Marxism

Marxism is the organized movements and theories established in Karl Marx's name, claiming to follow and set into practice his theories after his death in 1883. Marx is reputed to have said, in disgust at the quality of thinking of his French followers, that if these were Marxists, then he was not a Marxist at all. Marx and Engels nevertheless set about seeking to establish Marxism as a scientific rather than merely utopian socialism, and set out equally to place Marxism as the leading force in the formative international workingmen's movement. The history of Marxism is caught up with the history of the four internationals.

During his later life in exile in Britain, Marx's influence on the German social democrats took time to consolidate. The combined German Marxist party was formed in 1875. By the turn of the twentieth century, the German social democrats had become the first mass political party in the world and the subject of Roberto Michels's pioneering study in political sociology, Political Parties. It was a Marxist party, a party claiming to follow Marx. During Marx's lifetime, the more immediate object of struggle was the First or Workingmen's International. It was replaced by the Second International in 1889. As the German Social Democratic Party came to dominate global Marxism in this period, so did it dominate the Second International. The Second International collapsed in 1914, when German social democrats voted in parliament for war credits for World War I. With their successful seizure of state power in October 1917, the bolsheviks replaced the German social democrats as the dominant Marxist movement and in turn established the Third Communist International in 1921. Under Stalin, the Comintern became the arm of Soviet imperialism and was disbanded by Stalin in 1943 as a peace gesture to the Allies. In 1938, Leon Trotsky, the great bolshevik revolutionary forced by Stalin into exile in Mexico, proclaimed the Fourth International. International Trotskyism, taking its cue from Trotsky's 1938 Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, proceeded to split multiply across the remainder of the twentieth century, often over the question whether to work within the larger socialist or labour parties or to work independently or follow other successful revolutionary movements such as those in Cuba or Nicaragua. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is widely interpreted as indicating the end not only of communism or socialism but also of Marxism, though Marxism as a theory has become a permanent fixture in the academy, and its presence as the remaining critique of dominant global capitalism persists.

Marxism as a movement or series of movements has been different and had a distinctive fate than any other such social theory. The social theories of Durkheim and Weber generated no isms or ideologies to follow them. The only other social theorist to have a public influence in any way comparable to Marx was Freud, not at the level of state power or politics, but in the extraordinary spread of psychoanalysis, particularly in America. Marx's work, which proclaimed itself as a critique of ideology, follows the peculiar historical path in which it becomes an ideology, first of reform or opposition with the German social democrats, then of revolution and state power with the bolsheviks. By the 1930s, Soviet Marxism became the face of the most brutal state power alongside the Nazis, though it is important to recognise that there were always those Marxists who repudiated bolshevism from the start, and others who paid with their lives for standing against Stalinism in the name of Marxism and socialism. Marxism has always been a contested legacy.

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