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Quick context on the people and ideas of the Marxist tradition, adapted from the Marxists Internet Archive encyclopedia for readers new to this material. Unlike the reader glossary, these aren't our facilitators' definitions — they're general orientation. Concepts are ordered by how central they are to the classical Marxist corpus.
Alexandra Kollontai was a Bolshevik revolutionary and early feminist socialist. She led the Workers’ Opposition, which wanted unions run by workers, not the party. As the first woman ambassador in history, she also wrote passionately about free love and women’s rights.
Anton Pannekoek was a Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist. He helped form a Marxist party in the Netherlands and was a member of the German Social Democratic Party. You’ll meet him in discussions of council communism and the fight against capitalist state power.
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who helped found the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by the fascist regime in 1926, he spent years in prison, where he wrote influential works on hegemony, base and superstructure, and the role of intellectuals. Newcomers often encounter Gramsci when studying power, ideology, and revolutionary strategy in capitalist societies.
Antonio Labriola (1843–1904) was one of Italy’s first Marxists, a writer and philosopher. He is known for criticizing the ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche, Croce, and neo-Kantianism, helping introduce Marxist thought to Italy.
August Bebel was a German socialist leader who co-founded the Social Democratic Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869. He served in the Reichstag from 1867 and is remembered for his strong defense of women’s rights, arguing that emancipation was essential even before capitalism was overthrown. Newcomers encounter Bebel as a key early figure in Marxist politics and a bridge between labor movements and feminist struggles.
August Palm (1849-1922) was a Swedish socialist and the founder of Swedish Social-Democracy. He is often encountered by newcomers as one of the key figures who brought Marxist ideas to Sweden in the late 19th century, helping to establish the country’s labor movement.
Clara Zetkin was a leader of the international socialist women’s movement and a top official in the German Social Democratic Party. A longtime comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, she helped create the Spartacists and the German Communist Party, and she backed the new Soviet government. Newcomers will encounter her as a key figure in socialist feminism and the early communist movement.
Constance Markievicz was an Irish revolutionary and politician who worked closely with James Connolly. She was sentenced to death after the 1916 Easter Rising but was released, and later became the first woman elected to the UK Parliament, though she refused to take her seat. She served as Minister of Labour in the Irish revolutionary government and opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, siding with the republicans in the Civil War.
Daniel DeLeon was a Marxist activist who helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early 1900s. Newcomers encounter him because he wrote in detail about how a socialist society could be organized, with workers controlling industries through their unions.
David Riazanov was a Marxist historian and archivist who dedicated his life to preserving and publishing the works of Marx and Engels. He founded the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, making primary texts accessible to scholars and activists. Newcomers encounter him when studying the history of Marxism or the material conditions of socialist thought, as his editorial work remains foundational.
Ernest Belfort Bax was a pioneering British socialist writer who introduced many Marxist and materialist ideas to English-speaking audiences. He helped found the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first major socialist party, and his writings popularized a Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. For newcomers, Bax is significant as a key early translator and popularizer of Marxist thought in the English language.
Edward Carpenter was an English socialist poet, anthologist, and philosopher. He is also remembered as an early advocate for gay rights. Newcomers to Marxist politics may encounter his work as an example of the intersection between socialism and personal liberation, as well as his influential writings on socialism and simple living.
Eleanor Marx was a socialist organizer, writer, and speaker in late 19th-century Britain. She helped found the Socialist League with William Morris and wrote extensively for its paper, and she was deeply involved in women’s issues as well as militant trade unions like the Gasworkers and Dockers Union. You’ll encounter her as a key figure in early British socialism and as a bridge between Marxist theory and practical labor organizing.
Enrico Ferri was an Italian Marxist and criminologist active in the Second International, who sought to merge socialist theory with the study of crime and punishment. You’ll encounter him when exploring early Marxist responses to crime and law, as he argued that crime is rooted in social conditions and used this to advocate for social reform.
Eugene Debs helped build the American Railway Union and later the American Socialist Party. He was arrested for speaking out against World War I and ran for U.S. President from a prison cell, winning nearly a million votes. Newcomers meet him as a key early figure in American socialism and a symbol of resistance to wartime repression.
Ferdinand Lassalle was a German socialist and labor leader in the mid-1800s. You’ll meet him as a key figure in the early socialist movement who helped found the first mass workers’ party in Germany, but also as a rival of Marx, whose ideas and tactics were criticized by Marx and Engels.
Franz Mehring was a German writer and historian who belonged to the Social Democratic Party and later the Spartacist League. Newcomers may meet him as a key early Marxist intellectual and biographer of Marx.
G. D. H. Cole was an English socialist who championed guild socialism, which proposed self-governing worker associations. He is also remembered as a notable socialist historian, and his surveys of labor history and socialist thought are often a starting point for newcomers to Marxist politics.
Gabriel Deville (1854-1940) was a French socialist and one of the founders of the Second International in France. Newcomers might encounter him in discussions about the early organization of socialist parties and the international workers’ movement.
Georg Lukács was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic who held a cultural post in Hungary’s short-lived socialist government in 1919. Later he helped lead the 1956 uprising against Stalinist rule. Newcomers to Marxist politics encounter him for his influential theory of Marxist aesthetics, which argued against direct political control of art.
Georgi Plekhanov was a pioneering Russian Marxist who helped start the Russian Social-Democratic party. He became a Menshevik after the party split but tried to keep it united. He argued that capitalism needed to fully develop before socialism, so he opposed the Soviet government. Newcomers will encounter him as a key early theorist of Marxism in Russia.
Harry Quelch was a founding member of the early British socialist movement, helping to establish what became the Social Democratic Federation. Newcomers may encounter his name in discussions of the origins of organized Marxism in Britain.
Henry Hyndman founded Britain’s first socialist party, the Social Democratic Federation. He did not follow it into the Independent Labour Party and supported the War. Newcomers to Marxist politics encounter him as an early British socialist leader whose positions on nationalism and war were controversial.
James Connolly was an Irish socialist and revolutionary who founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896 and later served as Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. He was executed in 1916 for his key role in the Easter Rising, making him a central figure in Irish labor and independence movements. Newcomers encounter him as a bridge between Marxist theory and anti-colonial struggle.
José Carlos Mariátegui was a Peruvian intellectual and activist who founded the Peruvian Communist Party. Despite having little formal education, he taught himself and became a historian of both European Marxism and South American social movements. Newcomers to Marxist politics will encounter him as a key figure in adapting Marxist theory to Latin American realities.
Joseph Dietzgen was a German socialist who independently developed dialectical materialism around the same time as Marx and Engels. After discovering their work, he became a dedicated supporter and used dialectics to explore how we gain knowledge. Newcomers may encounter him as a working-class philosopher who helped shape Marxist theory.
Jules Guesde was a French socialist who became the leading figure of the Marxist wing in France’s workers’ movement. He helped found the French Workers’ Party and was known for his strict, orthodox reading of Marx, making him a key name for anyone exploring early French socialism.
Julius Martov was a Russian revolutionary. He began as a close collaborator of Lenin, but in 1903 they split over how to organize the party, and Martov became the leading figure of the Menshevik wing. Newcomers encounter him because this split defined the lasting division between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the Russian socialist movement.
Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) helped build the German Social-Democratic Party and was a leading theoretician of the Second International, known as the main interpreter of Marx and Engels after their deaths. During and after World War I, he became a pacifist, a stance that distinguished him from more revolutionary socialists. Newcomers meet him as a central figure in the debates over how to apply Marxist ideas in organized politics.
Karl Korsch was a German left communist whose work, especially ‘Marxism and Philosophy,’ helped shape what became known as Western Marxism. He was expelled from the Communist International for his heterodox views, grew disillusioned with Soviet-style socialism, and later expressed support for Mao’s China. Newcomers encounter Korsch as a key figure in the early split between orthodox Marxism and more critical, theoretical approaches.
Karl Liebknecht was a German socialist and Reichstag deputy who openly called on workers and soldiers to turn their guns against their own government from the parliament rostrum. He was executed by the German government for his opposition. Newcomers encounter him as a symbol of anti-militarist socialist resistance in World War I Germany.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the founders of Marxism. Together, they studied how capitalism works, traced the history of societies, and critiqued other philosophies to build a new political theory. They also helped establish the First International, an early organization uniting workers across countries.
Keir Hardie was a Scottish labour leader who founded the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893 and became one of the first working-class MPs in Britain. You’ll meet him when studying early socialist organizing and the formation of the Labour Party, as he broke away from liberalism to push for independent workers’ representation.
Léon Blum was a French socialist politician who led the Popular Front government in France from 1936 to 1939. He is remembered as the first Socialist and Jewish prime minister of France, and his government introduced major labor reforms like the 40-hour workweek and paid holidays. Newcomers to Marxist politics will encounter Blum as a key example of how socialists formed broad left-wing alliances to counter the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
Leon Trotsky was a Russian revolutionary who first stood with the Mensheviks and later joined the Bolsheviks. As war commissar, he built the Red Army and defeated the foreign invasion of Soviet Russia. He then organized the Left Opposition to remove Stalin, fearing the monstrous atrocities he would commit, and developed the theory of permanent revolution.
M N Roy was an Indian revolutionary and communist who played a key role in the early Communist International, later developing his own philosophy of radical humanism. Newcomers may encounter him as a major figure in the history of Indian communism and his break with orthodox Marxism.
Morris Hillquit was a leading figure in the early Socialist Party of America and a prominent labor lawyer on New York City’s Lower East Side. Newcomers meet him when studying how socialism developed in the United States, as he helped build the party and fought for workers’ rights in the early 1900s.
Nikolai Bukharin was a leading Bolshevik revolutionary and economic theorist who edited Pravda. He allied with Stalin against Trotsky, then led the Right Opposition against Stalin’s collectivization and forced industrialization. He wrote on market socialism and was executed after the Moscow Trials. He matters to newcomers as a key figure in the internal debates that shaped Soviet communism.
Otto Bauer was a major theorist of Austro-Marxism, a current of socialist thought that sought to combine Marxism with a focus on national and cultural questions. Newcomers often encounter him as a key figure in debates about socialist strategy and the national question in the early 20th century, especially through his association with the ‘2½ International’ (the Vienna International).
Paul Lafargue was a French revolutionary socialist who took part in the Paris Commune. He wrote about women’s rights, religion, and other topics, and was married to Karl Marx’s daughter Laura. You’ll come across him as a key figure in the early socialist movement and for his ties to Marx’s family.
Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist revolutionary who championed the idea of the mass strike as a tool for workers. A tireless opponent of World War I, she renounced the German Social Democracy, helped create the Spartacus League, and later the German Communist Party. She was also critical of the Soviet government. In 1919, she was executed by the German government.
Rudolph Hilferding was a German socialist and political economist. You’ll encounter him when studying Marxist economic theory, especially his book ‘Finance Capital,’ which explores how banks and monopolies shape modern capitalism. He also served as finance minister in Germany during the 1920s.
Sen Katayama was a Japanese Marxist who became a founding member of the Japan Communist Party in 1922. Born as Yabuki Sugataro, he was jailed for leading a strike in 1912, then moved to the U.S., where he joined the Communist movement. He later worked for the Communist International and spent his final years in the Soviet Union.
Tom Mann was a British trade union organizer who helped found the British Communist Party and brought Marxist ideas to Australia. He also played a key role in establishing the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), making him a central figure in early socialist and labor movements.
Vera Zasulich was a Russian revolutionary who helped found the Emancipation of Labour group with Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist organization. She translated several of Marx’s works into Russian and later became a Menshevik. Newcomers may meet her as a key early figure in spreading Marxism to Russia.
Victor Berger was an Austrian-born Marxist who became a key organizer of early American socialism. He founded the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America, and was among the first socialists elected to Congress. Newcomers encounter him as a foundational figure in the institutional history of U.S. socialism.
Vladimir Lenin helped create the Bolshevik party and led the Soviets to power in the Russian Revolution. He was elected head of the Soviet government until 1922, when he retired due to ill health. He created the Communist International and developed the theory of imperialism, stressing the key role of the political party. Any newcomer to Marxist politics will encounter Lenin because his ideas on revolutionary organization and imperialism are central to later communist movements.
Wilhelm Liebknecht was a German revolutionary and a comrade of Karl Marx in the Communist League during the 1840s. He later helped found the Social Democratic Party of Germany and became a key figure in the international socialist movement. Newcomers often encounter him as one of Marx’s early collaborators and a bridge from revolutionary theory to working-class politics.
William Morris was an artist and writer who became a revolutionary communist because he saw capitalism as destroying creativity and freedom in work. He helped found the Socialist League with Eleanor Marx and wrote stories imagining future communist societies.
Surplus value is the extra value workers create beyond the cost of their own upkeep, measured by unpaid labor time. In capitalist society, workers sell their labor-power for wages, but the value they produce exceeds their wages; this excess is captured by the capitalist as profit. It is the driving force of capitalist production.
Capital is money invested to buy things so they can be sold again for more money, rather than spent to meet people’s needs. It grows through the process of buying and selling, but according to Marx, profit cannot come from exchanging equal values; it comes from buying and using labor-power, which can create new value. Capital is not just wealth but a specific social relation between owners of means of production and propertyless workers, and it exists under certain historical conditions.
