Classical Marxism

Classical Marxism is the body of economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their works, as contrasted with orthodox Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, and autonomist Marxism which emerged after their deaths. The core concepts of classical Marxism include alienation, base and superstructure, class consciousness, class struggle, exploitation, historical materialism, ideology, revolution; and the forces, means, modes, and relations of production. Marx's political praxis (application of theory), including his attempt to organize a professional revolutionary body in the First International, often served as an area of debate for subsequent theorists.

Karl Marx (5 May 1818, Trier, Germany – 14 March 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, sociologist, political economist and revolutionary socialist. Marx addressed a wide range of issues, including alienation and exploitation of the worker, the capitalist mode of production and historical materialism, although he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to The Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was given added impetus by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 October Revolution and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century.

As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked: "[T]here are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike".

The early influences on Marx are often grouped into three categories, namely German philosophy, English/Scottish political economy and French socialism.

Main influences include Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.

Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, in 1841 he and Engels came to disagree with Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic and progressively broke away from German idealism and the Young Hegelians. Marx's early writings are thus a response to Hegel, German idealism, and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head", in his own view of his role by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature"). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic.

Main influences include Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists.