Marxist Schools Of Thought

Marxism has never been one doctrine. Within a decade of Marx’s death in 1883 his followers were divided over whether capitalism would collapse of its own contradictions or had to be pushed, and the divisions multiplied through the twentieth century into orthodox social democracy, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, structuralism, analytical Marxism and the various post-Marxisms of the academy.

Conservatives read this proliferation as evidence rather than as intellectual vigour. Each school arose to explain why the previous school’s predictions had failed, and each relocated the engine of history — from the economy to the party, from the party to the Third World peasantry, from the peasantry to culture, and finally to language itself. A theory whose central claims survive every disconfirmation by moving elsewhere is behaving less like science than its adherents suppose.

Key Takeaways

• Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist book of 1899, translated into English as Evolutionary Socialism, began the first split by observing that workers’ conditions were improving, not worsening.
• Leninism relocated agency from the class to the vanguard party; Maoism relocated it again to the peasantry.
• Western Marxism, from Lukács in 1923 through Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, shifted the field of struggle to culture and consciousness.
• Analytical Marxism, led by G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster from the late 1970s, abandoned the dialectic and rebuilt the argument on ordinary logic.
• Post-Marxism after Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) gave up class as the central category altogether.

History And Context

The first split was about prediction. Marx and Engels had written that competition would concentrate capital, immiserate the working class, and drive the rate of profit down until the system broke. By the 1890s German wages were rising and the Social Democratic Party was winning elections. Eduard Bernstein, one of Engels’s literary executors, drew the obvious conclusion in a book published in Stuttgart in 1899: the collapse was not coming, and socialists should pursue reform through parliament. Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg fought him, and the German party condemned revisionism while practising it.

The second split was about agency. Lenin’s answer, set out in 1902 and executed in 1917, placed a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries in the position Marx had assigned to the proletariat. After 1917 the question became what to make of a socialist revolution in the wrong country. Trotsky argued for permanent revolution and international extension; Stalin declared socialism in one country and won the argument by winning the succession.

The third split was about culture. Georg Lukács, writing in Viennese exile, published History and Class Consciousness in Berlin in 1923, and Antonio Gramsci filled thirty-three notebooks in a Fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, both concerned with the same problem: why the workers of the industrial West had refused to revolt. Gramsci’s answer was hegemony — the ruling order holds power through consent secured in schools, churches, newspapers and habits of thought, so the long struggle must be waged in those institutions first. The Institute for Social Research, founded at Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to New York in 1934, pursued a related line through Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, fusing Marx with Freud and turning the critique on mass culture.

Later currents moved further from Marx’s economics. Louis Althusser in Paris in the 1960s read Marx as a structural theorist and treated the human subject as an effect of ideology. G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978) rebuilt historical materialism using analytic philosophy and dropped the dialectic entirely.¹ Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in 1985 replaced the working class with a plurality of democratic struggles, a move that supplied much of the theoretical scaffolding for later identity politics.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives make three arguments about the family of schools taken together.

The first is about falsifiability. Marx’s testable predictions — immiseration, the disappearance of the middle class, revolution in the most advanced economies, the falling rate of profit — did not come true. Rather than treat this as refutation, each successive school preserved the conclusion and changed the mechanism. Karl Popper, writing in New Zealand exile during the war, argued that this pattern of rescue by reinterpretation is what separates a genuine research programme from a closed system that explains everything and forbids nothing.²

The second is about human nature. Conservatism holds that people are imperfect, partial to their own, attached to place and family, and moved by loyalties that are not economic. Marxist schools treat these attachments as products of the mode of production, which implies that changing the mode of production would change the person. Roger Scruton, who taught underground seminars in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland during the 1980s, argued that the attempt to remake the person by remaking the system produced neither a new man nor a just society, but a ruined civil order.³

The third concerns the cultural turn specifically. Conservatives regard Gramsci as the most consequential of the theorists, not because his diagnosis was wrong but because it was substantially right and was acted upon. The long march through the institutions — universities, teacher training, broadcasting, publishing, the professional bodies — proved a more effective strategy in wealthy democracies than any attempt at insurrection. Where Marx’s economics failed as prediction, the cultural schools succeeded as programme.⁴

Conservatives also note what the schools share despite the quarrels: a conviction that existing society rests on hidden domination, that ordinary people misunderstand their own interests, and that a class of theorists is positioned to see what the participants cannot. That structure survives every doctrinal revision.

Differing Positions

Marxist scholars answer that variety is what living traditions look like. Liberalism divided into Rawlsian, libertarian and utilitarian branches; economics into Keynesian, monetarist, Austrian and behavioural; nobody treats those splits as refutations. Analytical Marxists in particular accept the demand for rigour and argue that exploitation, understood as the appropriation of surplus produced by others, survives translation into ordinary logic without any dialectical machinery.

Defenders also press a factual point. Marx’s account of capital’s tendency to concentrate looks better in an era of platform monopolies than it did in 1950, and the labour share of national income in Western economies has fallen since the 1970s. Analysts across the spectrum use categories that came from Marx — class, ideology, commodification, alienation — without adopting the politics.

The conservative reply is that borrowing a useful category is not the same as accepting a philosophy of history. What conservatives object to is the claim that the direction of history is known, and the entitlement that claim confers on the people who believe they know it.

References

1. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, 1978).
2. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (Routledge, 1945).
3. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Bloomsbury, 2015).
4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Hoare and Nowell Smith (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).