Marxism

Marxism analyses society through historical materialism: the claim that a society's economic base — who owns the means of production and how — shapes its politics, law, and prevailing ideas, and that history advances through class struggle between groups defined by their position in production.

Its economic core is the theory of exploitation through surplus value. Workers sell their labour for a wage but produce goods worth more than that wage; the difference is appropriated by the owner of capital as profit. Marx also held that workers under this system suffer alienation — estranged from their labour, its products, and one another — and that the ruling ideas of any age tend to be the ideas of its ruling class, a claim about ideology that reshaped social thought far beyond economics.

Its prediction was that capitalism's own contradictions — recurring crises, the concentration of capital, and the increasingly social character of production trapped inside private ownership — would generate both the misery and the organized working class capable of superseding it. Marx and Engels announced this in the Communist Manifesto (1848); Capital (1867) supplied the economic analysis.

As a body of thought it is genuinely plural, because Marx wrote copiously about capitalism and little about how a post-capitalist society should run. The tradition consequently splits — council communism, social-democratic revisionism, Leninism, Western Marxism — over the state, the party, and democracy, disagreements sharp enough that its heirs have often regarded one another as enemies.

Its predictions were mixed: revolution came not in the advanced economies Marx expected but in agrarian Russia and China, wages rose rather than collapsing, and the twentieth-century states built in its name produced repression its own analysis arguably condemns. Marxists dispute whether this refutes the theory or reflects conditions it did not foresee.

It is routinely conflated with those states, but as a method — reading politics and culture through material interest and class — it remains widely used by scholars who draw no revolutionary conclusions at all, which is why 'Marxist' names both a politics and an analytical tradition.