Crisis of Marxism

The Crisis of Marxism was an internal crisis within the Marxist movement that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The crisis was the result of Karl Marx's prediction that the standard of living for the proletariat would inevitably decrease and lead to a revolution had ultimately proven to be false. As a result, the Marxist movement split into Leninism (later became Marxism-Leninism), orthodox Marxism (a de facto successor of utopian socialism), and fascism (alternatively self-identified as Trotskyism).

Origins[edit | edit source]

In the 19th century, German philosopher Karl Marx predicted that capitalism was doomed to fail. He believed that this was to come about due to the inevitability of the proletariat's standard of living gradually becoming worse as the capitalist system continued to develop, forcing the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie. By the 20th century, however, the standard of living for the European proletariat had actually improved and many proletarians found themselves identifying more with their nations than their classes. As a result, Marx's prediction had ultimately been proven wrong.

Factions[edit | edit source]

With time proving Marx's original predictions wrong, the Marxist movement split into three major faction in an attempt to explain what had happened and how Communism could still be achieved.

Leninism[edit | edit source]

Main article: Leninism, Bolshevism, Marxism-Leninism

In the Russian Empire, Vladimir Lenin attempted to explain where Karl Marx's prediction had failed and how the Marxist movement could continue to exist. To do so, he wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. The book explained that Marx's work had failed to account for the rise of imperialism and the subsequent aristocracy of labor in the late 19th century. Due to imperialism, the capitalist countries had been able to increase the standard of living by exploiting and extracting the natural resources of Third World nations. As a result, the European proletariat was placed at the top of the aristocracy of labor and enjoyed a higher standard of living than the Third World peasantry.^[1] The solution to this issue, outlined in What Is To Be Done?, was to create a vanguard party that could educate the proletariat and direct them towards revolutionary action.^[2]

Lenin, at the time, was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). The party itself was controlled by orthodox Marxists, leading Lenin to form the Bolsheviks as a vanguardist faction within the RSDLP.^[3] In 1914, the outbreak of the First World War sent the RSDLP sprawling into a crisis. The orthodox Marxist faction, known as the Mensheviks, capitulated to Russian nationalism and attempted to justify supporting the war effort of the Russian Empire against the German Empire. Lenin, on the other hand, invoked the principle of revolutionary defeatism to justify supporting the Central Powers as a method to weaken the Russian feudal class and enable revolutionary conditions.^[4]