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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. 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 Socialism 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.
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 were 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. For example, this idea saw the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) adopt a gradualist approach, taking advantage of Bourgeoisie 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.
Karl Kautsky is recognized as the most authoritative promulgator of orthodox Marxism following the death of Engels in 1895. As an advisor to August Bebel, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) until Bebel's death in 1913 and as editor of Die Neue Zeit from 1883 till 1917, he was known as the "Pope of Marxism". He was removed as editor by the leadership of the SPD when the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) split away from the SPD. Kautskyism, based on his interpretations of Marxism, became a significant ideological current within socialist thought. Kautsky was an outspoken critic of Bolshevism and Leninism, seeing the Bolsheviks (or Communists as they had renamed themselves after 1917) as an organization that had gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary changes for which there was no economic rationale in Russia. Kautsky was also opposed to Eduard Bernstein's reformist politics in the period 1896–1901.
Menshevism refers to the political positions taken by the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party prior to the October Revolution of 1917. The Mensheviks believed that socialism could not be realized in Russia due to its backwards economic conditions and that Russia would first have to experience a bourgeois revolution and go through a capitalist stage of development before socialism became technically possible and before the working class could develop the class consciousness for a socialist revolution. The Mensheviks were thus opposed to the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard party and their pursuit of socialist revolution in semi-feudal Russia.
Orthodox Marxism is contrasted with revisionist Marxism., in
Some writers also contrast it with Marxism–Leninism as it developed in the Soviet Union, while others describe the latter as firmly within orthodoxy:
Orthodox Marxism rested on and grew out of the European working class movement that emerged in the final quarter of the 19th century and continued in that form until the middle years of the twentieth century. Its two institutional expressions were the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, which despite the great schism in 1919, were marked by a shared conception of capital and Wage labour. Trotskyism and Left communism were equally orthodox in their thinking and approach, and must be considered left variants of this tradition.
Two variants of orthodox Marxism are impossibilism and anti-revisionism. Impossibilism is a form of orthodox Marxism that both rejects the reformism of revisionist Marxism and opposes the Leninist theories of imperialism, vanguardism and democratic centralism (which argue that socialism can be constructed in underdeveloped, Feudalism countries through revolutionary action as opposed to being an emergent result of advances in material development). An extreme form of this position is held by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. In contrast, the anti-revisionist tradition criticised official Communist party from the opposite perspective as having abandoned the orthodox Marxism of the founders.
Impossibilism posits that reforms to capitalism are counterproductive because they strengthen support for capitalism by the working class by making its conditions more tolerable while creating further contradictions of their own, while removing the socialist character of the parties championing and implementing said reforms. Because reforms cannot solve the systemic contradictions of capitalism, impossibilism opposes reformism, revisionism and ethical socialism.
Impossibilism also opposes the idea of a vanguard-led revolution and the centralization of political power in any elite group of people as espoused by Leninism and Marxism–Leninism.
This perspective is maintained by the World Socialist Movement, De Leonism, and to some extent followers of Karl Kautsky and pre-reformist social democracy.
Stalin's body of thought is known as Stalinism. The official thought of the Third International was based in orthodox Marxism combined with Lenin's and Stalin's views on revolutionary organization initially. The terms dialectical materialism and historical materialism are associated with this phase of orthodox Marxism.
Orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or 'improve' it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.
Western Marxism, the intellectual Marxism which developed in Western Europe from the 1920s onwards, sought to make Marxism more "sophisticated", open and flexible by examining issues like culture that were outside the field of orthodox Marxism. Western Marxists, such as György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, have tended to be open to influences orthodox Marxists consider bourgeois, such as psychoanalysis and the sociology of Max Weber. Marco Torres illustrates the shift away from orthodox Marxism in the Frankfurt School:
In the early 1920s, the original members of the Frankfurt Institute—half forgotten names such as Carl Grünberg, Henryk Grossman and Karl August Wittfogel, were social scientists of an orthodox Marxist conviction. They understood their task as an advancement of the sciences that would prove useful in solving the problems of a Europe-wide transition into socialism, which they saw, if not as inevitable, at least as highly likely. But as fascism reared its head in Germany and throughout Europe, the younger members of the Institute saw the necessity for a different kind of Marxist Scholarship. Beyond accumulating knowledge relevant to an orthodox Marxist line, they felt the need to take the more critical and negative approach that is required for the maintenance of an integral and penetrating understanding of society during a moment of reaction. This could be described as the politically necessary transition from Marxist positive science to Critical Theory.
In parallel to this, Cedric Robinson has identified a Black Marxist tradition, including people like C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and W. E. B. Du Bois, who have opened Marxism to the study of race, "stretching" it beyond orthodox Marxism.
In the postwar period, the New Left and new social movements gave rise to intellectual and political currents which again challenged orthodox Marxism. These include Italian autonomism, French Situationism, the Yugoslavian Praxis School, British cultural studies, Marxist feminism, Marxist humanism, analytical Marxism and critical realism.
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