The tradition of political and social thought descending from Karl Marx and Engels — and by the early 20th century, already a family of quarreling heirs rather than a single doctrine. Its core commitments are historical materialism (material conditions shape consciousness and institutions), a critique of capitalism as a system that exploits labor while dynamically transforming the world, and a view of history as driven by class struggle toward (eventually) a classless society.
Within two generations of Marx's death, Marxism split along lines that still organize the field. Orthodox / Second International Marxism (Kautsky, Plekhanov) read Marx as a scientific determinist predicting capitalism's inevitable collapse. Leninism — and after it Bolshevism, Stalinism, Maoism — added a theory of the vanguard party seizing the state, sometimes in societies Marx himself thought unready. Western Marxism (Lukács, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School) turned away from economic prediction toward culture, ideology, hegemony, and consciousness — asking why the revolution kept not happening in the developed West. Analytical Marxism (G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer) tried in the late 20th century to rebuild Marxist claims on foundations of rigorous social science.
As a political movement, Marxism produced both the most serious critique of liberal capitalism ever mounted and the authoritarian catastrophes of the 20th century — a tension the tradition is still metabolizing.
In the academic 21st century, after the fall of state socialism, Marxism has continued as a live critical tradition rather than a programmatic politics. David Harvey's geographical Marxism has become the most widely taught account of neoliberal capitalism. Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism (1991) read contemporary culture as the registration of late-capitalist structure. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000) attempted a positive democratic theory of "the multitude" against decentered global sovereignty. Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital (2016) fused Marxist political economy with climate analysis. Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (1983) and Angela Davis's work developed the Racial Capitalism strand. Collectively these figures show Marxism's persistence as a toolkit for structural critique even where its 20th-century political forms have collapsed.