Orthodox Marxism

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Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought that emerged in the period between the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century and 1914, 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 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 on the left and reformist socialism on the right. Orthodox Marxism aimed to codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. Orthodox Marxism maintained that Marx's historical materialism was a science which revealed the laws of history and proved that the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism were inevitable. The implications of this deterministic...

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