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Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form by Karl Kautsky.[1] Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence the orthodoxy of Vladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. It overlaps significantly with Instrumental Marxism.
Orthodox Marxism maintained that Marx's historical materialism was a science which revealed the laws of history and proved that the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism was inevitable. The implications of this deterministic view were that history could not be "hurried" and that politically workers and workers' parties must wait for the material economic conditions to be met before the revolutionary transformation of society could take place.[2] For example, this idea saw the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) adopt a gradualist approach, taking advantage of bourgeois parliamentary democracy to improve the lives of workers until capitalism was brought down by its objective internal contradictions.
The use of "orthodox" to refer to Kautsky's line is primarily to distinguish it from the reformism of Eduard Bernstein. Such "revisionists" were reviled by the orthodox Marxists for breaking with Marx's thought.
- ^ Kołakowski, Leszek (2005). Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden age, the Breakdown. Translated by Falla, P. S. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-32943-8. OCLC 213085194.
- ^ Rees, John (July 1998). The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415198776.