What is Marxism?
Marxism is built on the writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels. It works as a tool for studying society and as a plan for changing it. As a tool, it looks at how a society makes its goods and which groups gain or lose from that. Marxists say that conflict between classes drives history. As a plan, it asks workers to take the place of the capitalist class and own the means of production together. Movements as different as social democracy and Soviet-style communism both grew from it. Universities still teach it in sociology, history and economics.
Core beliefs
- The way a society produces its goods shapes its laws, its politics and even its ideas. Marx called this historical materialism.
- Class conflict is the engine of history.
- In capitalism, workers create more value than they receive as wages, and the owners pocket the difference.
- Capitalism lurches into crises, piles wealth into few hands and leaves workers cut off from the products of their own labor.
- Workers in every country share the same basic interests.
- After a transition, society should become classless and the state should fade away.
History
Marx and Engels formed their views in the 1840s from three sources: German philosophy, above all Hegel, British economics and French socialism. The Communist Manifesto (1848) gave the political aims in a short, fiery text. Capital, whose first volume came out in 1867, was Marx's long study of how capitalism works. Marx died in 1883, and Engels edited the rest of Capital and became the main teacher of the next generation. Socialist parties across Europe took up the ideas. Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg argued over how and when the change would come. In the next century, Lenin, Gramsci and Georg Lukacs each pulled Marxism in a different direction.
Variants
Many schools have grown from the original text. The orthodox camp of the Second International expected socialism to ripen inside advanced capitalism, usually through election-winning parties. Lenin's version, Marxism-Leninism, added a tight vanguard party and became the state creed of the Soviet Union and its allies, with Trotskyism and Maoism growing out of that tradition. Western Marxists such as Gramsci and the Frankfurt School wrote about culture, ideology and consciousness. Analytical Marxists later tried to restate the claims using modern economics and philosophy.
Criticisms
Free-market economists reject the labor theory of value, and say planners cannot gather the knowledge that prices carry. Liberals and conservatives note that states claiming Marxism became one-party systems with few freedoms, and that those regimes carried out mass repression. Anarchists and other leftists fear that Marxists trust state power too much in the transitional stage. The philosopher Karl Popper charged that Marxist predictions were framed so that no result could disprove them. Marxists answer that those states betrayed the theory, and that capitalism's inequality and crises still need an explanation.
In practice
Marxist thinking helped shape trade unions, early social democratic parties and the revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, each of which adapted it to local conditions. In democracies, Marxist analysis fed debates on working hours, union rights and public ownership. It has faded as a governing creed. Yet words like class, alienation and ideology remain standard in the social sciences and in criticism of culture. On the 12 axes it scores strongly toward Public ownership, Planned markets and Secular, and close to the middle on Authority and Security.