From the beginning of Communist rule in 1949, until the 1980s, when China was in the early years of economic reform, the focus was largely on peasant life, as interpreted via the officially sanctioned Marxist theory of class struggle.

Some like the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason have argued that the Second World War was a direct effect of the German economic system, which made expansionism necessary for domestic prosperity, indeed, survival ; and which made Jingoism necessary for the quelling of class conflicts.

Yet from then on, the yardstick of his economic thinking remained Marxist, adjusted, where necessary, to Indian conditions.

* von Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen Karl Marx and the Close of His System ( Classic criticism of Marxist economic theory )

Developed by, and named for, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin ( Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 1870 – 1924 ), Leninism comprises political and socialist economic theories, developed from Marxism, and Lenin ’ s interpretations of Marxist theory, for practical application to the socio-political conditions of the agrarian Russian Empire ( 1721 – 1917 ) of the early 20th century.

The role of the Marxist vanguard party was to politically educate the workers and peasants to dispel the societal false consciousness of religion and nationalism that constitute the cultural status quo taught by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat to facilitate their economic exploitation of peasant and worker.

However, the government is still sometimes referred to as Marxist – Leninist — or, more commonly, Stalinist — due to its political and economic structure ( see History of North Korea ).

A key aspect that affected the Bolshevik regime was the backward economic conditions in Russia that were considered unfavourable to orthodox Marxist theory of communist revolution.

Lenin advocated the need of the development of a large corps of technical intelligentsia to assist the industrial development of Russia and thus advance the Marxist economic stages of development, as it had too few technical experts at the time.

Most of these took elements of Marxist economic analysis, but combined them with a more cultural or ideological emphasis.

Some Marxist historians prefer to describe the Renaissance in material terms, holding the view that the changes in art, literature, and philosophy were part of a general economic trend from feudalism towards capitalism, resulting in a bourgeois class with leisure time to devote to the arts.

In particular, Marxism and socialists inspired by Marxist theory, holds that social mores, values, cultural traits and economic practices are social creations, and are not the result of an immutable natural law.

Marx and Engels held the view that the consciousness of those who earn a wage or salary ( the " working class " in the broadest Marxist sense ) would be moulded by their " conditions " of " wage-slavery ", leading to a tendency to seek their freedom or " emancipation " by overthrowing ownership of the means of production by capitalists, and consequently, overthrowing the state that upheld this economic order.

Leninist revolutionary theory alongside Marxist economic theory forms the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

Marxist theories on the other hand, see politics as intimately tied in with economic relations, and emphasize the relation between economic power and political power.

In the view of the young orthodox Marxist intellectuals, such as Jaime Wheelock, economic development had turned Nicaragua into a nation of factory workers and wage-earning farm laborers.

While Catholic scholars maintain that More's attitude in composing Utopia was largely ironic and that he was an orthodox Christian, Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky argued in the book Thomas More and his Utopia ( 1888 ) that Utopia was a shrewd critique of economic and social exploitation in pre-modern Europe and that More was one of the key intellectual figures in the early development of socialist ideas.

Proponents of socialist market economic systems argue from a Marxist perspective, stating that a planned socialist economy can only be brought about by first establishing a comprehensive commodity market economy and letting it fully develop until it exhausts its historical stage and gradually transforms itself into a planned economy.

The Marxist approach denies the notion that the political and economic influences on gentrification are invisible, but are intentional.

This explanation is consistent with the bulk of Marxist theory in which Politics and Religion are seen as mere outgrowths ( superstructures ) of the basic underlying economic reality of a people.

In the early 20th century, in the field of international relations, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed the theory of cultural domination ( an analysis of economic class ) to include social class ; hence, the philosophic and sociologic theory of cultural hegemony analysed the social norms that established the social structures ( social and economic classes ) with which the ruling class establish and exert cultural dominance to impose their Weltanschauung ( world view ) — justifying the social, political, and economic status quo — as natural, inevitable, and beneficial to every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs beneficial solely to the ruling class.

In Marxist terms, Crusoe's experiences on the island represents the inherent economic value of labour over capital.

The concern for a social " base and superstructure " is one of the remaining Marxist philosophic concepts in much contemporary critical theory.

At FU-Berlin, critical psychology was not really seen as a division of psychology and followed its own methodology, trying to reformulate traditional psychology on an unorthodox Marxist base and drawing from Soviet ideas of cultural – historical psychology, particularly Aleksey Leontyev.

Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms ( the superstructure ) and that of the political economy ( the base ).

In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production ( the economic base ) essentially control a culture.

In the period after the death of Lenin in 1924, Pravda was to form a power base for Nikolai Bukharin, one of the rival party leaders, who edited the newspaper, which helped him reinforce his reputation as a Marxist theoretician. A soldier reading Pravda during WWII.

However the Marxist notion of base is broader than the non-Marxist use of the term infrastructure, and some soft infrastructure, such as laws, governance, regulations and standards, would be considered by Marxists to be part of the superstructure, not the base.

