Continental · 1840s – today
Marxism
History is driven by material production and class struggle, and capitalism, which exploits wage labour, will give way to a classless society.
Why are the people who produce wealth so poor, and how can that change?
Industrial capitalism in 1840s Britain and Germany produced unprecedented wealth beside slums, child labour and failed revolutions. Young Hegelians such as Marx inherited Hegel’s idea that history unfolds through contradiction, but found his account too abstract to explain real misery.
Humans survive by working on nature, so how a society produces (its tools and property relations) shapes its laws, politics and ideas. Under capitalism workers sell their labour power for less than the value it creates, and the surplus becomes profit. Because this conflict is built into the system, Marx argued, it generates crises and eventually its own overthrow.
- Material conditions shape consciousness, not the other way round.
- History is the history of class struggles.
- Capitalism alienates workers from their labour, its products and each other.
It inspired labour movements, revolutions and twentieth-century socialist states, and remains a core tool in sociology, history and the critique of capitalism.
Thinkers
1818–1883Karl MarxGerman philosopher, economist and revolutionary in London exile1820–1895Friedrich EngelsManufacturer’s son who co-founded Marxism with Marx1891–1937Antonio GramsciItalian communist leader who wrote his major work in Mussolini’s prisonsKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofGerman IdealismMarx kept Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction but grounded it in material production instead of Spirit.Reacted against
The EnlightenmentMarx turned the political economy of Adam Smith into a critique: the labour that creates value is exploited.
What it led to
Carried on byCritical theory (Frankfurt School)The Frankfurt School kept Marx’s critique of capitalism but asked why the working class had not become revolutionary.Opposed by
Post-structuralismFoucault and Lyotard rejected Marxism’s grand narrative of history and its view of power as held by a class or the state.Carried on by
Postcolonial thoughtFanon and Spivak drew on Marx, and Gramsci’s word “subaltern” became a key term of the field.