marxist historical theory

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You are here, socy 151: foundations of modern social theory,  - marx's theory of history.

We consider closely Marx’s Grundrisse , written between The German Ideology  and  Das Kapital . In the  Grundrisse , Marx revisits and revises his theory of historical change. Previously, he argued that history is characterized by a uni-linear increase in the division of labor. He also argued that class struggle caused revolutionary transitions from one mode of production to the next–slavery to feudalism to capitalism–and that Communism will be the last stage in social evolution. In the  Grundrisse , Marx develops a theory of historical change focused on property relations. In addition, he depicts a more complex, multi-linear development of history. The facet of Marx which he exhibits in the  Grundrisse  tends not to be the one that is widely remembered, but understanding the nuances he presents there is crucial to fully understand his idea of history and historical change and the role of property in capitalism and Communism.

Lecture Chapters

• The Many Facets of Karl Marx
• "Grundrisse": Major Themes
• Centrality of Division of Labor in "The German Ideology"
• Modes of Production
• New Contributions in "Grundrisse"
• Multiple Trajectories in "Grundrisse"

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 7, 2019 | Original: November 9, 2009

As a university student, Karl Marx (1818-1883) joined a movement known as the Young Hegelians, who strongly criticized the political and cultural establishments of the day. He became a journalist, and the radical nature of his writings would eventually get him expelled by the governments of Germany, France and Belgium. In 1848, Marx and fellow German thinker Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto,” which introduced their concept of socialism as a natural result of the conflicts inherent in the capitalist system. Marx later moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1867, he published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital), in which he laid out his vision of capitalism and its inevitable tendencies toward self-destruction, and took part in a growing international workers’ movement based on his revolutionary theories.

Karl Marx’s Early Life and Education

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia; he was the oldest surviving boy in a family of nine children. Both of his parents were Jewish, and descended from a long line of rabbis, but his father, a lawyer, converted to Lutheranism in 1816 due to contemporary laws barring Jews from higher society. Young Karl was baptized in the same church at the age of 6, but later became an atheist.

Did you know? The 1917 Russian Revolution, which overthrew three centuries of tsarist rule, had its roots in Marxist beliefs. The revolution’s leader, Vladimir Lenin, built his new proletarian government based on his interpretation of Marxist thought, turning Karl Marx into an internationally famous figure more than 30 years after his death.

After a year at the University of Bonn (during which Marx was imprisoned for drunkenness and fought a duel with another student), his worried parents enrolled their son at the University of Berlin, where he studied law and philosophy. There he was introduced to the philosophy of the late Berlin professor G.W.F. Hegel and joined a group known as the Young Hegelians, who were challenging existing institutions and ideas on all fronts, including religion, philosophy, ethics and politics.

Karl Marx Becomes a Revolutionary

After receiving his degree, Marx began writing for the liberal democratic newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, and he became the paper’s editor in 1842. The Prussian government banned the paper as too radical the following year. With his new wife, Jenny von Westphalen, Marx moved to Paris in 1843. There Marx met fellow German émigré Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. In 1845, Engels and Marx published a criticism of Bauer’s Young Hegelian philosophy entitled “The Holy Father.”

By that time, the Prussian government intervened to get Marx expelled from France, and he and Engels had moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship. In 1847, the newly founded Communist League in London, England, drafted Marx and Engels to write “The Communist Manifesto,” published the following year. In it, the two philosophers depicted all of history as a series of class struggles (historical materialism), and predicted that the upcoming proletarian revolution would sweep aside the capitalist system for good, making the workingmen the new ruling class of the world.

Karl Marx’s Life in London and “Das Kapital”

With revolutionary uprisings engulfing Europe in 1848, Marx left Belgium just before being expelled by that country’s government. He briefly returned to Paris and Germany before settling in London, where he would live for the rest of his life, despite being denied British citizenship. He worked as a journalist there, including 10 years as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but never quite managed to earn a living wage, and was supported financially by Engels. In time, Marx became increasingly isolated from fellow London Communists, and focused more on developing his economic theories. In 1864, however, he helped found the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) and wrote its inaugural address. Three years later, Marx published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital) his masterwork of economic theory. In it he expressed a desire to reveal “the economic law of motion of modern society” and laid out his theory of capitalism as a dynamic system that contained the seeds of its own self-destruction and subsequent triumph of communism. Marx would spend the rest of his life working on manuscripts for additional volumes, but they remained unfinished at the time of his death, of pleurisy, on March 14, 1883.

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2 Historical Materialism

Paul Blackledge, London South Bank University

• Published: 10 September 2018
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Marx’s theory of history is often misrepresented as a mechanically deterministic and fatalistic theory of change in which the complexity of the real world is reduced to simple, unconvincing abstractions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Stalin attempted to transform Marxism into something akin to this caricature to justify Russia’s state-capitalist industrialization after 1928, neither Marx nor his most perceptive followers understood historical materialism in this way. This chapter shows that Marx’s theory of history, once unpicked from its misrepresentations, allows us to comprehend social reality as a non-reductive, synthetic, and historical totality. This approach is alive to the complexity of the social world without succumbing to the descriptive eclecticism characteristic of non-Marxist historiography. And by escaping the limits of merely descriptive history, Marxism offers the possibility of a scientific approach to revolutionary practice as the flipside to comprehending the present, as Georg Lukács put it, as a historical problem.

The term “historical materialism” has a peculiar place within the Marxist tradition. While it has come to function as a synonym for Marxism, the phrase itself was never used by Marx. In fact, it was first coined by Engels after Marx’s death as a synonym for an earlier notion, “the materialist conception of history,” which he had first used in his 1859 review of Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Engels 2001a : 8; 2001b : 36).

Engels aimed, both in his 1859 review and in a series of later essays and letters, to unpack Marx’s dense methodological comments to make them palatable to the general reader. Many critics have argued that in so doing Engels reduced Marx’s method to a mechanically determinist and fatalist caricature of the real thing. And just as Marx once famously joked that he was not a Marxist ( Engels 1992 : 356), Engels’s critics have suggested that neither was Marx an (Engelsian) historical materialist ( Thomas 2008 : 39). Others have gone further to suggest that Marx shared Engels’s mechanically determinist and reductive conception of history. So, despite the illuminating insights contained within his historical writings, the method outlined in the 1859 preface is incompatible with the tenets of modern historiography ( Rigby 1998 :94).

As we shall see, neither Marx, nor Engels (Blackledge 2017 ; 2019 ), embraced a reductive or mechanical method. In fact, Marx’s method, properly understood, facilitates the integration of evidence into a non-reductive, synthetic whole that offers the possibility of simultaneously explaining the historical process with a view to informing revolutionary practice. This approach stands in stark contrast to the tendency toward eclectic description characteristic of even the best of non-Marxist historiography.

Georg Lukács articulated the most sophisticated philosophical critique of the limitations of non-Marxist thought generally and non-Marxist historiography in particular. He argued that it was impossible to comprehend capitalism as a historical totality from the (bourgeois) standpoint of the individual within civil society because “when the individual confronts objective reality he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection” ( Lukács 1971 :48, 50, 63, 69). To argue that this standpoint is bourgeois should not be interpreted mechanically as assuming that those who hold it are individual members of the bourgeoisie. Rather, it is best understood as a claim that this general worldview emerged with the rise of capitalism, whose parameters it cannot escape. In relation to historiography, this failing explained the “total inability of every bourgeois thinker and historian to see the world-historical events of the present [1914–23—PB] as universal history.” More generally, Lukács claimed, “We see the unhistorical and antihistorical character of bourgeois thought most strikingly when we consider the problem of the present as a historical problem .” Because the standpoint of the individual within civil society tends to naturalize capitalist social relations, intellectuals viewing the world from this perspective are incapable adequately of conceiving “the present as history” ( Lukács 1971 :157–158).

Conversely, the collective struggles of the proletariat against alienation provide a standpoint from which intellectuals can begin to understand capitalism as a historical totality. It is because the proletariat exists at the center of the constant reproduction of bourgeois society that its struggles against this system are able to point beyond it. Historical materialism, from this perspective, is best understood as “the theory of the proletarian revolution . . . because its essence is an intellectual synthesis of the social existence which produces and fundamentally determines the proletariat; and because the proletariat struggling for liberation finds its clear self-consciousness in it” ( Lukács 1970 :9).

Conceived in this way, it is understandable that the influence of Marxism has tended to ebb and flow with changing fortunes in the class struggle. Within the academy, Marxism became more popular as the generation radicalized in the 1960s came to maturity, while the subsequent downturn in class struggle informed what Ellen Meiksins Wood called a “retreat from class” amongst intellectuals from the late 1970s onward ( Wood 1986 ). Subsequently, many radical intellectuals tended to justify their embrace of culturally defined New Social Movements at the expense of socially structured class politics through criticisms of Marxism’s supposed inability to comprehend non-economic forms of oppression and domination ( Blackledge 2013 ; Palmer 1990 ).

This article challenges this caricature of Marxism: the false claim that Marx’s method is reductive involves a one-dimensional interpretation of his attempt to conceptualize the complexity of the real world as a synthetic whole. As we shall see, although Marx’s dialectical approach is not reductive, it does fundamentally challenge the dominant tendency merely to describe reality superficially as the evolving interaction of a multiplicity of factors. As Georg Plekhanov argued more than a century ago, the problem with the factoral approach to social analysis lies not in the attempt to distinguish different aspects of the mediated whole but rather in the tendency to reify these factors such that history is made to stand still. Marxism transcends the theory of factors not by reducing everything to class but through a “synthetic view of social life” that facilitates our cognition of the whole as a complex totality centred on humanity’s productive engagement with nature ( Plekhanov 1944 :13). Because this approach allowed Marx to comprehend the social whole as a historically evolving totality it underpinned his organic conception of revolutionary politics ( Engels 1987 : 27).

1. The Materialist Conception of History

In 1859 Marx and Engels published outlines of their basic methodology. The first of these essays was Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , followed by Engels’s review of this book. Both these works are somewhat opaque: Marx’s preface was written with an eye to the censor ( Prinz 1969 ); while only the first two of three projected instalments of Engels’s review were written because the journal in which it was serialized, Das Volk (effectively edited by Marx), went bankrupt before Engels had time to complete the final part of the review ( MECW 16 , 673–674).

The central paragraph of Marx’s preface is an infamously dense summary of themes from the German Ideology (for a comparison of these texts see Carver 1983 :72–77).

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” ( Marx 1987 : 263).

According to Richard Miller, the widespread claim that this passage proffers a mechanically determinist and fatalist theory of history is predicated upon the assumption that Marx was a positivist. And while it is certainly possible to interpret Marx’s 1859 preface through a positivist lens as making hard technologically deterministic predictions which are not only falsifiable but have in fact been falsified, Miller points out that neither Marx nor “most of his insightful followers” understood historical materialism in this way ( Miller 1984 :7, 271). In fact, Marx’s method is best understood, contra positivism, as a precursor to the critical realist philosophy of social science. This approach includes a stratified conception of reality through which agency is explained as an emergent property rooted in but irreducible to underlying social relations. Further, this approach points to the existence of tendencies rather than superficial Humean constant conjunctions. Interpreted in this way, Marx is best understood as positing that though modes of production shape the contours of social struggles, definite historically and socially constituted men and women are the active, conscious, and (historically relative) free agents of change. In this model there is nothing preordained about the outcome of the struggles in which these agents engage ( Blackledge 2006a :14–16; Meikle 1985 :57; Collier 1994 ; Blackledge 2002 ). This is why, as Geoffrey de Ste. Croix has powerfully argued (and as many Marxist historians have demonstrated in practice), there is no necessary contradiction between Marx’s conception of social structure on the one hand and the demand that historians attempt to richly reconstruct historical processes on the other ( Ste. Croix 1983 :90; Blackledge 2008b ).

More concretely, Marx’s analytical distinction between forces and relations of production on the one hand, and base and superstructure on the other, is intended not as a schema of automatic historical progress but rather as a map of the broad coordinates of revolutionary politics. If the development of the forces of production—the means of production and the labor power required to utilize instruments and raw materials—sets the parameters of what is politically possible at any particular historical juncture, the relations of production—class relations of effective control—frame the contradictory material interests that underpin the evolving lines of conflict in developing struggles. This latter concept is the foundation of the Communist Manifesto ’s claim that “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” ( Marx and Engels 1984 :482).

If crises born of the contradiction between forces and relations of production evidence the historical necessity of revolution, the potential for hope emerges because structural crises create the conditions in which revolutionary movements tend to develop as groups rooted in the relations of production coalesce around competing responses to structural crises. But victory for these revolutionary forces is never guaranteed: though structural crises will tend to generate challenges to the existing relations of production, the legal, political, and ideological superstructure acts to ensure the reproduction of these relations. Which side will triumph in the ensuing conflicts is an open question. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto : the class struggle is “carried on an 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” ( Marx and Engels 1984 :482; Harman 1998 :7–54).

Engels’s own gloss on Marx’s method points in a similar direction. In his introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific he defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another” ( Engels 1990b : 289). He was, however, adamant that this was not a reductionist model:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. ( Engels 2001b : 34–35)

Engels emphasized, for instance, that this approach allowed “political power” to enjoy a degree of “relative independence” from the economic base ( Engels 2001c :60). Moreover, he insisted that the sophistication of his and Marx’s method was apparent in their works of historical analysis. While in polemics with their opponents they often one-sidedly “emphasise[d] the main principle . . . when it came to presenting a section of history . . . it was a different matter and there no error was permissible” ( Engels 2001b :36).

Some have charged that Engels mischaracterized Marx’s method in his 1859 review ( Carver 1983 :116). But this claim is difficult to square with what we know of the piece’s publication history. Marx was editing the journal in which Engels’s essay was published, he had asked Engels for the review, and Engels had offered it with a cover note suggesting that “if you don’t like it in toto , tear it up and let me have your opinion” ( Engels 1983 : 478). Moreover, while the phrase “materialist conception of history” may have been new in 1859, it certainly is not an eccentric description of either Marx’s 1859 preface, the approach outlined in The German Ideology , or (though Engels had not had sight of this) Marx’s method as detailed in his 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse ( Hunley 1991 :92).

This is not to say that nothing new was added to the Marxist method in the late 1850s. There was a shift in Marx’s understanding of method at this juncture, but this development constituted, as Henri Lefebvre has argued, a deepening of Marx’s conception of the historical method ( Lefebvre 2009 :69–74). To this end, he famously wrote to Engels in January 1858 stating: “What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel’s Logic ” ( Marx 1983 :249). Though Marx’s reengagement with Hegel is of the first importance to his method, before this aspect of his work is discussed it is instructive to outline the theory of history he articulated alongside Engels in The German Ideology .

The German Ideology is not an easy read. The text that eventually saw the light of day after its authors’ deaths was cobbled together from various unfinished texts penned between November 1845 and August 1846 and intended for publication as separate journal articles ( Carver and Blank 2014 ). Though this provenance gives The German Ideology a somewhat opaque quality, it nonetheless remains an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to understand and extend Marx and Engels’s method of analysis. For it was through these manuscripts that they achieved a degree of what they both described as “self-clarification” ( Marx 1987 :264; Engels 1990a :519), while the manuscript itself offers “page after page [of] astonishing insights” ( Arthur 2015 ).

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that humans make and remake themselves through labor to meet their needs. It is through social, conscious productive interaction with nature that our ancestors became human: they transformed themselves by working together to transform nature. So, while Marx and Engels argue that we do have a nature made up of needs and capacities, by contrast with crude materialists who posit this essence as a simple transhistorical fact, they insist that our nature is not fixed because these needs and capacities are not fixed. They claim that our essence evolves because these needs and capacities develop through our active interaction with nature ( Marx and Engels 1976 :41–43). This argument marks the point of synthesis between the concepts of practice and material need that constitutes a core feature of Marxism. Moreover, because need is a social concept that nonetheless has natural roots, this argument highlights the unity (but not identity) of natural and social history ( Marx and Engels 1976 :28–29).

This unity between natural and social history informs their famous claim that definite individuals at a specific moment in time differentiated themselves from nature by consciously transforming their environment in order to meet their (initially natural) needs:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31).

Consequently, rather than follow modern political theory from Hobbes and Locke onward in positing abstract “man” as the starting point for the analysis of the social world, Marx and Engels wrote that their study proceeds from the standpoint of definite individuals in definite social relations:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31).

The human essence is on their account a historical rather than ideal abstraction: at any particular juncture it is the “sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :54). Though too often dismissed as the background noise to history, the mere “reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals,” human productive interaction with nature is rather “a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31). More specifically, by contrast with traditional elitist ideologies that tend to denigrate practice as the poor cousin to theory’s pure universality, Marx and Engels insist that our consciousness is profoundly shaped by the way we produce to meet our needs.

Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. For the first manner of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; for the second manner of approach, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness ( Marx and Engels 1976 :36–37; also see Marx 1987 :263).

Marx and Engels argue that production includes both natural and social aspects. It comprises not only our work on nature to meet our needs but also the social relations that spring from working together to that end. Indeed, “a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :43). They labeled the totality of these relations a “mode of production,” and periodized history according to changes in the mode of production ( Marx and Engels 1976 :43). Their conception of a mode of production as a totality is in the first instance a “scientific hypothesis” about how the world works ( Vygodski 1973 :16). The essence of capitalism is different from the essence of feudalism and both of these differ again from other modes of production. The goal of science is, in the first instance, to grasp the essence of each particular mode so as to understand its distinct dynamic. It can only then move on to make sense of more complex characteristics of the system as a whole.

It was through the concept of mode of production that Marx and Engels began to overcome the limitations of earlier attempts to understand modernity ( Marx and Engels 1976 :32–37). By contrast both with liberalism’s attempt to naturalize egoistic individualism and private property and earlier socialist criticisms of the consequences of private property, they outlined a dialectical and historical approach according to which private property had a history—having evolved through “tribal,” “ancient communal,” “feudal,” and on to its present capitalist form—and through its history these specific forms had played positive and negative parts at specific junctures. Most recently, capitalist private property had fostered the social development necessary for the transition to socialism before itself becoming a fetter on further development ( Marx and Engels 1976 : 33, 48).

While this approach marked a step beyond both liberal and early socialist conceptions of private property, when compared with Marx’s later conception of social determination it remains analytically weak. For whereas Marx would subsequently insist that production determines exchange and distribution, in this earlier text he and Engels conceive production and exchange as co-determining distribution, which in turn determines them ( Marx and Engels 1976 :40). Nonetheless, the analysis of private property in The German Ideology did constitute a profound theoretical breakthrough. It allowed Marx and Engels to grasp capitalism as a historical mode of production with dominant progressive and regressive characteristics at different moments in its history. Furthermore, they understood this dialectical account of capitalism to be a specific example of a more general historical law: one whereby social change through revolutions occurs when social relations that had previously fostered social development subsequently come to fetter that development ( Marx and Engels 1976 :74; see, e.g., Marx 1987 :263). Marx subsequently worked an important improvement on the account of social change given in The German Ideology . Whereas in The German Ideology he used the term “forms of intercourse” to describe the social relations that initially fostered and latterly fettered the development of the forces of production and through which he periodized history, he subsequently refined this concept as relations of production to rid it of any remnants of technological determinism ( Therborn 1976 :366; Callinicos 2004 :48).

More specifically, Marx and Engels argued that though private property had previously played a progressive historical role, the crises and social conflicts that it now engendered meant that this was no longer the case. This claim was a double-edged sword: although socialism was now moving onto the historical and political agenda, this movement was possible only because economic growth had previously been fostered by private property relations. Consequently, any attempt to bypass this earlier stage of history would be disastrous for the socialist project, the

development of productive forces . . . is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it privation, want is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored. ( Marx and Engels 1976 :49)

Concretely, it is “only with large-scale industry [that] the abolition of private property becomes possible” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :64). As a fundamental precept of Marx’s theory of history this argument also undermines the claims that Stalin and Mao were able to introduce socialism in relatively backward countries ( Cliff 1974 ).

Socialism, in Marx and Engels’s model, far from being an abstract, transhistorical moral ideal is best understood as a historically concrete form offered as a solution by definite historically constituted individuals to historically specific problems ( Blackledge 2012 ). Ludwig Feuerbach, the most important antagonist in their critique could understand none of this because he assumed two related myths: a transhistorical human essence alongside a transhistorical natural world ( Marx and Engels 1976 :40–41). This mistake meant that insofar as he “is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :41).

Marx and Engels’s new approach to human history amounted to a real transcendence (sublation) of materialism and idealism. As Lukács argued, they aimed to overcome the opposition between materialism and idealism by synthesizing causal, materialist models of behavior with purposeful, idealist accounts of agency to provide a framework through which our actions could be understood as human actions ( Lukács 1975 :345). Marx famously contrasted his approach with these earlier systems in the first of his Theses on Feuerbach :

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such ( Marx and Engels 1976 :4).

So, Marx differentiated his materialism from older forms of materialism which were in one way or another reductive in their effects. His sublation of materialism and idealism into a new approach to history nonetheless remained a form of materialism because it recognized that priority should be assigned to satisfying our needs: as Chris Arthur writes, “ in the first instance material circumstances condition us, however much we revolutionise those conditions later” ( Arthur 1970 :23).

By contrast with the fatalism of earlier mechanical forms of materialism, because Marx and Engels aimed to grasp real historical change, theirs was a form of “practical materialism” focused on “revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence” ( Marx and Engels 1976 , 38). Indeed, they claimed that in the modern world practical materialism was a synonym for communism because only those intent on the revolutionary reconstruction of existing social relations are able to transcend the sterile opposition between the old mechanical materialism, which accepted reality as a pre-given and immutable fact, and its idealist (moralist) other that responded to the evils of the world with “impotence in action” ( Marx and Engels 1975 :201). Conversely, practical materialism assumes the existence of agents already challenging the status quo: “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :60). In the modern world, or so Marx and Engels claimed, this was the working class, and they framed their political activity in relation to its real struggles against capitalism.

2. Coquetting with Hegel

What Marx added to this model when he reread Hegel in the 1850s was a more nuanced understanding of how the social world might be conceived as a totality of interdependent processes. In his 1857 Introduction he wrote:

The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” ( Marx 1973 :101).

Though the approach set out here is clearly dialectical, it is also not Hegelian. Marx suggested that he “openly avowed [himself] the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even . . . coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him” ( Marx 1976 :103). However, whereas the Hegelian concept develops deductively, for Marx conceptual deepening emerged through the successive introduction of more complex determinations as he sought to move from the abstract to the concrete ( Ilyenkov 2013 :149–167). Commenting on this method, Bertell Ollman writes that Marx and Engels considered the whole to be constituted through its internal relations, and their work focused on the painstaking reconstitution of the whole as such a concrete totality ( Ollman 1976 :34; Marx 1973 :101). As Engels wrote:

Our view of history, however, is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential conditions of the various social formations individually investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them ( Enggels 2001a :8).

So, while Marx and Engels may well have agreed with Hegel that the truth is the whole, they nonetheless insisted that the process of reproducing the whole in thought as a concrete totality of many determinations was an arduous and ongoing scientific process. Marx’s goal was not to reduce non-economic processes of oppression and domination to class relations. Rather, he aimed to integrate these processes into a complex totality where explanation “means something like being placed correctly in the system of concepts that together form the theory of the capitalist mode of production” ( Callinicos 2014 :131; Gimenez 2001 ). According to Sue Clegg this method entails, for instance, not that forms of oppression are reduced to epiphenomena of class relations but that they are conceived as part of a greater whole: “The argument for historical materialism is not, as some of its critics have claimed, to reduce women’s oppression to class but that women’s position only makes sense in the explanatory context of the dynamics of particular modes of production” ( Clegg 1997 :210; cf Blackledge 2018 ).

Clegg is right, for though Marx insisted that relations of production constitute the inner essence of a mode of production, he also stressed that other aspects of the social whole cannot be reduced to these underlying social relations; they must be understood through an active engagement with empirical evidence:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given conditions ( Marx 1981 :927).

Consequently, in his theory of history Marx posited a method of analysis that opens with an attempt to grasp the essence of a system understood as the dominant form in which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. However, essence is not appearance, and science must also be able to comprehend totalities as complex wholes not as simple abstractions, and this entails careful theoretically informed and detailed engagement with evidence.

In modern capitalist societies Marx’s method involves starting from an analysis of wage labor, because this is the historically novel and dominant form through which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. Wage labor is not, of course, the only way that surplus is thus extracted, and it certainly is not the only form of work in the modern world. Nevertheless, it is the dominant form through which the system is reproduced and the specific character of wage labor differentiates capitalism from earlier modes of production. In particular, wage labor underpins capitalism’s most salient characteristics: its dynamism and its tendency to crisis.

By contrast with this essentialist model, descriptive accounts of history tend to reduce it to the successive iteration of mere chance—“one damn thing after another” as Toynbee wrote. By contrast with Marxism, the descriptive approach fails to recognize that to understand a thing we must grasp not merely what it is but also what it has the potential to become—and indeed what its essence necessitates that it tends toward (Meikle 1983 , 1985 ). For Marx, properly understood the scientific method aims to reveal the dynamic social essence beneath the appearance of things: “All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence” ( Marx 1981 :956). To this end, social science is a theoretical exercise aimed at cognizing the world we inhabit: “In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both” ( Marx 1976 :90). Marx’s own contribution to this project revealed that capitalist society necessarily tends to both dynamism and crisis, which in turn impose an aging process on the system—and these are all essential characteristics of capitalism. Of course, the ways in which these tendencies are realized in practice is highly mediated and complex. If this truth means that mechanical applications of Marx’s model to reality will tend to a crude caricature of existing reality, the alternative approach of dismissing essence as a metaphysical concept lends itself to the tendency to lose sight of the capitalist wood for the trees.

Critics of essentialism generally argue that it fails as a model of history because it is fundamentally reductive. But as Scott Meikle argues in relation to Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World this criticism of Marxism misses its mark. In his magnificent book, Ste. Croix aimed to reveal the essence of the ancient world as a system of surplus extraction from unfree labor. Far from being a reductive exercise, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World married the highest level of theoretical sophistication with an incredibly detailed knowledge both of the primary and the secondary sources for his period of study. By marrying these two aspects of knowledge, Ste. Croix was able to explain the historical evolution of the ancient Greek world in relation to slowly changing forms of unfree labor—whereas even the best of mainstream historians were only able to describe this process ( Ste. Croix 1983 ; Meikle 1983 ; Blackledge 2006a ).

Ste. Croix illuminated the changing form of surplus extraction over more than a millennium, and through his analysis he revealed the evolution from the ancient mode of production dominated by slavery to the feudal system dominated by serfdom. This changing essence underpinned changes across society more broadly, as new social relations gave rise to new forms of rationality, politics, and culture. In so doing, Ste. Croix’s book acts as a concrete application of Marx’s method. He shows how the “real individuals” noted as the starting point of analysis by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology are in fact, as Marx wrote in the 1857 Introduction , concrete not because they are the unmediated starting point of analysis imagined by naive positivists but because they are constituted through the synthetic “concentration of many determinations.” They are, therefore “a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception” ( Marx 1973 :101).

3. England’s Bourgeois Revolution?

The limitations of descriptive history are evident in mainstream interpretations of the English Revolution. Within the mainstream, the “Civil War” tends to be framed as a struggle between two sections of the English ruling class that had little or nothing to do with the rise of capitalism. Marxists, by contrast, have tended to label the events of 1640 to 1660 as a bourgeois revolution, though they disagree markedly over the meaning and even applicability of this term.

In his fundamental contribution to this literature, Brian Manning evidenced the power of Marx’s essentialist method as compared to the superficiality of mainstream historiography ( Blackledge 2005 ). He agreed that the mainstream account of the Civil War captured a superficial truth, but insisted that this account was inadequate as an explanation for the revolution. In a series of studies of turning points in the revolution he highlighted the decisive part played within it by the “intervention of people from outside the class that normally dominated politics” ( Manning 1992 :16–17).

In his discussion of the growing divisions with the ruling class in the period 1640 to 1642, Manning looked beneath the superficial story of the growing distrust felt for Charles by large sections of the aristocracy to examine the role of popular struggles in shaping the opposing sections of the ruling class. He explained the emergence of a strong royalist party in this period as a response to the fear caused by the independent actions of the London crowd. Conversely, he points out that parliamentarians came to believe that the only force that stood between them and the King’s wrath was the London crowd ( Manning 1991 :71, 101).

According to Manning, the independence of the core group of the crowd was rooted in the growing economic independence of the “middle sort of people” in the century preceding the conflict ( Manning 1991 :230). This analysis of the role of the middling sort in the revolution followed Maurice Dobb’s argument that English capitalism emerged from within the ranks of the direct producers, and that roughly speaking the nation divided in the 1640s along socioeconomic lines ( Dobb 1963 :170; Manning 1994 :86). Manning suggested that the growing importance of this group should be related to the prior development of industry, and through his stress on this development Dobb was able to explain why “industrial districts—not all of them—provided a main base for the parliamentarian and revolutionary parties” ( Manning, 1994 : 84–86). Following Dobb, Manning argued that the English Revolution could best be understood as a bourgeois revolution located within a framework dominated by “the rise of capitalism” ( Manning 1999 :45–51).

This concept of an English bourgeois revolution is contentious even amongst Marxists. Perhaps the most important critic of this sort of interpretation of the Civil War is Robert Brenner ( Blackledge 2008a ). Though Brenner has written a detailed analysis of the social roots of the conflict between the English monarchy and parliament in the 1640s ( Brenner 1993 ), he rejects the idea of a bourgeois revolution because, or so he argues, the break between feudalism and capitalism long preceded the Civil War. In his alternate account of this transition he argues that capitalism originated not as a result of a victory of the peasantry over the feudal nobility in the class struggle, and still less was it the product of a rising bourgeoisie. Rather the transition occurred as an unintended consequence of the class struggle under feudalism. According to Brenner:

The breakthrough from ‘traditional economy’ to relative self-sustaining economic development was predicated upon the emergence of a specific set of class or social-property relations in the countryside—that is, capitalist class relations. This outcome depended, in turn, upon the previous success of a two-sided process of class development and class conflict: on the one hand, the destruction of serfdom; on the other, the short-circuiting of the emerging predominance of small peasant property. ( Brenner 1985 :30)

In France, serfdom was destroyed by the class struggle between peasants and lords, but the process went beyond that needed for the development of capitalism, leading instead to the establishment of widespread small peasant property. In Eastern Europe, the peasants were defeated, which led to the reintroduction of serfdom. Only in England did optimal conditions come about for the evolution of agrarian capitalism.

Commenting on this thesis, Guy Bois has argued that Brenner’s thesis “amounts to a voluntarist vision of history in which the class struggle is divorced from all other objective contingencies and, in the first place, from such laws of development as may be peculiar to a specific mode of production” ( Bois 1985 :115). Conversely, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that Brenner’s interpretation of the transition to capitalism in England is of the first importance to the crique of capitlalism because, contra the orthodox Marxist case that ascribes explanatory primacy in history to the development of the productive forces, Brenner does not assume that a peculiar rationality (characteristic only of the capitalist mode of production) is a constituent element of human nature. His approach is therefore better able than its alternatives to grasp the specificity of capitalist rationality, and consequently the possibility of transcending capitalism ( Wood 1999 :7).

Though nominally aimed at Marx’s 1859 preface, Wood’s critique of orthodoxy is best understood as a challenge to GA Cohen’s understanding of historical materialism as detailed in his classic study Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence . Cohen’s interpretation of Marxism is characterized by its analytically rigorous defense of two key propositions. First, “the forces of production tend to develop throughout history (the development thesis),” and, second, “the nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the primacy thesis)” ( Cohen 2000 :134). Cohen explained the relationship between these propositions, and thus the course of history, in functionalist terms ( Cohen 2000 :260, 272). He also pointed to an explanation for the salience of the development thesis: he assumed that in a situation of scarcity human agents find it rational to develop the forces of production over time. This is because “men are . . . somewhat rational,” they live in a “historical situation of . . . scarcity,” and they “possess intelligence of a kind and degree which enables them to improve their situation” ( Cohen 2000 :152). Cohen’s interpretation of historical materialism consequently included an idiosyncratic defence of a type of political fatalism that was rooted in what Erik Olin Wright et al. call a “transhistorical” model of human rationality ( Wright et al. 1992 :24). He claimed that “in so far as the course of history, and more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound, predictably, to do” ( Cohen 2000 :147, Cohen 1988 :55). Commenting on this argument, Alex Callinicos observes that the inevitabilist structure of Cohen’s reinterpretation of historical materialism “is almost a reductio ” of historical materialism, while Terry Eagleton writes that “rarely has a wrongheaded idea been so magnificently championed” ( Callinicos 2004 :69; Eagleton 2011 :242–243; Blackledge 2015 ).

If some theorists have responded to Cohen’s work by dismissing the utility of the developmental thesis and productive force determinism, others have attempted to salvage the rational core of these ideas. The problem with Cohen’s account is that by interpreting Marx as a positivist he reconstructed a caricatured version of historical materialism as a fatalist theory of change. By contrast, when he was still a Marxist, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that if the ethical core of Marxist political theory was to be retrieved from the corpse of Stalinism, historical materialism must be rescued from such crude account of historical progress ( MacIntyre 2008a :32). Stalin’s claim that history’s general course was predictable rested, or so MacIntyre maintained, on a misconceived view of the role of the base-superstructure metaphor in Marxist theory. Marx understood this metaphor as denoting neither a mechanical nor a causal relationship. Rather, he utilized Hegelian language to denote the process through which the economic base of a society provides “a framework within which superstructures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows.” It was a mistake to imply that according to this model political developments followed automatically from economic causes. This is because in Marx’s view “the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure” ( MacIntyre 2008a :39).

Through this argument MacIntyre began the process of reconnecting Marx’s conception of history to his revolutionary politics after they had been torn asunder by the Stalinist counter-revolution. MacIntyre showed that once extricated from positivistic caricatures of his writings, Marx’s theory of history could be conceived as an essential resource for anyone wanting to understand capitalism as a historically transient mode of production, so as to overcome it. From a similar perspective, Manning’s work on the English Revolution detailed how the development of the forces of production in the century prior to 1640 had cumulatively restructured society. One consequence of these changes was the emergence of new forms of agency that were able to challenge the status quo in a way that would have been inconceivable a century earlier (see, e.g., Harman 1998 :96).

If it is difficult to imagine Cromwell’s victory, the Restoration, and subsequently the Glorious Revolution apart from these changes, it is equally true that the precise outcome of these revolutionary struggles was not inescapable. As Chris Harman argues, nothing was inevitable about the triumph of capitalism. For instance, the area around Prague was the most economically developed part of Europe in the early seventeenth century, but social forces similar to those that won a revolution in England were defeated by feudal reaction in Bohemia ( Harman 1998 :103–105). In an illuminating debate, Brenner and Harman agreed that the outcome of the class struggle could not be predicted, while disagreeing markedly in their assessment of the role of the development of the forces of production in history. Following Bois and others, Harman argued that a focus on the development of the forces of production allows historians to better explain why the revolutionary challenge to feudalism happened generally across Europe when it did, and not at any earlier point over the previous millennium ( Harman and Brenner 2006 ).

Whether one finds Harman or Brenner more persuasive on this point, they shared a desire to comprehend the transition from feudalism to capitalism in terms of forces inherent to the feudal system and without recourse to claims of inevitability. Gramsci embraced a similar conception of Marxism. Against attempts to downplay the role of individuals in the Marxist theory of history, Gramsci insisted that “organic crises” could develop and continue indefinitely if the agency required to overcome them did not appear.

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them. These . . . efforts . . . form the terrain of the conjunctural. ( Gramsci 1971 :178)

Similarly, though from the opposite angle, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution examined Lenin’s role in overcoming an organic crisis. Trotsky maintained that individual socialists could play pivotal roles in history. But whereas in the past the process of revolutionary change had been less consciously determined, the transition from capitalism to socialism could only be won if the agents had a clear understanding of their position within a historical process. Lenin not only had a profound understanding of the historical process but also had built a party able to act on this understanding. Consequently, he was able to intervene decisively into a “chain of objective historic forces” in October 1917. Specifically, Lenin accelerated the process through which the Bolsheviks were able to grasp the new reality at a moment when time was at a premium, such that without him the revolutionary opportunity would probably have been missed ( Trotsky 1977 :343). Commenting on these arguments, MacIntyre points out that by contrast with caricatured criticisms of Marxism, because Trotsky recognized that “from time to time history presents us with real alternatives” his History illuminated the dialectical unity that can exist between great social forces and individual political initiatives ( MacIntyre 2008b :275; Blackledge 2006b ).

4. Conclusion

Commenting on Trotsky’s History , C. L. R. James wrote that “it is the greatest history book ever written . . . the climax of two thousand years of European writing and study of history” ( James 1994 :118). James was no fool, and he did not give praise lightly. He believed that Trotsky deserved this accolade because his History creatively applied Marx’s synthesis of the great strands of European culture to reconstruct the historical totality without either reducing the role of individuals to epiphenomena of broader social forces or reifying them as “great men” separate from these forces. Trotsky’s History was therefore a powerful example, perhaps the most powerful example, of what Hobsbawm calls “total history,” understood not as a “history of everything but history as an indivisible web in which all human activities are interconnected” ( Hobsbawm 2007 :186).

To reconstruct the social totality in the mind was, of course, Marx’s aim, and it continues to be the aim of contemporary Marxists. This project is an intrinsic aspect of revolutionary politics because the social revolution demands the present be understood as a historically constituted whole. Such a scientific account of the present as a historically evolving whole is an essential prerequisite for coherent revolutionary practice. If radical theory too often shares with mainstream social science a tendency to mere description—one thinks of intersectionality theory, for instance—pseudo-radical criticisms of the ideas of essentialism, necessity, and totality actually undermine the attempt to move beyond abstract moral condemnation to the politics of liberation. This article argues, contra the caricatures of Marx’s theory of history as a mechanically deterministic and fatalist conception of reality, that by providing the resources necessary to understand the present as a historical problem, historical materialism is the necessary theoretical complement to socialist activity without which the latter is blind.

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• © 2021

Marxism and History

• Matt Perry 0

School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

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• Examines Marxism's enormous impact on the way historians approach the past
• Offers a clear introduction to Marxist views of history, key Marxist historians and thinkers, and the relevance of Marxist theory
• Tackles current historiographical questions in an accessible way

Part of the book series: Theory and History (THHI)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front matter, introduction, marxist history’s wide panorama, marx and engels’s conception of history, the historical writings of marx and engels, the second generation and the philosophy and writing of history, rescuing the poor stockinger: history from below, marxism , structuralism, and humanism, marxism and postmodernism in history, back matter.

This textbook examines Marxism’s enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Tackling current historiographical questions in an accessible way, the author offers a clear introduction to Marxist views of history, key Marxist historians and thinkers, and the relevance of Marxist theory and history to students’ own work. This is a concise, thorough overview of an important area of historiography. The second edition incorporates significant new developments in research, including Marxist contributions to the emergence of global, maritime and transnational history; the discovery of Marx’s ecologism and the historical critique of fossil capitalism as a source of environmental disaster; a reassessment of gender oppression through social reproduction theory; and the contribution of Marxism to debates on race, Eurocentrism and whiteness. 

• Friedrich Engels
• Historiography
• Second Generation Marxists
• Structuralism
• Postmodernism
• European history
• Marxist theory

Book Title : Marxism and History

Authors : Matt Perry

Series Title : Theory and History

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69511-8

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : History , History (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-69510-1 Published: 18 August 2021

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-69511-8 Published: 16 August 2021

Series ISSN : 2947-4388

Series E-ISSN : 2947-4396

Edition Number : 2

Number of Pages : IX, 195

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations

Topics : Historiography and Method , Political History , Labor History , Social History

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George Novack’s Understanding History

Major theories of history from the greeks to marxism.

Historical materialists would be untrue to their own principles if they failed to regard their method of interpreting history as the result of a prolonged, complex and contradictory process. Mankind has been making history for a million years or more as it advanced from the primate condition to the atomic age. But a science of history capable of ascertaining the laws governing man’s collective activities over the ages is a relatively recent acquisition.

The first attempts to survey the long march of human history, study its causes, and set forth its successive stages along scientific lines were made only about 2500 years ago. This task, like so many others in the domain of theory, was originally undertaken by the Greeks.

The sense of history is a precondition for a science of history. This is not an inborn but a cultivated, historically generated capacity. The discrimination of the passage of time into a well-defined past, present and future is rooted in the evolution of the organisation of labour. Man’s awareness of life as made up of consecutive and changing events has acquired breadth and depth along with the development and diversification of social production. The calendar first appears, not among food gatherers, but in agricultural communities.

Primitive peoples from savagery to the upper stages of barbarism have as little concern for the past as for the future. What they experience and do forms part of an objective universal history. But they remain unaware of the particular place they occupy or the part they play in the progression of mankind.

The very idea of historical advancement from one stage to the next is unknown. They have no need to inquire into the motive forces of history or to mark off the phases of social development. Their collective consciousness has not reached the point of an historical outlook or a sociological insight.

The low level of their productive powers, the immaturity of their economic forms, the narrowness of their activities and the meagreness of their culture and connections are evidenced in their extremely restricted views of the course of events.

The amount of historical knowledge possessed by extremely primitive minds may be gauged from the following observations made by the Jesuit father Jacob Baegert in his Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Peninsula written 200 years ago. “No Californian is acquainted with the events that occurred in the country prior to his birth, nor does he even know who his parents were if he should happen to have lost them during his infancy—The Californians—believed that California constituted the whole world, and they themselves its sole inhabitants; for they went to nobody, and nobody came to see them, each little people remaining within the limits of its small district.”

In pre-Spanish times they marked only one repetitive event, the pitahaya fruit harvest. Thus a space of three years is called three pitahayas. “Yet they seldom make use of such phrases, because they hardly ever speak among themselves of years, but merely say, ‘long ago’, or ‘not long ago’, being utterly indifferent whether two or 20 years have elapsed since the occurrence of a certain event.”