Division of labour is a way of organizing work where different tasks are assigned to different people. It has existed since early human history, and its form has changed over time, based on kinship in early societies and later on class relations. Under capitalism, division of labour becomes highly developed and confines individuals to narrow occupations. In a communist society, it would be transformed so that people can move between different kinds of work.
Class struggle is the conflict between social classes that arises from the unequal division of a society’s surplus product, where one class benefits by expropriating another. In capitalism, this takes the form of workers versus capitalists, and as workers organize, their local struggles can become a national political struggle. Marx held that class struggle is the fundamental antagonism in class societies and would ultimately lead to communism after a period of working-class political power.
Means of production are the tools and raw materials you use to make something. In Marxist analysis, this includes both the instruments (like machinery) and the subject of labour (the raw materials being worked on). The labour itself is considered productive when it uses these means to create a product.
Productive forces are the combination of the means of production (tools, machines, buildings, and raw materials) with human labor. In Marxist theory, they form the material basis of society and shape its social and political life. When productive forces outgrow the existing property relations, conflict and revolution can follow.
Money is a special commodity that acts as the universal equivalent, meaning it measures and stores the value of all other commodities and is used as a means of payment. Historically, money has been gold or silver, but in modern times it can exist in purely virtual forms, such as digital accounts. In capitalist society, money is essential for the exchange of goods and services, including the sale of labour power for wages.
A commodity is something produced specifically for exchange, not for direct personal use. It is the basic unit of capitalist wealth, as analyzed by Marx. A good or service becomes a commodity only when it is transferred to someone else through exchange, typically for payment. Products made for one’s own use or given freely are not commodities.
Materialism is a philosophical approach that holds the material world—the world outside consciousness—as the basis and determinant of thought and knowledge. It argues that ideas reflect matter, which exists independently of the mind. Marx added that this matter is engaged through human practice, not just passive observation.
Dialectical Materialism is a philosophical approach that combines dialectics (the logic of change through contradictions) with materialism (the view that matter is the fundamental reality). It holds that matter is always in motion and change, and that thought reflects material conditions. This methodology is the theoretical foundation of Marxism, applied to history as historical materialism.
Communism is a social system in which private property is abolished and the means of production are held in common, enabling people to freely develop and engage in varied activities. It is understood not as an ideal to be imposed, but as a real movement that abolishes the present state of things, requiring both a high development of productive forces and a world-historical working class. In its higher phase, the state withers away and distribution is based on the principle ‘to each according to his needs.’
The dictatorship of the proletariat is the revolutionary state power of the working class during the transition from capitalism to communism. It expands democracy for ordinary people while suppressing the resistance of the capitalist class. This power must be exercised through the active participation of the workers themselves, not by a small elite, and it aims to place the means of production under social control, including the means of information.
Labour power is the set of mental and physical abilities a person uses when producing goods or services. It becomes a commodity when a free worker sells it for a limited time in exchange for wages, rather than selling themselves outright. Its value equals the labour time needed to produce the worker’s necessities of life, including what supports their family so they can keep coming back to work.
Alienation is the process by which people become disconnected from the world they live in, and in Marx’s theory, it specifically refers to the way workers under capitalism are cut off from the products of their labor, from their own human nature, and from others. Marx argued that in wage labor, workers sell their labor power to survive, so their work is not a free expression of themselves but a means to an end, making their products seem foreign and even hostile. This is linked to commodity fetishism, where social relationships between people appear as relationships between things. Overcoming alienation requires transforming work so that it directly expresses human needs and creativity.
In Marx’s analysis, the rate of profit is the ratio of surplus value (profit) to the total capital invested (constant plus variable capital) in a production cycle. It measures how profitable a capitalist’s investment is, distinct from the rate of surplus value which relates profit only to wages. In bourgeois economics, it means the annual profit as a share of total capital, but Marx focuses on the circulation of capital and the exploitation of labor.
The proletariat is the class of workers in capitalist society who own no capital and must earn a living by selling their labor power (their ability to work) to employers. They emerged with the industrial revolution, as machines and factories concentrated production in the hands of capitalists and reduced workers to doing simple, repetitive tasks. Unlike slaves, they are legally free but must sell themselves piecemeal, wage by wage. As a class, they are seen as having the potential to overthrow capitalism and create a classless society.
Rent is the payment landowners receive for letting others use their property. In Marxist economics, rent is not a source of new value; only human labor creates value. Instead, rent is a way that landowners claim a share of the surplus value produced by workers. Land itself, untouched by labor, has no economic value, so what landlords actually profit from is the value added to land by human work and social development.
In Marxist political economy, value is the economic worth of a commodity, determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it under average conditions. It appears as exchange-value, the proportion at which different commodities trade. Value conceals the social relation between producers, as their labor is equated through exchange.
The state is an institution of organized violence that a ruling class uses to maintain its domination over other classes. It only exists in societies divided into hostile social classes, arising because class antagonisms cannot be reconciled. For socialists, the working class must take state power to overthrow capitalism, but it cannot simply use the existing bourgeois state machinery; it must build a workers’ state that will eventually wither away as class divisions disappear.
Wage labour is a mode of production in which workers sell their capacity to work (labor-power) as a commodity to capitalists, who own the means of production. The worker is paid wages in exchange for the use of their labor-power for a set time, but the product and the work process belong to the capitalist. Since workers lack other means of survival, they are forced to work for the capitalist class, and are alienated from their own labor.
Imperialism is an advanced stage of capitalism that emerged in the 20th century. It is marked by the dominance of monopolies and finance capital over industrial capital, the export of capital to less developed countries, and the division of the world among large capitalist powers. Lenin identified five features, including concentration of production into monopolies, merging of bank and industrial capital, and the territorial division of the globe. Imperialism represents the transition from free competition toward full socialization of production, but with private appropriation.
Historical materialism is the materialist conception of history developed by Marx and Engels. It says that the foundation of society is how humans produce their means of subsistence, including the productive forces and the social relations of production. From this base arise all institutions, ideas, religions, and philosophies. History progresses through changes in these material conditions, especially through class struggles and revolutions, rather than through the evolution of ideas alone.
Profit is the portion of unpaid labor (surplus value) that a capitalist actually retains from the production process, measured against the total capital invested. It is closely related to surplus value but is not identical, since surplus value is the total unpaid labor extracted from workers as a class. Profit is reduced by shares taken by landlords, banks, middlemen, and other claimants, so the individual capitalist never keeps all of it.
Private property is the right of an individual to exclude others from the use of an object. This right existed before class society, but under capitalism it takes the developed form of the contradiction between labor and capital, where workers are separated from the means of production. The abolition of private property would end this alienation and allow human beings to relate to objects and to each other in a comprehensive, human way.
Socialism is a society organised so that no one can exploit another’s labor, and everyone has equal means to develop their abilities. In full socialism, wealth is distributed according to each person’s contribution to production, not according to ownership of property. Marxists see it as the transitional stage between capitalism and communism, requiring working-class power (the dictatorship of the proletariat) to abolish bourgeois property relations.
The way a society organizes the production of what it needs to live, like food, housing, education, and other goods. It combines the physical tools and technology used to produce (productive forces) with the social relationships people enter into during production (relations of production). When the tools and technology develop to a certain point, they clash with the existing social relationships, leading to social change and revolution. This change happens according to historical necessity, not by people’s will.
Exchange-value is the quantitative aspect of value, as opposed to use-value, which is the qualitative aspect. It forms the basis of a commodity’s price. Exchange-value differs from price in that price is the actualization of exchange-value, varying with exchange conditions, and is expressed in money.
Use-value is the concrete usefulness of a thing, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, in meeting human needs. It depends on the thing’s physical properties, not on the amount of labor spent on it. A use-value becomes real when the thing is used or consumed, and use-values make up the material content of all wealth.
Wages are the price paid by capitalists to workers for their labor-power, not a share of the value the worker produces. This price is determined by the cost of producing labor-power, which includes the cost of the worker’s maintenance and training. Like any commodity, wages fluctuate with supply and demand between workers and capitalists.
Idealism is the philosophical view that ideas, spirit, or mind are primary and that nature and material reality are secondary or dependent on ideas. It holds that the material world is understood through concepts or abstractions, and it may even deny or doubt the existence of a world outside thought. Idealists often explain reality by relating ideas to other ideas, rather than to material conditions. This contrasts with materialism, which treats material reality as the basis for ideas.
Capitalism is a socio-economic system based on commodity exchange, private ownership of the means of production, and the exploitation of wage labour. The owning class (bourgeoisie) buys the labour power of the working class (proletariat) to generate profit, extracting surplus value by making workers labour beyond what is needed for their own subsistence. This creates an irreconcilable conflict between the two classes over the division of the product.
A form of government in capitalist society that serves the interests of the bourgeois class. Although it grants formal freedoms, these are limited by capitalist exploitation, making it effectively democracy for the propertied minority. Lenin characterized it as a bourgeois dictatorship, distinct from the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Consciousness is the foundation of all thought, making it difficult to define because any definition uses thought itself. It refers to the awareness of the material world, and the relationship between consciousness and matter has been a central philosophical problem. Marx argued that consciousness is not the source of social existence, but rather social existence—including material conditions and productive activity—determines consciousness.
The organic composition of capital is the ratio of constant capital (spent on machinery, materials, and other inputs) to variable capital (spent on labor-power). It reflects, in value terms, the technical composition of production—how much machinery and raw material are used relative to workers. Marx argued that this composition tends to rise over time as production becomes more capital-intensive, which puts downward pressure on the rate of profit.
Price is the observable form in which the value of a commodity is expressed when it is sold, typically as an amount of money. For Marx, price is the outward appearance that hides the underlying social relations of labor that determine value. Unlike bourgeois economics, which treats price as the fundamental category, Marxism sees price as a historically specific form that must be analyzed in relation to value.
In dialectics, a contradiction is the internal tension between opposing aspects of a single thing or idea, which drives change and development. It is not just a logical mistake but a feature of reality, as when motion requires an object to be both here and not-here at the same time. Contradiction is central to Marxist method, which studies how such oppositions unfold in society and history.
A term used by mainstream economists to refer to social relationships and networks that are not yet fully part of capitalism but can provide free inputs to profit-making or absorb its costs. It is not actually capital, but represents human creativity and cooperation that could potentially be turned into capital. Examples include workers’ skills, informal information networks, and family support that helps overworked employees. Economists often use the term to urge capitalists to exploit these relationships, while distinguishing ‘good’ social capital (like professional associations) from ‘bad’ (like trade unions) based on whether they resist being absorbed into capitalism.
In Marxist theory, property is not merely a legal right to objects but a social relation that enables some people to control the labor and products of others. Marx and Engels describe its earliest form in the family, where the husband has power over wife and children’s labor, and then trace its evolution through tribal, ancient, and capitalist forms, ultimately culminating in private property under capitalism. Property relations are thus tied to the division of labor and the development of productive forces.
In Marxist theory, religion is not a divine revelation but a human creation, produced by societies that are alienated and unjust. It is an inverted consciousness of a world that is itself inverted, serving as both an expression of real suffering and a protest against it. Marx called it ‘the opium of the people,’ meaning it provides illusory comfort and justification for an oppressive social order. Therefore, criticizing religion is a way of criticizing the real conditions that make it necessary.
Positivism is a philosophical tendency that regards science, especially natural science, as the highest model for all thought and action. It has gone through several distinct stages: first with Auguste Comte, who saw human progress moving toward a ‘positive’ scientific stage; second with Ernst Mach, who emphasized sensations and questioned a knowable material world; third with the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism, which turned to logic and language; and a fourth linked to complexity theory and modern information economics.
The working day is the number of hours a wage worker must spend at their job to earn enough to live. Its length is not fixed but is the result of an ongoing conflict between workers, who want shorter hours, and capitalists, who want longer hours to extract more profit. In Marxist analysis, the working day is made up of necessary labor time (which produces value equal to the worker’s wages) and surplus labor time (which produces profit for the capitalist). Historical struggles over the working day have led to reforms such as the 10-hour day and the 40-hour week.
Credit is buying or receiving goods now and paying later, so it is also debt. It is necessary for production and trade, but it also creates pretend wealth (fictitious capital) and paper money. In capitalist society, access to credit depends on existing wealth, so it widens the gap between rich and poor and often becomes a form of usury for workers.
Subjective idealism is a type of idealism, the philosophical view that reality is fundamentally mental, which asserts an absolute separation between thought and the material world. It either doubts the possibility of objective knowledge (as in skepticism) or rejects it outright. This sets it apart from absolute (objective) idealism, where thought and reality are seen as united.
Equality, in Marxist usage, usually means social equality: a system in which everyone has equivalent rights, privileges, and status. Historically, the content of equality has changed with modes of production—tribal society limited it to kin, slave and feudal societies denied it across classes, and capitalist society proclaims formal equality while preserving material inequality. Marxists criticize this formal equality and distinguish it from mathematical equality as abstract sameness; they argue for a deeper, material equality.
