With the many account requests that we’ve had, I noticed that more than a few of our new members say themselves they don’t really understand Marxism in their applications. I’m taking this opportunity then to help them out with this.

If you would like theory recommendations then just ask in the comments and I’m sure many people will be happy to help, though my own favourites are Principles of communism (Engels), Elementary principles of philosophy (Georges Politzer) and How Marxism works (Chris Harman).

What is marxism?

Marxism is essentially a framework with which we analyse the world, both present and past, and maybe sometimes the future – but that honestly rarely works. It’s a comprehensive, exhaustive ideological framework that explains what’s going on around us and how we can respond to events in a way that “makes sense”. This response makes sense because it correctly, accurately identifies the causes, the reasons and the developments of those events. Then, using Marxism again, we can have an answer to them.

• Why did Israel annex Palestine and why are they conducting a genocide?
• Why is Russia invading Ukraine?
• How did China manage to pull a billion people out of poverty?
• How did Roman civilisation fall when they were so big and strong for such a long time?
• Why is the US always invading countries?
• I hate my job and whoever invented capitalism should rot in hell.

Those are all questions (and one affirmation) that Marxism can answer within its framework. The strength of marxism, I think, is not only in all the powerful analyses that were proven right in time, but also in the fact that it always yields very similar results. If we conducted a test to prove a hypothesis and it yielded very different results every time, then the test would be faulty and the whole method might be called into question. This is what happens with liberals, who analyse events through all sorts of different angles that always seem to be competing, like parallel lines that are very close, but never meet somewhere.

Marxism has simply three components, which Lenin outlined in a very early work simply titled The three sources and components of marxism:

1. The philosophical aspect of marxism, that of dialectical materialism.
2. The economic aspect, the labour theory of value.
3. The societal aspect, the class struggle.

I wouldn’t however necessarily recommend that text to a complete newbie as it points to different historical events and currents that you might not be familiar with.

It is not even the point here to delve into those three components, there are many texts that go into all of these (in order: elementary principles of philosophy, Marx’s Wage labour and capital, Value price and profit, and finally honestly any marxist text will talk about the class struggle).

When we make a marxist analysis, we tend to focus on the first and third components, but all of them are inseparable from each other and actually interact with one another at all times. The basis of the class struggle is the labour theory of value, and dialectical materialism is a facet of life that guides our actions. These components interact in many different ways than the one I illustrated here. The class struggle is usually the most apparent component in our daily lives, but it is not the most important component; all of them are equally important.

What marxism is not

Marxism is not dogmatic (claiming to be self-evident truth), or deterministic (determining that things must happen a certain way as they have been preordained). Marxists themselves do not claim that. We are not saying communism is inevitable, we are saying that as long as capitalism exists, there will be a bourgeoisie and there will be a proletariat, and these two will always have diametrically opposed interests, and so the struggle will always remain, even if it hides below the surface at some points in time. We are not saying however that the proletariat is bound to win, or that they will win by some fated event (sorry, we still have to put in the work).

We call marxism a science however because we make hypotheses, test them out through the optics of marxism, and see where that gets us. We also change our “rules” as we test those hypotheses. I wrote about the interaction between theory and practice on prolewiki if you’re interested, but in short we test things out through this framework, and what works becomes theory and what doesn’t work is discarded or reconsidered. Much like science revisits what it thought was true (for the longest time we thought there was no mathematics outside Euclidean geometry), marxism reconsiders what it thought was true to always stay relevant and up to date. This also answers some concerns that I’ve heard over the years, that marxism was synthesized by some white guy in the 1800s so what does he know about the 21st century? We have not been resting on Marx’s writings alone, and today still there are plenty of writers, analysts and theorists that improve the science.

Marxism is not a system of government. The system of government is socialism and then communism. However, a marxist framework informs political decisions and helps us understand them through the class struggle. But it does not say “as a marxist you should make laws that do this or that”.

Marxism does not claim to always be right, and most marxists don’t claim that either. We make mistakes too, because we did not consider all the facts, some were not available to us or we were not careful in our assessments and mischaracterised a fact (e.g. not properly understanding the class dynamics in one or another crisis which leads to a faulty analysis). Sometimes we make mistakes because we just don’t know the topic very well.

Marxism is also not moralistic. In fact, it is possible to defend marxism without ever giving moral arguments. We give simple observations about the state of the world in the past and in the present day, and the way we act on them is not determined by marxism either; it’s not a code of conduct. Liberals decry marxism because it is the ideology of the proletariat, but they could use it too to analyse events, and make capitalistic decisions out of them.

Marxism is not individualistic, but we recognize personhood. Individuality is a recent concept, that is not tied to simply being a human, but to being an individual. That’s a concept tied very closely to liberalism, which we don’t agree with in many ways. One key difference, for example, is that liberals will look at individual events or people to make their conclusion, whereas we look at groups and their dynamics and movements.

During the religious wars in early Renaissance Europe, liberals would say that people just kinda got crazy over religion (christians and protestants) as they were so fanatically religious they were willing to kill each other over it. Our analysis is simply that Christians represented the old noble order and Protestants the new bourgeois order (free artisans and merchants not bound to a liege), and the wars of religion were really about fighting over who would become the dominant class. But you know one thing that vindicates us? Down the line, bourgeois academy recognizes our conclusions as true, except they rewrite them in their own words. Nowadays academia agrees with this marxist assessment, but this was not the case for a long time.

Marxism is not holistic, which is kind of a buzzword some non-marxists use sometimes to try and explain marxism. Marxism is dialectical, not holistic. This is a very difficult difference to explain, I think if you don’t get it yet you will once you understand dialectics (I recommend Politzer again as well as our articles on prolewiki.org).

Marxism is also not eternal. At this specific point in time, marxism the ideology most capable of answering our questions and needs for the future. Liberalism was a progressive philosophy as well in its time, replacing the old stagnant, very Christian philosophies of nobles and kings. One day marxism will need to be replaced too, and we can’t know what our descendants will come up with, much like liberals of the Enlightenment could not predict that marxism would be invented only 130 years after them.