Until several thousand years ago, peoples took their own particular organisation of social relations for granted. It appeared to them as fixed and final as the heavens and earth and as natural as their eyes and ears. The earliest men did not even distinguish themselves from the rest of nature or draw a sharp line of demarcation between themselves and other living creatures in their habitat. It took a far longer time for them to learn to distinguish between what belonged to nature and what belonged to society.

So long as social relations remain simple and stable, changing extremely slowly and almost imperceptibly over vast stretches of time, society melts into the background of nature and does not stand out in sharp contrast from it. Nor do the experiences of one generation differ much from another. If the familiar organisation with its traditional routine is disrupted, it either vanishes or is rebuilt on the old pattern. Moreover, surrounding communities, so far as they are known (and acquaintance does not extend very far either in space or time), are much the same. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the North American Indian could travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or the Australian native thousands of miles, without encountering radically different types of human societies.

Under such circumstances, neither society in general nor one’s own special mode of living is looked upon as a peculiar object which is worth special attention and study. The need for theorising about history or the nature of society does not arise until civilisation is well advanced and sudden, violent, and far-reaching upheavals in social relations take place during the lifetime of individuals or within the memories of their elders.

When swift strides are taken from one form of social structure to another, the old days and ways stand out in startling contrast, and even conflict, with the new. Through trade, travel and war, the representatives of the expanding social system undergoing construction or reconstruction come into contact with peoples of quite different customs on lower levels of culture.

More immediately, glaring differences in the conditions of life within their own communities and bitter conflicts between antagonistic classes induce thoughtful men who have the means for such pursuits to speculate on the origins of such oppositions, to compare the various kinds of societies and governments, and to try and arrange them in an order of succession or worth.

The English historian M.I. Finley makes a similar point in reviewing three recent books on the ancient East in the August 20, 1965, New Statesman : “The presence or absence of a ‘historical sense’ is nothing less than an intellectual reflection of the very wide differences in the historical process itself.”

He cites the Marxist scholar, Professor D.D. Kosambi, who attributes “the total lack of historical sense” in ancient India to the narrow outlook of village life bound up with its mode of agricultural production. “The succession of seasons is all important, while there is little cumulative change to be noted in the village from year to year. This gives the general feeling of ‘the Timeless East’ to foreign observers.”

The other civilised peoples of the ancient Near and Middle East likewise lacked a sense of history. There is nothing, notes Professor Leo Oppenhelm, “that would attest the awareness of the scribes of the existence of a historical continuum in the Mesopotamian civilisation”. This is confirmed by the fact that “the longest and most explicit Assyrian royal inscriptions—were embedded in the substructure of a temple or a palace, safe from human eyes and only to be read by the deity to whom they were addressed”.

The main preconditions for an historical outlook upon history in the West were brought into being from about 1100 to 700 BC by the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age in the Middle East and Aegean civilisations. The comparatively self-sufficient agricultural kingdoms and settlements were supplemented or supplanted by bustling commercial centres, especially in the Phoenician and Ionian ports of Asia Minor. There new classes—merchants, shipowners, manufacturers, artisans, seafarers—came to the fore and challenged the institutions, ideas and power of the old landed gentry. Patriarchal slavery became transformed into chattel slavery. Commodity relations, metal money, mortgage debt corroded the archaic social structures. The first democratic revolutions and oligarchic counterrevolutions were hatched in the city states.

The Ionian Greeks, who set down the first true written histories, were associates of traders, engineers, craftsmen and voyagers. The pioneer of Western historians, Hecaeteus, lived in the same commercial city of Miletus as the first philosophers and scientists and belonged to the same materialist trend of thought.

The writing of history soon engendered interest in the science of history. Once the habit of viewing events in their sequence of change was established, the questions arose: How did history unfold? Was there any discernible pattern in its flux? If so, what was it? And what were its causes?

The first really rational explanation of the historical process as a whole was given by the outstanding Greek historians from Herodotus to Polybius. This was the cyclical conception of historical movement. According to this view, society, like nature, passed through identical patterns of development in periodically repeated rounds.

Thucydides, the pre-eminent Greek historian, declared that he had written his record of the Peloponnesian wars to teach men its lessons since identical events were bound to happen again. Plato taught the doctrine of the Great Year at the end of which the planets would occupy the same positions as before and all sublunary events would be reduplicated. This conception was expressed as a popular axiom in Ecclesiastes: “There is no new thing under the sun.”

The cyclical character of human affairs was closely affiliated with the conception of an all-powerful, inscrutable, inflexible Destiny which came to replace the gods as the sovereign of history. This was mythologised in the persons of the Three Fates and further rationalised by learned men as the ultimate law of life. This notion of cosmic tragic fate from which human appeal or escape is impossible not only became the major theme of the classic Greek dramatists but is also embedded in the historical work of Herodotus.

Comparisons with other peoples, or between Greek states in different stages of social, economic, and political development, produced a comparative history along with the first inklings of historical progression. As early as the eighth century BC the poet Hesiod talked about the copper age that had preceded the iron one. Several centuries later Herodotus, the first anthropologist as well as the father of history, gathered valuable information on the customs of the Mediterranean peoples living in savagery, barbarism and civilisation. Thucydides pointed out that the Greeks once lived as the barbarians did in his own time. Plato in his Republic , L aws and other writings, and Aristotle in his Politics , collected specimens of different forms of state rule. They named, classified and criticised them. They sought to ascertain not only the best mode of government for the city state but also the order of their forms of development and the causes of political variation and revolution.

Polybius, the Greek historian of the rise of the Roman empire, viewed it as the prize example of the natural laws which regulated the cyclical transformation of one governmental form into another. He believed, like Plato, that all states inevitably passed through the phases of kingship, aristocracy and democracy which degenerated into their allied forms of despotism, oligarchy and mob rule. The generation and degeneration of these successive stages of rulership was due to natural causes. “This is the regular cycle of constitutional revolutions, and the natural order in which institutions change, are transformed, and return to their original stage”, he wrote.

Just as they knew and named the major kinds of political organisation from monarchy to democracy, so did the Greek thinkers of both the idealist and materialist schools originate the basic types of historical interpretation which have endured to the present day.

They were the first to try to explain the evolution of society along materialist lines, however crude and awkward were their initial efforts. The Atomists, the Sophists and the Hippocratic school of medicine put forward the idea that the natural environment was the decisive factor in the moulding of mankind. In its extreme expressions this trend of thought reduced social-historical changes to the effects of the geographical theatre and its climatic conditioning. Thus Polybius wrote: “We mortals have an irresistible tendency to yield to climatic influences; and to this cause, and no other, may be traced the great distinctions which prevail among us in character, physical formation and complexion, as well as in most of our habits, varying with nationality and wide local separation.”

These earliest sociologists taught that mankind had climbed from savagery to civilisation by imitating nature and improving upon her operations. The finest exponent of this materialist view in Graeco-Roman culture was Lucretius who gave a brilliant sketch of the steps in the development of society in his poem On The Nature of Things .

Predominant among the Greek thinkers, however, were the sorts of explanation which have ever since been the stock in trade of the historical idealists. There were five of these.

1. The Great God Theory. The most primitive attempts to explain the origin and development of the world and man are the creation myths to be found among preliterate peoples. We are best acquainted with the one in Genesis which ascribes the making of heaven and earth with all its features and creatures to a Lord God who worked on a six-day schedule. These fanciful stories do not have any scientific validity.

The raw materials for genuine history-writing were first collected in the annals of the reigns and chronicles of kings in the river valley civilisations of the Near East, India and China. The first synthetic conception of history arose from the fusion of elements taken over from the old creation myths with a review of these records. This was the Great God, or theological version of history which asserted that divine beings directed human affairs together with the rest of the cosmos.

Just as the royal despots dominated the city states and their empires, so the will, passions, plans and needs of the gods were the ultimate causes of events. The king is the agent who maintains the world in being by means of an annual contest with the powers of chaos. This theological theory was elaborated by the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians before it came down to the Greeks and Romans. It was expounded in the Israelite scriptures whence it was taken over and reshaped by the Christian and Mohammedan religions and their states.

Under the theocratic monarchies of the East the divine guidance of human affairs was wrapped up with the godlike nature of the priest-king. In Babylon, Egypt, the Alexandrian Empire and Rome the supreme ruling force of the universe and the forceful ruler of the realm were regarded as equally divine. The Great God and the Great Man were one and the same.

2. The Great Man Theory. The straightforward theological view of history is too crude and naive, too close to primitive animism, too much in conflict with civilised enlightenment to persist without criticism or change except among the most ignorant and devout. It has been supplanted by more refined versions of the same type of thinking.

The Great Man theory emerged from a dissociation of the dual components of the Great God theory. The immense powers attributed to the gods become transferred to and concentrated in some figure at the head of the state, the church or other key institution or movement. This exceptionally placed personage was supposedly endowed with the capacity for moulding events as he willed. This is the pristine source of the tenacious belief that unusually influential and able individuals determine the main direction of history.

Fetishistic worship of the Great Man has come down through the ages from the god-kings of Mesopotamia to the adoration of a Hitler. It has had numerous incarnations according to the values attached at different times by different people to the various domains of social activity. In antiquity these ranged from the divine monarch, the tyrant, the lawgiver (Solon), the military conqueror (Alexander), the dictator (Caesar), the hero-emancipator (David), and the religious leader (Christ, Buddha, Mohammed). All these were put in the place of the Almighty as the prime mover and shaper of human history.

The most celebrated latter-day expounder of this viewpoint was Carlyle who wrote: “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.”

3. The Great Mind Theory. A more sophisticated and philosophical variant of the Great God-Man line of thought is the notion that history is drawn forward or driven ahead by some ideal force in order to realise its preconceived ends. The Greek Anaxagoras said: “Reason ( Nous ) governs the world.” Aristotle held that the prime mover of the universe and thereby the ultimate animator of everything within it was God, who was defined as pure mind engaged in thinking about itself.

Hegel was the foremost modern exponent of this theory that the progress of mankind consisted in the working out and consummation of an idea. He wrote: “Spirit, or Mind, is the only motive principle of history.” The underlying goal of the World Spirit and the outcome of its laborious development was the realisation of the idea of freedom.

The Great Mind Theory easily slides into the notion that some set of brilliant intellects, or even one mental genius, supplies the mainspring of human advancement. Plato taught that there are “some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the state; and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be followers rather than leaders”.

Thus some 18th century rationalists who believed that “opinion governs mankind” looked toward an enlightened monarch to introduce the necessary progressive reconstruction of the state and society. A more widespread manifestation of this approach contrasts to the unthinking mob some upper stratum of the population as the exemplar of reason which alone can be entrusted with political leadership and power.

4. The Best People Theory. All such interpretations contain infusions of the prejudice that some elite, the Best Race, the favoured nation, the ruling class alone make history. The Old Testament assumed that the Israelites were God’s chosen people. The Greeks regarded themselves as the acme of culture, better in all respects than the barbarians. Plato and Aristotle looked upon the slave-holding aristocracy as naturally superior to the lower orders.

5. The Human Nature Theory. Most persistent is the view that history in the last analysis has been determined by the qualities of human nature, good or bad. Human nature, like nature itself, was regarded as rigid and unchanging from one generation to another. The historian’s task was to demonstrate what these invariant traits of the human constitution and character were, how the course of history exemplified them, and how the social structure was moulded or had to be remodelled in accordance with them. Such a definition of essential human nature was the starting point for the social theorising of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and other great idealists.

But it will also be found at the bottom of the social and political philosophy of the most diverse schools. Thus the empiricist David Hume flatly asserts in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding : “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.”

Many of the 19th century pathfinders in the social sciences clung to this old standby of “the constant and universal principles of human nature”. For example, E.B. Tylor, the founder of British anthropology, wrote in 1889: “Human institutions, like stratified rocks, succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seems the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature.”

Although they may have held different opinions of what the essential qualities of humanity were, idealist and materialist thinkers alike have appealed in the last resort to permanent principles of human nature to explain social and historical phenomena. Thus the materialist-minded Thucydides, as M.I Finley tells us in his introduction to The Greek Historians , believed that “human nature and human behaviour were—essentially fixed qualities, the same in one century as another”.

For many centuries after the Greeks, scientific insight into the workings of history made little progress. Under Christianity and feudalism the theological conception that history was the manifestation of God’s plan monopolised social philosophy. In contrast to the stagnation of science in Western Europe, the Moslems and Jews carried forward the social as well as the natural sciences. The most original and unsurpassed student of social processes between the ancients and moderns was the 14th century thinker of the Maghreb, Ibn Khaldun who analysed the stages of development of the Mohammedan countries and cultures and the causes of their typical institutions and features in the most materialist manner of his epoch.

This eminent Moslem statesman was very likely the first scholar to formulate a clear conception of sociology, the science of social development. He did so under the name of the study of culture.

He wrote: “History is the record of human society, or world civilisation; of the changes that take place in the nature of that society, such as savagery, sociability, and group solidarity; of revolutions and uprisings by one set of people against another with the resulting kingdoms and states, with their various ranks; of the different activities and occupations of men, whether for gaining their livelihood or in the various sciences and crafts; and, in general, of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.”

The next big advance in scientific understanding of history came with the rise of bourgeois society and the discovery of other regions of the globe associated with its commercial and naval expansion. In their conflicts with the ruling feudal hierarchy and the Church the intellectual spokesmen for progressive bourgeois forces rediscovered and reasserted the ideas of class struggle first noted by the Greeks and instituted historical comparisons with antiquity to bolster their claims. Their new revolutionary views demanded not only a wider outlook upon the world but a deeper probing into the mechanism of social change.

Such bold representatives of bourgeois thought as Machiavelli and Vico in Italy, Hobbes, Harrington, Locke and the classical economists in England, the Scottish school of Adam Ferguson, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, D’Holbach and others in France helped accumulate the materials and clear the site for a more realistic picture of society and a more rigorous understanding of its modes and stages of development.

On a much higher level of social and scientific development, historical thought from the 17th to the 19th centuries tended to become polarised, as in Greece, between idealist and materialist modes of explanation. Both schools of thought were animated by a common aim. They believed that history had an intelligible character and that the nature and sources of its laws could be ascertained.

Theological interpreters like Bishop Bossuet continued to see God as the director of the historical procession. While most other thinkers did not dispute that divine providence ultimately shaped the course of events, they were far more concerned with the mundane ways and means through which history operated.

Giambattista Vico of Naples was the great pioneer among these thinkers. He asserted at the beginning of the 18th century that since history, or “the world of nations”, had been created by men, it could be understood by its makers. He emphasised that social and cultural phenomena passed through a regular sequence of stages which was cyclical in character.

He insisted that “the order of ideas must follow the order of things” and that the “order of human things” was “first the forests, after that the huts, thence the village, next the cities and finally the academies”. His “new science” of history sought to discover and apply “the universal and eternal principles—on which all nations were founded, and still preserve themselves”. Vico brings forward the class struggle in his interpretation of history, especially in the heroic age represented by the conflict between the plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome.

The materialistic theorists who came after Vico in Western Europe looked for these “universal and eternal principles” which determined history in very different quarters than the idealists. But neither school doubted that history, like nature, was subject to general laws which the philosopher of history was obligated to find.

The key thought of the English and French materialists of the 17th and 18th centuries was that men were the products of their natural and social environments. As Charles Brockden Brown, an American novelist of the early 19th century, put it: “Human beings are moulded by the circumstances in which they are placed.” In accord with this principle, they turned to the objective realities of nature and society to explain the historical process.

Montesquieu, for example, regarded geography and government as the twin principal determinants of history and society. The physical factor was most influential in the earlier and more primitive stages of human existence, although its operation never ceased; the political factor became more dominant as civilisation advanced.

He and his contemporary materialists largely ignored the economic conditions which stood between nature and the political institutions. The economic basis and background of political systems and the struggles of contending classes which issued from economic contradictions were beyond their field of vision.

The French historians of the early 19th century acquired a deeper insight into the economic conditioning of the historical process through their studies of the English and French revolutions. They had watched the French revolution go through a complete cycle. This started with the overthrow of the absolute monarchy, passed through the revolutionary regime of Robespierre and the bourgeois-military dictatorship of Napoleon and ended in the Bourbon Restoration. In the light of these vicissitudes they learned the crucial role of class struggles in pushing history forward and pointed to sweeping shifts in property ownership as the prime cause of social overturns. But they remained unable to uncover the fundamental determinants which led to the reconstruction and replacement of property relations as well as political forms.

Many leading philosophers of the bourgeois era had a materialist view of nature and man’s relations with the world around him. But none of them succeeded in working out a consistent or comprehensive conception of society and history along materialist lines. At a certain point in their analyses they departed from materialist premises and procedures, attributing the ultimate causal agencies of human affairs to an invariant human nature, a farseeing human reason, or a great individual.

What was generally responsible for their inability to reach bedrock and their deviation into nonmaterialist types of explanation in the fundamental areas of historical and social determination? As bourgeois thinkers, they were hemmed in and held back by the inescapable restrictions of the capitalist horizon. So long as the ascending bourgeoisie was on its way to supremacy, its most enlightened ideologists had a passionate and persistent interest in boring deeply into economic, social and political realities. After the bourgeoisie had consolidated its position as the ruling class, its thinkers shrank from probing to the bottom of social and political processes. They became more and more sluggish and shortsighted in the fields of sociology and history because discovery of the underlying causes of change in these fields could only threaten the continuance of capitalist domination.

One big barrier to the deepening of social science was their tacit assumption that bourgeois society and its main institutions embodied the highest attainable form of social organisation. All previous societies led up to that point and stopped there. There was apparently no progressive exit from the capitalist system. That is why the ideologists of the English bourgeoisie from Locke to Ricardo and Spencer tried to fit their conceptions of the meaning of all social phenomena into the categories and relations of that transitory order. This narrowness made it equally difficult for them to decipher the past, get to the bottom of their present, and foresee the future.

Idealistic interpretations of history were promulgated and promoted by numerous theorists from Leibnitz to Fichte. Their work was consummated by Hegel. In the early decades of the 19th century Hegel revolutionised the understanding of world history, placing it at the widest vantage point of the bourgeois era. His contributions may be summed up in thirteen points.

1. Hegel approached all historical phenomena from the standpoint of their evolution, seeing them as moments, elements, phases in a single creative, cumulative, progressive and ceaseless process of becoming.

2. Since the world about him, which he called “objective mind”, was the work of man, he, like Vico, was convinced that it was intelligible and could be explicated by the inquiring mind.

3. He conceived history as a universal process in which all social formations, nations and persons had their appropriate but subordinate place. No single state or people dominated world history; each was to be judged by its role in the development of the totality.

4. He asserted that the historical process was essentially rational. It had an immanent logic which unfolded in a law-governed manner defined by the dialectical process. Each stage of the whole was a necessary product of the circumstances of its time and place.

5. Every essential element of each stage hung together as components of a unified whole which expressed the dominant principle of its age. Each stage makes its own unique contribution to the advancement of mankind.

6. The truth about history is concrete. As the Russian thinker Chernyshevsky wrote: “Every object, every phenomenon has its own significance, and it must be judged according to the circumstances, the environment, in which it exists—A definite judgment can be pronounced only about a definite fact, after examining all the circumstances on which it depends.”

7. History changes in a dialectical manner. Each stage of social development has had sufficient reasons for coming into existence. It has a contradictory constitution, arising from three different elements. These are the durable achievements inherited from its predecessors, the special conditions required for its own maintenance, and the opposing forces at work within itself. The development of its internal antagonisms supplies its dynamism and generates its growth. The sharpening of its contradictions leads to its disintegration and eventual dispossession by a higher and antithetical form which grows out of it by way of a revolutionary leap.

8. Thus all grades of social organisation are interlinked in a dialectically determined series from lower to higher.

9. Hegel brought forward the profound truth later developed by historical materialism that labour is imposed upon man as the consequence of his needs and that man is the historical product of his own labour.

10. History is full of irony. It has an overall objective logic which confounds its most powerful participants and organisations. Although the heads of states apply definite policies, and peoples and individuals consciously pursue their own aims, historical actuality does not fall into line or accord with their plans. The course and outcome of history is determined by overriding internal necessities which are independent of the will and consciousness of any of its institutional or personal agencies. Man proposes—the historical necessity of the Idea disposes.

11. The outcome of history, the result of its agonising labour, is the growth of rational freedom. Man’s freedom comes not from arbitrary, wilful intervention in events, but from growing insight into the necessities of the objective, universal, contradictory processes of becoming.

12. The necessities of history are not always the same; they change into their opposites as one stage succeeds another. In fact, this conflict of lower and higher necessities is the generator of progress. A greater and growing necessity is at work within the existing order negating the conditions which sustain it. This necessity keeps depriving the present necessity of its reasons for existence, expands at its expense, renders it obsolete and eventually displaces it.

13. Not only do social formations and their specific dominant principles change from one stage to the next but so do the specific laws of development.

This method of interpreting history was far more correct, all-encompassing and profound than any of its predecessors. Yet it suffered from two ineradicable flaws. First, it was incurably idealistic. Hegel pictured history as the product of abstract principles which represented differing degrees of the ceaseless contest between servitude and freedom. Man’s freedom was gradually realised through this dialectical development of the Absolute Idea.

