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Marxism

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   Important Marxists
   Karl Marx
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   Karl Kautsky
   Vladimir Lenin
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   Rosa Luxemburg
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   Antonio Gramsci
   Karl Korsch
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   Marxism refers to the philosophy and social theory based on Karl Marx's
   work on one hand, and to the political practice based on Marxist theory
   on the other hand (namely, parts of the First International during
   Marx's time, communist parties and later states). Marx, a 19th century
   German, Jewish-born atheist, socialist philosopher, economist,
   journalist, and revolutionary, often in collaboration with Friedrich
   Engels, developed a critique of society which he claimed was both
   scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most
   systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his most famous work,
   Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as Das
   Kapital (1867).

   Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a
   grand, cohesive theoretical outlook dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there
   have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's
   writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and
   conditions. The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested among
   proponents of numerous viewpoints who claim to be Marx's most accurate
   interpreters. There have been many academic theories, social movements,
   political parties and governments that lay claim to being founded on
   Marxist principles. Indeed, academic theorising on Marxism is so
   widespread that there are a number of different schools of Marxism in
   addition to the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels. Similarly, the
   use of Marxist theory in politics, including the social democratic
   movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern
   bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing
   countries have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism
   so much that it is difficult to define its core.

Classical Marxism

   Classical Marxism refers to the body of theory directly expounded by
   Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The term 'Classical Marxism' is often
   used to distinguish between "Marxism" in general and "what Marx
   believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a
   letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to his own
   son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary
   phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles: "if
   that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a
   Marxist". As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked, "there are
   few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly
   misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike."

   Classical Marxism can also refer to the second era of Marxism
   (1889-1914) where an organization known as the Second International
   propagated for the expansion of socialism internationally.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

   Karl Marx - Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels)
   Enlarge
   Karl Marx - Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels)

   Karl Heinrich Marx ( May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883,
   London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political
   economist, and socialist revolutionary. Marx addressed a wide range of
   issues, including alienation and exploitation of the worker, the
   capitalist mode of production and historical materialism, although he
   is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles,
   summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist
   Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history
   of class struggles." The influence of his ideas, already popular during
   his life, was given added impetus by the victory of the Russian
   Bolsheviks in the 1917 October Revolution, and there are few parts of
   the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the
   course of the twentieth century.
   Friedrich Engels was a co-founder and proponent of Marxism.
   Enlarge
   Friedrich Engels was a co-founder and proponent of Marxism.

   Friedrich Engels ( November 28, 1820, Wuppertal – August 5, 1895,
   London) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. He developed
   communist theory alongside Marx.

   The two first met in person in September 1844. They discovered that
   they had similar views on philosophy and on capitalism and decided to
   work together, producing a number of works including Die heilige
   Familie ( The Holy Family). After the French authorities deported Marx
   from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx decided to move to
   Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than some
   other countries in Europe. Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in
   January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee.

   In 1847 Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on
   Engels' The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word
   pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism
   understandable to a wide audience, and published it as The Communist
   Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and
   Marx. They moved to Cologne, where they began to publish a radical
   newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. By 1849 both Engels and Marx
   had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities
   applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but
   Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that
   Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.

   After Marx's death in 1883, Engels devoted much of the rest of his life
   to editing and translating Marx's writings. However, he also
   contributed significantly to feminist theory, seeing for instance the
   concept of monogamous marriage as having arisen because of the
   domination of man over women. In this sense, he ties communist theory
   to the family, arguing that men have dominated women just as the
   capitalist class has dominated workers. Engels died in London in 1895.

Early influences

   Classical Marxism was influenced by a number of different thinkers.
   These thinkers can roughly be divided into 3 groups:
     * German Philosophy including: Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Ludwig
       Feuerbach
     * English and Scottish Political Economy including: Adam Smith &
       David Ricardo
     * French Socialism including: Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Charles Fourier;
       Henri de Saint-Simon; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Louis Blanc

   Other influences include:
     * Antique materialism
     * Giambattista Vico
     * Lewis Morgan