The peasantry is the class of small farmers, often found in less industrialized countries where farming methods are old-fashioned and poor communication leaves them isolated. Like other middle classes, peasants are not a uniform group, but they can be the majority of the population, as in Russia in 1917 or China in 1949. For revolutions to succeed, the working class had to win the support of the peasantry, especially the poor peasants.
A market is a social space or network where buyers and sellers exchange goods and services and agree on prices. Originally a physical gathering place, the term now covers any system of exchange, even when transactions happen at different times and places. It also refers to effective demand—people who are willing and able to buy a given product. In capitalism, markets are central to how prices are set and how goods are allocated.
A planned economy is the conscious organization of society’s productive activity, as opposed to the unconscious, market-driven anarchy of capitalism. In Marxist theory, it becomes possible after the working class seizes political power and centralizes the means of production. It requires the working class to develop its own democratic forms of organization and systematic accounting and control. The exact form is left open by Marx, but it is fundamentally a matter of proletarian self-organization.
Subjectivism is an extreme emphasis on the significance of the individual subject in knowledge, as seen in movements like Second Positivism. In ethics, it claims that moral truths are entirely relative to the person and no objective moral truths exist. Dialectics combines subjectivism and objectivism for a complete understanding, recognizing both the individual’s role in making history and society’s influence on the individual.
Exchange is the practice of giving something up on the condition of receiving something of equal value in return. In capitalist society, the exchange of labor through commodity production becomes the basic building block, but this is only one historical way of organizing social cooperation. In families, feudal duties, or a future socialist society, people work to meet each other’s needs without demanding an exact equivalent in return.
The petty-bourgeois are small business owners, like shopkeepers and independent craftspeople, who are squeezed by large industrial firms that can sell goods more cheaply. The term also describes well-paid managers and supervisors who work for capitalists, controlling production without owning it. Though these managers are wage-workers, their role separates them from the broader working class.
Wealth is the freedom of access to the means of satisfying human needs, whether in commodity form or not. It comes from nature and labor, and is qualitative: wealth increases as the labor needed to acquire it decreases, unlike capital, which grows with more labor. Social wealth depends on labor productivity, not surplus-labor time, and true freedom beyond necessity requires a shortened working day.
For Marxists, following Hegel, truth is not only about ideas matching the world; it can also be said of social formations and practices themselves, and it is always historically relative—everything that exists eventually becomes false. In Marxist epistemology, practice is the fundamental criterion of truth, but this practice is understood as social and historical, not merely individual action, and no practical test can completely confirm or refute any idea.
Experience is knowledge of one’s interaction with the world. In philosophy, empiricism treats experience as the primary source of knowledge, in contrast to reason or authority. Kant argued that mere sensory contact does not constitute experience; it requires rational forms to understand the world.
Exploitation is the act of taking advantage of someone’s vulnerability to benefit at their expense, often by using their labor without fair compensation. In Marxist theory, it specifically refers to the extraction of surplus value from workers by capitalists, who profit from unpaid labor that exceeds what workers need to survive. Marx argued that this exploitation occurs even when wages are paid according to the value of labor power, making it a structural feature of capitalism that is considered unjust from a socialist standpoint.
The thing-in-itself is the concept of an object as it exists independently of our perceptions or knowledge, as opposed to the thing as it appears to us. In philosophy, especially Kant, it is considered unknowable through sensory experience, leading to contradictions when reason tries to grasp it. Hegel criticized this notion as an empty abstraction, and Engels later explained that unknown aspects of things become known through scientific progress.
For Marxists, history is not a self-contained story of leaders or ideas but is grounded in the material conditions of human life. People make their own history, but only under inherited circumstances, and the production of food, clothing, and shelter is the first historical act. History is shaped by the development of productive forces and modes of social cooperation, which together determine the nature of society and the course of class struggles.
Inflation is a situation where the prices of all goods and services rise steadily and more or less uniformly over time. Since a price is the ratio between a commodity and money, this really means that the value of money is falling. The main cause is typically an over-creation of money or credit without a corresponding increase in real goods and services, which undermines the purchasing power of money.
Freedom in the Marxist sense is the right and capacity of people to determine their own actions, but only in and through a community that enables the full development of human potential. Individual freedom cannot exist in isolation; it requires a social context. Under capitalism, freedom is limited for workers, who only have the ‘freedom’ to sell their labor power, while positive freedom (opportunities to develop) is restricted. Real freedom involves both negative freedom (absence of constraints) and positive freedom, and is achieved through a socialist community that ends exploitation.
The relationships people form with each other when they produce, exchange, and distribute goods—such as who owns the tools, land, and factories (the means of production). These relationships exist in any society whether people are aware of them or not, and they shape how work is organized and who benefits from it. In a society with private property, a few owners control production and exploit the rest; when the means of production are held in common, people can work freely and equally.
Self-consciousness is the awareness of being separate from the objective world. In Marxist thought, it emerges through practical activity, such as tool-making, where people discover their own powers in nature. It also marks the point where a social movement becomes aware of itself in opposition to existing conditions, as with working-class consciousness.
Empiricism is the philosophical doctrine that all knowledge comes from sense experience. It emerged in 17th-century England with thinkers like Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, who saw observation of nature as opposed to scripture or introspection. However, critics like Hume showed that experience alone can’t provide certainty, leading to skepticism. Marxists criticize empiricism for treating experience passively and ignoring the role of reason and social activity in producing knowledge.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1921 to replace War Communism, which had caused economic decline during the Russian civil war. It temporarily allowed limited free trade and foreign concessions alongside state-controlled industries to help revive agriculture and industry.
The labour theory of value is the proposition that the value of a commodity equals the amount of socially necessary labour-time required to produce it. In other words, goods are worth more if they take more time to make, compared to other goods. This idea was not original to Marx; it was known to earlier thinkers like Adam Smith. Marx analyzed it as a key feature of bourgeois society, but stressed that it was a specific, historically conditioned way of thinking, not a natural law.
Political economy is a branch of science concerned with the production of commodities and the accumulation of wealth, formerly the term for what is now called economics. Early thinkers like Adam Smith saw it as a branch of ethics, but later it became viewed as a pure science. Marx argued that political economy reflects the ideology of bourgeois society, presenting economic laws as natural and fixed even though they are historically specific and changeable.
An instrument of labour is anything a worker places between themselves and the material they work on, using its physical, mechanical, or chemical properties to shape that material. This includes simple things like stones used for cutting or grinding, and even the earth itself when used in agriculture. The types of instruments used in production mark different historical economic periods and the social conditions of labour.
Humanism is a system of thought that makes the human being its central value, as opposed to religious, abstract, or sectional ideals. Originating in the Renaissance and peaking in the Enlightenment, it holds that concepts are human products and that social relations are more fundamental than abstract ‘laws’ of history or nature. In Marxism, humanism is linked to a fully developed naturalism, resolving the conflict between man and nature, while bourgeois humanism is based on private property and proletarian humanism on cooperative social activity. Critics, especially structuralists, see humanism as an illusory belief in individual autonomy, while Marxist humanists argue that being human means producing oneself and being free.
Fictitious capital is value in the form of credit, shares, debt, speculation, or paper money that exceeds what can be backed by actual commodities or productive capital. It arises when financial institutions lend out more than they hold in deposits, creating multiple claims on the same underlying value. This proportion of capital cannot be simultaneously converted into real use-values, but it is essential for the growth of real capital through confidence in the future. When recession hits, this fictitious value is wiped out because the underlying production cannot support all the claims.
Development is a process of change in which something becomes more concrete and mature over time. It is not simply one thing replacing another, but a transformation driven by the struggle between form and content and the interplay of cause and effect. This concept is central to Hegel’s logic and Marxist dialectics.
This is a concept from G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy about how things develop. In simple terms, a first negation (a process of denial or opposition) is followed by a second negation, which does not just go back to where it started but creates a higher level that includes both the original and its opposite. This is often linked to the triad ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis,’ though Hegel’s own usage is more complex. Marxists used this idea to explain social and historical change, arguing that new forms arise from conflicts and preserve what was valuable in the old ones.
Proletarian democracy, also called socialist democracy, is a form of government that begins when workers take power. It is the same as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’—but not rule by a small elite. Instead, it means the working class itself governs through mass participation, open public control, and organizations like soviets (councils of workers). This democracy attacks capitalist privileges and is meant to lead to a classless society and the eventual end of the state.
In Marxist philosophy, reflection describes how material things influence each other, leaving traces or imprints, and how living things actively adapt to their environment. For materialists, it means mental images correspond to the material world that produces them. In dialectics, it specifically refers to recognizing quantities and qualities using concepts from past experience, and to the relationship between phenomena and their essence.
A term used pejoratively to describe the notion that there exists a final, complete truth that can be expressed in finite terms. Because any finite expression is necessarily partial and context-bound, absolute truth is rejected as impossible. The concept is associated with dogmatism, relativism, and scepticism.
In dialectics, transition refers to the process by which one concept or opposite turns into another. It emphasizes the dynamic movement and transformation inherent in contradictions, rather than just comparing distinct ideas. Transition differs from a simple sequence of unrelated items and from development, where one thing absorbs another into itself.
A class is a group of people who share the same relation to labor and the means of production. In Marxism, this shared material position gives rise to a collective consciousness, unlike common definitions based on income or other attributes. Classes are formed by the capitalist system, and the working class can only free itself through revolution.
Absolute and relative are philosophical terms about the interdependence of things, processes, and knowledge. ‘Absolute’ means independent, permanent, and not subject to qualification, while ‘relative’ means partial, transient, or dependent on circumstances. In dialectics, the absolute is the whole movement through relative stages of understanding, and relative truths contain some grain of absolute truth.
Absolute surplus value is profit created by making workers work longer hours, increasing the time they work beyond what’s needed to cover their wages. Relative surplus value is profit created by reducing the cost of workers’ necessities (or cutting wages), which shrinks the time needed to produce their own upkeep and thus increases the portion of the workday that goes to the capitalist. Together they describe two main ways capitalists increase the surplus value they extract from workers.
Abstract and concrete are concepts about how our knowledge develops. An abstract concept captures only one aspect or a simple determination, while a concrete concept is a rich whole that combines many abstractions and their interconnections. For Hegel and Marx, this distinction refers to thought itself, not to the difference between ideas and material reality.
Abstract Right is the first chapter of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, dealing with the individual will confronting the external world. It establishes that having rights is fundamental to being a person, summarized by the imperative: ‘Be a person and respect others as persons.’ The most basic form of right is expressed through property and possession, as things without will have no rights against persons.
Analysis is the mental process of breaking a whole into its constituent parts; synthesis is the process of reconstituting a whole from those parts. In dialectics, they form a unity and alternate at every stage of understanding a thing. Together they yield new knowledge and an all-sided view, since breaking something down and then recombining it reveals how parts interact and merge. Both are necessary for a fuller grasp of any object or process.
A concept Marx and Engels briefly used before 1857 to describe a distinct stage of social development in large Asian societies, positioned between tribal society and antiquity. They later abandoned the idea, replacing it with a simpler sequence of tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist modes. The term reflected an early, partially Hegelian view of Asian civilizations as the first form of civilization, but was dropped as historical research revealed more about primitive communism.
The Atomists were an ancient Greek school of philosophers who developed a materialist worldview. They held that everything is composed of indivisible particles called atoms, which move in a void, and that natural phenomena arise from their interactions. Leucippus is regarded as a key founder of this school.
Aufheben is a German term used in Hegelian and Marxist philosophy with no exact English equivalent. It means to simultaneously cancel, preserve, and lift something up to a higher level, so that the old form is abolished but its essential content is carried forward in a new way. For example, when Marx writes about ‘abolishing’ the family, he means transforming it by resolving its contradictions, not simply banning it.
Bourgeois society, also called capitalism, is a social system built on buying and selling, where nearly everything—including people’s ability to work—is treated as a commodity. It grew from towns and cities but only became the dominant way of life with industrial capitalism. In this society, the ruling class (bourgeoisie) owns the means of production as private property, while workers (proletariat) have no choice but to sell their labor-power for wages. People’s lives are driven by money and commodities, a phenomenon sometimes called commodity fetishism.
The business cycle, or cyclic crisis of capitalism, is the roughly ten-year pattern of alternating booms and slumps in capitalist economies. During booms, production and employment rise, but this leads to overproduction, debt, and falling profits, triggering a crisis where output collapses, unemployment spikes, and bankruptcies spread. Marx saw this cycle as unavoidable under capitalism, driven by the contradiction between expanding productive capacity and limited market demand, and it regularly disrupts workers’ lives and livelihoods.
Casualisation is the replacement of stable, continuing employment contracts with hourly, short-term hiring that offers no guarantee of future work or decent pay and conditions. It lets employers adjust labour to demand and use the constant threat of dismissal to push wages down. The term originated from a 1920 British government inquiry into dock work, where casual labour was common.
In dialectical materialism, chance (or accident) refers to transient, non-essential properties of things, while necessity refers to what is essential and determined. Determinism wrongly denies the objectivity of chance, leading to fatalism, while voluntarism denies the objectivity of necessity. In fact, necessity manifests itself through countless accidents, and each accident itself arises from necessary causal sequences.
Chemism is the second stage of the Object in Hegel’s Logic, where objects not only influence each other but transform into one another, like chemical reactions. It marks a qualitative advance over Mechanism by understanding nature in terms of processes rather than static things.