Such a logic of history was an intellectualised version of the notion that God directs the universe and history is the fulfilment of His design, which in this case is the freedom of humanity. As envisaged by Hegel, this freedom was not realised through the emancipation of mankind from oppressive and servile social conditions but from the overcoming of false, inadequate ideas.

Second, Hegel closed the gates on the further development of history by having it culminate in fact with the German kingdom and the bourgeois society of his own era. The exponent of a universal and never-ending history concluded that its ultimate agent was the national state, a characteristic product of its bourgeois phase. And in its monarchical form, modified by a constitution! He mistook a transient creation of history for its final and perfected embodiment. By thus setting limits upon the process of becoming, he violated the fundamental tenet of his own dialectic.

These defects prevented Hegel from arriving at the true nature of social relations and the principal causes of social change. However, his epoch-making insights have influenced all subsequent thought and writing about history. With the indispensable revisions, they have all been incorporated into the structure of historical materialism.

Hegel, the idealist dialectician, was the foremost theorist of the evolutionary process as a whole. The French social thinkers and historians carried the materialist understanding of history and society as far as it could go in their day. But even within their own provinces both fell short. Hegel could not provide a satisfactory theory of social evolution and the materialists did not penetrate to the most basic moving forces of history.

Not until the truthful elements in these two contrary lines of thought converged and combined in the minds of Marx and Engels in the middle of the 19th century was a rounded conception of history produced that was solidly anchored in the dialectical development of the material conditions of social existence from the emergence of early man to contemporary life.

All the different types of historical explanation cast up in the evolution of man’s thought survive today. Not one has been permanently buried, no matter how outmoded, inadequate or scientifically incorrect it is. The oldest interpretations can be revived and reappear in modern dress to serve some social need or stratum.

What bourgeois nation has not proclaimed in time of war that “God is on our side”, guiding its destiny? The Great Man theory strutted about under the swastika in the homage paid to Hitler. Spengler in Germany and Toynbee in England offer their re-editions of the cyclical round of history. The school of geopolitics makes geographical conditions in the shape of the heartland and the outlying regions into the paramount determinant of modern history.

Nazi Germany, Verwoerd’s South Africa and the Southern white supremacists exalt the master race into the dictator of history in its crudest form. The conception that human nature must be the basis of social structure is the last-ditch defence of the opponents of socialism as well as the point of departure for the utopian socialism of the American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and others.

Finally, the notion that reason is the motive force in history is shared by all sorts of savants. The American anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser stated in Early Civilisation : “Thus the whole of civilisation, if followed backward step by step, would ultimately be found resolvable, without residue, into bits of ideas in the minds of individuals.” Here ideas and individuals are the creative factors of history.

In describing his philosophy, the Italian thinker Croce wrote: “History is the record of the creations of the human spirit in every field, theoretical as well as practical. And these spiritual creations are always born in the hearts and minds of men of genius, artists, thinkers, men of action, moral and religious reformers.” This position combines idealism with elitism, the spirit using geniuses, or the creative minority, as the agency which redeems the masses.

These diverse elements of historical interpretation can appear in the most incongruous combinations in a given country, school of thought or individual mind. Stalinism has provided the most striking example of such an illogical synthesis. The votaries of “the personality cult” sought to fuse the traditions and views of Marxism, the most modern and scientific philosophy, with the archaic Great Man version of the contemporary historical process.

Except in Maoist China, this odd and untenable amalgam of ideas has already crumbled. Yet it demonstrates how generalised thought about the historical process can retrogress after making an immense leap forward. The history of historical science proves in its own way that progress is not even or persistent throughout history. Thucydides, the narrator of the Peloponnesian Wars in the fourth century BC, had a far more realistic view of history than did St. Augustine, the celebrator of the City of God, in the fourth century AD.

Marxism has incorporated into its theory of social development not only the verified findings of modern scientific research but all the insights into history of its philosophical predecessors, whether materialist, idealist or eclectic, which have proved valid and viable. To do otherwise would flout the mandate of its own method which teaches that every school of thought, every stage of scientific knowledge, is an outgrowth of the past work of men modified and sometimes revolutionised by the prevailing conditions and concepts of their existence. Scientific inquiry into history and society, like the process of history itself, has given positive, permanent and progressive results.

At the same time Marxism rejects all versions of antiquated theories which have failed to provide an adequate or correct explanation of the origins and evolution of society. It does not deny that historical idealisms contain significant ingredients of truth and can even exhibit a forward march. The main trend of their progression since the Greeks has been from heaven to earth, from God to man, from the imaginary to the real. Individuals, influential or insignificant, and ideas, innovating or traditional, are essential parts of society; their roles in the making of history have to be taken into account.

The idealists rightly pay attention to these factors. Where they go wrong is in claiming decisive importance for them in the total process of historical determination. Their method confines their analyses to the outer layers of the social structure so that they remain on the surface of events. Science has to delve into the nuclear core of society where the real forces which determine the direction of history are at work.

Historical materialism turns away from the Divine Director, the Great Man, the Universal Mind, the Intellectual Genius, the Elite, and an unchanging and uniformly acting Human Nature for its explanation of history. The formation, reformation and transformation of social structures over the past million years cannot be understood by recourse to any supernatural beings, ideal agencies, petty personal or invariant causes.

God didn’t create the world and hasn’t superintended the development of mankind. On the contrary, man created the idea of the gods as a fantasy to compensate for lack of real control over the forces of nature and of society.

Man made himself by acting upon nature and changing its elements to satisfy his needs through the labour process. Man has worked his way up in the world. The further development and diversification of the labour process from savagery to our present civilisation has continued to transform his capacities and characteristics.

History is not the achievement of outstanding individuals, no matter how powerful, gifted or strategically placed. As early as the French Revolution Condorcet protested against this narrow elitist view which disregarded both what moves the mass of the human race and how the masses rather than the masters make history. “Up to now, the history of politics, like that of philosophy or of science, has been the history of only a few individuals: That which really constitutes the human race, the vast mass of families living for the most part on the fruits of their labour, has been forgotten, and even of those who follow public professions, and work not for themselves but for society, who are engaged in teaching, ruling, protecting or healing others, it is only the leaders who have held the eye of the historian”, he wrote.

Marxism builds on this insight that history is the result of the collective actions of multitudes, of mass effort extending over prolonged periods within the framework of the powers of production they have received and extended and the modes of production they have created, built up and revolutionised.

It is not elites but the many-membered body of the people who have sustained history, switched it in new directions at critical turning points, and lifted humanity upward step by step.

History has not been generated nor has its course been guided by preconceived ideas in any mind. Social systems have not been constructed by architects with blueprints in hand. History has not proceeded in accord with any prior plan. Socio-economic formations have grown out of the productive forces at hand; its members have fashioned their relations, customs, institutions and ideas in accordance with their organisation of labour.

Human nature cannot explain the course of events or the characteristics of social life. It is the changes in the conditions of life and labour which underlie the making and remaking of our human nature.

In the introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another”.

These are the prime principles from which the rest of Marxist theory about the historical process is derived. They have come from two and half millennia of inquiry into the laws of human activity and social development. They represent its most valid conclusions. Historical materialism is itself the synthetic product of historically elaborated facts and ideas which are rooted in the economy and come to fruition in the science of society taken in the full span of its development.

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Analytical Marxism

Analytical Marxism is a predominantly Anglophone variety of Marxism that emerged in the late 1970s, and whose leading proponents are located in philosophy and social science departments in US and European universities. It can be distinguished from certain classical forms of Marxism by its openness to analytical methods, its critical attitude to certain substantive Marxist claims, its acknowledgement of its own normative commitments, and its assertion of the need for socialist design.

1.1 Components

1.2 structure, 1.3 bullshit, 1.4 further disambiguation, 2.1 origins, 2.2 september group, 3.1. methods, 3.2. methodological individualism, 3.3. functional explanation, 3.4. dialectic, 4.1 marxist substance, 4.2 history, 4.4 exploitation, 5.1 embracing design, 5.2 “coupon socialism”, 5.3 basic income, 5.4 transition, 6. overarching criticisms, other internet resources, related entries, 1. analytical marxism.

The arrival of analytical Marxism is often dated by the appearance, in 1978, of Karl Marx’s Theory of History. A Defence by G.A. Cohen (1941–2009). This particular label seems to have been coined by Jon Elster (1940–), and first appears in print as the title of a collection published in 1986 and edited by John Roemer (1945–). Those three figures—Cohen, Elster, and Roemer—are plausibly seen as the founders of analytical Marxism as a self-conscious intellectual current.

The label “analytical Marxism” requires some unpacking. Its component terms obviously get used in a wide variety of ways, and the combination looks an unnatural one to some.

Analytical Marxism often describes itself as the self-conscious product of Marxist and non-Marxist traditions, and the “analytical” modifier is provided by the latter. “Non-Marxist” is intended as a neutral descriptive term. It is not, for instance, equivalent to the pejorative use of “un-Marxist” by what—equally pejoratively—might be called “true believers”.

This dual inheritance takes a very particular form. Analytical Marxism is not a miscellaneous assembly of Marxist and non-Marxist elements, but rather embodies a distinctive division of labour between these two.

The division of labour internal to analytical Marxism runs between, on the one hand, its (non-Marxist) analytical methods (the plural is important), and, on the other, its (Marxist) substantive concerns and normative commitments .

Perhaps the only methodological commitment that analytical Marxists share is a negative one. They deny that there exists a distinctive and valuable Marxist method, one which is both useful and exclusive to Marxism (unavailable to non-Marxists). Analytical Marxists adopt non-Marxist mainstream methods whenever and wherever appropriate, and they maintain that, to the extent that, historically speaking, Marxism rejected a range of analytical methods—on the grounds of their putatively non-Marxist (“undialectical” or “individualistic”) character—this was to the detriment of Marxism’s engagement with its own substantive and normative concerns (G. Cohen 2000b: xviii).

The positive methodological commitments of analytical Marxism vary significantly, and some generalisations—about aspirations to precision, or rigour in argumentation, for instance—are not especially illuminating. That said, characteristic, if not constitutive, preferences, organised by discipline (and associated with Cohen, Elster, and Roemer, respectively) would include: in Philosophy, “those standards of clarity and rigour” associated with the techniques of logical and linguistic analysis that predominated in the Anglophone philosophical world in the twentieth century (G. Cohen 1978: ix); in Politics, political science treatments of action, choice, and strategy, and especially those which utilise decision theory or rational choice theory; and, in Economics, the major contributions of neoclassical economics, especially the mathematical modelling of general equilibrium and cooperative game theory (Roemer 1982). Whether these various methods have much in common is not certain. Erik Olin Wright suggests that they share: a commitment to conventional scientific norms; an emphasis on the importance of systematic conceptualisation; a concern with fine-grained specification of theoretical arguments; and a willingness to take the relationship between social processes and the intentional actions of individuals seriously (1994: 181–191).

The substantive concerns of analytical Marxism are broadly shared with classical forms of Marxism. They consequently range widely, but certainly include an interest in: historical explanation, class structure, and exploitation. What is potentially distinctive here is the analytical Marxist treatment of those, and other, classical Marxist topics.

The normative commitments of analytical Marxism are also broadly shared with classical forms of Marxism. The status and role of normative commitments in Marxist theory are much argued about, but it seems certain that—whatever their preferred self-descriptions—Marxists do have characteristic normative commitments. What is potentially distinctive here is that analytical Marxists acknowledge this, and see a need for further reflection on the relevant values and commitments. Analytical Marxists typically embrace values associated with socialism, such as equality and community, and endorse normative claims such as that existing capitalism is flawed, and that some non-capitalist alternative would be preferable.

More generally, this preliminary division of Marxism into elements—some of which can be rejected and others improved upon—reveals a further characteristic feature of the understanding and approach of analytical Marxism. In their various critical reflections on what is living, and what is dead, in classical Marxism (see, for instance, Elster 1985), analytical Marxists typically resist treating Marxism as a theoretical entity so systematic that it can only be swallowed, or rejected, as a whole.

In trying to characterise an intellectual current, it can help to identify those it is opposed to, or consciously contrasts itself with.

Cohen, Elster, and Roemer, all participated in an annual workshop usually known as the September Group. That Group initially also referred to itself as the “Non-Bullshit Marxism Group”. The label is intended both to be humorous—there was even a faux heraldic crest complete with cod Latin tag “ Marxismus sine stercore tauri [Marxism without the shit of the bull]” (G. Cohen 2013: 94)—and to convey some truth. It is also an aggressive characterisation, in that it implies that some kinds of Marxism are of the bullshit variety.

The best-known philosophical discussion of bullshit is, of course, that of Harry Frankfurt (2005). Cohen extended Frankfurt’s pioneering analysis to a variety of bullshit neglected in the latter’s original essay. A variety which: naturally inhabits the academy and not ordinary life; consists of the output (the bullshit) not the process (the bullshitting); is related to the ( OED ) dictionary definition of bullshit as “nonsense” or “rubbish”; and which further specifies the relevant nonsense as being by nature unclarifiable (G. Cohen 2013: 107 fn.27). It is the last of these characteristics—the “unclarifiable unclarity”—which appears central to this variety of bullshit, and which is purportedly celebrated by some of its producers and consumers.

Cohen goes on to affirm and defend the historical and empirical claim that “bullshit Marxism” flourishes in French intellectual culture. (He had judged this second part of his discussion as “too speculative”, and it was only published posthumously [G. Cohen 2013: viii].) In the 1960s, he read a great deal of French Marxism, especially work by Louis Althusser and his followers. At the time, Cohen found much of that material hard to understand, but located the blame for those difficulties entirely within himself. Moreover, whenever he finally managed to extract a reasonable idea from this Althusserian literature, he was inclined—precisely because of that effort and investment—to consider it more important and interesting than it actually was. This psychological mechanism—“a blend, perhaps” of “adaptive preference formation” and “cognitive dissonance reduction”—may be widespread (2013: 95). Despite this youthful attraction, Cohen did not succumb to Althusserianism, because, as he puts it:

I came to see that its reiterated affirmation of the value of conceptual rigour was not matched by conceptual rigour in its intellectual practices. (2013: 95)

And Cohen explicitly identifies this youthful “misguided Althusserian dalliance” as lying behind his own subsequent and fierce intolerance of bullshit (2013: 95).

The same phenomenon—the Althusserian promise of theoretical rigour, and the purported failure to deliver it in practice—may also have found biographical expression in Elster’s early graduate career. Not feeling at home with the Althusserian Marxists at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Elster ended up writing his dissertation under Raymond Aron.

In a distinct but related account, Erik Olin Wright characterises “full-blown” bullshit Marxism as beset by three intellectual “sins”. First, “obfuscation”, understood as offering arguments and analyses which sound profound, but which are resistant to clarification. The objection here is not to the use of technical, or quasi-technical, vocabulary as such, but rather to its use to obscure. Second, “intellectual dishonesty”, understood as the refusal variously: to clarify arguments in ways that are open to challenge; to acknowledge gaps in one’s understanding or knowledge; or to concede that there exist reasonable grounds for disagreement. This can take the form of what might be characterised as sincere dogmatism, but more often involves something closer to “bad faith”, in which authors repress their genuine doubts and qualifications when presenting their own views in public. The third is an “ideological style of argumentation” in which “a correct understanding of a subject” is conflated with “Marx’s understanding of that subject”; that Marx endorsed such and such a claim being treated as a conclusive argument in its favour (Kirby unpublished: 24–25 in Other Internet Resources ). Wright’s account of bullshit is more expansive than Cohen’s—not least, in venturing into the character of the bullshitter—but the idea of “obfuscation” looks to be a close relative of “unclarifiable unclarity”.

Note that the distinction between bullshit Marxism and non-bullshit Marxism is not an exhaustive one; that is, there are varieties of Marxism which are neither analytical nor bullshit. However, Cohen does provocatively suggest that, once analytical Marxism has a clear presence in the world, what might be called “pre-analytical Marxism” is no longer a stable outcome—it must tend to “either become analytical or become bullshit” as the case may be (G. Cohen 2000b: xxvi ).

Analytical Marxism, so understood, is not to be confused with adjacent intellectual movements that have shared the same, or a closely related, label, and with which they may have some affinity. Two earlier and non-Anglophone examples might be noted here.

First, a Japanese school of Marxist economics, also known as “analytical Marxism”, developed in the 1930s and was associated with the work of Shibata Kei and others based at Kyoto University. Shibata pioneered the critical use of tools of modern neoclassical economics to the problems of Marxist economics; in particular, contributing to a mathematical theorem which maintains that viable innovations in production methods will only increase or maintain the equilibrium rate of profit (Howard & King 1992; Negishi 2004; Rieu 2009).

Second, is a Polish school of “analytical-linguistic Marxism”, associated with the work of Adam Schaff and Władysław Krajewski in the 1960s. It is said to have resulted from a “collision” between Marxism and the Polish tradition of analytic philosophy (Skolimowski 1967), and involved, in particular, attempts to incorporate analytical tools into Marxist treatments of semantics and epistemology (Woźniak 2022).

These, and other, adjacent movements are not discussed further in this entry.

This is not the place for a thorough historical account of analytical Marxism. However, it might be helpful to say something about its origins and relation to the annual workshop of the September Group.

Analytical Marxism is sometimes conflated with participation in the September Group. This is both understandable and unfortunate. It is understandable because of the close overlap between the two; many of the best-known analytical Marxists (including the founding trio) were participants in the Group. And it is unfortunate because the two entities are distinct; their fates may often have overlapped but they are not synonymous.

First, analytical Marxism existed prior to, and independently of, the September Group. Each of the three founding figures had put “analytic methods” and Marxism together in their own work before they met the other two (see G. Cohen 1978, Elster 1978, and Roemer 1977), and before the formation of the Group.

(Biographically speaking—in understanding their positive response to analytical methods—it may also be significant that those three founding figures learnt their Marxism independently of, and prior to, their exposure to the analytical methods of their respective academic disciplines. Thus Cohen and Roemer were independently raised in North America by pro-Soviet parents, whilst Elster came from “an intellectual left-wing family” associated with the Norwegian Labour Party (G. Cohen 2000b: xx; Roemer 2019b [ Other Internet Resources ]; and Elster 2018: 201).)

Second, much analytical Marxist work is by individuals who are not participants in the September Group. A list of some of these, drawn from assorted secondary literature, might include: Alan Carling, Norman Geras, Andrew Levine, Daniel Little, Richard Miller, Charles W. Mills, Richard Norman, Jeffrey Reiman, Debra Satz, David Schweickart, William Shaw, Tommie Shelby, Elliot Sober, Ian Steedman, Nicholas Vrousalis, Robert Paul Wolff, and Allen Wood. All of those have been characterised as producing work, at some point, in the analytical Marxist mode, albeit that the list includes individuals who would not identify themselves as analytical Marxists, and others who have themselves criticised narrower versions of the tradition, such as rational choice Marxism (Wolff 1990)).

Some will also think the relevant conflation mistaken because the September Group is a diverse grouping of analytical Marxists and fellow travellers. “Fellow travellers” is intended here, non-pejoratively, to refer to individuals sympathetic to, and intellectually cooperating with, but not themselves identifying, either as analytical Marxists, or, indeed, as Marxists of any stripe. It might appear counterintuitive to characterise these fellow travellers as analytical Marxists, but the present entry operates on the basis of an expansive notion of analytical Marxism which includes all those working in the relevant mode—both “fellow travellers” in the September Group, and non-participants in the September Group—and attaches no special weight to self-identification.

Despite those caveats, the September Group did provide an institutional focus and momentum that was crucial to the early evolution of analytical Marxism.

The “prehistory” of the September Group centred on two London meetings of Marxist and Marxist ant scholars working on exploitation—convened at the initiative of Elster, and with the support of Cohen—in September 1979 and 1980. It was then decided to meet annually but no longer limit the discussion to exploitation. Consequently, the third meeting might be identified as the point at which the September Group had properly formed. It was attended by “the most dedicated” of those who had attended the first two meetings, plus “one or two” new invitees (G. Cohen 2000b: xix).

Between 1981 and 2002, membership of the Group was “remarkably stable” (G. Cohen 2000b: xix). These annual early meetings—usually, but not always, held in London—are remembered as intense and rewarding occasions, at which half of the group would pre-circulate papers, which were then introduced and commented on by someone other than the author (Wright 2005a, 343–344).

In 2000 the Group included (with then current academic affiliations in parenthesis): the economist Pranab Bardhan (Berkeley); the economist Samuel Bowles (Amherst); the historian Robert Brenner (Los Angeles); the political philosopher G.A. Cohen (Oxford); the political philosopher Joshua Cohen (Cambridge, Mass.); the political philosopher Philippe van Parijs (Louvain-la Neuve); the economist John Roemer (Yale); the political philosopher Hillel Steiner (Manchester); the political philosopher Robert Jan van der Veen (Amsterdam); the social scientist Erik Wright (Madison). Only two of that list had not been participants in 1982: Bowles had joined in 1987 and Joshua Cohen in 1996 (G. Cohen 2000b: xix).

