Marxism is is a theory and method of

working class self-emancipation. As a theory, it

relies on a method of socioeconomic analysis that
views classrelations and social conflict using
a materialist interpretation of historical
development and takes a dialectical view of social
transformation. It originates from the works of
19th-century German philosophers Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Marxism uses a methodology, now known
as historical materialism, to analyze and critique
the development of class society and especially
of capitalism as well as the role of class
struggles in systemic economic, social, and
political change.
According to Marxist theory, in capitalist
Karl Marx (1818-1883) societies, class conflict arises due to contradictions
between the material interests of the oppressed and
exploited proletariat—a class of wage labourers
employed to produce goods and services—and the bourgeoisie—the ruling class that owns
the means of production and extracts its wealth through appropriation of the surplus
product produced by the proletariat in the form of profit.
This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's productive
forces against its relations of production, results in a period of short-term crises as the
bourgeoisie struggle to manage the intensifying alienation of labor experienced by the proletariat,
albeit with varying degrees of class consciousness.
In periods of deep crisis, the resistance of the oppressed can culminate in a proletarian
revolution which, if victorious, leads to the establishment of socialism—a socioeconomic system
based on social ownership of the means of production, distribution based on one's
contribution and production organized directly for use. As the productive forces continued to
advance, Marx hypothesized that socialism would ultimately be transformed into a communist
society: a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership and the underlying
principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
Marxism has developed into many different branches and schools of thought, with the
result that there is now no single definitive Marxist theory.1 Different Marxian schools place a
greater emphasis on certain aspects of classical Marxism while rejecting or modifying other

1 Wolff and Resnick, Richard and Stephen (August 1987). Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 130. 
aspects. Many schools of thought have sought to combine Marxian concepts and non-Marxian
concepts, which has then led to contradicting conclusions.2 However, lately there is movement
toward the recognition that historical materialism and dialectical materialism remains the
fundamental aspect of all Marxist schools of thought.3
Marxism has had a profound and influential impact on global academia and has expanded
into many fields such as archaeology, anthropology,4 media studies,5 political
s c i e n c e , t h e a t e r , h i s t o r y, s o c i o l o g y, a r t h i s t o r y a n d t h e o r y, c u l t u r a l
studies, education, economics, ethics, criminology, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, film
theory, critical psychology and philosophy.6

HISTORY

Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political
economist and socialist revolutionary who addressed the matters of alienation and exploitation of
the working class, the capitalist mode of production and historical materialism. He is famous for
analysing history in terms of class struggle, summarised in the initial line introducing The
Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles".7
Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August
1895) was a German political philosopher who together with
Marx co-developed communist theory. Marx and Engels first
met in September 1844. Discovering that they had similar
views of philosophy and socialism, they collaborated and
wrote works such as Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family).
After Marx was deported from France in January 1845, they
moved to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of
expression than other European countries. In January 1846,
they returned to Brussels to establish the Communist
Correspondence Committee.

Friedrich Engels (1829-1895)

2 O'Hara, Phillip (September 2003). Encyclopedia of Political Economy, Volume 2. Routledge. p. 107.

3 Ermak, Gennady (2016). Communism: The Great Misunderstanding.

4 Bridget O'Laughlin (1975) Marxist Approaches in Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 4: pp. 341–70

5 S. L. Becker (1984) "Marxist Approaches to Media Studies: The British Experience", Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1(1): pp. 66–80.

6 Manuel Alvarado, Robin Gutch, and Tana Wollen (1987) Learning the Media: Introduction to Media Teaching, Palgrave Macmillan.

7 The Communist Manifesto (1847). Chapter one.

 In 1847, they began writing The Communist Manifesto (1848), based on Engels' The
Principles of Communism. Six weeks later, they published the 12,000-word pamphlet in
February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled them and they moved to Cologne, where they
published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a politically radical newspaper. By 1849, they had to
leave Cologne for London. The Prussian authorities pressured the British government to expel
Marx and Engels, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused.
After Marx's death in 1883, Engels became the editor and translator of Marx's writings.
With his Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State(1884) –
analysing monogamous marriage as guaranteeing male social domination of women, a concept
analogous, in communist theory, to the capitalist class's economic domination of the working
class—Engels made intellectually significant contributions to feminist theory and Marxist
feminism.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
The materialist theory of history
8analyses the underlying causes of

societal development and change from

the perspective of the collective ways
that humans make their living. All
constituent features of a society
(social classes, political pyramid,
ideologies) are assumed to stem from
economic activity, an idea often
portrayed with the metaphor of
How the decline of the working class made Labour a
party of the bourgeois left the base and superstructure.
The base and superstructure
metaphor describes the totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their
social existence. According to Marx: "The sum total of the forces of production accessible to
men determines the condition of society" and forms a society's economic base. The base includes
the material forces of production, that is the labour and material means of production and
relations of production, i.e., the social and political arrangements that regulate production and
distribution. From this base rises a superstructure of legal and political "forms of social
consciousness" of political and legal institutions that derive from the economic base that
conditions the superstructure and a society's dominant ideology. Conflicts between the
development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social
revolutions and thus the resultant changes to the economic base will lead to the transformation of

