The Marxist view of history is that history is governed by universal laws and that according to these laws, a society moves through a series of stages with the transition between stages being driven by class struggle.

* Chris Harman, A People's History of the World ( Marxist view of history according to a leader of the International Socialist Tendency )

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.

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.

In the Marxist view of capitalism, this is a conflict between capitalists ( bourgeoisie ) and wage-workers ( the proletariat ).

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.

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.

This is orthogonal to the Marxist view, but not necessarily opposed.

As a result, in ensuing years he would defend those who proposed a Marxist interpretation of history coupled with the existentialist view of the human individual.

Sigmund Freud's idea that religion is nothing more than an illusion, or even a mental illness, and the Marxist view that religion is " the sigh of the oppressed ," providing only " the illusory happiness of the people ," are two other influential reductionist explanations of religion.

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

Influenced by the Marxist view of history, Childe used the work to argue that the usual distinction between ( pre-literate ) prehistory and ( literate ) history was a false dichotomy and that human society has progressed through a series of technological, economic and social revolutions.

History ( 1947 ) continued his belief that prehistory and literate history must be viewed together, and adopted a Marxist view of history, whilst Prehistoric Migrations ( 1950 ) displayed his views on moderate diffusionism.

Marxist and Neo-Marxist theories of IR reject the realist / liberal view of state conflict or cooperation ; instead focusing on the economic and material aspects.

It was argued in the West that the Soviets rejected the Western concept of the " rule of law " as the belief that law should be more than just the instrument of politics ; the Soviet view on rights was criticized for considering the Marxist – Leninist ideology above natural law.

The Marxist view of the English Revolution suggests that the events of 1640 to 1660 in Britain was a bourgeois revolution in which the final section of English feudalism ( the state ) was destroyed by a bourgeois class ( and its supporters ) and replaced with a state ( and society ) which reflected the wider establishment of agrarian ( and later industrial ) capitalism.

Later developments of the Marxist view moved on from the theory of bourgeois revolution to suggest that the English Revolution anticipated the French and later revolutions in the field of popular administrative and economic gains.

The Marxist view also developed a concept of a “ Revolution within the Revolution ” ( pursued by Hill, Brian Manning and others ) which placed a greater deal of emphasis on the radical movements of the period ( such as the Agitator " Levellers ", Mutineers in the New Model Army and the Communistic " Diggers ") who attempted to go further than Parliament in the aftermath of the Civil War.

In the Marxist view, " normal " exploitation is based in three structural characteristics of capitalist society:

As a socialist, Taylor saw the capitalist system as wrong on practical and moral grounds, although he rejected the Marxist view that capitalism was responsible for wars and conflicts.

Marxist and Neo-Marxist international relations theories are structuralist paradigms which reject the realist / liberal view of state conflict or cooperation ; instead focusing on the economic and material aspects.

Mannheim's work was influenced by Lukac's Marxist view, as he credits Marx as the forerunner to the sociology of knowledge.

Orthodox Marxists view state socialism as an oxymoron ; while an association for managing production and economic affairs would exist in socialism, it would no longer be a state in the Marxist definition ( which is based on domination by one class ).

According to Kołakowski, neither Sartre's view that freedom must be safeguarded in revolutionary organization nor his view that there will be perfect freedom when Communism has abolished shortages is new in a Marxist context, and Sartre fails to explain how either could have been brought about.

As a Marxist and feminist, Brand believes that " by addressing real power can we begin to deal with racism ", that is, engaging in both economic and political power.

The ICU believes that the only possible programmatic basis for revolutionaries rests on Marxist ideas in the tradition of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

* Differently from most Trotskyist groups, The IMT believes that countries such as Burma and Syria, though their leaders were not delivering Marxist – Leninist speeches, were to be included in that same category when they had a planned economy.

** That the IRSP is a revolutionary Marxist organisation, and that by this we mean that the IRSP believes:

Formerly a Marxist, but now believes that Marxist theory became stagnant in the 1930s.

Marxist theory believes that everyone ’ s primary motives for acting are always linked with their material need.

