Marxism

The name

"Marxism" was at first not a name any party or group gave itself but one applied from outside. In the 1850s followers of Wilhelm Weitling spoke of "Marxians", and within the International Workingmen's Association (the First International) the supporters of Bakunin labelled their opponents "Marxists", after which supporters too began to use the word. The term "Marxism" itself is attested from the 1880s, for instance in Paul Brousse's pamphlet Le Marxisme et l'Internationale of 1882.

Marx and Engels called their theory "scientific socialism", distinguishing it from utopian socialism and anarchism. When French socialists around Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue called themselves Marxists in the late 1870s, Marx, as Engels reported, said that all he knew was that he himself was not a Marxist. Yet in the 1888 edition of Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy Engels added that without Marx the theory would be far from what it is, and so it rightly bears his name. Later coinages — dialectical materialism, historical materialism, scientific communism, Marxism–Leninism — never displaced "Marxism".

The core of the theory

In "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism" Lenin traced it to classical German philosophy, British political economy and French utopian socialism. Marx regarded Hegel's dialectics as the summit of philosophy but replaced its idealism with materialism, and extended materialism to the understanding of human society as historical materialism. On this view productive forces develop until they come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, which become "fetters" on them; society has passed through primitive community, slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and after capitalism come socialism and communism.

Capital, published in 1867, became the most important Marxist work. Taking over the labour theory of value from Smith and Ricardo, Marx set out labour power and surplus value as categories of their own and analysed how capital grows through the surplus value created by wage workers. At the centre of the political theory is the abolition of private ownership of the means of production through the political rule of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat; as class antagonisms disappear the state is not abolished but "withers away" once it becomes superfluous. After the Paris Commune of 1871 Engels wrote in a preface to the Communist Manifesto that the Commune had proved that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.

From the Communist League to the Second International

In 1847 Marx and Engels joined the League of the Just founded by Weitling, and after two congresses, in a reorganisation in which Wilhelm Wolff also took part, it was renamed the Communist League, with Marx's "Workers of all countries, unite!" as its motto. The Communist Manifesto, written on the League's commission, appeared in February 1848 but had as yet no significant influence on the course of the revolutions of 1848–1849. After their defeat Marx and Engels revised their expectation of an imminent anti-capitalist revolution and gave more weight to the everyday struggles of workers as the franchise widened. Joseph Weydemeyer, close to Marx since the League years, went to the United States, where he worked as a journalist and Marxist revolutionary.

The International Workingmen's Association was founded in London in 1864. In the Paris Commune of 1871 the Hungarian-born Leó Frankel headed the commission of labour and exchange, and Elisabeth Dmitrieff, one of the founders of the Russian section of the First International, founded the Women's Union together with Nathalie Lemel.

The systematisation of Marx's and Engels's ideas into a unified doctrine began after their deaths in the writings of Franz Mehring, Karl Kautsky, Antonio Labriola and Georgi Plekhanov. Marxism was first applied in practice in the nineteenth-century labour movement, above all in German Social Democracy. The Erfurt Programme of 1891, written by Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, committed the party to Marxism and became a model for socialist parties across Europe. In the Second International, founded in 1889, the revolutionary standpoint prevailed until the early 1900s. In Russia former Narodniks including Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich founded the first Russian Marxist organisation, the Emancipation of Labour group, in Geneva in 1883, and Marxism began to spread from the late 1880s. Nikolai Fedoseev led the first Marxist circles in the country, and in the 1890s Pyotr Struve, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky and others set out "legal Marxism" in legal publications, arguing that Russia suffered not from capitalism but from its underdevelopment.

Reform and revolution

In the revisionism debate that began in German Social Democracy in 1896, Bernstein argued that capitalism could be changed gradually through reforms rather than overcome by social revolution. Orthodox Marxism divided into a reformist and a revolutionary wing with the split of Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and the formation of a "Marxist centre" around Kautsky. In Serbia Dimitrije Tucović helped found the Serbian Social Democratic Party and became a leader and theorist of the socialist movement.

When the Social Democratic deputies voted for war credits on 4 August 1914, Rosa Luxemburg invited anti-war members of the party to her Berlin flat that evening. From that meeting, attended among others by Franz Mehring and joined in the following week by Leo Jogiches and Karl Liebknecht, came the "Gruppe Internationale", known from 1916 as the Spartacus Group; it was re-founded during the November Revolution of 1918 as the Spartacus League and merged into the Communist Party of Germany founded on 1 January 1919. In "The Russian Revolution" (autumn 1918) Luxemburg welcomed the October Revolution in principle but criticised the Bolsheviks' party organisation and internal dictatorship; the essay was published only in 1922, three years after her death.

Twentieth-century branches

After the October Revolution Lenin's theory of imperialism, together with the ideas of Marx and Engels, became the state ideology of the Soviet Union. Lenin regarded himself not as the founder of a new current but as a defender of Marxism; after his death, however, "Leninism" came into general use for a Marxism adapted to Russian conditions, and Stalin reshaped it around socialism in one country into Marxism–Leninism. After 1945 states in Eastern Europe and China, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere followed Marxism–Leninism, and how far it can be derived from the basic ideas of the founders is counted among the most contested questions in Marxist theory. Trotskyism, with its theory of permanent revolution, rejected socialism in one country and claimed the true heritage of Marx and Lenin. In the early 1920s Western Marxism emerged from György Lukács, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci as a critical reflection on Lenin's Marxism, and at the same time left communism formed as a criticism of the Comintern from the left.

Social-democratic parties drifted away from Marxism: the West German SPD renounced its programmatic commitment with the Godesberg Programme of 1959, the Spanish PSOE in 1979 with the election of Felipe González as leader. After the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, when Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxha denounced Khrushchev's course as revisionist, communist parties in many countries split into pro-Soviet and "anti-revisionist" groups oriented to China and Albania, and in the 1960s the New Left and various forms of neo-Marxism appeared alongside the student movement. Some Marxist organisations belonged to no international line: in Spain Joaquín Maurín led the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc and then the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification.