Karl Marx reportedly denied being a Marxist, and Engels disliked the word
According to Engels, writing in 1882, Marx once reacted to the ideas of the self-described Marxist Paul Lafargue by saying that if those views counted as Marxism, then he himself was certainly no Marxist. Engels shared the unease, complaining that rivals used the label as a weapon to claim they alone were the genuine followers.
The name stuck anyway, largely thanks to Karl Kautsky, who saw himself as the orthodox heir during the quarrel between orthodox and revisionist followers. His revisionist rival Eduard Bernstein later took up the term as well. What it names is a method developed by the German philosophers Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century: historical materialism, which explains social life by starting from how people produce what they need to survive.
In this picture a society's economic base, its mode of production, shapes the superstructure of laws, politics, culture and ideas. As technology and other productive forces improve, old ways of organising production become fetters, and the tension plays out as conflict between classes. Marx traced this sequence through Western European history in four stages, from cooperative tribal societies and slave-owning city-states through feudalism to capitalism, in which owners of the means of production employ a class of wage workers who must sell their labour to live.
Marx argued that capitalism breeds alienation, recurring crises and sharpening class struggle, and that workers would eventually overthrow it, replacing profit-driven production with cooperative ownership aimed at human needs and leading toward a society without classes, states or money. Exploitation, on his account, is a matter of surplus labour, work performed beyond what the worker receives back. He also cautioned, in an 1877 letter to a Russian newspaper, that his theory was not a master key imposing one fixed path on every people.
After his death the tradition splintered. Marxism-Leninism, developed following Lenin's death, became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and other Marxist states, while Western Marxism, Marxist humanism, Marxist feminism and libertarian Marxism often criticised state socialism and emphasised culture, philosophy or individual freedom. Concepts such as alienation, exploitation and class struggle have since worked their way into sociology, literary criticism, political science and cultural studies.
Source: Marxism
