s analysis:
- Platforms extract surplus value from digital labor
- Algorithmic management intensifies exploitation
- Network effects create monopolies Marx predicted
- Gig economy returns to pre-industrial precarity
Climate Crisis
Marx’s ecological insights (metabolic rift) address climate:
- Capitalism creates “metabolic rift” between humans and nature
- Profit motive drives environmental destruction
- Sustainable society requires transforming production’s social form
Financial Crises
2008 crisis and ongoing instability vindicate Marxist crisis theory:
- Tendency toward overproduction and falling profit rate
- Financialization as response to declining profitability
- Contradictions between socialized production and private appropriation
Racial Capitalism
Contemporary scholars show capitalism was racial from inception:
- Slavery wasn’t pre-capitalist but capitalist institution
- Colonialism was capitalism’s spatial form
- Racism organizes exploitation, not just ideology added to class
Global Inequality
Marxist analysis illuminates:
- Imperialism and uneven development
- Core-periphery relations
- Global value chains exploiting Global South labor
- Migration as response to capitalist displacement
Major Works
Foundational Texts
- Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848
- Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1. 1867
- Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. 1857-58
- Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 1884
Classical Marxism
- Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1917
- Luxembourg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. 1913
- Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 1930
Western Marxism
- Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. 1923
- Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. 1929-1935
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. 1955
- Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. 1964
- Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947
Structural Marxism
- Althusser, Louis. For Marx. 1965
- Althusser, Louis. Reading Capital. 1965
Feminist Marxism
- Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. 2004
- Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism. 2013
- Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women. 1983
Racial Capitalism
- Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism. 1983
- Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. 1981
- Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal. 1988
Contemporary
- Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 2005
- Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991
- Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. 2016