Where did the first government built on Marx's ideas take power?
Lenin led the revolution in Russia in 1917. The twentieth-century revolutions in Marx's name came in poorer, mainly rural countries such as Russia and China, not in industrial Britain or Germany.
- Began
- In the mid-19th century, with the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The Communist Manifesto (1848) to Capital (1867)
- Key figures
- Marx and Engels; Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, who led revolutions in its name; later scholars such as G.A. Cohen and John Roemer
- Where it dominated
- The Soviet Union, China and other communist states of the twentieth century
- Main rivals
- Mainstream economics, built on marginal analysis (reasoning about small changes), and the Austrian school of Böhm-Bawerk, Mises and Hayek
What it was reacting to
Marxism took shape in the mid-19th century as a critique of capitalism. Marx and Engels saw capitalism as a system of conflict between the class that owns factories and the class that works for wages.
Marx and Engels criticised earlier socialists such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. The Manifesto called their ideas utopian, because they drew up detailed blueprints for ideal societies. Marx refused to do so. He held that communism would grow out of capitalism's own development, and he said little about how it would be run.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
The key ideas
Can you name the four key ideas of Marxism?
The theory that the way a society produces goods shapes the rest of it, from its laws to its ideas. Forms of society rise while they help productive power grow, and are overthrown once they hold it back.
Can you think of an example?
In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that feudal property rights came to hold back new methods of production and trade, and were replaced by free competition.
Marxists see capitalist society as split between the bourgeoisie, owners of factories and other means of production, and the proletariat, wage earners. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels described the state as managing the shared affairs of the owning class.
Can you think of an example?
Marx allowed exceptions. When the classes were evenly balanced, as in France after Napoleon III's coup of 1851, he saw the state gaining some independence from both.
In the Marxist view, workers are exploited when the goods their wages buy embody less labour than they put in. Later Marxists such as John Roemer restated the idea without relying on the labour theory of value.
Can you think of an example?
A worker spends eight hours earning a wage that buys a coat which took four hours to make. In Roemer's sense, that worker is exploited.
Communist governments replaced most market decisions with central planning, in which the state sets what farms and factories produce. Marx left few details, so the systems were worked out by Lenin, Stalin and their successors.
Can you think of an example?
In the Soviet Union, the planning board Gosplan turned the party's goals into national plans, which ministries broke down into targets for each factory.