However, the Marxist ideology of the post-1949 government, in reacting to the overly literary and classical tradition of China, overstressed in turn " practical applications " and the superior wisdom of the worker and peasant, whose hand-skill was assumed to be the " base " to the " superstructure " of science and learning in general.

Cultural materialism incorporated and refined Marx's categories of superstructure and base ; Harris modified and amplified such core Marxist concepts as means of production and exploitation, but Harris rejected two key aspects of Marxist thought: the dialectic, which Harris attributed to an intellectual vogue of Marx ’ s time ; and, unity of theory and practice, which Harris regarded as an inappropriate and damaging stance for social scientists.

Or, as Marxist economics with nature represented as a form of lumpen proletariat, an exploited base of non-human workers providing surplus value to the human economy.

He concludes his discussion by suggesting that "' elegant superstructures ’ such as the League of Nations ‘ must wait until some progress has been made in digging the foundations ’, perhaps a reference to the Marxist base and superstructure model.

( Ironically, this is the same city that has historically been a strong base of Indian communism: West Bengal was ruled by the Communist Party of India ( Marxist ) ( CPI ( M )) dominated Left Front for nearly three decades — the world's longest-running democratically elected communist government.

However, it has been theorized that the supremacy of the Communist Party means that the Constitution and law are not supreme, and that this perspective is the result of the Marxist view of law as simply a superstructure combined with a lack of recognition of rule of law in philosophical or historical tradition.

A proponent of historical materialism, Braudel rejected Marxist materialism, stressing the equal importance of infrastructure and superstructure, both of which reflected enduring social, economic, and cultural realities.

Although Lukács does not contest the Marxist primacy of the economic infrastructure on the ideological superstructure ( not to be mistaken with vulgar economic determinism ), he considers that there is a place for autonomous struggle for class consciousness.

Under Marxist theory, however, culture was conceived as a part of the superstructure associated with the dominant class in society — in the Russian instance, that of the bourgeoisie.

Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field.

His biographer Sally Green noted that " his beliefs were never dogmatic, always idiosyncretic, and were continually changing throughout his life " but that " Marxist views on a model of the past were largely accepted by Childe offering as they do a structural analysis of culture in terms of economy, sociology and ideology, and a principle for cultural change through economy.

Forging the Social Democratic grip on Swedish politics that would last throughout the century, Hansson left an astounding legacy on his party as well as creating the " Swedish model " that remains largely intact to date, including a strict policy of neutrality, a wide-stretching welfare state through parliamentary legislation, and reformist social corporatism rather than Marxist nationalization of the means of production.

The term Europocentrism appears in the 1970s, through the Marxist writings of Samir Amin as part of a global, core-periphery or dependency model of capitalist development.

Following this he attended the Open University in his mid-twenties to study a Foundation Course and then later attended the University of Stirling, gaining a BA in history and a Ph. D. in economic history, with a thesis on the slave trade written as a critique of the Marxist model of historical change, entitled Warrior Aristocrats In Crisis: the political effects of the transition from the slave trade to palm oil commerce in the nineteenth century Kingdom of Dahomey.

In the first sense it is used for the bourgeoisie, the urban merchant and professional class that stood between the aristocracy and the proletariat in the Marxist model.

During the 1950s, Soviet-guided China followed the Soviet model of centralized economic development, emphasising heavy industry, and delegating consumer goods to secondary priority ; however, by the late 1950s, Mao had developed different ideas for how China could directly advance to the communist stage of Socialism ( per the Marxist denotation ), through the mobilization of China ’ s workers.

As Glazer would later recall, " one of the characteristics of group was a notion of its universal competence ... culture, politics, whatever was happening we shot our mouths off on ... It was a model created by the arrogance that if you ’ re a Marxist you can understand anything and it was a model that even as we gave up our Marxism we nevertheless stuck with.

Lehrer asserts that the model amounts to a Marxist conception of right-wing false consciousness.

While conceding that substantivism rightly emphasises the significance of social institutions in economic processes, Gudeman considers any derivational model that claims to be of universal nature, be it formalist, substantivist or Marxist, to be ethnocentric and essentially tautological.

The party had a revolutionary Marxist orientation: it saw attempts to reform capitalism as counterproductive to the goal of overturning the capitalist system entirely and replacing it with a socialist model.

The Godesberg Program had a very important influence in his social democratic thought as it became the model for his party and its cut with Marxist socialism.

These views placed Pătrăşcanu in opposition to other left-wing authors in Romania — namely, the influential Poporanists, most of whom had emphasized various contradictions between the Marxian model and local realities, using Junimeas theory as a fundament ( aside from Pătrăşcanu's own father, these included his contemporary Virgil Madgearu and, to a certain degree, the Marxist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea ).

But he is no Marxist himself, and his ideal model of the relationship between state and society is Bismarckian.

Using this model, Marr attempted to apply the Marxist theory of class struggle to linguistics, arguing that these different strata of language corresponded to different social classes.

This interpretation is not accepted by all Marxist scholars, because-the critics argue-all price-value differentials among different outputs are necessarily and by definition cancelled out at the aggregate level, not just in an assumed theoretical model, but in reality.