Eduard Bernstein was a German social democratic Marxist theorist and politician. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Bernstein had held close association to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but he began to identify what he believed to be errors in Marxist thinking and began to criticize views held by Marxism when he investigated and challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history. He rejected significant parts of Marxist theory that were based upon Hegelian metaphysics and rejected the Hegelian perspective of an immanent economic necessity to socialism.
Salvador Allende was the president of Chile from 1970 until his suicide in 1973, and head of the Popular Unity government; he was a Socialist and Marxist elected to the national presidency of a liberal democracy in Latin America. In August 1973 the Chilean Senate declared the Allende administration to be "unlawful," Allende's presidency was ended by a military coup before the end of his term. During Allende's three years, Chile gradually transitioned into a socialist state.
Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading structural Marxist; while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of the "democratic road to socialism." He is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s, such as Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's in Portugal, and Georgios Papadopoulos' in Greece.
The Coalition of the Radical Left – Progressive Alliance, best known by the syllabic abbreviation SYRIZA, is a centre-left to left-wing political party in Greece. It was founded in 2004 as a political coalition of left-wing and radical left parties, and registered as a political party in 2012.
Colin Barker was a British sociologist as well as a Marxist historian and writer. A former long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party in Manchester, he was the author of numerous articles and works on Marxism, including a history of the Polish trade union Solidarity, Festival of the Oppressed.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and supports a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach towards achieving socialism, usually under a social liberal framework. In practice, social democracy takes a form of socially managed welfare capitalism, achieved with partial public ownership, economic interventionism, and policies promoting social equality.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing set of political philosophies that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist, decentralised planned, or democratic centrally planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
Revisionism represents various ideas, principles, and theories that are based on a revision of Marxism. According to their critics, this involves a significant revision of fundamental Marxist theories and premises, and usually involves making an alliance with the bourgeois class. Some academic economists have used revisionism to describe post-Stalin, Eastern European writers who criticized one-party rule and argued in favour of freedom of the press and of the arts, intra- and sometimes inter-party democracy, independent labor unions, the abolition of bureaucratic privileges, and the subordination of police to the judiciary.
State socialism is a political and economic ideology within the socialist movement that advocates state ownership of the means of production. This is intended either as a temporary measure, or as a characteristic of socialism in the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production or to a communist society. State socialism was first theorised by Ferdinand Lassalle. It advocates a planned economy controlled by the state in which all industries and natural resources are state-owned.
Eurocommunism was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties which said they had developed a theory and practice of social transformation more relevant for Western Europe. During the Cold War, they sought to reject the influence of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The trend was especially prominent in Italy, Spain, and France.
The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is a Marxist and Trotskyist political international founded by South African political theorist Ted Grant and his supporters after they broke with the Committee for a Workers' International in 1992. The organization's website, Marxist.com or In Defence of Marxism, is edited by Alan Woods. The site is multilingual, and publishes international current affairs articles written from a Marxist perspective, as well as many historical and theoretical articles. The IMT is active in over 40 countries.
In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat holds state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and institutes elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership. During this phase, the administrative organizational structure of the party is to be largely determined by the need for it to govern firmly and wield state power to prevent counterrevolution and to facilitate the transition to a lasting communist society.
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the death 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 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.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
Popular Unity - Insubordinate Left is a left-wing political party in Greece.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
Social democracy originated as an ideology within the labour whose goals have been a social revolution to move away from purely laissez-faire capitalism to a social capitalism model sometimes called a social market economy. In a nonviolent revolution as in the case of evolutionary socialism, or the establishment and support of a welfare state. Its origins lie in the 1860s as a revolutionary socialism associated with orthodox Marxism. Starting in the 1890s, there was a dispute between committed revolutionary social democrats such as Rosa Luxemburg and reformist social democrats. The latter sided with Marxist revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein, who supported a more gradual approach grounded in liberal democracy and cross-class cooperation. Karl Kautsky represented a centrist position. By the 1920s, social democracy became the dominant political tendency, along with communism, within the international socialist movement, representing a form of democratic socialism with the aim of achieving socialism peacefully. By the 1910s, social democracy had spread worldwide and transitioned towards advocating an evolutionary change from capitalism to socialism using established political processes such as the parliament. In the late 1910s, socialist parties committed to revolutionary socialism renamed themselves as communist parties, causing a split in the socialist movement between these supporting the October Revolution and those opposing it. Social democrats who were opposed to the Bolsheviks later renamed themselves as democratic socialists in order to highlight their differences from communists and later in the 1920s from Marxist–Leninists, disagreeing with the latter on topics such as their opposition to liberal democracy whilst sharing common ideological roots.