Marx identified three interconnected forms that capital takes as it moves through the economy: commodity capital (selling products to realize surplus value), money capital (investing money to get more money through production), and productive capital (using means of production and labor to make products). These circuits depend on each other; for example, workers need commodities to reproduce their labor power, and capitalists need to find those commodities on the market. Together they show how total social capital circulates to generate profit.
Classification is an early stage of scientific understanding where things are identified and sorted based on similarities and differences, without yet grasping the deeper relations of opposition and contradiction. It relies on formal logic and comparison, and its main techniques are taxonomy and typology.
In Marxism, cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge of the objective world through practice. It holds that true knowledge comes from practical activity aimed at changing the world, and that action must be connected with theory. The central issue is the relationship between subject and object, and differing views on this lead to various philosophical stances like skepticism, relativism, or dogmatism.
The law of combined and uneven development, formulated by Leon Trotsky, explains how countries that start capitalist development late do not repeat the stages of early industrializers. Instead, they combine the most advanced technology and production methods from imperialist powers with their own primitive social and economic conditions, often skipping intermediate stages. This happens because the world market, dominated by imperialist powers, blocks the normal development of these countries while simultaneously introducing modern elements into them. As a result, such countries exhibit a unique mix of social relations, leading to a powerful proletariat alongside a peasantry, which shapes their revolutionary potential.
A command economy is a way of managing an entire country’s economy through top-down direction from central authorities, rather than relying on market forces. The term became common in the 1980s to describe the Soviet Union and other Stalinist states, where the whole economy was run like a single large enterprise. It is often confused with a planned economy, but that is a broader concept. Calling a command economy ‘socialism’ is only possible if the real meaning of socialism is forgotten.
Commercialisation is the process of shifting labour and activity away from public service values and toward the production of commodities for profit. It functions as a form of ‘creeping privatisation’ that has existed since the rise of bourgeois society, affecting areas like science, education, art, and sport. In practice, it means that funding and incentives push workers to serve commercial interests rather than human needs, often with corporations claiming ownership of results.
Commodification is the process of turning things that were not previously bought and sold—like relationships, services, or ideas—into commercial goods or services. It is a key feature of capitalism, in which human interactions and social spheres become reduced to market exchanges of buying and selling.
Communitarianism is a social and political current that stresses the importance of community and neighborhood, often described as a kind of property-owners’ collectivism. It holds up community and social equality as central values, in contrast to the individualism and democracy emphasized by liberalism. While it tends to downplay social class as divisive, it can become an ally of socialism when it takes root in working-class neighborhoods.
Concrete labour is the specific, skilled, and varied human effort that gives a commodity its particular useful qualities. Abstract labour is the common, undifferentiated expenditure of human energy that creates value. As markets develop, labour becomes more abstract and uniform, reducing the unique character of work and products.
A consumer is someone who uses a commodity, but in bourgeois social theory consumers are portrayed as a distinct group with separate interests from producers. In reality, every act of consumption is also an act of production, so the separation is an illusion. Consumerism refers either to the U.S. movement defending consumer rights or, in Britain and Australia, to a culture obsessed with buying and owning commodities.
Content and Form are two sides of any thing or process. Content is the full set of relations and possibilities within something, while Form is how that content exists, is expressed, or is organized. They are opposites that depend on each other: there is no content without a form and no form without content. Over time, they can transform into each other, and a form may or may not truly express its content.
Continuity and Discontinuity are paired concepts describing different aspects of things. Discontinuity refers to discrete, separate units or sudden leaps—like particles, boiling water, or birth—while continuity refers to fluid, divisible processes—like waves, time passing, or erosion. The source emphasizes that in nature these are not mutually exclusive: real processes mix gradual change with abrupt breaks, and whether something appears continuous or discontinuous can depend on how we observe it. Thus, nothing is simply one or the other.
Contract labour is a disguised form of wage labour where the employer treats the worker as an independent businessperson selling a service rather than as an employee. This gives workers no job security or benefits, since each contract is separate and workers must handle their own taxes, social security, and retirement. It pushes wages down, increases insecurity, and makes workers see themselves as owners rather than workers, weakening class solidarity.
Copyright refers to the conversion of intellectual, creative, and all other non-material labor into a commodity. This means that ideas, art, and other forms of mental work are treated like goods to be bought, sold, and controlled, rather than as shared knowledge. In capitalism, this commodification extends to all forms of human creativity.
A corporation is a legal entity treated as an individual under the law, typically a public company owned by anonymous shareholders. Originally meaning a town council or guild, it evolved to refer to companies with royal monopolies and later to large businesses. Corporations are often criticized for lacking moral responsibility and acting purely for profit, making them a key target of anti-capitalist movements.
Corporatisation is the process of restructuring an organisation, often a public service or a small part of a business, so it acts like an independent business rather than a department of a larger organisation. It replaces internal accountability and command with budget-based planning, and is usually a step toward privatisation or outsourcing. This process turns collaborative relationships into buyer-seller relationships and can be used to change power dynamics or weaken unions.
A crisis of capitalism is a breakdown in the normal functioning of the capitalist economy, which Marxist theory distinguishes into conjunctural, cyclical, and historic types. Conjunctural crises arise from unique circumstances, cyclical crises are regular boom-bust fluctuations, and historic crises reflect the system’s long-term decline. These crises stem from inherent contradictions in capitalism, such as the split between production and sale or the conflict between capital and labor. Ultimately, capitalism is understood as prone to permanent crisis because it constantly revolutionizes production while maintaining antagonistic social relations.
Critique is the practice of uncovering the social basis behind an argument. In Marxism, it is usually immanent critique: starting from within a theory, accepting its terms, and pushing it until it contradicts itself. This exposes the theory’s hidden social assumptions and interests.
In Marxist analysis, a customer is someone who buys a service or good, but the term refers to a specific social role under capitalism where human interactions are treated as exchanges of money for services. This framing replaces older, more paternalistic relationships (like patient-doctor or student-teacher) with a direct buyer-seller dynamic. It became prominent with modern management methods and economic reforms that pushed public services to treat people as consumers. The customer relationship isolates individuals and sets them as opposed parties, rather than collaborators.
The cycle of reproduction refers to the dual process by which capital invested in production is realized back as money, and labour applied to production is consumed and restored, enabling workers to return to work. This cycle operates both daily and across generations. It can be disrupted when commodities cannot be sold at their value, causing a crisis of realization, and its length affects capital requirements and profit rates.
A datum is a known fact or piece of information that serves as a starting point for drawing further inferences. In Marxist analysis, it refers to basic empirical knowledge from which theoretical conclusions can be developed.
For Hegel, a definition is a formal logical procedure that reduces a subject matter to its essential concept, stripping away the concrete details of its actual existence. Hegel criticizes this kind of reasoning as arbitrary and incomplete, since it ignores the rich, manifold determinations of reality that description captures.
Deism is the belief that God exists as the creator of the world but does not interfere with it after creation. Along with pantheism, it provides a basis for materialist criticism of religion. It was especially associated with Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Locke, and was influenced by Newton’s scientific ideas.
In Marx’s economic theory, the Departments of Capital are two broad categories of production: Department I produces means of production (machinery, materials, and other goods used in production), while Department II produces consumer goods (basic necessities and luxuries). This division helps explain how capital circulates and how profits are made by selling commodities. The relationship between the two departments is key to understanding economic crises and the ‘realisation problem’—the need to find buyers for goods produced.
Determinate refers to something that has a definite form or identity, like an object whose length can be measured; indeterminate means something not yet formed or not recognizable as a specific thing. Determinate being (Dasein) means existing as a concrete, specific thing rather than as a mere collection of attributes or possibilities.
Determinism is the view that all events are causally determined by prior events, meaning causality is an objective feature of the world. If carried to an extreme mechanical form, it denies any role for chance or accident, turning into fatalism where every outcome is completely fixed by what came before.
In Hegel’s philosophy, difference is a fundamental category of essence, where something is defined by what it is not. It arises as the negation of identity, but pure difference collapses because ‘everything is different’ becomes trivial. For difference to be meaningful, things must also be similar, which leads to essential difference, opposition, and contradiction. Marx applies this concept in Capital to analyze social and economic categories.
Discrete means discontinuous, marked by breaks or leaps in development rather than smooth continuity. In Marxist thought, it refers to matter existing as distinct objects or particles, and to counting numbers as opposed to infinitely divisible magnitudes.
Distribution and exchange are processes that divide the total social product among the population and trade products of equal value between individuals or organizations. They arise from a division of labor that separates production from consumption, and they mediate between the two. Distribution and exchange are not just passive links; they are forces of production themselves, shaping class relations and social development. In bourgeois society, exchange becomes the central relation, while socialism aims to transcend the need for exchange by eradicating social inequality.
The maxim of Diversity is a principle attributed to Leibniz stating that no two things are completely alike. It is examined in Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence as one of a series of logical laws, including identity and contradiction, which deepen our understanding of how things relate to one another. In dialectics, it helps explain that while things may share similarities, they always retain distinct differences.
Economics is a science that studies the production of commodities, their values, and money. It grew out of political economy, which examined value itself, but economics shifted to focus on price. Over time, different schools like Keynesianism and Monetarism have emerged, yet all treat markets and goods in ways that hide the social relations behind them.
The Eleatics were an ancient Greek philosophical school from the 6th–5th century BCE, including Parmenides and Zeno. They taught that true being is unchanging and that all visible change and difference are illusions, opposing thinkers like Heraclitus who saw change as fundamental. They downplayed sense perception as a source of knowledge and used logical arguments to show the contradictions in our ideas of motion and change.
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in 17th-18th century Europe that championed human reason as the ultimate guide to truth, challenging the authority of church and tradition. It reflected the rise of the capitalist class and produced new theories in science, politics, and ethics. Enlightenment thinkers used reason to critique absolute states and advocate natural rights and individual freedom, fueling reforms and revolutions.
An epigone is a disciple, follower, or imitator, particularly a second-rate one who comes in a later generation. In Marxist writing, Trotsky used it to describe people who professed loyalty to revolutionary ideals but did not genuinely understand or commit to them.
Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge—where it comes from, what its boundaries are, and how we can judge its truth or reliability. It investigates fundamental questions about how we know things and what counts as justified belief.
Eschatology is a set of beliefs about the end of the world, a final judgment, or a doomsday event. It interprets present-day life as preparation for that coming end, so current actions and suffering determine one’s fate in the ultimate outcome. Some critics apply this label to Marxism, claiming it treats socialism as a predetermined goal that justifies present struggles. However, Marx himself rejected this view, seeing communism as a real movement based on existing conditions, not an ideal imposed on reality.
Essentialism is the view that things have an underlying, fixed essence or meaning beyond what is immediately observed. In critical theory, it often refers to claims that certain social groups have unchanging, inherent characteristics, in contrast to social constructionism. In Marxism, however, essence is understood not as a final, unchanging core but as a social and historical process, revealed through practical activity and contradiction.
Ethics is the study and practice of how people should live, focusing on questions of morality and rights. It asks what ought to be, rather than what must be, and differs across societies. In capitalist society, ethics is often reduced to economics and utilitarian calculations, but socialists argue that true ethical action requires ending poverty and exploitation. Ethics can be understood as either an ethics of duty (what is right to do) or an ethics of virtue (what makes a good person).
The Law of Excluded Middle states that for any proposition, either it or its negation is true—if a proposition is not true, then its denial must be true. Formal logic treats this as an absolute rule, but intuitionism rejects it. Dialectics views the law as only relatively true because concepts are interconnected and changeable, so sometimes neither a proposition nor its denial is absolutely true.
Existence in philosophy does not mean being physically tangible; ideas and other non-material things also exist. In the Hegelian tradition, existence refers to a thing’s place within a whole web of relationships and processes—its ‘being in the world.’ This concept, later taken up by phenomenology, contrasts with a more abstract, isolated understanding of a thing.
Existentialism is a broad school of philosophy whose thinkers focus on the difference between Being and individual Existence, arguing that true understanding comes through personal lived experience rather than rational thought or perception. It grew out of 19th-century objections to impersonal rationalism, with influences from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Husserl, and was developed by key figures like Heidegger, Jaspers, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. In short, it prioritizes individual human existence over abstract systems of thought.
In bourgeois economics, ‘external’ refers to activities and natural conditions that lie outside the market economy yet support it, such as unpaid housework or wild forests. ‘Externalisation’ is the process by which enterprises shift their costs onto surrounding society, for example by dumping waste. Governments may use taxes, licensing, or bans to address this, but Marxists see these as temporary measures; real change requires transforming the underlying relations of production.
External reflection is a way of understanding something by looking only at its relations to other things outside it, focusing on superficial appearances rather than its internal contradictions or essential nature. It treats the object as if it is unaware of its connection to the subject observing it.
Marx’s theory that as capitalism develops, the amount spent on machinery and materials (constant capital) tends to grow relative to spending on wages (variable capital). If the rate of exploitation of workers stays the same, this rising ‘organic composition of capital’ causes the rate of profit—surplus value divided by total capital invested—to decline. He saw this as a tendency, not an absolute law, because countervailing factors like more intense exploitation or cheaper capital goods can temporarily offset the fall.
