# Orthodox Marxism

Part of a series on :
Marxism :
Theoretical works
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The Condition of the Working Class in England
The German Ideology
The Communist Manifesto
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Grundrisse
Capital
Critique of the Gotha Programme
Dialectics of Nature
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
What Is to Be Done?
The Accumulation of Capital
Philosophical Notebooks
Terrorism and Communism
The State and Revolution
Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
History and Class Consciousness
Literature and Revolution
Towards Socialism or Capitalism?
Prison Notebooks
The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
The Revolution Betrayed
Their Morals and Ours: The class foundations of moral practice
The Black Jacobins
On Practice
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Dialectic of Enlightenment
A Critique of Soviet Economics
The Long Revolution
Guerrilla Warfare
The Wretched of the Earth
Reading Capital
The Society of the Spectacle
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Ways of Seeing
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Social Justice and the City
Women, Race and Class
Marxism and the Oppression of Women
Imagined Communities
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
The Sublime Object of Ideology
Time, Labor and Social Domination
The Age of Extremes
The Origin of Capitalism
Empire
Late Victorian Holocausts
Change the World Without Taking Power
Caliban and the Witch
An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital
Capitalist Realism
Capital in the Anthropocene :
Philosophy
Alienation
Dialectical materialism
Ideology
Philosophy of nature
Philosophy in the Soviet Union
Reification
Marxist ethics :
Critique of political economy
Capital (accumulation)
Crisis theory
Commodity
Concrete and abstract labor
Factors of production
Falling profit-rate tendency
Means of production
Mode of production
Capitalist
Socialist
Productive forces
Scientific socialism
State monopoly capitalism
Surplus product
Socially necessary labour time
Value-form
Wage labour :
Sociology
Base and superstructure
Bourgeoisie
Class
Class consciousness
Classless society
Commodity fetishism
Communist society
Critical theory
Cultural hegemony
Democracy
Dictatorship of the proletariat
Soviet
Radical
Democratic centralism
Exploitation
False consciousness
Human nature
Immiseration
Imperialism
Lumpenproletariat
Metabolic rift
Proletariat
Private property
Relations of production
State theory
Working class :
History
Class struggle
Historical determinism
Primitive accumulation
Proletarian revolution
World revolution
Theory of historical trajectory :
Aspects
Aesthetics
Archaeology
Criminology
Cultural Marxism
Cultural Studies
Ethics
Film theory
Geography
Historiography
Literary criticism
Marxism and religion
Sociology
Philosophy :
Common variants
Structural
Autonomist
Marxism–Leninism
Guevarism
Maoism
Titoism
Trotskyism
Neo-Gramscianism
Regulation school
Third-worldist
Hegelian
Budapest School
Frankfurt School
Humanist
Neue Marx-Lektüre
Open
Political
Praxis School
Both
Black
Classical
Communization
Feminist
Leninism
Neo
Post
Western :
Other variants
Analytical
Austromarxism
Centrist
Council communism
Eurocommunism
Instrumental
Marxism–Leninism–Maoism
Nkrumaism
Orthodox
Revisionist
Situationist
Socialism with Chinese characteristics
Wertkritik :
People
Marx
Engels
Morris
Lafargue
Rubin
Kautsky
Plekhanov
Du Bois
Connolly
Lenin
Luxemburg
Liebknecht
Kollontai
Bogdanov
Stalin
Trotsky
Grossman
Zinoviev
Bloch
Lukács
Korsch
Bukharin
Ho
Serge
Gramsci
Galiev
Pashukanis
Bordiga
Benjamin
Mao
Basu
Mariátegui
Horkheimer
Dutt
Brecht
Marcuse
Kalecki
Fromm
Cox
Lefebvre
James
Adorno
Padmore
Sartre
Deutscher
Hoxha
Beauvoir
Sombart
Nkrumah
Sweezy
Emmanuel
Hill
Bettelheim
Draper
Jones
Hobsbawm
Althusser
Hinton
Williams
Freire
Mandel
Sivanandan
Miliband
Cabral
Thompson
Bauman
Fanon
Kosik
Berger
Castro
Guevara
Liebman
Heller
Guattari
Mészáros
O'Connor
Wallerstein
Mies
Tronti
Debord
Amin
Hall
Nairn
Parenti
Negri
Jameson
Gonzalo
Dussel
Harvey
Laclau
Bahro
Poulantzas
Vattimo
Badiou
Harnecker
Altvater
Anderson
Löwy
Vogel
Sison
Easthope
Rancière
Berman
Przeworski
Cohen
Therborn
Losurdo
Ture
Postone
Rodney
Bannerji
Spivak
Newton
Sakai
Wood
Federici
Wolff
Balibar
Eagleton
Kurz
Hartsock
Rowbotham
Mouffe
Geras
Brenner
Davis
Massey
Cleaver
Bishop
Haraway
Panitch
Clarke
Jessop
Davis
Wright
Fraser
Burawoy
Holloway
Rose
Screpanti
Tamás
Hampton
Cano
Žižek
Berardi
Sankara
Hennessy
McDonnell
Douzinas
Roediger
Foster
West
Ghandy
Marcos
Heinrich
Prashad
Kelley
Dean
Lordon
Linera
Fisher
Li
Coulthard
Malm
Seymour
Toscano
Bhattacharya
Moufawad-Paul
Srnicek
Horvat
Hamza
Saito :
Journals
Antipode
Capital & Class
Capitalism Nature Socialism
Constellations
Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory
Historical Materialism
Mediations
Monthly Review
New Left Review
Race & Class
Rethinking Marxism
Science & Society
Socialist Register :
Related topics
21st-century communist theorists
Anarchism
Creative destruction
Conflict theory
Criticism of Marxism
Communism
Communalism
Economic determinism
History of communism
Left-wing politics
Marxian economics
New Left
Old Left
Municipalism
Political ecology
Socialism
Authoritarian
Democratic
Market
Reformist
Revolutionary
Social
Utopian
Left-wing populism
Universal class
Vulgar Marxism
Economism
Worker cooperative
Workers' council :
Outline
Communism portal
Philosophy portal
Socialism portal :
vte :
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence the orthodoxy of Vladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. It overlaps significantly with instrumental Marxism.
Orthodox Marxism maintained that Marx's historical materialism was a science which revealed the laws of history and proved that the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism were inevitable. The implications of this deterministic view were that history could not be "hurried" and that politically workers and workers' parties must wait for the material economic conditions to be met before the revolutionary transformation of society could take place. For example, this idea saw the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) adopt a gradualist approach, taking advantage of bourgeois parliamentary democracy to improve the lives of workers until capitalism was brought down by its objective internal contradictions.
The use of "orthodox" to refer to Kautsky's line is primarily to distinguish it from the reformism of Eduard Bernstein. Such "revisionists" were reviled by the orthodox Marxists for breaking with Marx's thought.

