Classical Marxism

Classical Marxism is the body of economic and social theory that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves developed, forming the original bedrock that later, often quite different schools such as orthodox Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and autonomist Marxism would build on, reinterpret or argue against after both men had died. At its core sit several linked ideas: alienation, the way capitalism separates workers from the product and meaning of their own labor; the relationship between a society's economic base and its cultural and political superstructure; class consciousness, workers' growing awareness of their shared position and interests; class conflict as the engine of historical change; the extraction of surplus value from labor as the source of capitalist profit; and a materialist method for reading history through its changing economic organization. Marx and Engels described Western European history as passing through five broad stages of material development, primitive communism, an Asiatic mode of production, ancient slavery, feudalism and modern capitalism, and argued that class conscious workers, led by educated revolutionaries, would eventually overthrow capitalism through a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat on the way to a classless, propertyless society.