Marxism

Marxism

An intellectual tradition and political movement initiated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Marxism has devoted much attention and debate on matters of science, technology, and ethics. Marx and Engels themselves were particularly influenced by Darwinism and saw themselves as extending an understanding of organic evolution into human history. They believed that developments in the natural sciences of their times required elaboration of the philosophical and sociological consequences in the direction of a dialectical and historicist form of materialism. But they were critical of existing materialist currents as undialectical and existing dialectical positions as idealist. In the intellectual division of labor between Marx and Engels, Marx devoted his efforts to economics, while Engels wrote on philosophy, science, culture, morality, and gender, and entered into polemics with critics. His Dialectics of Nature, published posthumously in 1927, explores the philosophical implications of the natural sciences.

Marxism held that capitalism has played a crucial part in developing science and technology, but that only socialism could fulfill their potential and organize an equitable distribution of their benefits. For Marxism, capitalism was an inherently contradictory mode of production. It was a system based on the primacy of market forces and private ownership of the means of social production, generating a basic class division between those who own the means of production and those who own only their labor power.

Read the rest of this Article with our Marxism Access Pass.