False consciousness is a term used to describe a condition in which exploited groups and classes hold beliefs and ideologies that justify and perpetuate their own exploitation, preventing them from understanding their true interests. The phrase was used only once by Engels and later adopted by theorists like Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse to explain why workers do not automatically become revolutionaries and why capitalism remains stable. However, the concept is problematic because it implies that someone else can objectively know what is in another group’s best interest.
A type of society based on small-scale agriculture and traditional land ownership, where rights and duties are inherited through family and social rank. It is a class society with unequal rights, but unlike slavery, every class has rights and is considered human. Feudal society is not governed by profit or the market but by traditional rights and ethics, and it is the directly preceding stage to capitalism.
Finite and infinite are concepts used to describe whether something has limits or can be counted. Finite means having limits or being countable, while infinite means having no limits or being uncountable. In dialectical thinking, these terms are defined in relation to each other: declaring something finite immediately implies an infinite beyond it, and the infinite is understood as being composed of finite parts.
In Hegel’s philosophy, something is ‘for itself’ when it has developed to the point of consciousness of itself. In social terms, this describes a movement whose members know they belong to it and share a common program. However, in this stage there is a mismatch between the movement’s goals and the means to achieve them, as it has not yet fully realized its own idea.
For us” refers to the way something appears or is interpreted from a subjective standpoint, emphasizing meaning and significance rather than independent reality. In Hegelian and Marxist thought, it contrasts with “in itself,” distinguishing what exists for consciousness from what exists apart from it. Marx uses this distinction to explain alienation, where the opposition between subject and object, consciousness and self-consciousness, becomes central. Essentially, it highlights the role of perspective in understanding phenomena.
Fordism is a system of industrial management that combines assembly-line mass production of cheap, uniform goods with relatively high wages to encourage worker loyalty. It was pioneered by Henry Ford in the early 20th century, who paid workers $5 a day and reduced shifts to eight hours, while opposing unions. The approach aims to create a mass market by keeping prices low through high-volume efficiency, but it also enforces uniformity and leaves little room for worker input.
Formalism is the over-emphasis on form rather than content or meaning, which can be seen in politics, art, mathematics, and ethics. In mathematics, it specifically refers to the view, associated with David Hilbert, that mathematics is just a set of rules for constructing valid symbol sequences.
Free trade and protectionism are two opposing approaches to international trade. Free trade favors removing tariffs and barriers to the flow of goods and capital, while protectionism favors restricting trade to shield domestic industries from foreign competition. The conflict is primarily a battle within the capitalist class, but it has significant impacts on workers. Marx saw free trade as revolutionary because it accelerates capitalist development and the conditions for socialism, but he did not defend protectionism either.
Functionalism is a method of investigation that looks at the role or ‘function’ an object plays within a larger system, ignoring its outward appearance, material nature, and historical background. It was popular among sociologists and anthropologists in the early 20th century. When applied one-sidedly, functionalism treats things as static and overlooks internal contradictions and the living interdependence of the whole. Like structuralism, it tends to push the material side of things into an unknowable realm.
Fundamentalism is a social movement that aggressively and dogmatically asserts old-fashioned beliefs in defiance of modernism and social change. It often appears when groups that once enjoyed privilege feel threatened by change and try to restore their former status by reasserting traditional values. Though often used for religious movements, it also applies to secular dogmas like market fundamentalism and socialist fundamentalism.
Genetic Exposition is a method of explaining a concept by showing how it actually arises from the movement of the subject matter itself, rather than through logical deduction or simple historical narrative. It is used in Hegelian and Marxist dialectics to trace the real genesis of an idea in consciousness. In Marxism, it means following the order determined by the object being studied, not an external framework.
In dialectical materialism, genus refers to a whole or universal that exists only through the activity and interaction of its individual members, much as a biological species exists through its organisms. Unlike positivist definitions that group individuals by shared attributes, the dialectical genus is a dynamic relation: the whole sustains the individuals, and individuals realize the whole. For example, class consciousness is a property of individuals yet derives its content from the collective history and organization of the class, illustrating the dialectic of individual and genus.
Globalisation refers to the process by which economic, social, cultural, and political activities become worldwide, breaking down national boundaries. In Marxist analysis, it is seen as a new phase of capitalist development driven by the bourgeoisie’s constant need to expand markets, as described by Marx and Engels. It involves the global networking of production, finance, and information, and the penetration of domestic markets by transnational actors, undermining the sovereignty of national states.
In Marxist theory, God is a concept created by society: the dominant ideas of what is true and good are personified as a supreme, unchanging being, making them appear objective and eternal. Religion arises from an alienated and unjust world: it expresses real suffering and also protests it, but offers only illusory comfort and works to justify oppression. Therefore, criticizing the idea of God is a way of criticizing the social conditions that produce the need for such illusions.
In bourgeois economics, ‘goods’ refers to tangible products and ‘services’ to intangible activities, dividing the economy into two sectors. Marxists argue this distinction is misleading because both are commodities produced for exchange, and the same labor can be classified as either depending on how it is sold. What matters is the social relation, such as whether labor-power is sold for wages, not whether the output is a thing or an action.
A grand narrative (or master narrative) is a broad, all-encompassing story that claims to explain and legitimize knowledge, history, and social institutions. Jean-François Lyotard used the term to critique such big stories, especially the ‘emancipation narrative’ of progress and liberation. In postmodern thought, grand narratives are seen as outdated and oppressive because they exclude other viewpoints. Lyotard’s critique itself becomes a grand narrative, showing a contradiction.
Hegemony refers to the leadership of one class over other classes within an alliance, where the leading class secures public political power by guaranteeing certain benefits to its allies. The concept was developed by Antonio Gramsci, who argued that a class must establish intellectual and moral leadership over an ‘historic bloc’ of classes to build a new state. Hegemony also involves the ability to unify society around the ruling class’s interests, making its worldview appear natural and universal.
Human capital is a term used by capitalists to describe the talented employees of a company as an economic asset, similar to other resources. It refers to the idea that investing in a good working environment, management, and company culture adds value to the firm beyond the wages paid for labor. The concept treats workers as components of capital, which many find alienating because it overlooks their cooperation and social contributions. Workers may use this idea to demand better pay and conditions, but the source suggests that the value of their collaboration should be challenged rather than simply compensated.
In Hegel’s philosophy, the Idea is the final stage in the development of the Notion (concept), where subjective thought merges with objective reality to form a unity. It represents a principle or movement reaching maturity by interpenetrating all other areas of knowledge and culture. The Idea develops through stages—Life, Cognition, and the Absolute Idea—and captures how theory and practice shape each other. This concept influenced Marxist views on the unity of theory and practice.
The law of identity, expressed as A=A, is a logical principle stating that every thing is identical to itself. In formal logic it is an axiom about equality, but when applied broadly it underpins a metaphysical view of the world as composed of separate, unchanging entities. This contrasts with dialectical thinking, which sees things as interconnected, changing, and self-contradictory. The meaning of identity also depends on difference—what is not A—so nothing is truly fixed.
In Hegel’s philosophy, ‘illusory being’ (or ‘semblance’) is the initial, misleading appearance of an object when we first perceive it. It represents the unessential side of things in the contrast between what really matters and what doesn’t. For Hegel, even this deceptive appearance is part of the object’s reality, just not yet understood for what it is.
Immanent critique is a method of criticism that works from inside a theory, accepting its premises and showing that, properly understood, they lead to different conclusions. It originated with Hegel and was named by Georg Lukács in 1923. It aims to expose internal contradictions and generate more concrete concepts, rather than simply disprove a theory from outside.
Immediate knowledge is knowledge that is acquired directly, without the need for proof or logical reasoning. It is distinct from mediated knowledge, which is based on experience and inference. Immediate knowledge can arise from sensory experience or from intuitive, a priori understanding.
In Hegel’s system, this term refers to the Absolute Idea, a state where consciousness has merged with its own being. In history and society, it describes a social movement that has achieved its objective and become integrated into the whole social body.
In dialectical materialism, ‘in itself’ refers to a thing or concept in its less developed, hidden state, before its nature is fully revealed through interaction with other things. It emphasizes that things are interconnected and in transition, not isolated and fixed. This contrasts with idealist and mechanical materialist views that treat things as independent of their relations.
In Marxist logic, the individual is the concrete, immediately given object (such as a specific person) that contains within itself both particular features (e.g., being a 20th century American metalworker) and universal social relations (e.g., capitalism), while remaining distinct from them. Marxism seeks to understand any phenomenon in its individuality, particularity, and universality, avoiding the one-sided emphasis of liberalism (which overstresses the individual) or communitarianism (which overstresses the particular).
Individualism is an ethos that emphasizes the autonomy of the individual against the community or social group, while collectivism emphasizes the priority of the community or group over the individual. The terms emerged in the 19th century: individualism from de Tocqueville’s work and collectivism from the First International, originally meaning common ownership of the means of production. In Marxist theory, socialism involves a collectivism that does not suppress individualism but transcends it, enabling the free development of individuals through the abolition of private property and division of labor.
Induction is a method of reasoning that draws a general conclusion from specific facts. While natural and practical, this approach is philosophically flawed, as specific observations do not guarantee a valid general rule—such conclusions can become prejudice. Because of this, an inductive conclusion is never fixed and must always be checked against new facts.
Instrumental reason treats things and people as mere tools for achieving a goal, like using nature as a resource. Communicative reason, by contrast, treats others as ends in themselves, seeking mutual understanding and respect. Critical theorists like Adorno argued that modern capitalist society overuses instrumental reason, causing environmental destruction and treating humans as manipulable objects. Habermas proposed communicative reason as a better, more humane basis for social action.
Intellectual property is a set of laws that treat creations of the mind—like books, inventions, and brand names—as private property that can be owned, bought, and sold. These laws turn ideas and creative labor into commodities, meaning they become goods that can be traded in the market. Under capitalism, intellectual property rights often give large companies control over innovations, limiting access to knowledge and essential products, even though they are supposed to encourage creativity.
Intuition is the ability to grasp truth directly, without using evidence or reasoning. Philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza considered it important for understanding basic or essential truths. In dialectical thought, intuition is an early stage of knowing that comes before reflection and conceptual understanding.
Intuitionism is a trend in the foundations of mathematics, associated with Luitzen Brouwer, that seeks to construct mathematics on the basis of rational intuition. It rejects the law of excluded middle, which states every proposition is either true or false, and instead holds that mathematical truth requires an intuitive mental construction. This differs from intuitionalism, a philosophical current (e.g., Bergson) that opposes intuition to reason and experience.
The invisible hand is a metaphor from Adam Smith describing how people acting selfishly can unintentionally benefit society. Smith used it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to argue that the rich, by pursuing their own wants, help distribute necessities to the poor. In The Wealth of Nations, he applied it to investors who support domestic industry for their own security and thereby promote the public good. Later economists took it to explain how market prices arise from individual choices, although Smith himself saw natural prices as determined by labor, with market prices fluctuating around them.
In Hegel’s system, Judgment (or Judgement) is the second stage of the Subjective Notion, following Notion and leading to Syllogism. It is a process of assertion that begins with a simple agreement between concept and reality, then develops into reflective criticism, necessity, and eventually a new concept. This movement ultimately produces the Objective Notion.
Justice and injustice are concepts used to judge whether social arrangements and actions are right or wrong. Unlike mere legality, justice also covers production, distribution, and social welfare, and unlike good/evil, it applies to ethical social life rather than luck or personal vice. The content of these concepts changes historically, and a legal system can be judged unjust. Revolutionary socialism holds that capitalism is unjust because it is caused by human choices, harms people, and could be avoided.
In Russia, the labour standard was the amount of land that a peasant could cultivate by themselves, without hiring outside help or relying on others.
Laissez faire is an economic policy that calls for the government to interfere as little as possible in economic affairs. It stems from the idea that individuals following their own interests will best serve the public good, a notion associated with the Physiocrats and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” While popular in the 19th century, it was criticized after the Great Depression, though it saw a revival among right-wing monetarists in the late 20th century. Overly strict laissez faire has been blamed for economic problems in former Soviet countries after 1991.
The Laws of Dialectics are three principles formulated by Engels to popularize dialectical thinking in the workers’ movement. They are: the unity and interpenetration of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality (and vice versa), and the negation of the negation. Engels cautioned that these laws do not fully express the depth of dialectics, as further developed by Lenin.
Legitimation means making something lawful, but in social theory it refers to the broader processes by which actions, ideas, or institutions are accepted as valid and justified. These processes go beyond the legal system and involve power relations, ideology, and social interests, such as how scientific theories gain acceptance through institutional approval, peer review, and funding. Legitimation is fundamental to how societies maintain authority and shape dominant worldviews.
Libertarianism is a radical form of “life-style” liberalism that emphasizes extreme individual autonomy. It is usually closer to anarchism than to economic liberalism, but differs from anarchism by focusing less on community.
A limit is the boundary or determination of a thing, beyond which it would become something else. In dialectical thought, recognizing something as limited already implies transcending that limit in thought, since knowing what it is not defines its being. Becoming conscious of a limitation creates the impulse to go beyond it, as seen in Hegel’s dialectics. This concept relates to the dialectics of the finite and infinite.