Main ideas

   The main ideas to come out of Marx and Engels collective works include:
     * mode of production: The mode of production is a specific
       combination of productive forces (including human labour power,
       tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and
       improved land) and social and technical relations of production
       (including the property, power and control relations governing
       society's productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative
       work relations and forms of association, relations between people
       and the objects of their work, and the relations between social
       classes).
     * base and superstructure: The base refers to the means of production
       of society. The superstructure is formed on top of the base, and
       comprises that society's ideology, as well as its legal system,
       political system, and religions. For Marx, the base determines the
       superstructure.The relationship between superstructure and base is
       considered to be a dialectical one, not a distinction between
       actual entities "in the world".
     * class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the
       self-awareness of a social class and its capacity to act in its own
       rational interests.
     * ideology: Because the ruling class controls the society's means of
       production, the superstructure of society, including its ideology,
       will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best
       interests. Therefore the ideology of a society is of enormous
       importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create
       false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor
       as capital ~ a degradation of human life).
     * historical materialism: Historical materialism was first
       articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It
       looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies
       in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life,
       thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything
       that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social
       classes, political structures, ideologies).
     * political economy: The term political economy originally meant the
       study of the conditions under which production was organized in the
       nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy,
       then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing
       material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit
       that is the result of that activity.Political economy studies the
       means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests
       itself in economic activity.
     * exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment
       or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent
       feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit
       gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the
       product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker
       receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of
       paying workers less than the full value of their labour, in order
       to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
     * alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of
       their "human nature" (Gattungswesen, usually translated as
       'species-essence' or 'species-being'). Alienation describes
       objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't
       necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated. He
       believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism.

Class

   Marx believed that the identity of a social class derived from its
   relationship to the means of production (as opposed to the notion that
   class is determined by wealth alone, i.e., lower class, middle class,
   upper class).

   Marx describes several social classes in capitalist societies,
   including primarily:
     * the proletariat: "those individuals who sell their labour power,
       (and therefore add value to the products), and who, in the
       capitalist mode of production, do not own the means of production".
       According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production establishes
       the conditions that enable the bourgeoisie to exploit the
       proletariat due to the fact that the worker's labour power
       generates an added value greater than the worker's salary.
     * the bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy
       labour power from the proletariat, who are recompensed by a salary,
       thus exploiting the proletariat.

   The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy
   bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie are those
   who employ labour, but may also work themselves. These may be small
   proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted
   that the petty bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the
   constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this
   would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petty
   bourgeoisie to the proletariat. Marx also identified the
   lumpenproletariat, a stratum of society completely disconnected from
   the means of production.

Western Marxism

   Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist
   theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently
   North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union, the
   Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or the People's Republic of
   China.

Schools of Western Marxist thought

Structural Marxism

   Structural Marxism is an approach to Marxism based on structuralism,
   primarily associated with the work of the French theorist Louis
   Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the
   late 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers,
   political theorists and sociologists outside of France during the
   1970s.

Neo-Marxism

   Neo-Marxism is a school of Marxism that began in the 20th century and
   hearkened back to the early writings of Marx before the influence of
   Engels which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical
   materialism. It thus rejected economic determinism being instead far
   more libertarian. Neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of
   social inequality, such as status and power, to orthodox Marxist
   thought.

The Frankfurt School

   The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social
   research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for
   Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of
   Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The term "Frankfurt School" is an
   informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the
   Institute for Social Research or influenced by them: it is not the
   title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School
   did not use the term to describe themselves.

   The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe
   critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged
   followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas,
   usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties.
   Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in
   Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an
   economically, technologically, and culturally advanced nation
   (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's
   thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had
   never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's
   perceived omissions.

   Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in
   Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and
   Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was
   derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of
   positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's
   critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally
   Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as
   inherent properties of reality.

Cultural Marxism

   Cultural Marxism is a form of Marxism that adds an analysis of the role
   of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a
   society, often with an added emphasis on race and gender in addition to
   class. As a form of political analysis, Cultural Marxism gained
   strength in the 1920s, and was the model used by the Frankfurt School;
   and later by another group of intellectuals at the Centre for
   Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England.

Analytical Marxism

   Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was
   prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists
   during the 1980s. It was mainly associated with the September Group of
   academics, so called because they have biennial meetings in varying
   locations every other September to discuss common interests. The group
   also dubbed itself "Non-Bullshit Marxism" (Cohen 2000a). It was
   characterized, in the words of David Miller, by "clear and rigorous
   thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by ideological
   fog". (Miller 1996)

Marxist humanism

   Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on
   Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical
   Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx exposes his theory of alienation, as
   opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more
   with his structural conception of capitalist society. It was opposed by
   Louis Althusser's " antihumanism", who qualified it as a revisionist
   movement.

   Marxist humanists contend that ‘Marxism’ developed lopsided because
   Marx’s early works were unknown till after the orthodox ideas were in
   vogue — the Manuscripts of 1844 were published only in 1932 — and it is
   necessary to understand Marx’s philosophical foundations to understand
   his latter works properly.

Key Western Marxists

Georg Lukács

   Georg Lukács ( April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist
   philosopher and literary critic in the tradition of Western Marxism.
   His main work History and Class Consciousness (written between 1919 and
   1922 and first published in 1923), initiated the current of thought
   that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for
   contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to
   sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing Marx's
   theory of alienation before many of the works of the Young Marx had
   been published. Lukács's work elaborates and expands upon Marxist
   theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class
   consciousness.

Karl Korsch

   Karl Korsch ( August 15, 1886 - October 21, 1961) was born in Todstedt,
   near Hamburg, to the family of a middle-ranking bank official.

   In his later work, he rejected orthodox (classical) Marxism as
   historically outmoded, wanting to adapt Marxism to a new historical
   situation. He wrote in his Ten Theses (1950) that "the first step in
   re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in
   breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary
   initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction" and that
   "today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in
   its original function as a theory of the working classes social
   revolution are reactionary utopias."

   Korsch was especially concerned that Marxist theory was losing its
   precision and validity - in the words of the day, becoming "vulgarized"
   - within the upper echelons of the various socialist organizations. His
   masterwork, Marxism and Philosophy is an attempt to re-establish the
   historic character of Marxism as the heir to Hegel.

Antonio Gramsci

   Antonio Gramsci ( January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian
   writer, politician and political theorist. He was a founding member and
   onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci can be seen as
   one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century,
   and in particular a key thinker in the development of Western Marxism.
   He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of history and analysis
   during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks,
   contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well
   as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory
   associated with his name, such as:
     * Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a
       capitalist society.
     * The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of
       intellectuals from the working class.
     * The distinction between political society (the police, the army,
       legal system, etc.) which dominates directly and coercively, and
       civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions,
       etc.) where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means
       of consent.
     * 'Absolute historicism'.
     * The critique of economic determinism.
     * The critique of philosophical materialism.

Louis Althusser

   Louis Althusser ( October 16, 1918 - October 23, 1990) was a Marxist
   philosopher. His arguments were a response to multiple threats to the
   ideological foundations of orthodox Communism. These included both the
   influence of empiricism which was beginning to influence Marxist
   sociology and economics, and growing interest in humanistic and
   democratic socialist orientations which were beginning to cause
   division in the European Communist Parties. Althusser is commonly
   referred to as a Structural Marxist, although his relationship to other
   schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation.

   His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti- humanism
   in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and
   "species-being," which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths
   of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity." His essay Contradiction and
   Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from
   psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a
   more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an
   idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony).

   Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his
   best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes
   Toward an Investigation . The essay establishes the concept of
   ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony
   is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws
   on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase
   respectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to
   meaningfully have a concept of the self.

Herbert Marcuse

   Herbert Marcuse ( July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a prominent
   German- American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent, and a
   member of the Frankfurt School.

   Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955
   synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book
   One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student
   movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student
   protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left," a
   term he disliked and rejected.

Post Marxism

   Post-Marxism represents the theoretical work of philosophers and social
   theorists who have built their theories upon those of Marx and Marxists
   but exceeded the limits of those theories in ways that puts them
   outside of Marxism. It begins with the basic tenets of Marxism but
   moves away from the Mode of Production as the starting point for
   analysis and includes factors other than class, such as gender,
   ethnicity etc, and a reflexive relationship between the base and
   superstructure.

Marxist Feminism

   Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the
   dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women. Marxist feminism
   states that capitalism, which gives rise to economic inequality,
   dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social
   relations between men and women, is the root of women's oppression.

   According to Marxist theory, in capitalist societies the individual is
   shaped by class relations; that is, people's capacities, needs and
   interests are seen to be determined by the mode of production that
   characterises the society they inhabit. Marxist feminists see gender
   inequality as determined ultimately by the capitalist mode of
   production. Gender oppression is class oppression and women's
   subordination is seen as a form of class oppression which is maintained
   (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling
   class. Marxist feminists have extended traditional Marxist analysis by
   looking at domestic labour as well as wage work in order to support
   their position.

