Origins of Marxism

Marxism began at the end of the 1870s, and it continued all the way through to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There’s still a predominant association: when people think about Marx, they think about a determinist conception of history, the materialist conception of history, the science of history, etc. These are all associated with Marxism. And Marxism is something which develops, first of all, from Engels. It arises out of the situation of the German Social Democrats in the 1870s.

Electorally, the German Social Democrats are beginning to make progress, but they’re aware that if they try to threaten the Bismarckian regime they will be put in prison and the movement will be set upon. It’s in this context that Engels, perhaps not deliberately, becomes the architect of the rationale of Marxism from the 1880s onwards. That is to say, capitalism is an unstable construction. The development of the working class, industrialisation and the falling rate of profit – because there are more plants than human labour involved in the production of commodities – are all going to result in a crisis of capitalism. And capitalism is going to collapse.

A theory of sequence and historical determinism

The so-called collapse theory of capitalism develops very strongly in the period between the 1880s and 1914, particularly among German Social Democrats. Karl Kautsky, for instance, is someone who develops a whole theory of Marxism. Along with this is the idea that there’s a sequence: that you go from ancient societies to feudalism to capitalism and then to socialism. That means that in the case of Russia, for instance, you have to develop an effective capitalist system before you can think of socialism. And this is what Russian Marxists like Plekhanov stand for. However, of course, when it comes to 1917, Lenin actually disrupts this process and goes for a communist revolution, despite the fact that in terms of the theory of historical development, maybe Russia should still be thinking about having capitalism first.

A bird's eye view of a community in New Harmony, Indiana, United States, as proposed by Robert Owen. wikimedia Commons Public Domain.

This theory of Marxism goes together with the determinist theory of history. Originally, this was something which came from the Owenites, which is the idea that man is a natural being; he is determined by his environment, he’s governed by the desire to increase pleasure and reduce pain and, therefore, he’s a determined figure. He’s not free, but a product of his environment.

This is challenged in some of Marx’s writings by the idea that man transforms history. But in the period of the Second International, between the 1880s and 1914, this idea is very much subordinated to the idea of historical determinism. And this historical determinism gets attached to Marx all the way through to the end of the 20th century and the fall of communism.

Who was Friedrich Engels?

Friedrich Engels was the son of a manufacturer. He didn’t have a university education; he had a merchant’s apprenticeship. He was sent by his father to work in Manchester, where the family had one of their cotton mills. This was his formal training. But he was very intellectually curious. He was very gifted in terms of learning languages and writing in different languages. So he combined being an apprentice merchant with being a radical journalist.

Engels joined the oppositional groups of young Hegelians. He chose to spend his year of military service in Berlin so that he could meet them. And then, when he is sent to Manchester, he develops The Condition of the Working Class in England, which remains a classic book on industrialisation to this day.

Marx is greatly influenced by this book and Engels’s work Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which is inspired by the teachings of Robert Owen. When Engels is in Manchester, he attends the Owenite meetings. He himself becomes sort of Owenite. For Engels, the Welsh socialist Robert Owen is much more important than Hegel when it comes to real influences on his manner of thinking.

Engels and Marx

According to Owen, the character of man is formed for him, not by him; it’s formed by the environment. So this idea that man transforms history, present in Marx, isn’t really there in Engels.

Engels is a much more efficient character than Marx. He writes a lot. When they both have to be in Britain in the 1850s, and Marx starts writing for American publications, he actually gives the work to Engels to write because his English isn’t good enough. Marx does eventually become much better at English, but Engels is much quicker. He has voluminous correspondence. He becomes the public face of Marx, and he lives all the way through to 1895.

Anti-Dühring; Herr Eugen Dühring's revolution in science by Friedrich Engels 1894. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Engels exercises a predominant influence on the character of what’s called Marxism with his book Anti-Dühring, published in 1878. He develops the Marxist view in distinction from existing social democratic ideas, in particular those of Eugen Dühring. This book becomes the standard textbook for anyone becoming a socialist or a Marxist all the way through to the late 20th century.

Lenin’s view of Marxism

In 1848, Marx had resisted the idea that the revolution was over. The Communist League carried on as a minority organisation. And it’s from that moment of defying the historical political situation that Lenin draws inspiration.

One of the elements that Marx used in that period was the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat as the transition from bourgeois rule to socialist rule or communist rule. That idea of the need for a dictatorial moment of transition is something which – although Marx mentions it in one or two places – we ultimately associate with Lenin. And when Lenin wants intellectual support for this idea, he cites Marx on the subject. So he sees that idea of dictatorship of the proletariat as being a key concept in Marxist theory.

Marx thought that Russia might be able to avoid a capitalist period, moving from a peasant commune to a socialist commune without having to go through an intermediate capitalist stage. Lenin doesn’t like that, and nor do the other Russians around Lenin. He takes his ideas instead from Plekhanov, and Plekhanov had already developed his ideas in opposition to the idea of a peasant commune, so this is one of the conflicts between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the pre-revolutionary period.

Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The Mensheviks thought that you went through a sequence of capitalism to socialism; you couldn’t have socialism before you had had capitalism. The Bolsheviks went for a directly revolutionary approach. They didn’t try to develop capitalism in the revolution-making period, although afterwards they went for what they called the New Economic Policy, in which there would be an encouragement of capitalist development. But by that stage, the Bolsheviks were fully in control.

How Marxist is Marxism-Leninism?

It depends from what angle you look at it. If you think that making the revolution is, above all, what the communist parties are about, then there’s material that Lenin can use from Marx’s writings of the 1848 period which fit into his own theory. You can construct a whole theory of communism, which develops from Lenin’s interpretation of what Marx’s emphasis was. It can be made to look intellectually quite impressive. And it was the predominant theory used by communist parties through the 20th century. But one of its characteristics is this focus on revolutionary change, and a dictatorial party leading that change, rather than thinking that the revolutionary process will develop on its own.

Discover more about

the development of Marxism

Stedman Jones, G. (1984). Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982. Cambridge University Press.

Stedman Jones, G., & Claeys, G. (Eds.). (2011). The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought. Cambridge University Press.

Stedman Jones, G. (2004). Introduction. In F. Engels, & K. Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Books.

Engels, Lenin and the development of Marxism