Socialism and Marxism

Socialism is a political and economic order in which the means of production (e.g. land, factories, machinery, communication and transportation infrastructure, etc.) are subject to public control and the traditionally gendered and often unpaid labor of reproduction (e.g. child rearing, domestic labor, etc.) is compensated or socialized. While the structure of governance, use of markets, degree of cooperative labor, and kinds welfare guarantees may vary, socialism seeks to prioritize the satisfaction of human needs, while mitigating material inequality and social oppression. Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) argued that the objective possibility of socialism was immanent to capitalism. (Socialism supported by moral principles or human will alone, was critically referred to as utopian.) Immanent to socialism, in turn, is the objective possibility of communism, which entails the complete dissolution of the state, division of labor, and the value form associated with commodity production. Marxist socialism is thus a stage in the historical development of communism, whose defining characteristic is the overcoming of all internal contradictions and radical otherness (a characteristic it shares with Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit). Marxism, however, also refers to a systematic, dialectical, and historical analysis of capitalism; a reflexive form of critical social theory with an emancipatory intent; a historical materialist methodology; theories of class formation, conflict, and ideology; as well as to critiques of alienation, reification, and commodity fetishism. There are now several different schools of Marxist thought, from Humanist, Structuralist, and Autonomist Marxism, to Analytical, Feminist, and Cultural Marxism, among others.

The Theory of the Four Movements

New View of Society

The Communist Manifesto

History and Class Consciousness (1923); Louis Althusser, For Marx (1965); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 2 Volumes (1960, 1985).