The academic location of analytical Marxism is often noted, and sometimes linked with its purported distance from practical, real world, concerns. One critic refers to “the donnish remoteness of the whole project” (Roberts 1996: 219), and another maintains that its “standards of judgement” and “sense of proportion” are “derived not from the political arena but from the Senior Common Room” (E. Wood 1989: 88). The gender composition of the September Group is also sometimes raised as a concern, and its early practices would certainly appear to have reproduced, rather than challenged, the contemporary marginalisation of women in the relevant academic disciplines (Wright 2005a: 344).

There is also critical interest in the ideological composition of the Group. Descriptions of the Group as involving “a set of Marxists, or semi-Marxists” (G. Cohen 2013: 95), and as composed of scholars of “Marxist or quasi-Marxist stripe” (G. Cohen 2000b: xix), might be thought not to capture, either its early diversity, or the direction of its subsequent evolution. Wright characterises the politics of participants as ranging:

from fairly traditional commitments to revolutionary democratic socialism to the Greens to what might be termed left-wing libertarianism. (1994: 181)

Amongst proponents of the latter, Steiner characterises his own views as “[b]asically left-wing, though in a sense which has been largely unfashionable for most of this century” (Ricciardi 1997: 38), whilst Van Parijs describes himself as a person emphatically of the left, but as someone who has “never defined myself as a Marxist”, adding that he had always felt “extremely comfortable” within the September Group precisely “because it included fellow travellers and not just analytical Marxists” (1997: 17). At one point, the possibility of “political-ideological criteria for “membership” in the annual meeting” was discussed, but the Group agreed that what really mattered was not a commitment to a particular set of political positions, but rather “the possibility of constructive dialogue among the participants” (Wright 1994: 181 fn4).

The biggest internal disruption in the Group’s early history consisted in the dramatic departure, in 1993, of Elster (the original convener) and the political scientist Adam Przeworski (who had joined in the second year). Its causes remain uncertain. The “leavers” expressed criticisms of the evolving intellectual character of the group, and Przeworski suggested that insofar as its original purpose was the critical evaluation of Marxism, that task had been completed, and that “[w]e ultimately found that not much of Marxism is left and there really wasn’t much more to learn” (2007: 490). Indeed, Elster would subsequently characterise analytical Marxism as a rare case of “intellectual autophagy”, which had succeeded in revealing that “non-bullshit Marxism” was largely “an empty set” (2011: 163). Marx’s only remaining contribution of value was now said to concern, not his substantive views, but “his normative conception of the good life as one of active and joint self-realization” (2011: 163). In contrast, some “remainers” viewed these departures as reflecting external factors, especially the complex impact of the demise of the Soviet Union on a certain generation of leftists. “Complex”, not least, in that its demise was seen as involving both the removal of a hideous regime and the loss of a non-capitalist space (G. Cohen 2009b: 352).

Those contemporary tendencies—the perceived waning of both the value of Marxist ideas, and the availability of non-capitalist alternatives—perhaps impacted more widely on the dynamism and focus of the Group. In 2000 participants debated whether to continue. Some thought the decision to carry on (meeting biannually) was motivated as much by fellowship as strictly intellectual pay-offs (Wright 2005a: 345). Others affirmed the continuing intellectual benefits of a group of “people from different academic disciplines who have a radical orientation and who can fertilize each other’s thoughts” (G. Cohen 2009b: 352).

The September Group is now widely seen to have evolved away from a primarily Marxist orientation and towards other concerns. Wright suggested that whilst the group still shared an egalitarian approach to social justice:

the specific preoccupation with Marxism as a source of ideas and debates for advancing that normative agenda was no longer so important. (2005a: 345)

That tendential evolution was reflected in, and perhaps amplified by, the arrival of new participants (with then current academic affiliations in parenthesis), including the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas (Yale) and the philosopher Seana Shiffrin (UCLA). Even those who identified as Marxists were less likely to think of Marxism as “a comprehensive theoretical paradigm capable of constituting a general theory of history and society” (Wright 2005a: 342). The simple passage of time also left its mark on the composition and character of the Group (G. A. Cohen died in 2009, and Wright in 2019). This evolution remains tendential, in that there may be exceptions, perhaps including Brenner’s work on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and on the nature of contemporary capitalism (1993, and 2002). However, Roemer has recently confirmed that, although the Group continues to meet, “most of us no longer identify as Marxists” (Roemer 2019b in Other Internet Resources ). That “most” appears to include Roemer himself:

I tend not to call myself a Marxist anymore because I do not credit many of the ideas that Marx believed were at the center of his view: the labour theory of value, the falling rate of profit, and the claim that dialectical materialism is a special kind of logic. (Roemer 2020b: 135)

Of course, it is not certain that Roemer had previously subscribed to those particular Marxist ideas either (see 1981), but the changing self-identification says something nonetheless.

Whilst the September Group provided an institutional focus and momentum that was crucial to the early evolution of analytical Marxism, neither the past, nor the future, of these two entities is identical.

In considering the non-Marxist methods adopted by analytical Marxists, it is important to emphasise the plural. The variety of methods and approaches that analytical Marxists have adopted is striking. Nor is this merely a question of the disciplinary divides mentioned above (between Philosophy, Politics, and Economics). Once we move beyond generalisations about clarity and precision, there is no clear consensus within analytical Marxism about the merits of particular “analytical” methods and approaches.

Two examples of methodological disagreement within analytical Marxism are sketched here.

The enthusiasm of many analytical Marxists—including Elster, Przeworski, and Roemer—for the doctrine of methodological individualism is widely known. Perhaps as a result, it is sometimes thought that all analytical Marxists are committed to methodological individualism, and that this doctrine forms a fault line between analytical and other forms of Marxism. Both of these claims look questionable.

The proper characterisation of “methodological individualism” is contested (see entry on methodological individualism ). It is understood here as a methodological position which maintains that all macro-level social phenomena—political states, economic classes, social processes, group norms, and so on—are in principle reducible to micro-level explanation involving only individuals and their properties (Elster 1985: 5).

So understood, methodological individualism may have fewer implications than sometimes thought. For instance, there is no necessary connection with rational choice explanations (see Wolff 1990). One might think of the two theories as playing different roles: the first arguing for explanations at the level of individuals; and the second adopting a particular model of rational action at that level (Wright, Levine, & Sober 1992: 126). Similarly, there is no necessary connection between methodological individualism and what is sometimes called “atomism”; namely, the claim that only non-relational entities are explanatory (Wright, Levine, & Sober 1992: 110). Methodological individualists can allow that the individual characteristics considered explanatory include inherently relational properties (being an “employer”, for example).

Even so, methodological individualism remains a demanding doctrine. In particular, its proponents insist on the indispensability of micro-level explanations, and the desirability of dispensing with “holist” accounts. Elster, for one, characterises it as “a form of reductionism”, recommending the move from the aggregate to the less aggregate level of phenomena (1985: 5).

Methodological individualism also looks to have an historically uneasy, if not downright antagonistic, relation with Marxism. First, many of the most enthusiastic proponents of the former were fierce critics of the latter (including Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper). Second, if pre-analytical Marxists had expressed a view about methodological individualism, then it would probably have been to reject it (perhaps encouraged by Marx’s emphasis on the importance of social totalities, and his scepticism about explanations based on “abstract individuals”). Third, analytical Marxists have often raised methodological individualist concerns about Marx’s own attempts at social explanation; suggesting, for instance, that Marx substituted “wishful thinking” for “social analysis” in his account of the dynamics of communist revolution (Elster 1988: 225).

However, analytical Marxists have also held that, whilst Marx often (implicitly) denied methodological individualism, he was also “at least intermittently” committed to it. That more positive attitude is said to be evident, for instance, in some of his anti-teleological remarks in the German Ideology manuscripts (Elster 1985: 109). At a time when Elster insisted that “most of the views” that he himself held to be “true and important” could be traced back to Marx, he explicitly included methodological views in that category, alongside substantive views and values (1985: 531).

Other analytical Marxists—including Wright, Levine, and Sober—have sought to resist the reductive ambitions of methodological individualism, without embracing the position they call “radical holism” (which seeks to eliminate the individual level of analysis). Broadly speaking, the central issue here—between Elster on the one hand, and Wright, Levine, and Sober on the other—is whether the only good social explanations are what J.W.N. Watkins calls “rock-bottom” explanations in terms of individual actions, or whether “half-way” explanations might not also be meaningful and useful (Watkins 1957: 106). For the methodological individualist, to explain a social phenomenon just is to provide an account of the individual level mechanism that produces it. In the absence of such an account, the phenomenon remains unexplained. However, Wright, Levine, and Sober embrace a position they call “anti-reductionism”, which denies that all “macro-level” social explanations are in principle reducible to “micro-level” accounts in terms of individuals and their properties (1992: 115).

This line of response draws on a distinction between two distinct threads in the methodological individualist position: its ontological claim that all macro-level social entities are constituted by individuals; and its explanatory claim that all macro-level social entities are ultimately explicable in terms of facts about individuals. Accepting the truth of the former does not require one to endorse the distinctive “reductive” ambitions of the latter. And there might be good reasons for resisting the latter, including: the possibility of regularities at the macro-level which are not derivable from regularities at the micro-level; and (more pragmatically) in the existence of cases where, although it might in principle be possible to perform the derivation, the benefits of doing so might be extremely limited. In both cases, there are good reasons to preserve the “explanatory autonomy” of the social (Little 1991: 183–195).

One kind of case which resists reduction is where there is no single relation between the social phenomenon and individual properties, because the relevant macro-level phenomenon can be realised in multiple ways at the micro-level. Examples might include the idea of “fittingness” in evolutionary biology, or of “economic survival” (of capitalist firms) in economics (Wright, Levine, & Sober 1992: 119). In such circumstances, no particular micro-level account can be identified as explaining the macro-level phenomenon, because the latter can be realised in multiple combinations of the former. The provision of a micro-level account might still be desirable—for instance, identifying a possible micro-foundation might improve our confidence in the macro-level explanation—but here it offers no support for a general project of reduction (1992: 122). In short, Wright, Levine, and Sober recognise that facts about social phenomenon might supervene on facts about individuals and their interaction, without it being the case that all social phenomenon can be explained in individualistic terms alone. The question of how many social phenomenon are irreducible to individual level properties looks to be an open empirical matter (List & Spiekermann 2013).

There are complex issues in the philosophy of social science raised here, but—irrespective of one’s considered judgement about the balance of argument—these disagreements confirm that a commitment to analytical methods does not require endorsement of methodological individualism. Wright, Levine, and Sober, for example, have all produced work within the analytical Marxist tradition and yet reject elements of this particular methodological doctrine.

The methodological diversity of analytical Marxism is also apparent in disagreements about the legitimacy of functional explanation in the social sciences. The initial context of this disagreement is provided by Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History. A Defence (1978).

Cohen and Elster had independently come to see that Marx, in his theory of history, was, in some sense, committed to functional explanation. They differ in that, whereas Elster deplores that commitment and recommends an alternative game theoretic account, Cohen defends this role for functional explanation and expresses scepticism about the suitability of Elster’s alternative (G. Cohen 2014: 284). (Note that only some elements of their debate are covered here.)

Cohen identifies a number of explanatory connections between the “ensembles” that appear in Marx’s “1859 Preface”: the productive forces; the relations of production; and the superstructure. Consider an example involving the first two of those ensembles. The productive forces are those facilities and devices—means of production (including tools, raw materials, and premisses) and labour power (including strength, skill, and technical knowledge)—used to productive effect in the process of production. They are said, on this account, to grow in power over the course of human history. And the relations of production—the sum total of which are said to constitute the economic structure (or “base”) of a given society—are the relations of power that people enjoy, or lack, over those forces, over means of production and labour power (G. Cohen 1988: 4).

In the context of the relationship between those growing forces and the relations of production (the economic structure), Marx propounds two claims which might look to be in tension with each other. First, that the productive forces have explanatory primacy over the relations; that is, that the level of development of the productive forces explains the nature of the economic structure. And second, that the economic structure has considerable effect on the forces; not least, that the economic structure controls (facilitates or frustrates) the development of the productive forces. It is this combination of claims which confirms that the “first primacy thesis”—that “the level of development of the productive forces in a society explains the nature of its economic structure” (G. Cohen 2014: 289)—is best understood as functional in form.

A functional explanation is one in which something that has an effect, is explained in terms of its effect. Cohen often uses an example from evolutionary biology to illustrate this; namely, that “birds have hollow bones because hollow bones facilitate flight”. Here, something (birds having hollow bones) which has a certain effect (facilitating flight) is explained by the fact that it has that effect (“birds have hollow bones because hollow bones facilitate flight”; G. Cohen 1988: 8). In short, where e is a cause and f is its effect, functional explanations maintain that: e occurred because it would cause f . Or, more properly, functional explanations maintain that: e occurred because the situation was such that an event like e would cause an event like f (G. Cohen 1988: 8).

Functional explanation, so understood, renders these two claims—namely, that the relations of production are explained by the forces of production, and that the relations of production control the development of the forces of production—consistent. For instance, where relations of production endure (that is, exist in a stable fashion), they do so because they promote the development of the productive forces. And, where relations of production are revolutionised (that is, where old relations are abandoned for new ones), old relations cease to exist because they no longer favour the forces, and the new relations come into being (and/or come to preponderate) because they do favour the forces. On this reading, the impact of the relations on the forces is no embarrassment to Marx’s theory of history because of the functional manner in which it explains economic structures in terms of productive forces. Economic structures rise and fall according to whether they sustain or frustrate the development of the productive forces. To be clear, the suggestion is not, strictly speaking, that Marx propounds functional explanations, but rather that the claims which he does propound put severe constraints on the kind of explanation that is required, and that functional explanation is the most plausible candidate meeting those constraints.

Elster takes issue with Cohen’s twofold claim that, historical materialism “cannot shed its commitment to functional explanation”, and that “there is nothing inherently suspect in it” (G. Cohen 2014: 294). Elster maintains that the conditions that justify the use of functional explanation in evolutionary biology do not obtain in social theory, and especially not in the context of historical materialism.

Elster insists that functional explanations of macro-phenomena are methodologically acceptable only where it is possible to indicate, at least schematically, the mechanisms at the level of individual behaviour through which the aggregate behaviour emerges. That is, macro-explanations require what he calls “microfoundations” at the level of the processes of individual choice and action. Indeed, it seems that “holist” social explanations are not really considered explanations at all. They involve—in this figuratively mechanistic account—a black box whose internal workings are hidden, when to explain just:

is to provide a mechanism, to open up the black box and show the nuts and bolts, the cogs and wheels, the desires and beliefs that generate the aggregate outcomes. (Elster 1985: 5)

In this context, Elster recommends that Marxism abandon (insufficiently supported) functional explanation and utilise game theoretic explanation in its place.

In response, Cohen makes two broad points.

First, Cohen maintains that, whilst providing “microfoundations”—what he prefers to call “elaborations” of a functional mechanism—would improve a functional explanation, their absence does not necessarily invalidate it. The nineteenth-century Darwinian claim that birds have hollow bones because hollow bones facilitate flight, for example, was already an “excellent” explanation, which was subsequently rendered “even better” through twentieth-century developments in the science of genetics (G. Cohen 1988: 12). Marx’s theory of history might be figuratively located at an analogous position to that not-yet-fully-elaborated Darwinian stage.

Second, Cohen judges the proposal to replace functional explanation with game theoretic accounts as an unpromising one. Whilst game theory can provide imaginative accounts of aspects of class struggle—of alliances and revolution, for instance—class struggle is not the most basic of the phenomena that historical materialism is trying to explain. For Marxists, “class struggle has primary political significance, but the political dimension of society is not itself primary” (G. Cohen 1988: 17). Game theory might help explain the immediate outcome of various political struggles, but whether those outcomes stick, or not, is explained by the material conditions in which they take place.

Again, there are complex issues in the philosophy of social science raised here, but—irrespective of one’s considered judgement about the balance of argument—this dispute confirms that analytical Marxism is home to disagreement and debate about particular methods.

Commentators sometimes claim that analytical Marxism holds an unremittingly negative view of “dialectic”, with one suggesting that:

a good test to follow if in doubt whether a particular writer supports the analytic school is to see whether he mentions dialectics with favour. If he does, he must immediately be crossed off the list. Even to cite the word at all counts against membership in the analytic school. (Gordon 1990: 22–3.)

Both that claim and this test are rejected here. (This section draws on Leopold 2008.)

Analytical Marxists share the negative methodological view that there is no distinctive Marxist method, no valuable tools and approaches which are available only to Marxists. That view is perhaps most likely to be resisted by “Hegelian Marxists” who identify the Marxist method with some variety of dialectic. However, it does not follow that analytical Marxists have to reject all talk of dialectic. (There is, of course, also a potential irony in the hostility of Hegelian Marxists to the embrace of non-Marxist methods by analytical Marxists, given that their own preferred method presumably owes much to its eponymous “bourgeois” source.)

Many of the best-known analytical Marxists are proponents of what can be called modest conceptions of dialectic. Consider, for example, Elster’s account of three dialectical strands in Marx’s work, of which two are judged valuable (Elster 1978: chapters 3–5; Elster 1985: 37–48; and Elster 1986a: 34–39).

The first, and wholly unpromising, strand concerns dialectic as a method of presentation. In parts of the Grundrisse (1986–87 [1857–58]) and Capital (1996 [1867]), for instance, Marx appears to adopt a “quasi-deductive procedure”, presenting certain results of his economic analysis in a manner analogous to the developing categorical system of Hegel’s science of logic. Elster is deeply unsympathetic to this method of presentation, purporting to find, both the relevant passages, and their underlying motivation, scarcely intelligible (1985: 37). (For a more positive account, see Arthur 2004.)

The second, and modestly promising, strand concerns the “dialectical laws”, associated with Friedrich Engels, but also found in Marx’s own work. In Engels’ famous formulations, these “laws” include: the “negation of the negation”; the “transformation of quantity into quality”; and the “interpenetration of opposites”. Elster scales down the status and explanatory reach of Engels’ account, suggesting that, rather than indicating laws of nature, we think of these terms as describing “not infrequent patterns of change” sometimes found in nature, society, and consciousness (1985: 40). There is no suggestion that all developments, in those various contexts, follow such patterns, and their extent is treated as an open empirical question. However, with those, and other, cautions in place, Elster suggests that these imprecise but suggestive ideas can be illuminating.

For example, the “negation of the negation” describes the third step of a triadic development from a stage of “undifferentiated unity” (where some subject is undivided from some object), through a stage of “differentiated disunity” (where that subject is divided from the object in a manner which creates discord), to a stage of “differentiated unity” (where the distinction between subject and object remains but harmony between them is restored). Analytical Marxists are happy to allow that certain social and individual developments exhibit this dialectical pattern. Cohen, for instance, describes a historical development from pre-capitalist society, where collective structures and consciousness inhibit individualism (a stage of undifferentiated unity), through the divisions of capitalism, which stimulate an unbridled individualism and undermine community (a stage of differentiated disunity), to a communist future, which will preserve (aspects of) individuality in a context of regained community (a stage of differentiated unity). Note that society is said to undergo a dialectical transformation here simply by virtue of experiencing the relevant stages in turn. There is no suggestion of the development being a necessary one, of each stage having to generate the next (G. Cohen 1988: 185).

The third, and most promising, of the three dialectical strands is a theory of social contradictions. Elster sees Marx as a pioneer in the study of “real contradictions”; that is, situations in (psychological or social) reality which can only be described in terms of logical contradiction. The core idea here involves a contrast between the local and the global, between what is possible for a particular social agent and what is possible for all agents in that social position. This core idea is judged both clear (impervious to some standard “analytical” objections to dialectical talk) and fertile (operationalizable and capable of generating substantive social scientific results).

Elster outlines two variants of social contradiction: “counterfinality” and “suboptimality”. Only the former is discussed here. Broadly speaking, counterfinality refers to the discrepancy between individual intentions and actual results which obtains when each individual acts upon non-universalizable beliefs about the behaviour of others (see Van Parijs 1982, 592). In what Elster calls “condensed jargon”, counterfinality can be described as “the embodiment of the fallacy of composition” (1985: 44). Consider the following example of the contradictory character of capitalist behaviour. In response, say, to some exogenously induced fall in demand, each individual capitalist reduces their own workers’ wages in order to maintain profits. The aggregative result, contrary to that intention, is a further reduction of workers’ buying power (and thus a further reduction also of profits). Any capitalist might have succeeded were they the only one to act, but when they all act in this way they fail (Elster 1985: 46). These desires taken together are contradictory, in the sense that there is no possible world in which all capitalists can have that desire satisfied. Given certain structural contexts, those social contradictions can cause social change; for instance, in certain cases, generating collective action (perhaps including state intervention) designed to overcome or mitigate those contradictions.

There is no suggestion that only Marxists can identify or appreciate these two kinds of modest dialectic. For instance, there is an interesting parallel of “the negation of the negation” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of three “distinct and often successive” stages in the relation between an individual and religious belief (see Tocqueville 1835–40 [1994: 187]). And Elster (1978: 106) notes that the concept of counterfinality was developed by an intellectually highly diverse group of, both early proponents (Bossuet, Mandeville, Vico, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx), and more recent defenders (Oskar Morgenstern, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Nozick, and Trygve Haavelmo).