8 Evans, p. 53; Marx's account of the theory is the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
the superstructure.9 This relationship is reflexive, as at first the base gives rise to the
superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organization, hence that formed
social organization can act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure so that the
relationship is not static but a dialectic, expressed and driven by conflicts and contradictions. As
Engels clarified: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes".10
Marx considered class conflicts as the driving force of human history since these recurring
conflicts have manifested themselves as distinct transitional stages of development in Western
Europe. Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of
development in relations of production:11
• Primitive communism: as in co-operative tribal societies.
• Slave society: a development of tribal to city-state; aristocracy is born.
• Feudalism: aristocrats are the ruling class; merchants evolve into capitalists.
• Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the proletariat.

Criticism of capitalism
According to the Marxist theoretician
and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, "the
principal content of Marxism" was "Marx's
economic doctrine".12 Marx believed that the
capitalist bourgeois and their economists were
promoting what he saw as the lie that "the
interests of the capitalist and of the worker
are ... one and the same", therefore he believed
that they did this by purporting the concept that
"the fastest possible growth of
productive capital" was best not only for the
Civil wars between the proletariat and
wealthy capitalists but also for the workers bourgeois
because it provided them with employment. 13

9  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Preface, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas and Engels

10 The Communist Manifesto (1847). Chapter one.

11 Letter to editor of the Russian newspaper paper Otetchestvennye Zapiskym (1877). 

12 Lenin 1967 (1913). p. 7.

13 Marx 1849.
 Exploitation is a matter of surplus labour—the amount of labour one performs beyond
what one receives in goods. Exploitation has been a socioeconomic feature of every class society
and is one of the principal features distinguishing the social classes. The power of one social
class to control the means of production enables its exploitation of the other classes.
In capitalism, the labour theory of value is the operative concern; the value of
a commodity equals the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Under that
condition, surplus value (the difference between the value produced and the value received by a
labourer) is synonymous with the term "surplus labour", thus capitalist exploitation is realised as
deriving surplus value from the worker.
In pre-capitalist economies, exploitation of the worker was achieved via physical
coercion. In the capitalist mode of production, that result is more subtly achieved and because
workers do not own the means of production, they must voluntarily enter into an exploitive work
relationship with a capitalist in order to earn the necessities of life. The worker's entry into such
employment is voluntary in that they choose which capitalist to work for. However, the worker
must work or starve, thus exploitation is inevitable and the "voluntary" nature of a worker
participating in a capitalist society is illusory.
Alienation is the estrangement
of people from their humanity, which
is a systematic result of capitalism.
Under capitalism, the fruits of
production belong to the employers,
who expropriate the surplus created by
others and so generate alienated
labourers.14 In Marx's view, alienation
is an objective characterization of the
worker's situation in capitalism—his or
her self-awareness of this condition is
not prerequisite.
Whatever the result, this is a mass revolt against
alienation and it can't be ignored

Social classes
Marx distinguishes social classes on the basis of two criteria: ownership of means of
production and control over the labour power of others. Following this criterion of class based on
property relations, Marx identified the social stratification of the capitalist mode of
production with the following social groups:

14 "Alienation" entry, A Dictionary of Sociology

1. Proletariat: "the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of
their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.”15 The capitalist mode
of production establishes the conditions enabling the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat
because the workers' labour generates a surplus value greater than the workers' wages.
2. Bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy labour power from the
proletariat, thus exploiting the proletariat. They subdivide as bourgeoisie and the petite
bourgeoisie.
3. Petite bourgeoisie are those who work and can afford to buy little labour power i.e. small
business owners, peasant landlords, trade workers and the like. Marxism predicts that the
continual reinvention of the means of production eventually would destroy the petite
bourgeoisie, degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat.
4. Lumpenproletariat: the outcasts of society such as the criminals, vagabonds, beggars, or
prostitutes without any political or class consciousness. Having no interest in international or
national economics affairs, Marx claimed that this specific sub-division of the proletariat
would play no part in the eventual social revolution.
5. Landlords: a historically important social class who retain some wealth and power.
6. Peasantry and farmers: a scattered class incapable of organizing and effecting socio-
economic change, most of whom would enter the proletariat while some would become
landlords.
Class consciousness denotes the awareness—of itself and the social world—that a social
class possesses and its capacity to rationally act in their best interests, hence class consciousness
is required before they can effect a successful revolution and thus the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
Without defining ideology,16 Marx used the term to describe the production of images of
social reality. According to Engels, "ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker
consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him
remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he
imagines false or seeming motive forces".17 Because the ruling class controls the society's means
of production, the superstructure of society (the ruling social ideas), are determined by the best
interests of the ruling class. In The German Ideology, he says "The ideas of the ruling class are in
every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is, at the
same time, its ruling intellectual force."18

15Engels, Friedrich (1888). Manifesto of the Communist Party. London. pp. Footnote. Retrieved 15 March 2015.

16 Joseph McCarney: Ideology and False Consciousness, April 2005

17 Engels: Letter to Franz Mehring, (London 14 July 1893), Donna Torr, translator, in Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers, 1968.

18 "Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology".

 The term "political economy" initially referred to the study of the material conditions of
economic production in the capitalist system. In Marxism, political economy is the study of the
means of production, specifically of capital and how that manifests as economic activity.
This new way of thinking was invented because socialists believed that common
ownership of the "means of production" (that is the industries, the land, the wealth of nature, the
trade apparatus, the wealth of the society, etc.) will abolish the exploitative working conditions
experienced under capitalism. Through working class revolution, the state (which Marxists see as
a weapon for the subjugation of one class by another) is seized and used to suppress the hitherto
ruling class of capitalists and by implementing a commonly-owned, democratically controlled
workplace create the society of communism, which Marxists see as true democracy. An economy
based on co-operation on human need and social betterment, rather than competition for profit of
many independently acting profit seekers, would also be the end of class society, which Marx
saw as the fundamental division of all hitherto existing history.
Marx saw work, the effort by humans to transform the environment for their needs, as a
fundamental feature of human kind. Capitalism, in which the product of the worker's labor is
taken from them and sold at market rather than being part of the worker's life, is therefore
alienating to the worker. Additionally, the worker is compelled by various means (some nicer
than others) to work harder, faster and for longer hours. While this is happening, the employer is
constantly trying to save on labor costs: pay the workers less, figure out how to use cheaper
equipment, etc. This allows the employer to extract the largest mount of work (and therefore
potential wealth) from their workers. The fundamental nature of capitalist society is no different
from that of slave society: one small group of society exploiting the larger group.
Through common ownership of the means of production, the profit motive is eliminated
and the motive of furthering human flourishing is introduced. Because the surplus produced by
the workers is property of the society as whole, there are no classes of producers and
appropriators. Additionally, the state, which has its origins in the bands of retainers hired by the
first ruling classes to protect their economic privilege, will disappear as its conditions of
existence have disappeared. 19

19 Frederick Engels. "Origins of the Family- Chapter IX". Marxists.org. Retrieved 26 December 2012.

 CONTEMPORARY MATERIALISM
Late 20th century
In 1959, the Cuban Revolution led to the victory
of Fidel Castro and his July 26 Movement. Although
the revolution was not explicitly socialist, upon
victory Castro ascended to the position of Prime
Minister and adopted the Leninist model of socialist
development, forging an alliance with the Soviet
Union.20 One of the leaders of the revolution, the
Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che
Guevara (1928–1967), subsequently went on to aid
revolutionary socialist movements in Congo-
Kinshasa and Bolivia, eventually being killed by the
Bolivian government, possibly on the orders of
the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA), though the
CIA agent sent to search for Guevara, Felix
Rodriguez, expressed a desire to keep him alive as a
possible bargaining tool with the Cuban government.
Fidel Castro at UN General Assembly of He would posthumously go on to become an
1960 internationally recognised icon.
In the People's Republic of China,
the Maoist government undertook the Cultural Revolution from 1966 through to 1976 to
ameliorate capitalist elements of Chinese society and achieve socialism. However, upon Mao
Zedong's death, his rivals seized political power and under the Premiership of Deng
Xiaoping(1978–1992), many of Mao's Cultural Revolution era policies were revised or
abandoned and much of the state sector privatised.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the collapse of most of those socialist states that had
professed a Marxist–Leninist ideology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of
the New Right and neoliberal capitalism as the dominant ideological trends in western politics—
championed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—led
the west to take a more aggressive stand against the Soviet Union and its Leninist allies.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union the reformist Mikhael Gorbachev became Premier in March
1985 and sought to abandon Leninist models of development towards social democracy.
Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms, coupled with rising levels of popular ethnic nationalism in the
Soviet Union, led to the state's dissolution in late 1991 into a series of constituent nations, all of
which abandoned Marxist–Leninist models for socialism, with most converting to capitalist
economies.