Marxism as a political practice

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   Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have
   appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and
   policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and
   conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between
   the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to
   socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parliamentarian
   frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a
   socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the
   capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency, later known as social
   democracy, came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the
   Second International and these parties supported their own governments
   in the First World War. This issue caused the communists to break away,
   forming their own parties which became members of the Third
   International.

   The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth
   century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still
   do as of 2006): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, Chile, China,
   Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova,
   Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia,
   the USSR and its republics, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In
   addition, the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist
   governments.

   Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined
   since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most
   notably Nepal.

History

   The 1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin, was the first large
   scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into
   practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and
   foreign intervention. Many, both inside and outside the revolution,
   worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic
   development as Marxism requires capitalism to have exhausted its
   mechanisms of growth before attaining socialism. Consequently, the
   major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist
   within twenty-four hours, according to Jonathan Wolff. Socialist
   revolution in Germany and other western countries failed, leaving the
   Soviet Union on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap
   solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP).
   Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating
   rivals and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible
   challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the
   geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the
   probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of
   industrialisation which, while successful, was executed at great cost
   in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term
   environmental devastation.

   Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin,
   Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one
   country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist
   critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist
   state long before its formal dissolution.

   Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military
   backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the
   world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and
   establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included
   the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany,
   Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and others.
   In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable
   examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China,
   as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders
   disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be
   implemented into society.

   Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's
   Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating
   economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations
   were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that
   perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various
   problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed
   Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the
   failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism
   to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the
   international trading relationships that capitalism had previously
   developed.

   The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a
   single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as
   happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese
   government - after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980
   and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping - seems to have solved the succession
   crises that have plagued self-proclaimed Leninist governments since the
   death of Lenin himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which
   is a NEP ( New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the
   1920s was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to
   operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian
   experience in Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so
   opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt but especially after
   China's application to join the WTO this does not seem to apply
   universally.

   The death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but
   since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has
   clearly retained final say over both commercial and political affairs.
   Questions remain however as to whether the Chinese Party has opened its
   markets to such a degree as to be no longer classified as a true
   Marxist party. A sort of tacit consent, and a desire in China's case to
   escape the chaos of pre-1949 memory, probably plays a role.

   In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to
   identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed
   suit. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to
   be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been
   replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialism—or, more
   commonly, by aggressively neoliberal capitalism. Marxism has also had
   to engage with the rise in the Environmental movement. A merging of
   Marxism, socialism, ecology and environmentalism has been achieved, and
   is often referred to as Eco-socialism.

Social Democracy

   Social democracy is a political ideology that emerged in the late 19th
   and early 20th century. Many parties in the second half of the 19th
   century described themselves as social democratic, such as the British
   Social Democratic Federation, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour
   Party. In most cases these were revolutionary socialist or Marxist
   groups, who were not only seeking to introduce socialism, but also
   democracy in un-democratic countries.

   The modern social democratic current came into being through a break
   within the socialist movement in the early 20th century, between two
   groups holding different views on the ideas of Karl Marx. Many related
   movements, including pacifism, anarchism, and syndicalism, arose at the
   same time (often by splitting from the main socialist movement, but
   also by emerging of new theories.) and had various quite different
   objections to Marxism. The social democrats, who were the majority of
   socialists at this time, did not reject Marxism (and in fact claimed to
   uphold it), but wanted to reform it in certain ways and tone down their
   criticism of capitalism. They argued that socialism should be achieved
   through evolution rather than revolution. Such views were strongly
   opposed by the revolutionary socialists, who argued that any attempt to
   reform capitalism was doomed to fail, because the reformers would be
   gradually corrupted and eventually turn into capitalists themselves.

   Despite their differences, the reformist and revolutionary branches of
   socialism remained united until the outbreak of World War I. The war
   proved to be the final straw that pushed the tensions between them to
   breaking point. The reformist socialists supported their respective
   national governments in the war, a fact that was seen by the
   revolutionary socialists as outright treason against the working class
   (Since it betrayed the principle that the workers of all nations should
   unite in overthrowing capitalism, and the fact that usually the lowest
   classes are the ones sent into the war to fight, and die, putting the
   cause at the side). Bitter arguments ensued within socialist parties,
   as for example between Eduard Bernstein (reformist socialist) and Rosa
   Luxemburg (revolutionary socialist) within the SPD in Germany.
   Eventually, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, most of the world's
   socialist parties fractured. The reformist socialists kept the name
   "Social democrats", while the revolutionary socialists began calling
   themselves "Communists", and soon formed the modern Communist movement.
   (See also Comintern)

   Since the 1920s, doctrinal differences have been constantly growing
   between social democrats and Communists (who themselves are not unified
   on the way to achieve socialism).