Finally, no support is offered here to those insisting on the existence of a radical gulf between “dialectical” and “analytical” reasoning. The explicit assumption is that dialectical talk can make analytic sense. Indeed, as Cohen remarks, in a slightly more aggressive formulation, the idea that belief in dialectic is a rival to analysis “thrives only in an atmosphere of unclear thought” (G. Cohen 2000b: xxiii).

These modest conceptions will, of course, be too modest for some, but they confirm that analytical Marxism does not reject the very idea of dialectic.

It is the substantive concerns of analytical Marxism which—along with its normative commitments—are said to embody its Marxist heritage (by comparison with its adoption of non-Marxist methods).

This section outlines some aspects of analytical Marxist treatments of: historical explanation; class structure; and exploitation.

The present section sketches some aspects of Cohen’s account of historical materialism (1978), and of his subsequent reflections on the explanatory scope of that theory (1988: 155–179).

Marx is said to understand history as, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, maintaining that forms of society, which are organised around economic structures, “rise and fall according as they enable and promote, or prevent and discourage, that growth” (G. Cohen 1988: 3). The canonical text for this interpretation being Marx’s “1859 Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , which is treated not as one piece of evidence amongst many, but as the text providing the clearest theoretical statement of historical materialism.

Cohen presents Marx as committed to the following claims, amongst others:

• First, the Development Thesis: which claims that the productive forces have an autonomous tendency to develop throughout history. The productive forces are those facilities and devices—means of production (including tools, raw materials, and premisses) and labour power (including strength, skill, and technical knowledge)—used to productive effect in the process of production. Growth here can be measured by the decreasing amount of labour it takes with given forces to produce what is necessary to satisfy the basic physical needs of the immediate producers.
• Second, the First Primacy Thesis: which claims that the level of development of the productive forces in a given society explains the economic structure (the set of relations of production) that obtain in that society. The relations of production—the sum total of which are said to constitute the economic structure (or “base”) of a given society—are the relations of power that people enjoy, or lack, over the productive forces, over means of production and labour power (G. Cohen 1988: 4).
• Third, the Second Primacy Thesis: which claims that the “base”, understood as the economic structure of a given society, explains the legal and political “superstructure” in that society.
• Fourth, the claim that the kind of explanation involved in both of these two Primacy Theses is functional explanation (see section 3.3 ).

To put a little flesh on those abstract bones, consider the following elaboration of the First Primacy Thesis (Wright, Levine, & Sober 1992: 19). A given level of development of the productive forces is only compatible with a certain type (or with limited types) of economic structure. Since forces of production tend to develop over time (see the “Development Thesis”), the forces eventually reach a level where they are no longer compatible with the relations of production under which they had previously developed. When such incompatibilities arise, the relations are said to “fetter” the development of the forces of production (G. Cohen 1988: 109–123). This fettering leads to revolution, in which social actors (classes) with the capacity to bring new relations into effect emerge, and revolutionise the economic structure in ways that restores growth in the productive forces.

This model of growing levels of productive power, and their associated forms of society, is said to generate a four-stage periodisation of progressive epochs in human history (G. Cohen 1978: 197–201). In the first stage, the material position involves an absence of surplus, and the corresponding social form is a primitive classless society (productive power being too low to enable a class of non-producers to live off the labour of producers). In the second stage, the material position is a surplus large enough to support an exploiting class, but too small to sustain capitalist accumulation, and the corresponding social form is a pre-capitalist class society. In the third stage, the material surplus is moderately high—high enough to support capitalist accumulation—and the corresponding social form is capitalist class society. Capitalism subsequently generates a growing surplus such that it becomes itself unsustainable (for contested reasons), leading to a fourth and final stage, where, on the basis of a precondition of a massive surplus, a modern classless society emerges.

Such an abbreviated summary ignores many interesting complexities and changes in Cohen’s views, but hopefully give some sense of its character as a defence of a “traditional”, even “old-fashioned”, conception of historical materialism attaching explanatory primacy to the forces of production (G. Cohen 1978: x).

There is a huge critical literature on Cohen’s reading of Marx’s theory of history. A thorough survey is scarcely possible here, but most criticisms tend to cluster around three main kinds of concern.

First, there are criticisms based on Cohen’s treatment of what might be called textual issues. For example, there is some suspicion of what is seen as his over -reliance on the “1859 Preface” (critics sometimes utilising Printz 1969). Or, to give another example, there are appeals to the lack of fit between Cohen’s interpretation and some of the more concrete accounts of historical development found elsewhere in Marx’s own writings (Miller 1984: 188–195).

Second, there are criticisms pressing on coherence issues arising from Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx’s theory. For example, there is some scepticism about whether the “base” can be distinguished from the “superstructure” in the way that he requires (F. Cohen & Acton 1970; Lukes 1982). Or, to give another example, whether Cohen’s distinction between social and material properties is conceptually flawed in ways that undermine his claims about the primacy of the productive forces (Coram 1989).

Third, there are criticisms examining the empirical truth of this account of Marx’s theory. For example, there are doubts about whether the historical record of pre-capitalist societies—especially given cases such as the “long period” in Chinese history, or the “second serfdom” in Poland—offer support for the claim that there is little productive regression in history (J. Cohen 1982: 266–268). In addition, some historians are sceptical of whether, given pre-capitalist relations, economic actors have the relevant incentives to act in the ways—especially, in transforming property relations—that Cohen’s theory seems to require (Brenner 1985a, 1985b, and 1986). Or, to give a final empirical example, as part of a wider insistence that Cohen’s early work is flawed by its lack of gender awareness, Paula Casal argues that his four-stage periodisation of epochs (and associated producers) cannot survive serious reflection on the economic position of women (2020).

These, and many other, critical questions are not pursued further here. Instead, the remainder of the section considers the explanatory scope of historical materialism.

Cohen accepts that Marx’s theory makes some large and controversial claims, but comes to think that these may be less demanding than is often thought. Cohen distinguishes two interpretations of historical materialism. On an inclusive reading, the theory claims that material and economic developments explain the principal features of other, non-economic developments. However, on a restricted reading, the theory commits itself to explaining non-economic phenomena only when, if they weren’t so explained, they would seem to control material development. The theory, on this “restricted” reading, limits itself to explaining non-economic phenomena which possess “economic relevance” (G. Cohen 1988: 173). It seems likely that Marx and Engels—perhaps under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history—assumed an inclusive reading, but Cohen suggests that the restricted reading is consistent with the “1859 Preface”, and may offer a better fit with historical evidence.

An example can illuminate the difference between these two readings (G. Cohen 1988: 160–165). Assume that the following increasingly Weberian-looking claims are all true: first, that Protestantism took hold and persisted for non-economic reasons; second, that Protestantism had important consequences for European religious life; and, third, that Protestantism had important consequence for European economic life. Note that inclusive historical materialism is challenged by both the conjunction of the first two claims, and the third claim; whereas restricted historical materialism is challenged only by the addition of the third claim to the first two. Moreover, on Cohen’s functionalist account, the latter can meet that challenge:

if the features of Protestantism in virtue of which it had economic effects arose because of their tendency to have such effects. (1988: 176)

Cohen was subsequently persuaded (by Wright) that this distinction between restricted and inclusive historical materialism is better understood in the light of a “prior distinction” between Marxist theory of history and Marxist sociology (G. Cohen 1988: 176–177). Marxist theory of history is identified with the restricted variant, and the familiar Marxist claims that the latter refrained from affirming (about the economic explaining the principal features of non-economic life) are now allocated to Marxist sociology. Where Marxist theory of history is concerned with the issue of how social formations succeed one another, Marxist sociology is concerned with how the elements within a social formation are related. The latter, but not the former, insists that non-economic structures and modes of consciousness are, in their broad outlines, explained by material and economic factors. The two theories are often conflated, but they are sufficiently distinct that they require independent assessment (G. Cohen 1988: 178).

The concept of class is central to the Marxist tradition. Of course, many non-Marxist thinkers—including Ricardo, Weber, Durkheim, and Bourdieu—also utilise some idea of class, but it is typically conceptualised differently, and allocated a less important role in their social theory. For Marxists, class is standardly defined in an “objective” manner, and designates the social position occupied by individuals within a network of relations of production. Indeed, an objective account is necessary if certain Marxist claims about the ways in which class conditions and shapes “consciousness, culture, or politics” are to be sustained (G. Cohen 1978: 73). And class, so understood, typically plays a crucial explanatory part in Marxist accounts of, variously: the character of, and development between, historical epochs; the institutional form, and behaviour, of the state; and many of the beliefs, and actions, of individual and collective agents.

Class is a recurring topic in analytical Marxist writings. Examples include: Wright’s account of the “middle class ”; Przeworski’s analysis of the class basis of social democracy (1985); Roemer’s discussion of the relationship between class position and exploitation status (1982); and Alan Carling’s game theoretic portrayal of relations between men and women as class relations (1991: 253–299). This section outlines some aspects of the first of those examples.

Wright has written at least five books on the subject, changed his views over time, and collaborated in extensive empirical work using modern sample survey methodology and multivariate statistical techniques across countries (Wright 1989). This section only touches on: the Marxist character of Wright’s view of class structure; his early response to the problem of “the middle class”; and his revised understanding of the relation between exploitation and class.

Wright identifies six “conceptual constraints” that diverse Marxist approaches to class—including his own—typically respect (1985: 26–37). First, that the class structure of a society is the “basic” determinant (1985: 28) of the limits of possible variation in class formations, class consciousness, and class struggle. Second, that class structures constitute the central organising principle of societies, shaping the possible variations of “the state, ethnic relations, gender relations, etc.”, and offering the best way of identifying historical epochs (1985: 31). Third, that the concept of class is a relational one, classes are defined within social relations, and especially by their relation to other classes (to be a feudal serf, for instance, is to stand in a certain relation to a feudal lord). Fourth, that the social relations which define classes are intrinsically antagonistic; that is, classes have conflicting interests, between which compromise or accommodation—but not harmony—is possible. Fifth, that the objective basis of those antagonistic relations is exploitation (Marxists do not, for instance, merely claim that lords are rich and serfs are poor, but insist rather that the former are rich because they appropriate a surplus produced by the latter). Sixth, and finally, that the fundamental basis of exploitation is located in the social organisation of production, notwithstanding disagreements about how to locate classes within relations of production (whether, for instance, ideology, property, control, or something else, are crucial). The last four of these constraints can be said to elaborate the structural properties of the Marxist concept of class.

Wright’s best-known early contribution to class analysis—his model of “contradictory class locations”—is preoccupied with theorising the class character of “the middle class” within a Marxist framework. The context here is the seeming tension between modern historical developments and the classical Marxist idea of capitalist society as increasingly composed of two hostile camps (capitalists and proletarians) with any third class (the “petit-bourgeoisie”) as “transitional” in nature (on its way to being squeezed out by the other two). That claim about a pervasive tendency towards class polarisation would appear to conflict with the huge growth of professional, managerial, technical, and bureaucratic positions, in both modern corporations and modern states (Wright 1985: 7–9). The resulting “problem of the middle class” raises issues, not only about the accuracy of received Marxist accounts of class structure, but also about the sociological plausibility of their associated accounts of class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle (since these newer groups do not obviously share the interests and attitudes of traditional proletarians).

Wright rejects Marxist responses which either deny the gap between the polarisation account and empirical reality, or assimilate these new social groups to the petit-bourgeoisie. Instead, his own early approach abandons the assumption that the class locations of individuals are mapped in a one-to-one relation to the actual class structure of capitalism. Rather than assuming that individuals are only ever capitalist, petit-bourgeois, or proletarian, Wright suggests that some occupy positions that have “a multiple class character; they may be in more than one class simultaneously” (1985: 43). Those individuals occupy “contradictory class locations”; or, more precisely, “contradictory locations within contradictory class relations”.

Wright’s earliest attempts to operationalise this increasingly differentiated account of the class structure of contemporary capitalism focuses on whether individuals are self-employed, and whether they supervise the labour of others. This resulted in a simplified typology which added “managers” to the three original Marxist classes (capitalists, petit-bourgeoisie, and proletariat). His subsequent work further differentiated these new social groups on the basis of the extent of individual control (full, partial, minimal, or none) over money capital, physical capital, and labour within production. The resulting contradictory class locations now included: managers (simultaneously bourgeois and proletarian); non-managerial technical/professional staff (simultaneously petty-bourgeois and proletarian); and small employers (simultaneously bourgeois and petty-bourgeois). By 1979, Wright had a schematic typology that added five contradictory class locations to the three original Marxist classes (Wright 1985: 48 figure 2.2).

After 1979, Wright’s account evolved significantly in response to criticisms, especially from Roemer. Wright now criticised his own earlier view for emphasising domination, and downplaying exploitation. Exploitation is understood here as diagnosing the ways in which income inequalities are generated by inequalities in rights and powers over productive resources; that is, the ways in which:

exploiters, by virtue of their exclusionary rights and powers over resources, are able to appropriate surplus generated by the efforts of the exploited. (Wright 2005b: 17)

This new account resulted in a typology in which ownership and non-ownership of means of production are complicated by effective control of “organisation assets” and “credential assets”, both of which can constitute a strategic basis for generating higher incomes. Some of the resulting class locations are occupied by individuals who are both exploited in one dimension (because they don’t own or control capital), and exploiters in another (because they can leverage their organisational and credential assets in the relevant ways). Wright’s new typology of class locations has twelve categories: three types of owner of means of production (differentiated by their amount of capital); and nine varieties of wage-earner (differentiated by organisation and credential assets). The latter group contains a wide range of class locations distinct from proletarians proper, including expert managers, expert non-managers, semi-credentialled supervisors, and more (Wright 1985: 88 table 3.3).

Critics have acknowledged Wright’s theoretical ingenuity, but sometimes identified a gradational neo-Weberian account of stratification as really doing the work here, only partially concealed behind Marxist rhetoric about exploitation (Mayer 1994: 137). Wright concedes the similarity of appearances here—in particular, the shared focus on the ways in which class determines “life chances”—but insists on the distinctiveness of the two theoretical frameworks. The Marxist character of his own account is said to rest on the central role of exploitation—and the distribution of the rights and powers of individuals over productive resources—in determining the distribution of income and economic activities (Wright 2005b: 16–19).

Finally, Wright also identifies possible continuities with his earlier views. The idea of the “middle classes” occupying “contradictory locations” is perhaps preserved in the idea of those individuals having interests that conflict with both capital and labour (Wright 1985: 87). The relevant groups are like workers in that they are excluded from ownership of the means of production, but they also have interests opposed to workers because of their effective control of organisational and credential assets.

Exploitation is a highly contested concept. This section is intended only to introduce some aspects of its treatment by analytical Marxism, and not to rule out alternative usages.

The basic concept of exploitation involves some agent benefitting from social interaction with another by taking advantage of that other, sometimes (interestingly) in ways that are both mutually beneficial and consensual (A. Wood 1995: 151). Of course, not all kinds of “taking advantage” are morally problematic. To give a standard example: there may be nothing wrong with a chess grandmaster exploiting a weakness in their opponent’s endgame. Consequently, we might want to avoid “moralised” definitions of “exploitation” which make it wrongful or unjust by definition. That said, cases of “wrongful exploitation” are of particular significance in the Marxist tradition, often being treated as providing a reason for seeking to replace capitalist economic arrangements with non-exploitative alternatives.

Marxist claims about exploitation are often said—by both Marxists and their critics—to depend on the labour theory of value. This is denied by Cohen who, in a well-known article, argues that the relation between the two, despite their long historical association, is one of mutual irrelevance (1988: 209). The labour theory of value is understood here as a theory of equilibrium price, whose central claim is that magnitude of value is determined by socially necessary labour time. Cohen suggests that those Marxists who have insisted on the labour theory as the basis of exploitation have confused the idea of producers creating value with the idea of producers creating that which has value (the product). This latter, somewhat simpler, idea is the real basis of the charge of exploitation. What matters for exploitation is not that capitalists appropriate value created by workers, but rather that they appropriate (part of) the value of what the worker produces.

In the place of arguments that make exploitation claims depend on the labour theory of value, Cohen endorses the “Plain Argument” (1988: 228):

• The labourer is the person who creates the product, that which has value.
• The capitalist appropriates some of the value of the product.
• The labourer receives less value than the value of what she creates,
• The capitalist appropriates some of the value of what the labourer creates.
• The labourer is exploited by the capitalist.

It is this Plain Argument which is said typically to motivate Marxists, whatever their official view of the labour theory of value.

Note that the claim that the capitalist appropriates part of the value of the worker’s product (step 4) is not (as it stands) a normative one. For that appropriation to constitute wrongful exploitation the normative dimensions of the step from 4 to 5 in the Plain Argument would need to be fleshed out. The present section outlines three candidate explanations of the relevant wrongfulness—involving the ideas of unfairness, instrumentalising vulnerability, and domination, respectively—which have found support within analytical Marxism.

The first, and best-known, analytical Marxist account maintains that wrongful exploitation rests on the capitalist benefitting from prior unfairness , in particular, benefitting from the injustice of property relations. (This account is associated with Roemer, amongst others, but note that many additional issues raised by the latter’s innovative work on exploitation—for instance, his account of socialist exploitation resting on unequal ownership of productive skills—are not discussed here (see Roemer 1982, 1986b, 1986c, 1988).)

Roemer develops a general theory of exploitation; “general”, not least, in aiming to capture both Marxist and neoclassical accounts within the same framework. He proposes that a group is exploited “if it has some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off” (1986c: 103). Formally this involves specifying a game played by coalitions of agents in an economy, and specifying payoffs if they withdraw.

We can say that capitalist exploitation obtains when capitalists are made better off by the existence of workers, but workers are made worse off by the existence of capitalists (Roemer 1996: 40). More precisely, capitalists exploit workers if and only if the following three conditions obtain. First, if workers were to withdraw from the society, endowed with their per capita share of society’s alienable property (including means of production) then workers would be better off (in terms of income and leisure) than they are at the present allocation. Second, if capitalists were to withdraw under the same conditions, then capitalists would be worse off (in terms of income and leisure) than they are at present (because some of their current share would go to workers). Third, if workers were to withdraw from society with their own endowments (not their per capita share), then capitalists would be worse off than at present (because they would no longer be able to benefit from the workers’ labour).

For Roemer, exploitation as such is not morally objectionable. In an adjacent context (1988: 129–130), he describes a two-person economy where a fair initial distribution of resources, but differing preferences for work and leisure: X prefers to work hard and defer consumption while Y prefers leisure and immediate consumption, which results in X being able to hire Y under conditions such that (a) X is made better off by this arrangement, (b) Y is not made worse off by this arrangement; (c) Y could have freely chosen not to enter into this arrangement; and (d) Y is exploited by X in that X appropriates some of the labour time of Y . In examples like these, Roemer maintains, exploitation exists but does not appear morally objectionable or unjust.

For Roemer, exploitation is best understood as the distributive result of inequalities in the distribution of productive assets and resources. It is unjust only where it results from a prior injustice in the underlying distribution of those assets and resources (Roemer 1996: 96). He consequently recommends that Marxists should drop their traditional focus on the micro level of the relationship between classes in production, and attend rather to the macro level of the distribution of property in society. It is unjust distribution—specifically, the unjust capitalist monopoly of effective control of the means of production—that generates (the secondary phenomenon of) unjust capitalist exploitation, and which should be the primary locus of any normative concern.

One critical concern about this account is that, although the existing capitalist monopoly over the means of production may have come about in a morally problematic way (not least, through violence and theft), we can at least imagine (perhaps having read Nozick 1974) a capitalism with a morally clean origin story, where the same inequalities emerge from a just starting point and just subsequent steps (involving, perhaps, voluntary choices and the right kind of luck). In such circumstances, Roemer’s three conditions might be met, but, on his own account, there looks to be nothing wrongful about the result. This might appear a surprising result in a Marxist account of exploitation, and is perhaps indicative of a wider problem.

In this context, consider the paradigmatic example of exploitation suggested by Nicholas Vrousalis (2013: 148); namely “the pit case”:

A finds B in a pit that B cannot exit unaided. A can get B out at little cost or difficulty. A offers to get B out, but only if B agrees to pay a million euros, or to sign a sweatshop contract with A . B signs the contract.

We do not seem to require to know how B came to be in the pit—whether, for instance, it was through just or unjust steps—in order to assess the offer as wrongfully exploitative. It seems enough to notice that A could easily rescue B without asking for anything, but instead takes advantage of B ’s vulnerability in order to improve their own lot (Vrousalis 2013: 149). By analogy, asset injustice does not look to be a necessary condition for wrongful exploitation.

A second analytical Marxist account maintains that wrongful exploitation rests on capitalists enriching themselves by taking advantage of the vulnerability of workers. (This model is suggested by some of Wood’s writings on exploitation (see especially 1995).)

Wood maintains that exploitation in general “consists in the exploiter”s using something about the person for the exploiter’s ends by playing on some weakness or vulnerability in that person’ (1995: 147). And he acknowledges that, so understood, exploitation is not always wrongful (as, for instance, in cases like the previously mentioned chess grandmaster).

