Orthodox Marxists - Description

Description

The emergence of orthodox Marxism can be associated with the late works of Friedrich Engels, such as Dialectics of Nature and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which were efforts to popularise Marx's work, make it more systematic, and apply it to the fundamental questions of philosophy. Daniel De Leon, one of the early American socialist leaders, contributed much during the last years of the 19th century and early 20th century. Orthodox Marxism was further developed during the Second International by thinkers such as George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky. 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 ideology of the Third International was based in orthodox Marxism combined with Leninist views on revolutionary organization. The terms dialectical materialism and historical materialism are associated with this phase of orthodox Marxism. Rosa Luxembourg, Hal Draper and Rudolf Hilferding are prominent thinkers in the orthodox Marxist tradition.

Orthodox Marxism has the following characteristics:

• 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, as developed in post-First World War Social Democratic parties. 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 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. The Anti-Revisionist tradition, in contrast, criticised official Communist parties from the opposite perspective, as having abandoned the orthodox Marxism of the founding fathers.