Socialism

   Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary social movements
   and political parties around the world, since the collapse of the
   Soviet Union and its satellite states, very few countries have
   governments which describe themselves as Marxist.Although socialistic
   parties are in power in some Western nations, they long ago distanced
   themselves from their direct link to Marx and his ideas.

   As of 2005, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China -
   and to a certain extent Venezuela had governments in power which
   describe themselves as socialist in the Marxist sense. However, the
   private sector comprised more than 50% of the mainland Chinese economy
   by this time and the Vietnamese government had also partially
   liberalised its economy. The Laotian and Cuban states maintained strong
   control over the means of production.

   Alexander Lukashenko president of Belarus, has been quoted as saying
   that his agrarian policy could be termed as Communist. He has also
   frequently reffered to the economy as being ' market socialism'.
   Lukashenko is also an unapologetic admirer of the Soviet Union.

   North Korea is another contemporary socialist state, though the
   official ideology of the Korean Workers' Party (originally led by Kim
   Il-sung and currently chaired by his son, Kim Jong-il), Juche, does not
   follow doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism as had been espoused by the
   leadership of the Soviet Union.

   Libya is often thought of as a socialist state; it maintained ties with
   the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc and Communist states during the
   Cold War. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, describes
   the state's official ideology as Islamic socialism, and has labeled it
   a third way between capitalism and communism.

Communism

   Part of the Politics series on
   Communism

   History of communism
     __________________________________________________________________

   Schools of communism
   Marxism · Leninism
   Left communism
   Trotskyism · Autonomist Marxism
   Eurocommunism Council communism
   Anarchist communism
   Luxemburgism
     __________________________________________________________________

   Political Parties
   Communist League
   Communist International
   World Communist Movement
   International Communist Current
   Communist Workers International
   Fourth International
     __________________________________________________________________

   Related subjects
   Socialism
   Capitalism · Cold War
   New Left · Planned economy
   Historical materialism
   Marxist philosophy
   Left communism
   Democratic centralism
   Soviet democracy
   New Economic Policy
   Anti-communism
     __________________________________________________________________

   Notable Communists
   Karl Marx · Friedrich Engels
   Vladimir Lenin · Leon Trotsky
   Rosa Luxemburg · Anton Pannekoek
   Antonio Gramsci · Antonio Negri
   Amadeo Bordiga · Che Guevara
   Herman Gorter · Georg Lukács
   Karl Korsch · Mansoor Hekmat
   Communism Portal

   A Communist state is a state which declares its allegiance to the
   principles of Marxism-Leninism. Communist states have a centrally
   planned economy, a rigid system based on collectively owned property,
   although some Communist states such as the People's Republic of China
   have allowed some controlled private investment in an effort to expand
   their economies. The governments of Communist Party states are
   dominated by a Communist party, either as a single-party state or a
   single list, which includes formally several parties, as was the case
   in the GDR; historically this power concentration has tended to produce
   totalitarian rule. Their governments have generally referred to their
   states as socialist states.

   Communist governments have historically been characterized by state
   ownership of productive resources in a planned economy and sweeping
   campaigns of economic restructuring such as nationalization of industry
   and land reform (often focusing on collective farming or state farms.)
   While they promote collective ownership of the means of production,
   Communist governments have been characterized by a strong state
   apparatus in which decisions are made by the ruling Communist Party.
   Dissident communists have characterized the Soviet model as state
   socialism or state capitalism.

Marxism-Leninism

   Marxism-Leninism, strictly speaking, refers to the version of Marxism
   developed by Vladimir Lenin known as Leninism. However, in various
   contexts, different (and sometimes opposing) political groups have used
   the term "Marxism-Leninism" to describe the ideologies that they
   claimed to be upholding. The core ideological features of
   Marxism-Leninism are those of Marxism and Leninism, viz. belief in the
   necessity of a violent overthrow of capitalism through communist
   revolution, to be followed by a dictatorship of the proletariat as the
   first stage of moving towards communism, and the need for a vanguard
   party to lead the proletariat in this effort. It involves subscribing
   to the teachings and legacy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
   (Marxism), and that of Lenin, as carried forward by Joseph Stalin.
   Those who view themselves as Marxist-Leninists, however, vary with
   regards to the leaders and thinkers that they choose to uphold as
   progressive (and to what extent). Maoists tend to downplay the
   importance of all other thinkers in favour of Mao Zedong, whereas
   Hoxhaites repudiate Mao.