Exploitation is wrongful, on this account, when exploiters enrich themselves by taking advantage of the vulnerability of the exploited. The wrongfulness here seems to involve the instrumental treatment of others in ways which are humiliating or disrespectful. Wood maintains that:

Proper respect for others is violated when we treat their vulnerabilities as opportunities to advance our own interests or projects. It is degrading to have your weaknesses taken advantage of, and dishonourable to use the weakness of others for your ends. (1995: 150–151)

The relation between capitalist and worker would appear to exemplify this account of wrongful exploitation. The vulnerability here arises from the workers’ propertyless condition, which compels them to sell their labour power in terms advantageous to the capitalist. This structural feature of the capitalist economy is not fundamentally altered, and only lightly mitigated, by the existence of some collective bargaining and government regulation (A. Wood 1995: 155). (Note that “wrongful exploitation” here might, or might not, constitute an injustice on Wood’s account.)

One critical concern about this pure vulnerability account is that it might look too expansive; that is, it might look liable to indicate falsely that exploitation is present in particular cases. It might, for example, seem committed to the claim that a cancer doctor, who makes a very comfortable living out of treating the seriously ill, necessarily exploits their patients (Arneson 2016: 10). Those who hesitate to endorse that claim may seek to resist such implications.

A third analytical Marxist account treats the instrumentalization of vulnerability as a necessary but not sufficient condition for wrongful exploitation. The additional condition for exploitation to obtain is that this instrumentalization of vulnerability occurs in a manner which involves domination . (This model is suggested in some of Wood’s writings on exploitation (1972, 2014), as well as in work by Vrousalis (2013, 2016).)

On this domination account, it is the abuse of power that is the real wrong-making feature of exploitation; exploitation is paradigmatically “domination for self-enrichment” (Vrousalis 2013: 131). The relevant kind of domination obtains when the exploiter either inflicts some “power-induced injury” to the status of the exploited, or imposes some “servitude” on the part of the exploited (Vrousalis 2016: 3). This refinement appears to address the critical concern about the expansiveness of the pure vulnerability account; for instance, domination looks to be missing in the case of the cancer doctor and patient, but present in the relation between A and B in the case of the pit.

To be clear, the present account is intended to give some introductory sense of an ongoing debate about whether unfairness, the instrumentalization of vulnerability, or domination, are at the heart of wrongful exploitation. There is no suggestion here that any consensus about the precise character of exploitation has emerged within analytical Marxism.

5. Socialism

Analytical Marxists have typically broken with Marx’s “utopophobia”, rejecting his view that providing detailed descriptions of the socialist future is undemocratic, impossible, and unnecessary (Leopold 2016). Instead, analytical Marxists have embraced the need for socialist design, and explicitly sought to develop coherent and credible accounts: first, of the values of socialism; second, of the institutional, and other, arrangements which might best embody and promote those values; and third, of the forms that a transition to those alternatives to capitalism might take (Elster & Moene 1989).

The values endorsed by analytical Marxism are familiar from the wider socialist tradition (see entry on socialism, §3.1 ). They include: equality; community; democracy; individual freedom; and self-realization. Within analytical Marxism, there is no general agreement about the character, weight, or potential to conflict, of these. However some examples of their elaboration by analytical Marxists can be given.

Equality is understood by Cohen as “socialist equality of opportunity” (distinct from bourgeois and left-liberal variants of equality of opportunity). He construes this in a luck egalitarian way, as seeking to correct for all unchosen disadvantage, disadvantage for which the agent herself cannot be held responsible, whether it reflects social or natural misfortune (2009a: 10–11). Community , on Cohen’s account, requires “that people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another” (2009a: 34–35). Meaningful community is put under strain when large inequalities obtain, and so this principle limits certain inequalities that the egalitarian principle alone would permit. Democracy can be understood as extending beyond the political, narrowly construed, to require that people have “broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions” affecting their lives as members of society (Wright 2010: 12). Individual freedom is defended in a variety of increasingly demanding ways, from negative liberty, though non-domination, to the “real freedom” of having security, self-ownership, and the greatest possible opportunity to do whatever you might want to do (Van Parijs 1995: ch. 1). And self-realisation is seen as valuable (for reasons involving welfare and autonomy), even if considerations of feasibility and desirability require some scaling down of the classic Marxist requirement of “the full and free actualization and externalization of the powers and the abilities of the individual” (Elster 1989: 131).

Turning to the kind of institutions that might best embody and promote these, and other, values, it might be said that analytical Marxists typically proceed with a certain humility. In particular, they often acknowledge the inhuman and irrational dimensions of many twentieth-century varieties of actually-existing-socialism. Wright figuratively warns that, rather than having detailed maps with clear destinations and identifiable routes, contemporary socialists are in the position of early explorers with a “compass” and some sense of the direction in which they want to go (2006). And Cohen wryly cautions that, although we have a reasonably clear sense of socialist values “we now know that we do not now know” how to design the social institutions that might best embody and promote those goods (2009a: 81).

Two institutional examples of alternatives to capitalism—market socialism and basic income—associated with analytical Marxism are sketched here (see also Arneson 1992).

Market socialism can take many different forms. John Roemer has developed, and serially refined, a particular variant referred to here as “coupon socialism” (1994a, 1994b, 1996). Coupon socialism is an example of a kind of market socialism sometimes called “shareholder socialism”; that is, a type of economic model which combines a stock market with public ownership of firms (Corneo 2017: 184–197). Sceptics might characterise the result as “capitalism without capitalists”, but Roemer defends it as a feasible and desirable attempt to combine: efficient market mechanisms; some state planning over broad investment priorities; an egalitarian distribution of property rights; and an egalitarian distribution of profits.

Roemer is keen not to rerun earlier battles between socialism and the market. Socialists, he insists, cannot afford to neglect the importance of efficiency and innovation in generating sustainable prosperity. He variously: allows that Soviet-style command economies failed; presents Friedrich Hayek as winning the “socialist calculation debate”; and recommends learning from the real-world institutional “experiments” of contemporary capitalisms (where ownership and control are already differentiated, and diverse mechanisms—involving figurative “carrots” and “sticks”—have been developed to tackle principal-agent problems). A strong public sector is likely to be a central ingredient of a socialist society, but socialists are admonished to stop “fetishizing” public ownership, and to be open-minded about possible ownership relations, judging them only by their effects on equality and efficiency (Roemer 1994b: 454–457). Roemer’s own earlier work on exploitation had convinced him that property relations and asset inequalities—not markets as such—are the real problems.

Coupon socialism aims to distribute the profits of firms equally amongst citizens without unacceptable losses in efficiency compared to contemporary capitalism. The model eliminates capitalist class relations whilst retaining market mechanisms. Ownership is distributed equally through arrangements which involve a stock market and decentralised decision making. Its most striking institutional feature is perhaps the creation of two kinds of money—call them “dollars” and “coupons”—which are not convertible by individuals (who cannot legally exchange coupons for dollars or transfer coupons as gifts or bequests). Dollars are used to buy all the commodities that you might currently purchase (including labour power and consumption goods) except that they cannot be used to buy ownership rights in listed companies. The latter can only be purchased by individuals with coupons, and coupons are distributed to individuals in an egalitarian manner. The shares are priced in coupons but any subsequent dividend would be in dollars. At the legal age of maturity, individuals receive their per capita share of the total coupon value of the economy. It is assumed that most individuals will invest their coupons in shares through mutual funds rather than directly. A share of a firm entitles the mutual fund to a share of the relevant firm’s profits, and a share of a mutual fund entitles the individual to a share in the fund’s revenues (Roemer 1996: 20). The model effectively endows citizens at adulthood with a modest income stream during their lives, generated from the profits of public companies that are not directly owned by the state. The various restrictions on the relevant property rights ensure that the scope for accumulating wealth in means of production is limited. Differentials in coupon wealth would exist, but the main causes of inequality would be differential wages and savings behaviour.

Such a brief sketch of coupon socialism raises many questions (see Wright 1995, and Veneziani 2021, for further discussion). These include questions about its feasibility and desirability.

Feasibility worries often concern the economic details of the model. Critics wonder variously about: the place of small private capitalist firms (shops, restaurants, small manufacturers); the modesty of the coupon-driven income stream; and the structures needed for raising investment funds (through credit markets and other mechanisms which allow companies to convert coupons into dollars subject to regulation) (Corneo 2017: 184–197).

Desirability worries often concern the socialist credentials of the model. Critics wonder variously about: the extent to which these institutional arrangements might embody and promote an individualism corrosive of community; or how far these arrangements might fail to embody and promote the kind of control over work arrangements that socialists have historically endorsed and sought to realise (Wright 1995).

More generally, much seems to depends on the intended aim of the model. Should we think of coupon socialism as: an imaginative theoretical demonstration that economic efficiency can be conceptualised outside of capitalist private ownership; a deliberately modest and accessible first step away from capitalist society towards a more egalitarian future; or as the very best socialist arrangements that are feasible? (These alternatives are not intended to be exhaustive.)

Roemer has continued to work on issues of socialist design, focussing more recently on the modelling of individual economic behaviour (Roemer 2019a). Any coherent socio-economic system, he suggests, requires “three pillars”: a set of property relations and institutions that organise the allocation of resources; a distributive ethic that identifies a fair or just pattern of income and resources; and a behavioural ethos that specifies how economic actors make decisions. These three should work together, in that if economic agents act according to the relevant ethos, then the relevant institutional arrangements should implement the relevant just distribution. Roemer now insists that the behavioural ethos is as important as the other two pillars, and criticises earlier models of market socialism—including coupon socialism—for having changed the institutional arrangements of capitalism but kept its behavioural ethos (Roemer 2019a: 179; see Carens 1981 for a possible exception).

In capitalism, the behavioural ethos is said to be “individualism” (the individual “goes it alone”), where each actor is conceived as “being in competition with all other actors, and the actions of all are constrained by nature”. In socialism, in contrast, the behavioural ethos is cooperation, where citizens of a socialist society are engaged in a cooperative enterprise to transform nature in order to improve the lives of everyone (Roemer 2020a: 10–11).

More precisely, Roemer recommends a socialist model of cooperation that he calls “Kantian optimisation”. Kantian optimisation challenges both the standard economic picture of individuals as utility maximisers, and in the standard ways in which that standard picture is adjusted for other-regarding motivations (Roemer rejects the idea that Nash optimisation is the uniquely rational way to optimise). In Kantian optimisation, individuals choose the action that maximises their payoff, assuming that all other agents take the same action. Very roughly, cooperation depends, not on altruism (which is implausibly demanding), but on solidarity (the idea that we are “all in the same boat”) and trust (the idea that if we take the cooperative action, enough others will do so as well). This socialist model of cooperation is said to be realistic, in that it respects certain behavioural results in both the laboratory and real life (recycling and tipping, for instance (Roemer 2019a: 14–16)).

Roemer uses formal models—general competitive equilibrium and game theory—to demonstrate some surprising payoffs for socialist design once this model of cooperation is integrated into it. Not least, he demonstrates that, under some fairly uncontroversial assumptions, market socialist economies can rectify the unequal income distribution of capitalism without paying a price in efficiency or market failures (Roemer 2019a: 206–207, and Veneziani 2021). In short, given Kantian optimisation, certain familiar problems in socialist design may be less serious than were once thought (Roemer 2015: 107).

The idea of basic income has a long history (early forerunners include Thomas Spence 1797 [2004] and Joseph Charlier 1848 [2004]), and some confusingly close relatives (including basic endowment and a negative income tax). Its most recent revival owes much to Philippe Van Parijs. The core idea is deceptively simple and seductive. Basic income consists in:

a regular income paid in cash to every individual member of a society, irrespective of income from other sources and with no strings attached. (Van Parijs & Vanderborght 2017: 4)

The proposal assumes a territorially defined political community, and that recipients are fiscal residents. The regular payment is in cash and not in kind (food, shelter, clothes, etc.). It is paid to each individual, irrespective of their domestic arrangements (not, for instance, only to “heads of households”). It is universal, involving no means test, but paid, at the same rate, to rich and poor alike. And it is an obligation-free payment, carrying no requirement, in particular, for beneficiaries to work or be available to work.

Beyond that core idea, particular basic income schemes differ considerably; not least concerning the level at which the basic income is to be paid. To help calibrate alternatives, Van Parijs suggests that an amount corresponding to a quarter of current GDP per capita—which, in 2015, would have corresponded to $1163 per month in the United States—would sit between “modest” and “generous” versions of the idea (Van Parijs & Vanderborght 2017: 11).

Since the model apparently assumes an economy dominated by appropriately regulated capitalist markets, enthusiasm for a basic income might be thought to sit uneasily with the normative commitments of analytical Marxism. One response is to emphasise the ways in which a basic income scheme might reduce our dependence on that market. It could variously: strengthen the bargaining position of workers (against their employers and others); effect a partial decommodification of labour power (reducing the economic compulsion to sell the latter); and make engagement in socially useful but unpaid activities much easier (Wright 2005c). So understood, basic income answers questions about both socialist transition and socialist design; a basic income scheme might help us move away from a capitalist society, and form part of the institutional structure of the non-capitalist alternative.

In a set of delightfully provocative essays written with Robert van der Veen, Van Parijs took that suggestion—that a basic income scheme might transform capitalism in a progressive direction—and ran with it (Van der Veen & Van Parijs 1986a, 1986b, 2006). They laid out the possibility of “a capitalist road to communism”; arguing that welfare state capitalisms have the potential to move smoothly, if slowly, towards Marx’s own communist ideal. The communist “realm of freedom”—understood here as involving widespread material abundance, voluntary productive contributions according to ability, and distribution according to need—is now reached via the introduction of, and gradual increase in, a basic income scheme in capitalist societies. It is not reached by the traditional “transitional”, or “strictly socialist”, stage involving state or social ownership of means of production. On this account, that “strictly socialist” stage is redundant, and can be skipped entirely (for critical comment, see Wright 1994: 157–172).

Framed in this way, the case for basic income seems to rest on controversial perfectionist assumptions; for instance, about the disvalue of wage labour and value of unalienated activities (see Kandiyali 2022). This might make it a hard sell in liberal pluralistic societies committed to respecting a diversity of conceptions of the good life, and Van Parijs has subsequently sought to reposition the proposal.

The appeal of basic income is now said to rest on its emancipatory potential, its ability to deliver “real freedom”—the “genuine capacity” of individuals to act on their own life plans free from certain debilitating pressures (including unemployment and employment traps)—to all. Freedom considerations also, of course, play a role in determining the form of basic income; for instance, helping to justify its being a cash payment with no restriction on what is purchased or when. The tightness of the connection between basic income and this real libertarian foundation might be doubted, but this is now Van Parijs’ preferred grounding.

So understood, basic income rests on a conception of social justice which is both liberal, in not privileging particular contested conceptions of the good, and egalitarian, in requiring justifications for any derivation from a baseline equal distribution. Freedom is treated not as a constraint on what justice requires, but as “the very stuff that justice consists in distributing fairly” (Van Parijs & Vanderborght 2017: 104). Basic income is justified as a way of maximising the level of real freedom to those with the least of it (“maximin real freedom”), or rather “maximining” the “gifts” that form the “material substratum” of such real freedom. “Gifts” here refer to the immense stock of wealth for which none of us are individually responsible, and which should be treated as our common inheritance (Van Parijs & Vanderborght 2017: 104–109).

Criticisms of basic income are sufficiently many and varied to make meaningful summary impractical. However, two familiar worries might be noted.

First, a familiar desirability worry is that basic income involves an apparent unfairness. In advocating unconditional benefits it violates some conception of “reciprocity”, allowing individuals to receive a share of their society’s income without making a productive contribution in return (White 2003). Elster provocatively describes basic income as a recipe for the “exploitation of the industrious by the lazy” (1986b: 719). A number of responses are available, including: conceding the validity of the concern, but seeing it as outweighed by the practical difficulties of enacting conditionality; or allowing that reciprocity considerations are persuasive in the context of certain cooperative ventures, but denying their relevance in the context of distributive justice.

Second, a familiar feasibility worry is that basic income schemes might be unaffordable. In facilitating a move away from paid productive activities, basic income risks undermining the very source of funding on which it depends. Again, a number of responses are available, including: claiming that perverse labour supply effects might be reduced by taxing things other than individual income (natural resources, financial transactions, consumption, and so on); or stressing that the weight of this objection depends on the level at which the basic income is set (uncertainty perhaps recommending that we start low and introduce increases experimentally).

The lack of agreement about the shape of a desirable and feasible post-capitalist future, might make discussion of how to reach that goal look premature. However, preliminary reflection on the issue of socialist transition—of how to get from “here” to “there”—might still be useful. The many examples of such reflection from within analytical Marxism include: Cohen’s discussion of the proletariat as a collective agent (2000a: 101–115); Adam Przeworski’s account of the electoral dilemmas of social democracy (1985); and Erik Olin Wright’s reflections on socialist strategy. An outline of the latter is provided here.

Wright’s ambition—looking both “behind” and “ahead”—is to move beyond the tired and limited contrast between “reform” and “revolution”. He offers a conceptual map of socialist—and, more broadly, anti-capitalist—strategies that have been historically important, as well as suggesting how they might be combined in a strategic vision for those seeking to escape the harms of contemporary capitalism (2010: 273–365).

Wright (2019: 38–53) identifies five “strategic logics” embodied in anti-capitalist struggles (historical examples of movements adopting them are in parentheses). The initial pair of examples share a revolutionary goal—replacing capitalism with a very different kind of economic structure—but have competing accounts of how that might be accomplished. First, smashing capitalism: according to which “a decisive, ruptural break” with a system that is, at root, unreformable is necessary (see early twentieth-century revolutionary communism). Second, dismantling capitalism: according to which democratic politics facilitate state-directed reforms gradually replacing capitalist elements with alternatives (see “democratic socialism”). Third, taming capitalism: which typically uses state policies of regulation and redistribution in order to “neutralise” the harms of capitalism, without trying to destroy their underlying causes (see post-war social democracy). Those last two strategies rely heavily on the exercise of state power, and in this respect differ from Wright’s final two models. Fourth, resisting capitalism: which involves more or less organised attempts within civil society—and not primarily the state—to alleviate the harms of capitalism (see trade unions, boycotts, consumer movements, and anarchist-inflected social movements). And fifth, escaping capitalism: which pursues a more separatist strategy, not tackling capitalism directly, but rather seeking to isolate a group from its harms (see intentional communities, communes, and certain religious communities).

Wright locates these five “strategic logics” within a schematic typology with two dimensions (2019: 53–58). The first dimension differentiates between “neutralising harms” and “transcending structures”. The “taming” and “resistance” models aim to neutralise harms; and the “smashing”, “dismantling”, and “escaping”, models aim to transcend structures. The second dimension differentiates between three “transformative logics” using the metaphor of a “game”. The “ruptural” strategy seeks to change the game being played, and is exemplified by the “smashing” model. The “symbiotic” strategy seeks to change the rules of the game being played, and is exemplified by the “taming” and “dismantling” models. And the “interstitial” strategy seeks to change the way in which one plays within a given set of rules, and is exemplified by the “resisting” and “escaping” models. Anyone seeking to visualise a grid with these two dimensions will realise that one of the six resulting cells is empty. No-one presumably uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut, or, a little less figuratively, no-one thinking that the most effective way of neutralising harms is to change the game itself.

Wright’s evaluation of these historical movements is broadly negative; they all seem to have either failed at the time, or to have only limited current purchase. From the political vantagepoint of developed capitalist countries: revolutionary communism and democratic socialism have largely disappeared; social democracy has declined, and lost its connection with labour militancy; and, whilst “anarchist inflected social movements” survive as perhaps the most dynamic form of anti-capitalism, they often remain disconnected from political projects and parties. Wright appears most critical of the ruptural strategy, doubting that democratic support for a sharp break and rapid transition is sustainable given the nature of the “transition trough”—a concept adopted from Przeworski—faced by the middle classes, in particular (2010: 308–320). (A “transition trough” refers to the initial decline in production and living standards that is likely to follow a ruptural break with capitalism. Depending on the depth and extent of these troughs, it might not be in the material interests of individuals to support a ruptural path to socialism even where they plausibly believe that the material conditions of life under socialism will eventually come to exceed those of previously-existing capitalism.)

Looking forwards, Wright recommends the strategy of eroding capitalism (2019: 59–64). Existing economic systems are said to combine capitalism with other economic arrangements, including what we might call proto-socialist alternatives (embodying democracy, equality, and community). The eroding strategy combines elements of interstitial and symbiotic approaches. In the former mode, it involves a “bottom-up” strategy focused on civil society, participating in various marginal alternative economic activities. In the latter mode, it involves a “top-down” strategy focused on the state, seeking to secure and expand those alternatives through law and public policy. The ambition of this mixed approach is gradually to allow proto-socialist economic relations and practices to succeed and displace their capitalist counterparts.

The strategic vision of eroding capitalism corresponds only uncertainly to real world movements, but Wright suggests that certain movements in Latin America and Southern Europe (including Podemos in Spain) may capture something of its spirit. He also portrays it as analogous to the process by which capitalism itself historically displaced feudalism. Proto-capitalist forms of economic life emerged in the niches of feudalism, and slowly grew to the point where they displaced the dominant feudal structures. Political upheavals occurred as part of this process, but they typically served to consolidate and rationalise socioeconomic changes that had already taken place (Wright 2019: 61).

