Orthodox Marxism#Kautskyism

The emergence of orthodox Marxism is associated with the latter works of Friedrich Engels, such as the Dialectics of Nature and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which were efforts to popularise the work of Karl Marx, render it systematic and apply it to the fundamental questions of philosophy.{{cite journal |first=Jack |last=Mendelson |title=On Engels' metaphysical dialectics: A foundation of orthodox "Marxism" |journal=Dialectical Anthropology |date=1979 |volume=4 |issue=1 |pages=65–73 |doi=10.1007/BF00417685 |s2cid=145499456}} Daniel De Leon, an early American socialist leader, contributed much to the thought during the final years of the 19th century and the early 20th century. Orthodox Marxism was further developed during the Second International by thinkers such as Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky in Erfurt Program and The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program).

Karl Kautsky is recognized as the most authoritative promulgator of orthodox Marxism following the death of Engels in 1895. As an advisor to August Bebel, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) until Bebel's death in 1913 and as editor of Die Neue Zeit from 1883 till 1917, he was known as the "Pope of Marxism". He was removed as editor by the leadership of the SPD when the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) split away from the SPD. Kautskyism, based on his interpretations of Marxism, became a significant ideological current within socialist thought.{{cite book |first=John Hans |last=Kautsky |title=Karl Kautsky: Marxism, Revolution, and Democracy |publisher=Routledge |date=1994 |page=164}} Kautsky was an outspoken critic of Bolshevism and Leninism, seeing the Bolsheviks (or Communists as they had renamed themselves after 1917) as an organization that had gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary changes for which there was no economic rationale in Russia.{{cn|date=March 2025}} Kautsky was also opposed to Eduard Bernstein's reformist politics in the period 1896–1901.{{cn|date=March 2025}}

Menshevism refers to the political positions taken by the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party prior to the October Revolution of 1917. The Mensheviks believed that socialism could not be realized in Russia due to its backwards economic conditions and that Russia would first have to experience a bourgeois revolution and go through a capitalist stage of development before socialism became technically possible and before the working class could develop the class consciousness for a socialist revolution.{{cite web |url=http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/m/e.htm |title=Menshevik |work=Marxists Internet Archive |access-date=9 October 2013}} The Mensheviks were thus opposed to the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard party and their pursuit of socialist revolution in semi-feudal Russia.

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The characteristics of orthodox Marxism are:

• A strong version of the theory that the economic base (material conditions) determines the cultural and political superstructure of society. In its most extensive form, this view is called economic determinism, economism and vulgar materialism. A related variation is that of technological determinism.
• The view that capitalism cannot be reformed through policy and that any attempt to do so would only exacerbate its contradictions or distort the efficiency of the market economy (in contrast to reformism). Orthodox Marxism holds that the only viable and lasting solution to the contradictions of capitalism is for the establishment of a post-capitalist socialist economy.
• The centrality of class as a process and the view that existing policymakers and government is largely and structurally beholden to the interests of the ruling class.{{cite book |last=Goldstein |author-first=Joshua S. |author-link=Joshua S. Goldstein |date=2004 |title=International Relations |edition=Canadian |editor-last=Whitworth |editor-first=Sandra |location=Toronto |publisher=Pearson Education |pages=147}} This view is called instrumental Marxism.{{cn|date=June 2025}}
• The claim that Marxist methodology is a science (a concept captured by Marx and especially Engels' idea of scientific socialism).
• The attempt to make Marxism a total system, adapting it to changes within the realm of current events and knowledge. (This system would come to be known as historical materialism or dialectical materialism.)
• An understanding of ideology in terms of false consciousness.
• That every open class struggle is a political struggle.

Orthodox Marxism is contrasted with revisionist Marxism.{{cite book |editor-first=Philip P. |editor-last=Wiener |editor-link=Philip P. Wiener |url=http://etext.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html |title=Dictionary of the History of Ideas |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |location=New York}}, in {{cite book |date=1973–74 |first=R. K. |last=Kindersley |url=http://etext.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html |title=Marxist revisionism: From Bernstein to modern forms |via=University of Virginia Library |access-date=28 April 2008}}

Some writers also contrast it with Marxism–Leninism as it developed in the Soviet Union,{{citation needed|date=September 2012}} while others describe the latter as firmly within orthodoxy:

Orthodox Marxism rested on and grew out of the European working class movement that emerged in the final quarter of the 19th century and continued in that form until the middle years of the twentieth century. Its two institutional expressions were the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, which despite the great schism in 1919, were marked by a shared conception of capital and labour. Trotskyism and Left communism were equally orthodox in their thinking and approach, and must be considered left variants of this tradition.{{cite magazine |first=Mike |last=Rooke |url=http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext30/Rooke.html |title=Marxism is Dead! Long Live Marxism! |magazine=What Next Journal |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130505113637/http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext30/Rooke.html |archive-date=5 May 2013}}{{better source|date=October 2017}}

Two variants of orthodox Marxism are impossibilism and anti-revisionism. Impossibilism is a form of orthodox Marxism that both rejects the reformism of revisionist Marxism and opposes the Leninist theories of imperialism, vanguardism and democratic centralism (which argue that socialism can be constructed in underdeveloped, quasi-feudal countries through revolutionary action as opposed to being an emergent result of advances in material development). An extreme form of this position is held by the Socialist Party of Great Britain.{{cite journal |last1=Howard |first1=M.C. |last2=King |first2=J. E. |title=State Capitalism in the Soviet Union |journal=History of Economics Review |publisher=Thought Society of Australia |url=http://www.hetsa.org.au/pdf/34-A-08.pdf |quote=The same point was made, in the United Kingdom, by the leadership of the remorselessly orthodox Socialist Party of Great Britain. |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210228154047/http://www.hetsa.org.au/pdf/34-A-08.pdf |archive-date=28 February 2021}} In contrast, the anti-revisionist tradition criticised official Communist parties from the opposite perspective as having abandoned the orthodox Marxism of the founders.

{{See also|Marxist schools of thought}}

A number of theoretical perspectives and political movements emerged that were firmly rooted in orthodox Marxist analysis, as contrasted with later interpretations and alternative developments in Marxist theory and practice such as Marxism–Leninism, revisionism and reformism.

{{main|Impossibilism}}

Impossibilism stresses the limited value of economic, social, cultural and political reforms under capitalism and posits that socialists and Marxists should solely focus on efforts to propagate and establish socialism, disregarding any other cause that has no connection to the goal of the realization of socialism.{{cite web |url=https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/m.htm |title=Impossiblism |website=Marxists Internet Archive}}

Impossibilism posits that reforms to capitalism are counterproductive because they strengthen support for capitalism by the working class by making its conditions more tolerable while creating further contradictions of their own,{{cite book |editor-last=Browne |editor-first=Waldo R. |date=1921 |chapter=Impossiblism, Impossibilist |title=What's What in the Labor Movement: A Dictionary of Labor Affairs and Labor Terminology |location=New York |publisher=B. W. Huebsch |pages=215}}{{cite web |url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm |title=Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League |first1=Karl |last1=Marx |author1-link=Karl Marx |first2=Friedrich |last2=Engels |author2-link=Friedrich Engels |website=Marxists Internet Archive |access-date=5 January 2013 |location=London |date=March 1850 |quote=However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable.}} while removing the socialist character of the parties championing and implementing said reforms. Because reforms cannot solve the systemic contradictions of capitalism, impossibilism opposes reformism, revisionism and ethical socialism.{{cite journal |last=Rosenstone |first=Robert |author-link=Robert A. Rosenstone |url=http://authors.library.caltech.edu/14561/1/HumsWP-0017.pdf |title=Why is there no socialism in the United States? |journal=Reviews in American History |date=November 1978 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240616112251/https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/caltechauthors/ec/2a/8b79-f12e-42d9-b75b-663db345c600/data?response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3DHumsWP-0017.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIARCVIVNNAKP37N3MU%2F20240616%2Fus-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240616T112250Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=03ada7a551384d9f04458c3c127f973a0618b4ba2324e365f7338bfe5b4404e5 |archive-date=16 June 2024}}

Impossibilism also opposes the idea of a vanguard-led revolution and the centralization of political power in any elite group of people as espoused by Leninism and Marxism–Leninism.{{cn|date=June 2025}}

This perspective is maintained by the World Socialist Movement, De Leonism, and to some extent followers of Karl Kautsky and pre-reformist social democracy.{{cn|date=June 2025}}

{{More citations needed section|date=February 2022}}

{{Main|Leninism|Marxism-Leninism|Stalinism}}

Kautsky and to a lesser extent Plekhanov were in turn major influences on Vladimir Lenin, whose version of Marxism was known as Leninism by its contemporaries. Whereas the generation of orthodox Marxists before Marx, such as Plekhanov, believed that Imperial Russia was too backwards for the development of socialism and would first have to undergo a capitalist (bourgeois) phase of development even if a Marxist party would head its government, Lenin urged a socialist revolution in Russia to inspire a socialist revolution in Germany and in the majority of the developed countries. His and Bukharin's New Economic Policy was to develop capitalism in Russia initially.{{cite book |last=Steele |first=David Ramsay |author-link=David Ramsay Steele |title=From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation |publisher=Open Court |date=September 1999 |isbn=978-0875484495 |page=67 |quote=Lenin is urging a socialist revolution in Russia, against the traditional Marxists who argue that Russia is too backwards for anything but a bourgeois revolution.}} Stalin, proposing the possibility of socialism in a single country, went further, arguing that socialism could be rapidly built by the party state.