   Leninism holds that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary
   means; that is, any attempts to reform capitalism from within, such as
   Fabianism and non-revolutionary forms of democratic socialism, are
   doomed to fail. The goal of a Leninist party is to orchestrate the
   overthrow the existing government by force and seize power on behalf of
   the proletariat, and then implement a dictatorship of the proletariat.
   The party must then use the powers of government to educate the
   proletariat, so as to remove the various modes of false consciousness
   the bourgeois have instilled in them in order to make them more docile
   and easier to exploit economically, such as religion and nationalism.

   The dictatorship of the proletariat is theoretically to be governed by
   a decentralized system of proletarian direct democracy, in which
   workers hold political power through local councils known as soviets
   (see soviet democracy). (In practice, the Bolsheviks banned other
   political organizations and removed all real political power from the
   soviets shortly after the October Revolution as the Russian Civil War
   got underway, when it became clear that the Bolshevik Party lacked
   popular support in the nonindustrial areas outside the major cities of
   St. Petersburg and Moscow.)

Trotskyism

   Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky.
   Trotsky considered himself a Bolshevik- Leninist, arguing for the
   establishment of a vanguard party. He considered himself an advocate of
   orthodox Marxism. His politics differed sharply from those of Stalin or
   Mao, most importantly in declaring the need for an international "
   permanent revolution". Numerous groups around the world continue to
   describe themselves as Trotskyist and see themselves as standing in
   this tradition, although they have diverse interpretations of the
   conclusions to be drawn from this.

   Trotsky advocated proletarian revolution as set out in his theory of "
   permanent revolution", and he argued that in countries where the
   bourgeois- democratic revolution had not triumphed already (in other
   words, in places that had not yet implemented a capitalist democracy,
   such as Russia before 1917), it was necessary that the proletariat make
   it permanent by carrying out the tasks of the social revolution (the
   "socialist" or "communist" revolution) at the same time, in an
   uninterrupted process. Trotsky believed that a new socialist state
   would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile
   capitalist world unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in
   other countries as well.

   On the political spectrum of Marxism, Trotskyists are considered to be
   on the left. They supported democratic rights in the USSR, opposed
   political deals with the imperialist powers, and advocated a spreading
   of the revolution throughout Europe and the East.

   Trotsky developed the theory that the Russian workers' state had become
   a " bureaucratically degenerated workers' state". Capitalist rule had
   not been restored, and nationalized industry and economic planning,
   instituted under Lenin, were still in effect. However, the state was
   controlled by a bureaucratic caste with interests hostile to those of
   the working class. Trotsky defended the Soviet Union against attack
   from imperialist powers and against internal counter-revolution, but
   called for a political revolution within the USSR to restore socialist
   democracy. He argued that if the working class did not take power away
   from the Stalinist bureaucracy, the bureaucracy would restore
   capitalism in order to enrich itself. In the view of many Trotskyists,
   this is exactly what has happened since the beginning of Glasnost and
   Perestroika in the USSR. Some argue that the adoption of market
   socialism by the People's Republic of China has also led to capitalist
   counter-revolution.

Maoism

   Maoism or Mao Zedong Thought (Chinese: 毛泽东思想, pinyin: Máo Zédōng
   Sīxiǎng), is a variant of Marxism-Leninism derived from the teachings
   of the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong ( Wade-Giles
   transliteration: "Mao Tse-tung").

   The term Mao Zedong Thought has always been the preferred term by the
   Communist Party of China and that the word Maoism has never been used
   in its English-language publications except pejoratively. Likewise,
   Maoist groups outside China have usually called themselves
   Marxist-Leninist rather than Maoist, a reflection of Mao's view that he
   did not change, but only developed, Marxism-Leninism. However, some
   Maoist groups, believing Mao's theories to have been sufficiently
   substantial additions to the basics of the Marxist canon, call
   themselves "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist" (MLM) or simply "Maoist."