Logic is the study of the forms of thought used in reasoning, social practice, and history. A proper materialist logic recognizes that all premises arise from specific contexts, so reasoning must be grounded in that context to be valid. Idealist logic, by contrast, treats reasoning as merely moving from premises to conclusions without examining their origins.
Logicism is a position in the philosophy of mathematics, associated with Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, which holds that mathematics is a branch of logic and can be developed entirely from formal logic, without appeal to any non-logical content.
Manchester Liberalism was the political and economic outlook of industrial capitalists in mid-1800s Britain. It centered on the campaign for free trade, which was organized from Manchester, the home of the Anti-Corn Law League. The League pushed for the repeal of the Corn Laws and was dissolved in 1846 after achieving its goal.
Market socialism is a proposed economic system that combines socialist political control with market-based commodity production. It aims for working-class political power while allowing markets for goods, services, and sometimes labor and capital. Critics argue it is a contradiction because markets generate inequality and capitalist ideology, so true socialism must eventually transcend markets.
The masses are the large numbers of people who participate in a social movement or are involved by their social position, but are less committed or organized than the vanguard. They are diverse and heterogeneous, and typically act at decisive moments that change history. The practical action of the masses is the creative engine of politics, and when an idea is embraced by them it becomes a powerful material force.
The master-slave dialectic is a concept from Hegel describing how two self-conscious subjects meet, leading to a life-or-death struggle where one submits to the other. The victor becomes the master, the loser the slave. The slave’s labor shapes the world, while the master becomes dependent, and eventually the slave gains a deeper self-awareness. This idea has been used to analyze oppression like colonialism and patriarchy.
Mechanical materialism is a form of materialist philosophy that explains all natural phenomena through the laws of mechanics and the action of objects upon one another, as exemplified by Newtonian physics. It treats the world as a machine and focuses on external forces rather than internal change or historical development. This view was common in the 18th century when mechanics was the most advanced science, leading it to reduce even living things to machines and to see nature as eternally repeating cycles. It was later challenged by developments in chemistry, biology, and relativity.
Mechanisation is when machines come to control the labour process, reducing workers to repetitive, partial tasks and producing uniform goods. Automation is a later stage where machines can run whole processes, so workers shift to supervisory roles and products become varied and flexible, making knowledge workers more important. Such changes in the labour process reshape the working class and have broad cultural effects.
Micro-economic reform is a capitalist strategy for managing class struggle, adopted after the failures of Keynesianism and monetarism. It focuses on directly breaking worker resistance in the workplace through improved management techniques, such as Toyotist methods and social-psychological tools, rather than relying solely on macroeconomic policy like unemployment or centralised wage bargaining.
A mixed economy is a capitalist system that includes a significant amount of public ownership or state-run enterprise. The term was coined in 1949 to describe Britain and was used widely in the twentieth century for economies with both private and public sectors. Marxists view such economies as unstable and temporary, since they involve markets that can lead to inequality and eventually be privatized or transformed.
In Hegel’s philosophy, ‘Modifications of Being’ refers to the various stages of the Idea or divisions of Logic, emphasizing that each stage is still a form of being. These stages repeatedly show themselves to be something other than what they initially seemed, then become immediate or concrete. For example, a social class is also thousands of individuals, a chemical structure is also atoms, and an animal is also organic chemicals.
Mondism was a policy in Britain in the late 1920s, named after businessman Alfred Mond. It proposed that trade unions should work together with employers to protect workers’ living standards and make industry more efficient. Right-wing union leaders supported this idea, but left-wing critics called it ‘class collaboration’—meaning it sided with bosses instead of fighting them.
Monetarism is an economic doctrine developed by Milton Friedman that holds the money supply—the total amount of currency and bank balances in circulation—is the main controller of economic activity. It argues that restricting the money supply can cut inflation and increase unemployment, and it was used in the 1970s and 1980s in the US and UK to manage the economy. The theory was later abandoned as ineffective.
Monotheism is the belief in a single supreme deity, characteristic of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. It emerged historically as a later development, with the Jewish god Jehovah as a specific instance. This form of religion serves as a way for people to relate emotionally to the alien natural and social forces that dominate them, and it continues as long as those forces control human life.
Nationalisation means bringing privately owned land or industries under state or public ownership. The term was first used in 1874, specifically in reference to the nationalisation of land. It is the opposite of privatisation.
Natural Capital is a term economists use for parts of nature that can be turned into private property and used for profit, like forests in national parks that might be harvested. It also refers to nature as an ‘externality’—something outside the market that provides free resources (raw materials, air, water) and absorbs waste and pollution without payment. When capital destroys these natural conditions, it must spend money to fix or replace them, such as installing filters or planting trees. In short, Natural Capital is nature viewed as a free input and dumping ground for capitalist production.
Necessary labour time is the portion of a worker’s working day needed to produce the value equivalent to their own means of subsistence—food, shelter, clothing, and raising the next generation—at the socially and historically determined standard of living. Surplus labour time is the extra time worked beyond that, during which the worker creates value that goes to the capitalist as profit and to maintain the state and other non-workers. Together they partition the working day. The wage form hides this division, making all labour appear paid.
Negation, meaning ‘no’, is the act of denying or supplanting a statement. In dialectics, negation isn’t just rejection: when something is negated, it is taken up into a higher truth as a subordinate part, a process called ‘sublation’ where the old is both ended and preserved.
Neocolonialism is a form of imperialism in which powerful capitalist countries exploit former colonies through economic dependence instead of direct colonial rule. Though such countries are politically independent, the imperialist power maintains control through economic pressure, debt, and market dominance, and may use military intervention to secure favorable conditions. The term became prominent in the 1960s, notably through Kwame Nkrumah’s book ‘Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism.’
Nominalism is the philosophical theory that objects grouped under a single general word, such as “dog,” share only that name and have no common essence or reality beyond it. In nominalism, universal terms are just labels we apply to collections of particular things, not names for real shared entities. This stands in contrast to realism, which holds that such categories correspond to something real in the world.
Non-violence is a political tactic of confronting oppressive authority without resorting to violence, a term coined by Gandhi in 1920. Unlike pacifism, it is a strategic method that can effectively undermine the legitimacy of tyrannical powers, leading the masses to overwhelm the armed forces. It has been used successfully in revolutions such as Iran in 1979 and Algeria.
A Notion is a generalized conception of something that grasps its essential nature, including its inner contradictions and its connections to other things. In dialectics, a Notion is not a fixed definition but develops over time, starting as an abstract ‘germ’ and becoming more concrete as it is tested and refined. This process contrasts with metaphysical approaches that see a Notion as a static property stripped of all context.
In epistemology, the subject is the active knower (a person or group with consciousness and will), while the object is what that activity is directed toward. Dialectical theory treats subject and object as a unified pair: the subject is active in knowing, yet also exists within an independent world. This overcomes one-sided views that emphasize either the subject’s mental activity (idealism) or the world’s independent existence (materialism).
The object or subject of labour is the material or thing that work is applied to, such as raw materials. It is one of the components of the means of production, which are the resources needed to produce goods.
Objectification is when human activity takes shape in a tangible product, so that the product reflects the person’s labor and the social conditions they worked in. This is a normal part of all human work, unlike alienation, where the product becomes strange and hostile, or reification, where relationships between people appear as relationships between things. Objectification also refers to social relations that treat people as objects rather than as active subjects.
Objective and subjective are terms used to distinguish between what belongs to the object itself and what belongs to the observer. Something is objective if it pertains to the object independently of any subject or observer. Something is subjective if it pertains to the point of view of the subject, rather than to the object under consideration.
Objective Logic, in Hegel’s philosophy, is a stage of logic that explains how a new idea, social movement, or organization comes into being. It has two parts: Being, where forms come and go without development, and Essence, where contradictions force the content to take a true form and become self-conscious, leading to Subjective Logic.
Objectivism is a philosophical standpoint that avoids making value judgments and avoids intervening with the object, but it fails to recognize that the subject is part of the object. It treats the object as separate from the observer, ignoring the subjective role in shaping knowledge.
Objectivity refers to understanding reality based on the object itself, apart from the subject’s thoughts or feelings. Overemphasizing objectivity leads to ‘objectivism’, a stance that avoids critical judgment and action, resulting in powerlessness. In Hegel’s system, objectivity is the second stage of the Notion, where concepts confront the external world and are eventually synthesized with subjectivity through the Idea.
Observation is a way of perceiving the world to collect basic data for scientific research, where the researcher tries not to influence what they are studying. It separates the object from the researcher’s interference, but doesn’t ignore that the object is connected to everything else. Observation has been important since Aristotle but became systematic with Francis Bacon, and it works together with experimentation and practice.
Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of being, existence, or reality. It asks what kinds of things exist and what it means for something to be. Historically it fell out of favor, but was revived by Edmund Husserl and became important in phenomenology and existentialism, often focusing on the mind-body problem.
Operationalism is a theory of meaning that says a concept is only meaningful if it can be verified through a specific set of operations or tests. It rejects any idea that cannot be directly tested, reducing concepts to their operational definitions. While it highlights the practical side of knowledge, it excludes important social concepts like ‘class’ or ‘value’ that are not directly observable. As a result, operationalism is limited by a one-sided, subjectivist approach.
Optimism and pessimism are contrasting outlooks on the world. The term ‘optimism’ was coined in 1737 to describe Leibniz’s idea that God created the best possible world, while ‘pessimism’ was coined in 1794 as its opposite. Marxists see these dispositions as shaped by early social conditions, and note that periods after working-class defeats often breed pessimism and reaction. This outlook can significantly affect the prospects for progressive politics.
Out-sourcing is the practice of contracting out work that was once done by an organization’s own employees to outside companies. It turns internal labor costs into purchases of goods or services, a form of commodification. Since the mid-1980s it has been used to cut costs, weaken unions, and let firms focus on core activities, though it can also reduce quality and increase supervision costs.
In Marxist economics, ‘overproduction and underconsumption’ refers to the situation that triggers capitalist crises: too many goods are produced relative to what workers can afford to buy, leading to unsold inventory, production halts, layoffs, and a downward spiral. The term ‘overproduction’ is misleading because the real problem is that consumers lack purchasing power, i.e., underconsumption. Alternatively, it can also mean overproduction of capital itself—fictitious capital built on speculation that becomes unsustainable and leads to slump.
Pantheism is the philosophical view that God and Nature are identical, rather than Nature being created or controlled by a separate God. It holds that the divine is present in all things, and that every event is an expression of God’s will. Philosophers like Spinoza argued that this view is compatible with free will, since human will is also an expression of God’s will.
In Marxist dialectics, the Particular is the intermediate concept between the Universal (the general class) and the Individual (a specific instance). It denotes a group of individuals that share a common trait, representing the universal in a more concrete form. The Universal only manifests through individuals, and their interrelations constitute the Particular.
In Marxist political economy, patents turn intellectual, creative, and other non-material labour into a commodity that can be bought and sold. Patents are a form of intellectual property that grant exclusive rights over an invention, treating the product of mental work as a marketable asset. This is part of how capitalism extends commodity production to ideas and knowledge.
Perestroika was a policy introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Its goal was to reform the Soviet economy by introducing ‘full cost accounting,’ meaning enterprises had to balance costs and income to make a profit. This shift moved away from purely administrative control to more economic management methods, increasing the independence of enterprises and democratizing management. It functioned as a preparatory stage for privatization, similar to Western corporatization.
The petit-bourgeoisie are the small business owners and self-employed people, such as shopkeepers and small farmers. The term sometimes also includes professionals and better-off farmers. They are seen as a class between the working class and the large capitalists, often owning some property but still working for a living.
A phenomenon is something that is manifested to the senses, an object of experience. It is often contrasted with the noumenon, or ‘thing-in-itself,’ which lies beyond experience. In dialectical materialism, there is no sharp boundary between phenomenon and thing-in-itself.
In Marxist theory, philanthropy refers to charitable giving by capitalists and affluent workers, using money ultimately extracted from labor as surplus value. A small portion of exploited wealth is given back to create an appearance of good faith. It can also serve imperialist interests by funneling charity into poor nations, creating markets for surplus goods and sustaining economic dependency.
Piece work is a form of wage labor where workers are paid per unit produced rather than per hour worked. Although it looks like a straightforward sale of labor, it actually hides the same capitalist-worker relationship: the capitalist owns the means of production and can push the piece rate down to a minimum, forcing workers to labor intensely just to survive. Piece work thus disciplines workers and increases the intensity of labor, as Marx analyzed in Capital.
Pluralism is a political policy that supports a diversity of views and loyalties within a single organization or society. It traces back to an ancient philosophical idea that reality consists of many different substances, not just one. Marxists generally support pluralism as necessary for cultural development and social cohesion, but they recognize that during serious crises, tolerance for different actions may need to give way to unified action.
In philosophy, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are not just opposites. Positive refers to affirming something, like positive knowledge that asserts facts about the world. Negative involves negation, rejecting what is taken for granted to reveal possibilities or deeper meaning. Dialectics is called negative because it challenges immediate certainties.
