Marxism the philosophy of Karl Marx, or any of several systems of thought or approaches to social criticism derived from Marx. The term is also applied, incorrectly, to certain sociopolitical structures created by dominant Communist parties during the mid-twentieth century. Karl Marx himself, apprised of the ideas of certain French critics who invoked his name, remarked that he knew at least that he was not a Marxist. The fact that his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a popularizer with a greater interest than Marx in the natural sciences, outlived him and wrote, among other things, a ‘dialectics of nature’ that purported to discover certain universal natural laws, added to the confusion. Lenin, the leading Russian Communist revolutionary, near the end of his life discovered previously unacknowledged connections between Marx’s Capital (1867) and Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) and concluded (in his Philosophical Notebooks) that Marxists for a half-century had not understood Marx. Specific political agendas of, among others, the Marxist faction within the turn-of-the-century German Social Democratic Party, the Bolshevik faction of Russian socialists led by Lenin, and later governments and parties claiming allegiance to ‘Marxist-Leninist principles’ have contributed to reinterpretations. For several decades in the Soviet Union and countries allied with it, a broad agreement concerning fundamental Marxist doctrines was established and politically enforced, resulting in a doctrinaire version labeled ‘orthodox Marxism’ and virtually ensuring the widespread, wholesale rejection of Marxism as such when dissidents taught to accept this version as authentic Marxism came to power.
Marx never wrote a systematic exposition of his thought, which in any case drastically changed emphases across time and included elements of history, economics, and sociology as well as more traditional philosophical concerns. In one letter he specifically warns against regarding his historical account of Western capitalism as a transcendental analysis of the supposedly necessary historical development of any and all societies at a certain time. It is thus somewhat paradoxical that Marxism is often identified as a ‘totalizing’ if not ‘totalitarian’ system by postmodernist philosophers who reject global theories or ‘grand narratives’ as inherently invalid. However, the evolution of Marxism since Marx’s time helps explain this identification.
That ‘orthodox’ Marxism would place heavy emphasis on historical determinism – the inevitability of a certain general sequence of events leading to the replacement of capitalism by a socialist economic system (in which, according to a formula in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, each person would be remunerated according to his/her work) and eventually by a communist one (remuneration in accordance with individual needs) – was foreshadowed by Plekhanov. In The Role of the Individual in History, he portrayed individual idiosyncrasies as accidental: e.g., had Napoleon not existed the general course of history would not have turned out differently. In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin offered epistemological reinforcement for the notion that Marxism is the uniquely true worldview by defending a ‘copy’ or ‘reflection’ theory of knowledge according to which true concepts simply mirror objective reality, like photographs. Elsewhere, however, he argued against ‘economism,’ the inference that the historical inevitability of communism’s victory obviated political activism. Lenin instead maintained that, at least under the repressive political conditions of czarist Russia, only a clandestine party of professional revolutionaries, acting as the vanguard of the working class and in its interests, could produce fundamental change. Later, during the long political reign of Josef Stalin, the hegemonic Communist Party of the USSR was identified as the supreme interpreter of these interests, thus justifying totalitarian rule. So-called Western Marxism opposed this ‘orthodox’ version, although the writings of one of its foremost early representatives, Georg Lukacs, who brilliantly perceived the close connection between Hegel’s philosophy and the early thought of Marx before the unpublished manuscripts proving this connection had been retrieved from archives, actually tended to reinforce both the view that the party incarnated the ideal interests of the proletariat (see his History and Class Consciousness) and an aesthetics favoring the art of ‘socialist realism’ over more experimental forms. His contemporary, Karl Korsch, in Marxism as Philosophy, instead saw Marxism as above all a heuristic method, pointing to salient phenomena (e.g., social class, material conditioning) generally neglected by other philosophies. His counsel was in effect followed by the Frankfurt School of critical theory, including Walter Benjamin in the area of aesthetics, Theodor Adorno in social criticism, and Wilhelm Reich in psychology. A spate of ‘new Marxisms’ – the relative degrees of their fidelity to Marx’s original thought cannot be weighed here – developed, especially in the wake of the gradual rediscovery of Marx’s more ethically oriented, less deterministic early writings. Among the names meriting special mention in this context are Ernst Bloch, who explored Marxism’s connection with utopian thinking; Herbert Marcuse, critic of the ‘one-dimensionality’ of industrial society; the Praxis school (after the name of their journal and in view of their concern with analyzing social practices) of Yugoslav philosophers; and the later Jean-Paul Sartre. Also worthy of note are the writings, many of them composed in prison under Mussolini’s Italian Fascist rule, of Antonio Gramsci, who stressed the role of cultural factors in determining what is dominant politically and ideologically at any given time. Simultaneous with the decline and fall of regimes in which ‘orthodox Marxism’ was officially privileged has been the recent development of new approaches, loosely connected by virtue of their utilization of techniques favored by British and American philosophers, collectively known as analytic Marxism. Problems of justice, theories of history, and the questionable nature of Marx’s theory of surplus value have been special concerns to these writers. This development suggests that the current unfashionableness of Marxism in many circles, due largely to its understandable but misleading identification with the aforementioned regimes, is itself only a temporary phenomenon, even if future Marxisms are likely to range even further from Marx’s own specific concerns while still sharing his commitment to identifying, explaining, and criticizing hierarchies of dominance and subordination, particularly those of an economic order, in human society.
See also CRITICAL THEORY, FRANKFURT SCHOOL , LUKACS , MARX , PRAXIS , PRAXIS SCHOO. W.L.M.