   In the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong Thought is part of the
   official doctrine of the Communist Party of China, but since the 1978
   beginning of Deng Xiaoping's market economy-oriented reforms, the
   concept of " socialism with Chinese characteristics" has come to the
   forefront of Chinese politics, Chinese economic reform has taken hold,
   and the official definition and role of Mao's original ideology in the
   PRC has been radically altered and reduced (see History of China).

   Unlike the earlier forms of Marxism-Leninism in which the urban
   proletariat was seen as the main source of revolution, and the
   countryside was largely ignored, Mao focused on the peasantry as the
   main revolutionary force which, he said, could be led by the
   proletariat and its vanguard, the Communist Party of China. The model
   for this was of course the Chinese communist rural Protracted People's
   War of the 1920s and 1930s, which eventually brought the Communist
   Party of China to power. Furthermore, unlike other forms of
   Marxism-Leninism in which large-scale industrial development was seen
   as a positive force, Maoism made all-round rural development the
   priority. Mao felt that this strategy made sense during the early
   stages of socialism in a country in which most of the people were
   peasants. Unlike most other political ideologies, including other
   socialist and Marxist ones, Maoism contains an integral military
   doctrine and explicitly connects its political ideology with military
   strategy. In Maoist thought, "political power comes from the barrel of
   the gun" (one of Mao's quotes), and the peasantry can be mobilized to
   undertake a " people's war" of armed struggle involving guerrilla
   warfare in three stages.

Other

   Some libertarian members of the laissez-faire and individualist schools
   of thought believe the actions and principles of modern capitalist
   states or big governments can be understood as "Marxist". This point of
   view ignores the overall vision and general intent of Marx and Engels'
   Communist Manifesto, for qualitative change to the economic system, and
   focuses on a few steps that Marx and Engels believed would occur, as
   workers emancipated themselves from the capitalist system, such as
   "Free education for all children in public schools". A few such reforms
   have been implemented — not by Marxists but in the forms of
   Keynesianism, the welfare state, new liberalism, social democracy and
   other minor changes to the capitalist system, in most capitalist
   states.

   To Marxists these reforms represent responses to political pressures
   from working-class political parties and unions, themselves responding
   to perceived abuses of the capitalist system. Further, in this view,
   many of these reforms reflect efforts to "save" or "improve" capitalism
   (without abolishing it) by coordinating economic actors and dealing
   with market failures. Further, although Marxism does see a role for a
   socialist "vanguard" government in representing the proletariat through
   a revolutionary period of indeterminate length, it sees an eventual
   lightening of that burden, a "withering away of the state."

Disputing these claims

   Many academics dispute the claim that the above political movements are
   Marxist. Communist governments have historically been characterized by
   state ownership of productive resources in a planned economy and
   sweeping campaigns of economic restructuring such as nationalization of
   industry and land reform (often focusing on collective farming or state
   farms.) While they promote collective ownership of the means of
   production, Communist governments have been characterized by a strong
   state apparatus in which decisions are made by the ruling Communist
   Party. Dissident communists have characterized the Soviet model as
   state socialism or state capitalism. Further, critics have often
   claimed that a Stalinist or Maoist system of government creates a new
   ruling class, usually called the nomenklatura.

   However Marx defined "communism" as a classless, egalitarian and
   stateless society. Indeed, to Marx, the notion of a socialist state
   would have seemed oxymoronical, as he defined socialism as the phase
   reached when class society and the state had already been abolished.
   Once socialism had been established, society would develop new
   socialist relations over the course of several generations, reaching
   the stage known as communism when bourgeois relations had been
   abandoned. Such a development has yet to occur in any historical
   self-claimed Socialist state. Often it results in the creation of two
   distinct classes: those who are in government and therefore have power,
   and those who are not in government and do not have power — thus
   inspiring the term State capitalism. These statist regimes have
   generally followed a command economy model without making a transition
   to this hypothetical final stage.

Criticisms

   Criticisms of Marxism are many and varied. They concern both the theory
   itself, and its later interpretations and implementations.

   Criticisms of Marxism have come from the political Left as well as the
   political Right. Democratic socialists and social democrats reject the
   idea that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and
   violent revolution. Anarchists reject the need for a transitory state
   phase. Some thinkers have rejected the fundamentals of Marxist theory,
   such as historical materialism and the labour theory of value, and gone
   on to criticize capitalism - and advocate socialism - using other
   arguments. Some contemporary supporters of Marxism argue that many
   aspects of Marxist thought are viable, but that the corpus also fails
   to deal effectively with certain aspects of economic, political or
   social theory.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