## Theory

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. 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).
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. This view is called instrumental Marxism.
* The claim that Marxist methodology is a science.
* The attempt to make Marxism a total system, adapting it to changes within the realm of current events and knowledge.
* An understanding of ideology in terms of false consciousness.
* That every open class struggle is a political struggle.
* A pre-crisis emphasis on organizing an independent, mass workers' movement (in the form of welfare, recreational, educational and cultural organizations) and especially its political party, combining reform struggles and mass strikes without overreliance on either.
* The socialist revolution is necessarily the act of the majority (contrasted with Marxism–Leninism's view of the vanguard party and democratic centralism).
Orthodox Marxism is contrasted with revisionist Marxism. Some writers also contrast it with Marxism–Leninism as it developed in the Soviet Union, 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. Their fortunes therefore rose and fell together. Trotskyism and Left communism were equally orthodox in their thinking and approach, and therefore must be considered left-variants of this tradition.
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. In contrast, the anti-revisionist tradition criticised official Communist parties from the opposite perspective as having abandoned the orthodox Marxism of the founders.

## Variants

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.

### 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.
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, 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.
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.
This perspective is maintained by the World Socialist Movement, De Leonism, and to some extent followers of Karl Kautsky and pre-reformist social democracy.

### Leninism

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. The official thought of the Third International was based in orthodox Marxism combined with Leninist views on revolutionary organization initially. The terms dialectical materialism and historical materialism are associated with this phase of orthodox Marxism.
Orthodox Marxism is contrasted with later variations of Marxism, notably revisionism and Stalinism. In contrast to Stalin's idea of the socialism in a single backward country, orthodox Marxists said 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.

### Luxemburgism

Luxemburgism is an informal designation for a current of Marxist thought and practice that originates from the ideas and work of Rosa Luxemburg. In particular, it stresses the importance for spontaneous revolution which can only emerge in response to mounting contradictions between the productive forces and social relations of society and therefore rejects Leninism and Bolshevism for its insistence on a "hands-on" approach to revolution. Luxemburgism is also highly critical of the reformist Marxism that emerged from the work of Eduard Bernstein's informal faction of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. According to Rosa Luxemburg, under reformism "[capitalism] is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened by the development of social reforms".

### Trotskyism

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.

### Anti-revisionism

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. 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.

### Menshevism

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. The Mensheviks were thus opposed to the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard party and their pursuit of socialist revolution in semi-feudal Russia.

### Kautskyism

Karl Kautsky is recognized as the most authoritative promulgator of orthodox Marxism following the death of Friedrich 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. 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. Kautsky was also opposed to Eduard Bernstein's reformist politics in the period 1896–1901.

### 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".

## Criticism

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. 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.
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.
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.
In the postwar period, the New Left and new social movements gave rise to intellectual and political currents which again challenged orthodox Marxism. These include Italian autonomism, French Situationism, the Yugoslavian Praxis School, British cultural studies, Marxist feminism, Marxist humanism, analytical Marxism and critical realism.