In Hegel’s philosophy, possession is the act of making something one’s own through direct physical grasping, forming, or marking it. Hegel also argues that through self-consciousness one can take possession of oneself, but it is contrary to right for a person to be property of another. Possession is a key concept in understanding property and legal right.
In dialectical thought, possibility and reality are not sharply separated; the presence of all necessary conditions means something will become real. To assess possibility, you need to understand the full set of conditions that lead from potential to actual, rather than just calculating probabilities or relying on willpower. This idea draws on Hegel’s critique of these categories, emphasizing the totality of conditions in transition.
Postmodernism is the period of bourgeois (capitalist) society from the late 1960s/early 1970s to the present, along with its cultural aspects. It is characterized by skepticism toward science, authority, and ethical life, combined with relativism and a rejection of ideas like progress, originality, and truth. The period emerged after the postwar boom ended, as capitalism shifted to rely on knowledge and image industries and an international division of labor.
In Hegel’s philosophy, the Practical Idea is a stage where knowing and willing are united, so that thought and reality become one. It is the penultimate step before the Absolute Idea, which combines the Theoretical Idea (knowledge) with the Practical Idea (action). Hegel famously turns things upside down, making theory the test of truth rather than practice.
For Marxists, practice is purposeful activity that always includes its mental and theoretical aspects, so it is inseparable from theory. Theory gives practice its means and end, while practice is the basis for developing theory. Separating theory and practice distorts both; they can only fully develop together. Practice, in the broadest sense, is the criterion of truth.
The ‘practico-inert’ is a concept from Jean-Paul Sartre that describes a social field created by people’s successful struggles, but which then becomes rigid and unresponsive to those people’s needs. Bureaucracy is a classic example: it emerges from collective action but later resists further change. Sartre saw this as a kind of ‘anti-dialectic,’ where past activity hardens into an inert obstacle to ongoing struggle. The term highlights the demobilizing effect of successes that become institutionalized.
In Marxism, praxis means practice understood as inseparable from theory: neither theory nor practice makes sense without the other. The term was popularized by Georg Lukács in 1923 and later by Western Marxists, though Marx himself used it in an 1844 manuscript that was later translated as ‘practice.’ Claude Lévi-Strauss also used the term differently, contrasting praxis (the everyday way material life is produced and reproduced) with practices (the specific operations that achieve that praxis), and argued that conceptual systems like totemism mediate between the two.
Private labour is work performed for the account of private individuals, typically for the market. In capitalist society, it appears as abstract universal labour, where the social character of work is expressed indirectly through exchange. Historically, it became prominent with independent artisans producing commodities. Under capitalism, production becomes increasingly social but remains privately controlled, creating a contradiction that communism resolves by establishing directly social labour.
Privatisation is the transfer of public assets and services into private ownership, typically through sale. Nationalisation is the opposite: bringing private companies, assets, or resources into public ownership. Historically, post-war nationalisations aimed to rebuild nations and provide public services, while later privatisations from the 1980s sought to increase profitability by making public utilities and services profit-driven. However, neither guarantees workers’ control: nationalisation can still be run for capitalist goals, and privatisation changes the motive from public service to profit maximisation.
In Marxist economics, productive labor is work that creates surplus value — extra value taken by the capitalist as profit — and thus increases capital. Unproductive labor is work that does not create surplus value, even if it is useful. The distinction depends on the social relationship of production, not the type of work performed. For example, a teacher who enriches a school owner is productive, while a soldier paid from state revenue is not.
Professionalisation is the process by which an activity becomes an industry within the capitalist system, turning amateur or community-based practices into paid professional work. It often involves setting formal standards and regulations, and is part of commodification, where goods and services are produced for exchange rather than direct use. Examples include sports becoming big business and community services like babysitting or volunteering turning into paid, qualified roles.
In dialectical materialism, quality is the essential character that makes something what it is, while quantity refers to changes in amount or degree that do not initially alter that character. A purely quantitative change (like adding pages to a book) becomes a qualitative change when it transforms the thing’s fundamental nature (e.g., reducing a book to a single page no longer makes it a book). This concept helps explain how gradual accumulations of small changes can lead to sudden shifts in a thing’s essential nature.
A dialectical law which holds that gradual quantitative changes eventually reach a critical point, at which a sudden qualitative change occurs, transforming a thing into something new. For example, cooling water lowers its temperature (quantity) until it freezes and becomes ice (quality). This law is associated with Hegel, who saw ‘measure’ as the unity of quantity and quality.
Realisation, in the context of value, means turning a surplus product or credit into actual money. For capitalists, this happens when they sell the goods they have produced; only then can they complete the cycle of production and profit. If goods can’t be sold, the surplus value they contain is not realised, and this failure often triggers economic crises.
Reciprocity is a concept in Hegel’s logic where cause and effect, action and reaction, possibility and necessity become completely intertwined. It represents the fullest stage of actuality, where things are understood as a network of interactions, though it still requires a deeper concept or ‘notion’ to unify them. It is also sometimes called ‘interaction’.
Recognition is a concept in political philosophy referring to the act of acknowledging another as a moral equal, a subject rather than an object. It grew from legal and diplomatic meanings into a central philosophical idea through Fichte and Hegel, who argued that self-awareness and freedom depend on being recognized by others. Later, recognition became key to social movements seeking respect for marginalized identities, though it has recently been criticized as insufficient without equal democratic participation.
Reification is the process by which social relations and human activities are transformed into ‘things’ that appear natural, objective, and independent of human action. Drawing on Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, it describes how people mistake man-made social structures for unchangeable facts of nature. The concept was developed by Georg Lukács, who highlighted that this ‘thingification’ obscures the fact that society is a product of human activity.
Something is relative if its meaning or measurement depends on its relation to something else. It is the opposite of ‘absolute,’ which stands for permanence and independence. The idea of relativity rests on the premise that all things are interconnected and constantly changing.
Right (or the system of rights) is the set of socially regulated freedoms that arise from the relations between individuals, classes, and the community. It may be written into enforceable law, but it also exists in informal social arrangements, and it is always contested and evolving. Historically, it has taken different forms: under feudalism it was tied to one’s social rank, while in capitalist society it centers on property rights and formal political rights.
Scepticism is a philosophical view that emphasizes doubt and the relativity of human knowledge, while dogmatism underestimates that relativity and claims to know absolute truths. Scepticism emerged in ancient Greece and was later associated with David Hume, who argued that experience only gives knowledge of sensations, not of things beyond sensation. Scepticism tends to dominate during social crises, while dogmatism is often found in the immature stages of a movement.
In Hegel’s philosophy, ‘self-identical’ means a concept that lacks internal contradiction, making it abstract, motionless, and isolated. Such a state is considered impossible because all real things are in motion and have internal contradictions.
Semblance is a term used in Marxist philosophy to describe the deceptive appearance of things, which hides their true essence. It is synonymous with ‘Illusory Being’ and is a translation of the German ‘Schein’.
Semiology is the study of signs and signalling, including words, gestures, symbols, and indices. It was developed by thinkers like Peirce, Saussure, and Vygotsky, each emphasizing different aspects of how signs relate to meaning and practical activity. In Marxist theory, it studies signs as part of social and material practice.
A slave society is a social system in which the main class division is between masters and slaves, and slaves are the primary producers. In such societies, slaves are treated as property, completely owned by their masters. According to Marx and Engels, this was the earliest form of class society, emerging when productivity allowed prisoners of war to be put to work. Historical examples include the Roman Empire and the plantation societies of the Americas.
The social contract is an idea from Jean-Jacques Rousseau that legitimate state authority arises from an agreement among free individuals to submit to a general will. Marxist analysis rejects this as mythology: states were founded in violence, and the ‘contract’ serves to legitimize rule by the bourgeoisie. In reality, the state is an instrument of class rule, and only direct democracy like the Paris Commune can provide real legitimacy.
That part of workers’ income that comes from free public services rather than wages. Social democrats sometimes argue that improving these services is better than fighting for pay rises, as it can reduce conflict and inequality. However, the concept is often criticized for discouraging class struggle and wage demands. The term became less common as governments cut public services from the late 20th century onward.
Socialist Competition (or Emulation) is a concept first proposed by Lenin to motivate work after the Russian Revolution, when the usual profit motive was absent. It encouraged workers’ collectives to compete in organizing labor and distribution, assuming that workers would see the enterprise as their own through participation in the Soviet government. Stalin later renamed it ‘socialist emulation’ to emphasize cooperation among workers rather than rivalry, and it was used in campaigns like Stakhanovism to push higher productivity. The term thus refers to a system of collective incentives and peer pressure in a socialist economy.
Solidarity is giving support to strangers on their own terms, unlike community (which is for insiders) or philanthropy (which follows the giver’s terms). It is the central ethic of the workers’ movement, obliging workers to support all oppressed people, and it is built actively through social movements, especially trade unions. Solidarity creates trust among people who share a struggle, and is seen as essential for modern urban life and social progress.
The Sophists were fifth-century BC Greek philosophers who traveled and taught ‘wisdom’ professionally, but they did not form a single philosophical school. They were known for skill in argument and rhetoric. Their critics coined the term ‘sophistry’ to describe arguments that were superficially plausible but logically flawed.
In Hegel’s logic, the speculative stage (also called Positive Reason) is the third phase of thinking where opposites are understood as unified in their very opposition. It goes beyond abstract understanding and dialectical negation to grasp the affirmative unity that emerges from the contradictions. This is not speculation in the everyday sense of guesswork; rather, it is the highest mode of rational comprehension according to Hegel.
The ‘spirit of the times’ is a concept from Hegel referring to an underlying rationality or principle that shapes a historical period. It is not a uniform opinion but the shared cultural and conceptual framework within which all disputes and contradictions arise. Hegel saw it as a kind of world-mind working through individuals unconsciously, not as something created by human labor. Marx criticized this view, arguing that this spirit actually emerges from human activity and material conditions.
Stagflation is an economic condition where stagnation (recession, high unemployment) and inflation (rising prices) happen at the same time. This goes against the usual business cycle pattern where recession brings falling prices. The term was coined in 1965 and became widely used in the 1970s, when policies to fight unemployment made inflation worse and vice versa.
Structuralism is an approach that seeks to uncover the underlying structures of complex phenomena, setting aside their surface appearances, historical development, and material qualities. It was influential in sociology and philosophy, especially from the 1940s to the 1960s, drawing on linguistics and anthropology. Proponents like Louis Althusser applied it to Marxism, but critics note it overemphasizes form at the expense of content, history, and materiality.
Structure refers to the inner organization of a system, consisting of stable relationships between its elements and the laws that govern these relationships. Different types of structures (chemical, economic, social, etc.) overlap and interact in everything that exists. The concept emphasizes the stable, formal aspect of things, setting aside their content, materiality, and internal contradictions. Structures are not permanent; they change and transform into other structures, and are often contrasted with function, which focuses on processes rather than fixed arrangements.
Subject refers to the person or entity that performs an action, as opposed to the object that is acted upon. In a historical context, it denotes the conscious agent of historical events, those who actively shape history rather than being passive tools. Dialectics treats subject and object as interdependent parts of a single relation, not as separate things. The term has evolved from its original meaning of someone under a monarch’s authority to its modern philosophical sense of a thinking, willing, and morally responsible agent.
The subject of labour (also called the object of labour) is whatever human work is applied to—for example, soil, fish, timber, or ore. It is one part of the means of production. If the thing has already been changed by earlier work, it is called raw material. All raw materials are subjects of labour, but not every subject of labour is a raw material.
Relating to the mind or personal viewpoint of an individual, rather than the objective characteristics of the thing itself.
Subjective Logic is the second major division of Hegel’s Logic, dealing with the development of the Notion (a fully realized concept) after it has become self-conscious. Unlike Objective Logic, which describes how a principle or movement emerges and evolves through contradiction without yet being aware of itself, Subjective Logic concerns the phase where a principle is explicitly formulated, organized, and developed into a complete science or movement. It focuses on the internal maturation of a movement’s program and its eventual integration into society as a whole.
Subjectivity is the coming together of three things: knowledge (awareness of a situation), agency (being a morally responsible actor), and identity (seeing oneself as that actor). Marxists reject the idea that subjectivity is a private, unobservable inner state; instead, it is a social activity that happens through relations with shared cultural and material things. It can belong to groups like classes and nations as well as individuals, and becomes full when a group knows itself as an active force in history.
In Russian history, the subsistence standard was the minimum amount of land needed to feed a peasant family. Families with less land could not sustain themselves through farming alone and faced hardship. This concept was used to assess rural poverty and land distribution.
Subsumption refers to how capitalist relations take over the labour process. Marx distinguishes formal subsumption, where capital simply takes over an existing labour process without changing how work is done, and real subsumption, where capital transforms work so that the labour process is fully reshaped to serve capital’s needs. This distinction explains why capitalism must first exploit existing forms of production and then create the very conditions needed for its full development.
System and Method refer to two related aspects of a philosopher’s work: the method they used to develop their ideas, which can be imitated, and the system of concepts they produced, which can be used. For example, Hegel’s dialectical method involves finding contradictions in concepts (thesis) and showing how they lead to opposites (antithesis) and then to richer concepts (synthesis). His system is the structured sequence of concepts in The Logic. Marx and Engels valued Hegel’s method over his system.
