School of thought

Marxism

Tradition

Explore in the interactive map

Classification

Period
c. 1840 CE onward
Regions
europe
Domains
Ethics , Political Philosophy

Overview

Marxism analyzes societies through material production, class relations, and historically changing forms of power. Marx examined alienated labor, exploitation, and conflicts within capitalism; later Marxists developed competing accounts of how economic structures, political organization, class struggle, and ideas interact in historical change. Revolutionary transformation is therefore a problem of historical conditions and political action, not an automatic outcome guaranteed by a single contradiction.

Key ideas

  • Historical Materialism: Modes of production and class relations condition law, politics, and dominant forms of thought. The framework gives material production explanatory importance without reducing every historical change to a one-way, mechanical effect of the economic base.
  • Alienation: Under capitalism, workers are alienated from their labor, its products, their fellow workers, and their own human potential — reduced to commodities in the production process.
  • Class Struggle: 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.' Social change comes through conflict between those who own the means of production and those who labor.

Key figures

Karl Marx · Friedrich Engels · Rosa Luxemburg · Antonio Gramsci

Methods used

Positions held

  • Exploitation

    The subject is the tradition rather than Marx alone: his own texts analyse surplus extraction without explicitly calling capitalism unjust, while later Marxists state the wrong itself as unjust appropriation.

    Question scope: Structural Injustice

Influenced by

  • German Idealism

    Took over Hegel's dialectic but inverted it — from the self-movement of spirit to the development of material and economic conditions.

Later connections

  • Critical Theory Influenced by this tradition
  • Post-Structuralism Influenced by this tradition

    Adapted the Marxist analysis of ideology and power — via Althusser — while rejecting its economic determinism and totalizing philosophy of history.

  • Structuralism Influenced by this tradition

    Marxism shaped Althusser's and Barthes's structural analyses of ideology and culture, grafting the analysis of power onto the Saussurean model of the sign.

  • Anarchism Reacted to this tradition

    The Bakunin–Marx split at the First International crystallized a lasting opposition between libertarian and authoritarian socialism, anarchism rejecting the transitional state Marx accepted.

References

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Karl Marx
  • Friedrich Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, 21–22 September 1890
  • G. A. Cohen, 'The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation', Philosophy & Public Affairs 8:4 (1979), arguing that the capitalist's appropriation of some of the value of what the worker produces grounds the moral charge of exploitation made by Marxists, independently of the labour theory of value
  • Allen W. Wood, 'The Marxian Critique of Justice', Philosophy & Public Affairs 1:3 (1972), pp. 244–282, arguing that Marx and Engels do not explicitly claim that capitalism is unjust
  • Karl Marx, Capital vol. I (1867), Part III chs. 7–9, on surplus value as unpaid labour appropriated through an exchange that is formally free
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Karl Marx, §5 'Theory of History'
  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I.A, 'Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas'
  • The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
  • Capital, Volume 1 — Karl Marx
  • Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — Karl Marx