Orthodox Marxism is the body ofMarxist thought that emerged after the deaths ofKarl Marx andFriedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form byKarl Kautsky.[1] Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of thesocialist movement as represented in theSecond International until theFirst World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence theorthodoxy ofVladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions inclassical Marxism.
Orthodox Marxism maintained that Marx'shistorical materialism was a science which revealed the laws of history and proved that the collapse ofcapitalism and its replacement bysocialism 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.[2] For example, this idea saw theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) adopt a gradualist approach, taking advantage ofbourgeoisparliamentary 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 ofEduard Bernstein. Such "revisionists" were reviled by the orthodox Marxists for breaking with Marx's thought.
The emergence of orthodox Marxism is associated with the latter works ofFriedrich Engels, such as theDialectics of Nature andSocialism: 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.[3]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 asGeorgi Plekhanov andKarl Kautsky inErfurt Program andThe Class Struggle (Erfurt Program).[citation needed]
Karl Kautsky is recognized as the most authoritative promulgator of orthodox Marxism following the death of Engels in 1895. As an advisor toAugust Bebel, leader of theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) until Bebel's death in 1913 and as editor ofDie 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 theIndependent 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.[4]
Menshevism refers to the political positions taken by theMenshevik faction of theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party prior to theOctober 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 asocialist revolution.[5]
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Orthodox Marxism is contrasted withrevisionist Marxism,[6] and grew out of the European working class movement that emerged in the final quarter of the 19th century, continuing in that form until the middle years of the twentieth century. Its two institutional expressions were the2nd and3rd Internationals, which despite the great schism in 1919, were marked by a shared conception ofcapital andlabour.Trotskyism andLeft communism were equally orthodox in their thinking and approach, and must be considered left variants of this tradition.[7][better source needed]
Two variants of orthodox Marxism areimpossibilism andanti-revisionism. Impossibilism is a form of orthodox Marxism that both rejects thereformism 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 theSocialist Party of Great Britain.[8]
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 asMarxism–Leninism, revisionism and reformism.
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.[9]
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,[10][11] 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.[12][10]
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Kautsky and to a lesser extent Plekhanov were in turn major influences onVladimir Lenin, whose version of Marxism was known asLeninism by its contemporaries. Whereas the generation of orthodox Marxists before Marx, such as Plekhanov, believed thatImperial 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'sNew Economic Policy was to develop capitalism in Russia initially.[13]
Anti-revisionists (which includes radicalMarxist–Leninist factions,Hoxhaists andMaoists) criticize the rule of the communist states by claiming that they werestate capitalist states ruled byrevisionists.[14][15] 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 ofde-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 upholdSocialist Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin.[16]
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 asrevisionism, 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.[citation needed] 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 youngGyörgy 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.[17]
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 asGyörgy Lukács,Karl Korsch,Antonio Gramsci and theFrankfurt School, have tended to be open to influences orthodox Marxists considerbourgeois, such aspsychoanalysis and thesociology ofMax 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 asCarl Grünberg,Henryk Grossman andKarl 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 asfascism 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 toCritical Theory.[18]
In parallel to this,Cedric Robinson has identified aBlack Marxist tradition, including people likeC.L.R. James, Walter Rodney andW. E. B. Du Bois, who have opened Marxism to the study of race, "stretching" it beyond orthodox Marxism.[19]
In the postwar period, theNew Left andnew social movements gave rise to intellectual and political currents which again challenged orthodox Marxism.[20][21][22][23] These include Italianautonomism,[24] FrenchSituationism, the YugoslavianPraxis School, and Britishcultural studies.[20]
The same point was made, in the United Kingdom, by the leadership of the remorselessly orthodox Socialist Party of Great Britain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