Due to this huge amount of support, Cuba became a major sponsor of Marxist " wars of national liberation " not only in Latin America, but worldwide.

Human beings collectively work on nature but do not do the same work ; there is a division of labor in which people not only do different jobs, but according to Marxist theory, some people live from the work of others by owning the means of production.

As with the anarchists, they too saw the Bolshevik take-over of the soviets ( like that of the trade unions ) as subverting the revolution and beginning the restoration of domination and exploitation ... Over the years this emphasis on working class autonomy has resulted in a reinterpretation of Marxist theory that has brought out the two-sided character of the class struggle and shifted the focus from capital ( the preoccupation of orthodox Marxism ) to the workers ... As a result, not only has there been a recognition that capitalism seeks to subordinate everyone's life ( from the traditional factory proletariat to peasants, housewives and students ) but that all those peoples ' struggles involve both the resistance to this subordination and the effort to construct alternative ways of being.

Although delegates from the Soviet Union and Comintern had attended, the first congress ignored Lenin's advice by refusing to accept a temporary alliance between the communists and the " bourgeois democrats " who also advocated national revolution ; instead they stuck to the orthodox Marxist belief that only the urban proletariat could lead a socialist revolution.

They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures ( among the youngest ones ), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party ; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him ( he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it )...

Those involved had gradually come to believe that not only the middle-class nuclear family oppressed women, but also social movements and organizations that claimed to stand for human liberation, notably the counterculture, the New Left, and Marxist political parties, all of which they considered to be male-dominated and male-oriented.

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.

In 1963, the Chinese Communist Party began to openly denounce the Soviet Union, publishing a series of nine polemics against its Marxist revisionism, with one of them being titled On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism and Historical Lessons for the World, in which Mao charged that Khrushchev was not only a revisionist but also increased the danger of capitalist restoration.

As a result, they are the only realms where knowledge may arise ( since truth and knowledge only make sense in relation to matter, according to Marxist epistemology ).

From a new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry was deemed to represent an introspective " bourgeois aesthetic ", reflecting only trivial " female " preoccupations, not in keeping with these new revolutionary politics of the time.

For Mandel, profitability could be influenced by numerous different factors, and was only the general indicator of the condition of the system as a whole ; his critics ( such as Paul Mattick ) however argued that Mandel is too eclectic, and failed to give an orthodox Marxist explanation of the famous " tendency of the rate of profit to fall ".

In contrast, Marxist socialism and revolutionary socialism holds that a socialist revolution is the only practical way to implement fundamental changes in the structure of society.

However, he does not seem to have succeeded in establishing any serious contact with workers ' groups in that country-Spain joined the international movement only after the Cantonalist Revolution of 1868, while events such as the arrival of the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli made it a strong bastion of Anarchism ( and not of the Marxist current that Lafargue chose to represent ).

This is because these nations have not yet transcended capitalism or state capitalism and progressed toward pure communism in the Marxist sense, which can only be achieved once capitalism exhausts itself.

This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition (" philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways ; the point, however, is to change it "), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.

Attacking Marxist state socialism as much as Liberal capitalism, Black argues that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs and employment, instead turning necessary subsistence tasks into free play done voluntarily – an approach referred to as " ludic ".

Although maintaining that they were a Marxist party, after affiliation to the Labour Party in 1918, they renounced vanguardism and saw in the Russian Revolution only the danger that it might weaken the United Kingdom's war effort.

They maintained, however, the principle that only the Fourth International, as a consciously Marxist organization of the working class can lead the world revolution.

ISFI and the leadership of SWP revised the basic Trotskyist principle that only a conscious Marxist leadership can ensure a successful socialist revolution.

Since the 1970s, however, most Marxist organizations explicitly support such liberation movements, not only because they are worthy in and of themselves, but also on the grounds that they are seen as necessary for a working-class revolution.

Marxist Georg Lukács would also criticize, in his book History and Class Consciousness ( 1923 ), the Kantian abandon of knowledge of the concrete totality: according to Lukács, Kant's distinction between noumenons and phenomena lead to the abandonment of the knowledge of the historical process, which could be only apprehended, in his eyes, by dialectical materialism.