This entry already contains many examples of criticisms of particular authors and particular arguments within analytical Marxism. However, these were not typically targeted at the intellectual current as a whole. Indeed, some were advanced from perspectives sympathetic to the approaches, concerns, and commitments, of analytical Marxism. However, there are also less sympathetic critics willing to move beyond specific authors and arguments, and issue a negative verdict on analytical Marxism as such. These comprehensive criticisms are varied, but might be grouped roughly according to which of the three sources and component parts of analytical Marxism forms their central target.

A first group of comprehensive criticisms focus on the methodological claims of analytical Marxism. The diversity of positive methodological approaches amongst analytical Marxists has been emphasised here, but there remains a shared (negative) premise; namely, that there is no distinct and valuable Marxist method. And there are critics who—holding that there is such a method, and that it is superior to the “bourgeois” tools adopted by analytical Marxism—reject that premise. For example, they might maintain that Marxism is necessarily committed to a “dialectical” approach—sometimes based on a wider philosophy of “internal relations”—which analytical Marxists are bound to reject (Sayers 1984, 2015). Or, they might suggest that “analytical” and “Marxist” are rival methodologies embodying a tension that can only be resolved fully by one side routing the other; on this account, some September Group participants are portrayed as remaining true to their analytical methods by slowly abandoning their Marxism (Roberts 1996: 14).

A second group of comprehensive criticisms focus on the substantive concerns of analytical Marxism. The critical suggestion here is typically that in translating the substantive concerns of traditional Marxism into the language and frameworks of “mainstream social science”, analytical Marxism has lost what was valuable about them (Levine 2003: 123). For instance, it is suggested that analytical Marxism’s treatment of exploitation, class, and history, involves an abstract, individualistic, and ahistorical, framework that makes its conclusions hard to distinguish, in many respects, from the theories of “bourgeois social science” (E. Wood 1989: 55). Or, in an another variant, that analytical Marxists seem to have lost sight of, or never really appreciated, the centrality of the “system of labour” to Marx’s substantive account of human society (Chitty 1998: 40).

A third, and final, group of comprehensive criticisms focus on the “normative turn” of analytical Marxism, reacting against the suggestion that the predictive failures of classical Marxism might have amplified the need for normative clarification and argument (G. Cohen 2000a: 103–4). One variant insists that Marxism neither has, nor needs, a normative theory. Marx is rather to be commended for holding that normative theory is pointless because it is motivationally ineffective or unnecessary (Leiter 2002, 2015). Another variant criticises the content, rather than the fact, of analytical Marxist commitment to normative theory. For instance, normatively speaking, it suggests that analytical Marxism has increasingly “fused and interpenetrated” with left-liberalism, to a point where it is difficult to tell them apart (Bertram 2007: 137).

These comprehensive criticisms are not directly challenged here. However, there are reasons, at least, to hesitate before endorsing them.

First, it might simply be too early for comprehensive criticism. Attempts at the latter sometimes fail to consider that only a very provisional assessment of analytical Marxism as a research programme might be appropriate at this point. After all, many participants in the first wave of analytical Marxism—including Brenner, Roemer, and Van Parijs—continue to produce significant and interesting work. In addition, there are more recent contributions which offer the possibility of a constructive future development of the paradigm. Consider, for example, the “Afro-analytical Marxism” outlined and endorsed by Tommie Shelby (2021). Very roughly, Shelby approves of analytical Marxism’s methodological combination of analytical and empirical rigour, together with its substantive interest in exploitation and ideology, but regrets—and seeks to make good—its failure, both to theorise racism and racial hierarchy, and to examine the place of the black radical resistance in the fight for social justice and a “post-capitalist” future (2021, and Mills 2003: 155). More generally, the future of analytical Marxism looks open; its research programme does not appear closed to future development, nor has it been replaced decisively by a competitor. The intellectual merits of intellectual traditions—think of utilitarianism, for instance—are not always exhausted by one’s judgement of the first group of authors with whom they are associated. Simply put, it might be better to leave the full autopsy until the death of the patient is more certain.

Second, some of these comprehensive criticisms might appear to be unproductively preoccupied with the Marxist credentials of analytical Marxism. “Marxism” is treated stipulatively as an honorific, and then this analytical variant is located beyond the pale—exposed as not Marxist, or not Marxist enough, or not Marxist in the right kind of way, or even “anti-Marxist” (Lebowitz 1988: 195; Hunt 1992: 105).) Of course, this issue—of whether, and to what extent, analytical Marxism is Marxist—can take a legitimate form. It might, for instance, form a step in a more substantive argument, or the context might be one in which proper labelling is an appropriate concern (intellectual history, for instance). However, in the absence of further argument, these criticisms can appear to adopt an inappropriately “religious” approach to the evaluation of an ongoing research programme. Cohen expresses regret that, historically, it was the label “Marxism”—rather than, say, that of “scientific socialism”—that came to be associated with the relevant concerns and commitments. After all, it is typically religions, rather than sciences, which are named after their founders. Progressive disciplines are not expected to preserve the theses of their founders (G. Cohen 2000b: xxvii). We do not, for instance, ask physicists whether they are still sufficiently Galilean (assuming, for the sake of the example, that Galileo founded physics)?

Third, and finally, some of these comprehensive criticisms look ungenerous and one-sided, making little effort to consider the potential achievements here. More positively, analytical Marxism might be said to have established itself as an intelligent and valuable form of “Enlightenment Marxism”. Its enthusiasm for clarity in, careful elaboration of, and honesty about, arguments, constitute contextually-important reminders of significant intellectual virtues. Substantively, its evolving treatment of core Marxist concerns—including historical development, class, and exploitation—reflect and confirm an openness to science, reason, and empirical evidence. As such, analytical Marxism recognises and continues certain valuable, and often neglected, elements of Marx’s own thought (Little 1986). In addition, analytical Marxism aspires to advance our understanding of the social world without abandoning, or obscuring, or disparaging, the role of normative theory. Finally, its rejection of Marx’s “utopophobia” is well-founded, and its corresponding efforts to explore and promote alternatives to capitalism, in ways which balance the concerns of desirability and feasibility, are imaginative and thought-provoking. Analytical Marxism, it might be suggested, rightly takes its place as one current of thought, in a wider radical stream, striving to understand social oppression, and to contribute to its reduction and elimination (G. Cohen 2001: 14).

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Kirby Mark, unpublished, “An Interview with Erik Olin Wright”, written 2001, [ Kirby 2001 available online ].
• Roemer, John E., 2019b, “‘Exploitation, Cooperation, and Distributive Justice’ Interview by Maya Adereth and Jerome Hodges”, in Phenomenal World , 24 October 2019. [ Roemer 2019b available online ]

Althusser, Louis | economics [normative] and economic justice | exploitation | individualism, methodological | markets | Marx, Karl | rational choice, normative: expected utility | socialism | social minimum [basic income] | work and labor

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jan Kandiyali, Lucinda Rumsey, and an anonymous SEP referee, for comments on a previous version of this entry.

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Marxism and Art by Andrew Hemingway LAST REVIEWED: 25 July 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 30 January 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920105-0023

Marxism combines a theory of history with a philosophical worldview that aims to transcend the contemplative posture of earlier philosophies and provide the intellectual means for humanity’s emancipation from oppressive social and political forms. It offers a holistic perspective that necessarily encompasses the aesthetic, which is central to both its critique of capitalism and its vision of communism. The collected works in English of Marxism’s founders, Karl Marx (b. 1818–d. 1883) and Friedrich Engels (b. 1820–d. 1895), comprise fifty substantial volumes: a corpus of books, articles, pamphlets, manuscripts, and correspondence produced over a forty-year period. Key texts such as The German Ideology (1846) were not published in the authors’ lifetimes; even Capital (1867), the single volume for which Marx is best known, was only the first installment of a projected four-volume work of which Volumes 2 and 3 appeared posthumously. The fragmentary and diverse nature of this legacy is one reason why it has been possible to put such diverse interpretations on Marx’s work. Many of his key terms and categories were given no single unambiguous definition, and subsequent Marxists have sought to deduce them from different usages and contexts. Another factor complicating interpretation is the long collaboration with Engels, which began in 1844 and lasted until Marx’s death. It is widely accepted that Engels’s later philosophical writings departed from the positions he and Marx shared in the 1840s and served to give Marxism a crude positivist cast that facilitated its transformation into a political ideology. Moreover, some interpreters—most notably Louis Althusser—have seen a break within Marx’s thought between an early and a mature phase, which is also a distinction between prescientific and scientific status. These differences are symptomatic of a tension within the Marxist synthesis between elements deriving from German idealist thought and a more naturalistic conception of a science of society that continues to divide Marxists. The history of Marxism as a theoretical tradition is a succession of attempts to turn this complex heritage into a unified system at the same time as refashioning and developing it in response to different historical and political conditions. Given Marxism’s totalizing ambitions, Marxist art history has been as responsive to these twists and turns in the larger character of Marxist thought as other specialist disciplines. Accordingly, this article includes a periodization of Marxist thought that also marks—at least roughly—phases in the development of Marxist art-historical methodology. The scope of the article is confined to Western art.

Neither Marx nor Engels wrote systematically on aesthetics, although Marx planned to do so in 1841–1842 and again in 1857. As with their ideas on a whole range of topics, their thinking on the arts must be extrapolated mainly from statements made in texts addressing other matters from across their diverse literary remains. It was not until the period of the Third International that an extensive compilation of these statements was made under the direction of Mikhail Lifshitz. (For Lifshitz, see Third International and Official Marxism .) The fruits of this labor were a sequence of Soviet bloc publications that include Marx and Engels 1953 and Marx and Engels 1976 . These remain useful, but Marx and Engels 1974 —which was not produced under the shadow of Stalinism—is a more balanced presentation. Prawer 1976 exhaustively traces Marx’s readings in literature and his literary opinions throughout his life; it also restores to them the historical dimension largely absent from the Soviet anthologies. Marx’s statements on the visual arts are far less extensive than those on literature, but his judgments on the relative value of different style epochs were linked in important ways with his larger historical perspective, as Rose 1984 shows. Solomon 1973 remains impressive in its nonjudgmental presentation of a wide array of thinkers associated with the Second and Third Internationals as well as with the Western Marxist tradition. It also has a useful bibliography. To date the only book-length presentation of the history of Marxist art history is Hemingway 2006 , which includes essays on five of the most important and influential Marxist art historians, together with three on Marxist thinkers whose work has had a particularly profound influence within the discipline (Benjamin, Lefebvre, and Morris), and a further three evaluating the contributions of the art-historical New Left.

Hemingway, Andrew, ed. Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left . Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2006.

An anthology of essays on Frederick Antal, Walter Benjamin, Arnold Hauser, Francis Klingender, Henri Lefebvre, Mikhail Lifshitz, William Morris, Max Raphael, and Meyer Schapiro, together with three appraisals of New Left art history. Written by an international group of scholars.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Über Kunst und Literatur: Eine Sammlung aus ihren Schriften . Edited by Mikhail Lifshitz. Berlin: Henschel, 1953.

Larger and better organized than Marx and Engels 1976 ; although his foreword is brief, Lifshitz’s interpretation is clearly embedded in the structure and headings.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings . Edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York: International General, 1974.

A concise and well-organized compilation of texts illuminating the fundamental issues with a judicious introductory essay by Morawski.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On Literature and Art . Moscow: Progress, 1976.

Introduced by B. Krylov. Partial translation of Marx and Engels 1953 . Far more comprehensive than Baxandall and Morawski’s selection ( Marx and Engels 1974 ), but the commentary is only of interest as a period piece.

Prawer, Siegbert Salomon. Karl Marx and World Literature . Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

A high-level analysis that is an extraordinarily useful source on the formation of Marx’s aesthetic ideas.

Rose, Margaret A. Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

The first six chapters trace ways in which debates around the visual arts among the Young Hegelians and Young Germany movement informed Marx’s early writings and (arguably) defined the long-term character of his aesthetic views. The claim that there is a “latent Saint-Simonian aesthetic” (p. 34) in his work long term is contentious.

Solomon, Maynard, ed. Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary . New York: Knopf, 1973.

Compiled by a New York musicologist and record producer, this remains unsurpassed as an anthology of Marxist thinking on the arts, ranging from the founders of Marxism to the Frankfurt School. The term “essays” in the title is somewhat misleading in that most texts are extracts from larger works.

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What Is Marxism?

Understanding marxism, marxian economics.

• Class Conflict
• Communism/Socialism/Capitalism

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The Bottom Line

Marxism: what it is and comparison to communism, socialism, and capitalism.

What you need to know about these social, political, and economic theories

Ivestopedia / Zoe Hansen

Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after the 19th-century German philosopher and economist Karl Marx . His work examines the historical effects of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development, and argues that a worker revolution is needed to replace capitalism with a communist system.

Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes—specifically between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers—defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will lead inevitably to a communist revolution.

Key Takeaways

• Marxism is an economic and political theory that examines the flaws inherent in capitalism; it's primarily based on the work of German philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
• Marxist theories were influential in the development of socialism, which requires shared ownership by workers of the means of production.
• Communism outright rejects the concept of private ownership, mandating that "the people," in fact the government, collectively own and control the production and distribution of all goods and services.

Marxism is both a social and political theory, and encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics . Marxism was first publicly formulated in 1848 in the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , which lays out the theory of class struggle and revolution.

Marxian economics focuses on criticism of capitalism, detailed by Marx in his book Das Kapital , published in 1867.

Generally, Marxism argues that capitalism as a form of economic and social reproduction is inherently flawed and will ultimately fail.

Capitalism is defined as a mode of production in which business owners (the capitalists) own all of the means of production (the factory, the tools and machinery, the raw materials, the final product, and the profits earned from their sale). Workers (labor) are hired for wages and have no ownership stake and no share in the profits.

Moreover, the wages paid to workers are lower than the economic value that their work creates for the capitalist. This is the source of capitalists' profits and it is at the root of the inherent class struggle between labor and capital.

Another theory developed by Marx is historical materialism. This theory proposes that society at any given point in time is ordered by the type of organization and technology used in the processes of production. In the modern era of industrial capitalism, capitalists organize labor in factories or offices where they work for wages using modern tools and machines.

Like other  classical economists , Karl Marx believed in a  labor theory of value  (LTV) to explain relative differences in market prices. This theory stated that the value of a product can be measured objectively by the average number of hours of labor required to produce it. In other words, if a table takes twice as long to make as a chair, then the table should be considered twice as valuable. What Marx added to this theory was the conclusion that this labor value represented the exploitation of workers.

Marx claimed that there are two major flaws in capitalism that lead to the exploitation of workers by employers: the chaotic nature of free market competition and the extraction of surplus labor.

Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually destroy itself as more people become relegated to working-class status, inequality rises, and competition drives corporate profits to zero. This would lead, he surmised, to a revolution after which production would be turned over to the working class as a whole.

Class Conflict and the Demise of Capitalism

Marx’s class theory portrays capitalism as one step in a historical progression of economic systems that follow one another in a natural sequence. They are driven, he posited, by vast impersonal forces of history that play out through the behavior and conflict among social classes. According to Marx, every society is divided into social classes, whose members have more in common with one another than with members of other social classes.

The following are some key elements of Marx’s theories of how class conflict would play out in a capitalist system:

• Capitalist society is made up of two classes: the bourgeoisie , or business owners, who control the means of production , and the proletariat , or workers, whose labor transforms raw commodities into goods that have market value.
• Ordinary laborers, who do not own the means of production, such as factories, buildings, and materials, have little power in the capitalist economic system. Workers are also readily replaceable in periods of high unemployment, further devaluing their perceived worth.
• To maximize profits, business owners have to get the most possible work out of their laborers while paying them the lowest possible wages. This creates an imbalance between owners and laborers, whose work is exploited by the owners for their own gain.
• Since workers have little personal stake in the process of production, Marx believed they would become alienated from their work, and even from their own humanity, and turn resentful toward business owners.
• The bourgeoisie are able to leverage social institutions, including government, media, academia, organized religion, and the banking and financial systems, as tools and weapons against the proletariat with the goal of maintaining their positions of power and privilege.
• Ultimately, the inherent inequalities and exploitative economic relations between these two classes will lead to a revolution in which the working class rebels against the bourgeoisie, takes control of the means of production, and abolishes capitalism.

Thus, Marx thought that the capitalist system contained the seeds of its own destruction. The alienation and exploitation of the proletariat that are fundamental to capitalist relations would inevitably drive the working class to rebel against the bourgeoisie and seize control of the means of production.

This revolution would be led by enlightened leaders, known as “the vanguard of the proletariat,” who understood the class structure of society and would unite the working class by raising awareness and class consciousness.

After the revolution, Marx predicted, private ownership of the means of production would be replaced by collective ownership, first under socialism and then under communism .

In the final stage of human development, social classes and class struggle would no longer exist.

Karl Marx believed that the proletariat would overthrow capitalism in a violent revolution.

Communism vs. Socialism vs. Capitalism

Marx and Engels' ideas laid the groundwork for the theory and practice of communism, which advocates for a classless system in which all property and wealth are communally (rather than privately) owned.

China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam are the only nations that have communist systems today. Notably, most of these nations have relaxed some of their most rigid policies in the name of economic progress and global trade.

The Soviet Union was an experiment in communism that was created in 1921 and collapsed in 1991, leaving behind 15 former Soviet Socialist Republics to rebuild their economies from scratch. None chose communism as a model.

Notably, Marx and Engels didn't consistently differentiate between socialism and communism. Today, there is often confusion about the ways they are distinct.

Socialism predates communism by several decades. Its early adherents called for a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, solidarity among workers, better working conditions, and common ownership of land and manufacturing equipment.

Socialism is based on the concept of public ownership and regulation of the means of production, but individuals may still own property. Rather than rising out of a class revolution, socialist reform has taken place within existing social and political structures, whether they are democratic, technocratic, oligarchic, or totalitarian.

Both communism and socialism oppose capitalism, an economic system characterized by private ownership and a system of laws that protect the right to own or transfer private property.

In a capitalist economy, private individuals or the companies they create own the means of production and the right to profit from them.

Communism and socialism aim to right the wrongs of capitalism’s free-market system. These include worker exploitation, inequities between classes, and outright poverty.

Marx inspired multitudes of followers, but many of his predictions have not come to pass. Marx believed that increasing competition would not produce better goods for consumers but would lead to bankruptcies and the rise of monopolies, with control of production in fewer and fewer hands.

Bankrupt former capitalists, he thought, would join the proletariat, eventually creating an army of the unemployed. In addition, the market economy , which by its nature is unplanned, would experience crippling supply-and-demand problems and cause severe economic depressions.

Capitalism has not collapsed, but it has changed since Marx's time. Governments in many capitalist countries, including the U.S., have the power to crack down on monopolies and monopolistic business practices. Governments set minimum wages and regulatory agencies set standards for worker protection.

Economic inequality has increased in many capitalist societies. There have been recessions periodically as well as one Great Depression, but they are not thought to be an inherent feature of free markets.

Indeed, a society entirely without competition, money, or private property has not materialized in the modern world, and recent history suggests it is unlikely to emerge in the future.

What Kind of Philosophy Is Marxism?

Marxism is a philosophy developed by Karl Marx in the second half of the 19th century that unifies social, political, and economic theory. It is mainly concerned with the consequences of a society divided between an ownership class and a working class and proposes a new system of shared ownership of the means of production as a solution to the inevitable inequality that capitalism fosters.

What Did Marx Predict for the Future?

Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably self-destruct. Competition would grow so fierce that most businesses would fold and be absorbed into unwieldy monopolies. Workers would reject a system that exploited them. The oppressed workers would ultimately overthrow the owners to take control of the means of production, ushering in a classless society of shared ownership.

Was Karl Marx Right?

Not so far. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the most successful of the few remaining communist countries, notably China and Vietnam, have reformed some of their most rigid practices. None has been able to entirely eliminate personal property, money, and class systems in the way that Karl Marx envisioned.

Capitalism, in its various forms, remains the dominant economic system. But it has changed, too, since Marx's time, with some of the worst excesses addressed. Worker safety standards, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and anti-poverty programs are all examples.

Is Marxism the Same Thing As Communism?

Marxism is a philosophy, while communism is a system of government based on Marxist principles. Marx envisioned a society in which workers owned the means of production. In real-world communism, governments own the means of production.

Marxism is the social and economic theory developed by Karl Marx in the 19th century. Marxian economics describes the capitalist system of production as inherently unfair to the workers, who represent most of the population.

Marx's social theories connected these flaws of capitalism with a growing class conflict between labor and business owners, ultimately leading to a revolution that would empower the working class and create communal ownership of the means of production.

His theories have been tested in the real world. The communist experiment in the Soviet Union ended in 1991. It continues to be tested in China, which is creating a hybrid social and economic system that Marx might not recognize.

Correction—Dec. 21, 2023 : This article has been corrected to more accurately define Marxism.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. " Karl Marx "

American Journal of Public Health. " Friedrich Engels: Businessman and Revolutionary ."

Marxists.org. " Karl Marx: Capital A Critique of Political Economy Volume I, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital ."

Marxists Internet Archive. " Works of Karl Marx 1843, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ."

ThoughtCo. " A List of Current Communist Countries in the World ."

History. " How Are Socialism and Communism Different? "

The Library of Economics and Liberty. " Marxism ."

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