20 Coltman 2003 and Bourne 1986.

21st century
At the turn of the 21st century, China, Cuba,
Laos, North Korea and Vietnam remained the only
officially Marxist–Leninist states remaining,
although a Maoist government led
by Prachanda was elected into power in Nepal in
2008 following a long guerrilla struggle.
The early 21st century also saw the election
of socialist governments in several Latin American
nations, in what has come to be known as the "pink Hugo Chavez casting a vote in 2007
tide". Dominated by the Venezuelan government
of Hugo Chávez, this trend also saw the election
of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Forging
political and economic alliances through international organisations like the Bolivarian Alliance
for the Americas, these socialist governments allied themselves with Marxist–Leninist Cuba and
although none of them espoused a Leninist path directly, most admitted to being significantly
influenced by Marxist theory.
For Italian Marxist Gianni Vattimo in his 2011 book Hermeneutic Communism, "this new
weak communism differs substantially from its previous Soviet (and current Chinese) realization,
because the South American countries follow democratic electoral procedures and also manage
to decentralize the state bureaucratic system through the Bolivarian missions. In sum, if
weakened communism is felt as a specter in the West, it is not only because of media distortions
but also for the alternative it represents through the same democratic procedures that the West
constantly professes to cherish but is hesitant to apply". 21
Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi
Jinping has announced a deepening commitment of
the Communist Party of China to the ideas of Marx. At an
event celebrating the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth, Xi
said “We must win the advantages, win the initiative, and
win the future. We must continuously improve the ability
to use Marxism to analyse and solve practical problems...”
also adding “powerful ideological weapon for us to
Xi Jinping, General Secretary of understand the world, grasp the law, seek the truth, and
the Communist Party in China change the world,”. Xi has further stressed the importance
of examining and continuing the tradition of the CPC and
embrace its revolutionary past.22

21 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx Columbia University Press. 2011. p. 122

22 Shepherd, Christian (2018-05-04). "No regrets: Xi says Marxism still 'totally correct' for China". Reuters.
 REFERENCES

Footnotes

1 Wolff and Resnick, Richard and Stephen (August 1987). Economics: Marxian versus
Neoclassical. The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 130.
2 O'Hara, Phillip (September 2003). Encyclopedia of Political Economy, Volume 2. Routledge.

p. 107.
3 Ermak, Gennady (2016). Communism: The Great Misunderstanding.
4 Bridget O'Laughlin (1975) Marxist Approaches in Anthropology Annual Review of

Anthropology Vol. 4: pp. 341–70

5 S. L. Becker (1984) "Marxist Approaches to Media Studies: The British Experience", Critical

Studies in Mass Communication, 1(1): pp. 66–80.

6 Manuel Alvarado, Robin Gutch, and Tana Wollen (1987) Learning the Media: Introduction to

Media Teaching, Palgrave Macmillan.

7 The Communist Manifesto (1847). Chapter one.
8 Evans, p. 53; Marx's account of the theory is the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy (1859).

9 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Preface, Progress Publishers,

Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas and Engels

10 The Communist Manifesto (1847). Chapter one.
11 Letter to editor of the Russian newspaper paper Otetchestvennye Zapiskym (1877).
12 Lenin 1967 (1913). p. 7.
13 Marx 1849.
14 "Alienation" entry, A Dictionary of Sociology
15Engels, Friedrich (1888). Manifesto of the Communist Party. London. pp. Footnote.

Retrieved 15 March 2015.

16 Joseph McCarney: Ideology and False Consciousness, April 2005
17 Engels: Letter to Franz Mehring, (London 14 July 1893), Donna Torr, translator, in Marx and

Engels Correspondence, International Publishers, 1968.

18 "Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology".
19 Frederick Engels. "Origins of the Family- Chapter IX". Marxists.org. Retrieved 26

December 2012.
20 Coltman 2003 and Bourne 1986.
21 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to

Marx Columbia University Press. 2011. p. 122

22 Shepherd, Christian (2018-05-04). "No regrets: Xi says Marxism still 'totally correct' for

China". Reuters.
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