Stalin's body of thought is known as Stalinism. The official thought of the Third International was based in orthodox Marxism combined with Lenin's and Stalin's views on revolutionary organization initially.{{citation needed|date=October 2017}} The terms dialectical materialism and historical materialism are associated with this phase of orthodox Marxism.

{{Main|Trotskyism}}

{{Unreferenced section|date=February 2022}}

The tradition founded by Leon Trotsky purports that the USSR was a "degenerated workers' state" on the basis that, although maintaining that it held onto some aspects of a revolutionary workers' state (such as state control of foreign trade or the expropriation of the bourgeoisie), it lacked key aspects it used to have, namely soviet democracy and freedom of organization for workers, which only benefitted a bureaucracy led by Joseph Stalin. In his book The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky supports a multi-party democratic model of revolutionary organizations and proposes a solution for the USSR's bureaucratic caste, that of a political revolution that reinstates those aspects the bureaucrats erased. Trotskyists maintain that the countries of the Eastern bloc, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and others were "deformed workers' states" which needed political revolutions while critically defending these countries from imperialist aggressions.

{{Main Article|Anti-Revisionism (Marxism-Leninism)}}

Anti-revisionists (which includes radical Marxist–Leninist factions, Hoxhaists and Maoists) criticize the rule of the communist states by claiming that they were state capitalist states ruled by revisionists.{{cite web |url=http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html |title=Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union |access-date=15 April 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160113204704/http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html |archive-date=13 January 2016 |url-status=live}}{{cite web |url=http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html |title=A Critique of Soviet Economics |access-date=15 April 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303192812/http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html |archive-date=3 March 2016 |url-status=live}} Though the periods and countries defined as state capitalist or revisionist varies among different ideologies and parties, all of them accept that the Soviet Union was socialist during Stalin's time. Maoists view the Soviet Union and most of its satellites as "state capitalist" as a result of de-Stalinization; some of them also view modern China in this light, believing that the People's Republic of China became state capitalist after Mao's death. Hoxhaists believe that the People's Republic of China was always state capitalist and uphold Socialist Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin.{{Cite web |url=http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/historymaotable.html |title=Class Struggles in China by Bill Bland |access-date=18 September 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100606024720/http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/historymaotable.html |archive-date=6 June 2010 |url-status=live}}

{{Main|Instrumental Marxism}}

Instrumental Marxism is a theory derived from classical Marxism which reasons that policy makers in government and positions of power tend to "share a common business or class background, and that their decisions will reflect their business or class interests".

There have been a number of criticisms of orthodox Marxism from within the socialist movement. From the 1890s during the Second International, Eduard Bernstein and others developed a position known as revisionism, which sought to revise Marx's views based on the idea that the progressive development of capitalism and the extension of democracy meant that gradual, parliamentary reform could achieve socialism.{{cn|date=March 2025}} But Bernstein himself was a revolutionary and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party in Germany which advocated for a socialist republic in 1918. This view was contested by orthodox Marxists such as Kautsky as well as by the young György Lukács, who in 1919 clarified the definition of orthodox Marxism as thus:

[O]rthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or 'improve' it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.{{cite book |last=Lukács |first=Georg |author-link=György Lukács |title=History & Class Consciousness |date=1967 |via=Marxists Internet Archive |publisher=Merlin Press |translator-last=Livingstone |translator-first=Rodney |chapter=What is Orthodox Marxism? |quote=Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. |orig-date=1919 |chapter-url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm}}

Western Marxism, the intellectual Marxism which developed in Western Europe from the 1920s onwards, sought to make Marxism more "sophisticated", open and flexible by examining issues like culture that were outside the field of orthodox Marxism. Western Marxists, such as György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, have tended to be open to influences orthodox Marxists consider bourgeois, such as psychoanalysis and the sociology of Max Weber. Marco Torres illustrates the shift away from orthodox Marxism in the Frankfurt School:

In the early 1920s, the original members of the Frankfurt Institute—half forgotten names such as Carl Grünberg, Henryk Grossman and Karl August Wittfogel, were social scientists of an orthodox Marxist conviction. They understood their task as an advancement of the sciences that would prove useful in solving the problems of a Europe-wide transition into socialism, which they saw, if not as inevitable, at least as highly likely. But as fascism reared its head in Germany and throughout Europe, the younger members of the Institute saw the necessity for a different kind of Marxist Scholarship. Beyond accumulating knowledge relevant to an orthodox Marxist line, they felt the need to take the more critical and negative approach that is required for the maintenance of an integral and penetrating understanding of society during a moment of reaction. This could be described as the politically necessary transition from Marxist positive science to Critical Theory.{{cite magazine |first=Marco |last=Torres |url=http://platypus1917.org/2008/05/01/the-science-that-wasnt/ |title=The science that wasn't: The orthodox Marxism of the early Frankfurt School and the turn to Marxist Critical Theory |magazine=Platypus |date=1 May 2008}}

In parallel to this, Cedric Robinson has identified a Black Marxist tradition, including people like C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and W. E. B. Du Bois, who have opened Marxism to the study of race, "stretching" it beyond orthodox Marxism.{{cite journal | last= Alagraa | first=Bedour | title=Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: Thirty-Five Years Later | journal=The CLR James Journal | publisher=Philosophy Documentation Center | volume=24 | issue=1/2 | year=2018 | issn=21674256 | jstor=26752191 | pages=301–312 | url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26752191 | access-date=17 June 2025|quote=we should read Robinson’s intervention as an interruption of Western episteme as a general order of knowledge. Orthodox Marxism, according to Robinson, contributed to a conception of Man that placed other forms of difference, such as race, as epiphenomenal and thus, at the periphery... What does it mean to offer Black radicalism as a logical outcome of a refusal of Western epistemic framings, including Marxism, when many of the thinkers he invokes never rejected Marxism, but rather, ‘stretched’ Marxism (to borrow from Fanon’s declaration)... The Black radical tradition is therefore not an addendum to Marxist theory, it makes up part of a world that is manifested by its blind spots, and reveals to us, that we do not need to adhere to orthodox Marxism in order to think dialectically.}}

In the postwar period, the New Left and new social movements gave rise to intellectual and political currents which again challenged orthodox Marxism.{{cite journal | last=Davis | first=Madeleine | title=The Marxism of the British New Left | journal=Journal of Political Ideologies | volume=11 | issue=3 | date=1 October 2006 | issn=1356-9317 | doi=10.1080/13569310600923949 | pages=335–358}}{{cite journal | last=Copello | first=David | title=The ‘invention’ of human rights as a revolutionary concept: Confronting orthodox Marxism and the New Left (Argentina, 1972) | journal=Journal of Human Rights | volume=20 | issue=3 | date=27 May 2021 | issn=1475-4835 | doi=10.1080/14754835.2020.1868295 | pages=304–317}}{{cite journal | last=Efstathiou | first=Christos | title=E. P. Thompson's Concept of Class Formation and its Political Implications: Echoes of Popular Front Radicalism in The Making of the English Working Class | journal=Contemporary British History | volume=28 | issue=4 | date=2 October 2014 | issn=1361-9462 | doi=10.1080/13619462.2014.962907 | pages=404–421 | url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2014.962907 | access-date=17 June 2025| url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal | last=Klare | first=Karl E. | title=THE CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE, MARXISM, AND THE NEW LEFT | journal=Berkeley Journal of Sociology | publisher=Regents of the University of California | volume=16 | year=1971 | issn=00675830 | jstor=40999912 | pages=15–45 | url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/40999912 | access-date=17 June 2025}} These include Italian autonomism,{{cite journal | last=Pitts | first=Frederick Harry | title=From the age of immanence to the autonomy of the political: (Post)operaismo in theory and practice | journal=Philosophy & Social Criticism | date=16 March 2024 | issn=0191-4537 | doi=10.1177/01914537241240430 | doi-access=free | page=| hdl=10871/135460 | hdl-access=free }} French Situationism, the Yugoslavian Praxis School, British cultural studies, Marxist feminism, Marxist humanism, analytical Marxism and critical realism.{{cn|date=March 2025}}

{{cols|colwidth=21em}}

• Left communism
• Materialist conception of history
• Marxian economics
• Marxist revisionism
• Real socialism
• Scientific socialism
• Technological determinism

{{colend}}

{{reflist|colwidth=35em}}

{{Commons category|Marxism}}

• [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm Lukács What is Orthodox Marxism] (1919)

{{Marxist and communist phraseology}}

Category:Economic ideologies

Category:Eponymous political ideologies

Category:Marxist schools of thought

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Category:Sociological theories

Category:Types of socialism