Tao (or Dao) is a central concept in classical Chinese philosophy, first described in the Tao Te Ching around 500 B.C.E. It is often translated as ‘the way’ or ‘path’ of nature. The Tao is said to be present in all things and to encompass contradictions—like yin and yang—while also going beyond them. This idea is sometimes seen as an ancient form of dialectical synthesis.
Taoism (also spelled Daoism) is an ancient Chinese philosophy that began around 500 BCE, based on the idea of living in harmony with the Tao, or the natural way of the universe. It was introduced by the philosopher Lao Tzu, and emphasizes accepting nature’s flow rather than fighting it, as expressed in the principle of wu-wei (actionless action). Taoism sees the world as filled with opposites (like yin and yang) that are always changing into each other. Along with Lao Tzu, it has two other early founders, Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu, and over time it also developed into a religious tradition.
Taxation is the share of society’s surplus that is taken by the government through various methods of collection. In Marxist terms, taxes are part of surplus-value, along with rent and profit, and they affect how that surplus is divided among capitalists, landlords, bankers, and the state. Taxes pay for functions needed to maintain capitalism—such as police, military, and infrastructure—that capital itself finds unproductive or unprofitable. Taxes can also fund social services, which some call the ‘social wage’ that workers receive alongside wages.
Taylorism is a system of industrial management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor that breaks production into simple, repetitive tasks and uses time-and-motion studies to maximize efficiency by minimizing labor time. It relies on extreme division of labor, intense supervision, and strict discipline, reducing workers to machine-like operations. While it boosts productivity, it is stressful and oppressive for workers, and often creates a large supervisory class. In contemporary usage, it stands for a backward management style that eliminates worker initiative.
The Theoretical Idea is a concept from Hegel’s Logic that represents thought as separate from reality. It gradually develops into the Practical Idea, where abstract thinking becomes real and actually confronts the world. In simpler terms, it describes the process by which ideas, initially only theoretical, become practical and concrete.
In Marxism, theory is not detached from reality but an ideal reflection of the material world that is shaped by and intertwined with practice. It helps humans mentally organize the world into objects, but no single theory can fully capture the infinite richness of real life, so contradictions within theory are natural and even a strength, driving further development. Theory is not just for intellectuals – everyone uses a theoretical framework to understand the world, and it is ultimately rooted in practical activity like material production.
Theory and practice are two sides of human activity: theory reflects and organizes practice, while practice manifests and enriches theory. Their separation originated with the division of society into classes, leading to speculation in theory and unconscious activity in practice. In essence, they belong together and should inform each other.
The theory of marginal utility, developed in the 1870s by Jevons, Menger, and Walras, is an economic theory that explains value by the subjective usefulness of the last unit of a good consumed. It states that as a person acquires more of a good, each additional unit provides less utility, and purchases continue until the utility of the next unit falls below its price. This approach shifted economics away from studying production and class distribution, focusing instead on individual choice and market prices.
In Marxist philosophy, the ‘thing-for-us’ refers to how an object appears to us through perception and experience—its phenomenal aspect—as distinguished from the ‘thing-in-itself,’ which exists independently of our perception and cannot be directly known. The term was popularized by Engels to explain this distinction in a more accessible way.
Totality refers to a whole composed of many parts that is recognized as a single entity, such as a painting or a state. Totalisation is the ongoing process—both subjective and objective—by which living people actively constitute and maintain such a totality, preventing it from disintegrating into its parts. This concept, developed by Lukács and Sartre, applies to social institutions and organizations, not just material objects.
Toyotism refers to a management culture and set of labour processes that became dominant in developed capitalist countries in the late twentieth century, modeled on Japanese industrial practices, especially at Toyota. It emphasizes labour-management cooperation, multi-skilling, cross-functional teamwork, just-in-time production, and a division between a privileged core of secure workers and a mass of casual, low-wage laborers. The term is used by analogy with Fordism and Taylorism to describe a distinct stage of capitalist production.
A triad is a three-stage pattern that runs through much of Hegel’s writing. In the common formulation, a starting point (thesis) is opposed by its negation (antithesis), and the process resolves into a synthesis that preserves both while moving beyond them. Hegel applied this pattern to concepts such as Being, Essence, and Notion, and to history, as in primitive communism, class society, and communism. Note that Hegel himself never used the phrase ‘thesis–antithesis–synthesis’.
Tribal society is a pre-class social system based on extended family and kinship relations, in which production and consumption are communal and there is no exploitation or state. People live in small, self-governing groups with a simple division of labor, typically by sex, where the land and major property belong to the tribe. It existed before the rise of social classes and still survives in isolated areas today.
A discredited economic theory claiming that wealth concentrated among the rich automatically benefits the poor as it ‘trickles down’ through employment and investment. The term was coined by Ronald Reagan in 1981 to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. In practice, this often failed because the wealthy kept their gains instead of investing them for the broader population.
In Hegel’s logic, Understanding (Verstand) is the first stage of thought, which holds concepts fixed and sharply distinct from one another, treating each limited abstraction as if it had an independent existence of its own. It is one side of logic, alongside the dialectical stage (where these fixed categories pass into their opposites) and the speculative stage (which grasps their positive unity).
A union is a large organization of workers that comes together to win common goals like fair pay, reasonable hours, safe working conditions, and job security. It is mainly a defensive body, protecting members from mistreatment by employers, but powerful unions can also bring about significant social and political changes. By acting collectively, workers in a union gain strength to negotiate with bosses and improve their lives.
A Universal is a property or principle that applies to all things in the world, such as ‘redness’ that exists in many individual objects. Universals do not exist independently; they are always realized in particular individuals and through human practice and thought. Marxists distinguish abstract universals (a single shared aspect) from concrete universals (a unifying law or principle). To understand a universal, one must consider its connection to the individual and particular.
Universalism is the belief that certain moral values apply to all people everywhere, regardless of culture or nation. In politics, this idea is often used to justify military intervention or economic sanctions against countries accused of violating those values, such as ‘human rights abuses.’ Marxism agrees that some values are shared across cultures, but insists that real solidarity comes from working-class internationalism and respect for each nation’s right to decide its own path. Imperialist powers, however, only support universalism when it benefits them.
Utility is a measure of the subjective value a person assigns to a commodity, reflected in what they would pay for it. It is a key concept in modern economics, especially in marginal utility theory. John Stuart Mill helped develop it as a quantitative idea that includes beauty, scarcity, and usefulness, making it comparable to exchange-value. Unlike ‘use-value,’ utility is about how much someone personally values a thing in relation to its price.
Utopia is a term originating from Thomas More’s 1515 novel, describing an imaginary island with a perfect, communist society. Since then, it has come to mean any ideal or perfect society envisioned by a social movement, often carrying the connotation of being unrealistic or having no basis in actuality. The opposite of a utopia is a condition that already has a real, even if embryonic, basis. Throughout history, utopias have been both imagined in literature and attempted in practice, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony or the Fourierist colonies.
In Marxist politics, the vanguard is a group of people who are more resolute, committed, and organized than the broader mass, and who take a leading role in revolutionary struggle. The vanguard and the mass are not fixed; they are defined by their relationship within a movement, and people move between them over time. Marxist theory holds that the working class needs such a vanguard to lead it through revolutionary struggle against capitalism and toward socialism.
Virtue, in ethics, is about what kind of person one should be, rather than what actions one should take. Bourgeois ethics focuses on duty and moral dilemmas, while socialist ethics emphasizes virtue, aiming to cultivate the needs and desires that lead to a better life and society. Marx and Engels rejected moralism—imposing eternal rules—but championed a communist virtue of brotherhood, community, and free individual development.
Volition means the Will or intention, the faculty of choosing or deciding. In Marxist theory, it relates to the concept of ‘The Good’ and is contrasted with material conditions. Voluntarism is the standpoint that one-sidedly exaggerates volition, overemphasizing will or intention.
Voluntarism is a philosophical approach that one-sidedly emphasizes the role of will in determining truth, while downplaying reason and knowledge. It ignores the importance of cognition, and as Hegel argued, this can actually obstruct achieving goals because the will isolates itself from understanding.
Wage hustling is when workers take time for themselves during the hours they are paid to work, doing things like chatting, reading, or even sleeping instead of working. It can range from small moments to hours, and both the worker (who may be lazy or overworked) and the boss (who may be fooled or controlling) are involved. Because it’s done secretly, it’s not part of any contract, and it can cause resentment among workers who pick up the slack. Communists see it as a symptom of unfair working conditions and aim to solve it through solidarity and collective action.
Welfare is the provision and maintenance of living conditions for individuals by the community. It has negative and positive aspects: negative welfare provides a safety net or benefits, while positive welfare provides opportunities for people to help themselves. Marxists support both but recognize that capitalism inevitably creates inequality, with some people dependent on welfare and others providing it through exploitation. Only by bringing the means of production under proletarian democracy can the need for welfare be abolished.
Fascism is an extreme right-wing, nationalist, and totalitarian ideology and practice that emerged in early 20th-century Italy, Germany, and Spain. It is a reactionary form of capitalist rule, marked by dictatorship, rigid social hierarchy, anti-egalitarianism, corporate control, and state propaganda glorifying war. Fascism often co-opts religious and populist rhetoric to appeal to the masses while suppressing leftist ideals and opposition.
Pragmatism is a philosophy, often seen as distinctly American, holding that the meaning of a concept lies entirely in its practical usefulness and that ideas are to be tested by their practical consequences. It makes practice the sole criterion of theory, rejecting any entity or universal that cannot be practically demonstrated. While this emphasis on practice brings it close to Marxism, pragmatism differs by tying truth to immediate individual experience, whereas Marxism understands practice as socially mediated activity.
Dogmatism is a way of thinking that treats knowledge as fixed and absolute, not influenced by new information or real-world experience. It denies that knowledge depends on historical context and changing social practice. Dogmatism downplays doubt and insists that certain and unchangeable truths about the world are possible.
Species Being is a concept Marx borrowed from Feuerbach, used mainly in his early writings like the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It has two meanings: first, that humans can only truly exist in community with others, making us fundamentally social beings; second, that humans uniquely shape the material world according to our own conscious purposes through productive labor. This concept suggests we find fulfillment through productive activity, so society should be organized to allow free, conscious activity.
The concentration of capital refers to the process where ownership of capital becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially during crises when larger capitalists outcompete and absorb smaller ones. This happens because bigger firms have advantages like the ability to wage price wars, swamp markets, and survive downturns. Marx saw this as a key tendency of capitalism, leading to the growth of the working class and eventually the expropriation of capitalists by the masses.
The form of value is the historically evolved way in which the exchange value of commodities is expressed in a society. It shows how the value of goods becomes visible through their relationships with other goods. This form developed from simple, accidental exchanges into more regular ones, eventually leading to money as a measure of value. The money-form is the most developed form of value, and it has changed over time, from gold-backed currencies to the modern international system.
Primitive accumulation is the process by which capitalism is born, involving the violent separation of people from the land and other means of production they relied on for survival. This creates a class of ‘free’ laborers who own nothing and must sell their labor-power to capitalists. Marx contrasted this brutal reality with earlier, idealized stories that claimed capitalism arose from hard work and saving.
The transformation of capital between commodity and money forms during circulation, represented by Marx as M – C – M’. In this cycle, capital is advanced as money to buy commodities (means of production and labor), which are then used in production to create a new commodity containing surplus value, and finally sold for more money. The production process interrupts the circulation, but the overall metamorphosis results in an increase in capital when the final money form is realized.
Naturalism is the view that consciousness is a direct product of nature, ignoring the active role of humans in shaping their world through labor. Marx contrasted it with humanism, but also argued that a consistent naturalism unifies idealism and materialism. In Marxist thought, naturalism alone is insufficient; it must be combined with humanism because human beings are natural beings whose labor must conform to nature, yet consciousness also arises from social relations.
Power is the ability of a dominant class, group, or individual to impose their will on society or others. It arises with economic surplus and the division of labor, giving rise to the state and forms of inequality based on class, race, and gender. While revolutionaries may wield power to overthrow existing structures, power can only fully dissolve under communism, when goods are distributed according to need and freedom no longer requires domination.
In Marxist theory, Being refers to the totality of material and social conditions in a society, which exist independently of consciousness. It is the real foundation that shapes social, political, and intellectual life, as well as individual consciousness itself. Rather than consciousness determining Being, Being determines consciousness.
A philosophical view that holds that nature and human history unfold according to pre-existing ideals or rational laws, rather than through purely material causes. Marx saw Hegel as an objective idealist, and argued that this position, despite its idealist framing, is closer to consistent materialism than subjective idealism.
Morality is how a person acts in relation to the rights and ethics of their society, based on the kind of society they live in and their position within it. According to Marxism, moral ideas are not eternal truths but derive from the economic conditions and class relations of a given time. Because these change, morality changes as well. In class society, morality is always class morality—either supporting the domination of the ruling class or expressing the future interests of the oppressed; the morality of the working class represents that future.
Essence refers to the inherent significance or truth of something, which is not directly visible but must be grasped through conceptual understanding. In Hegel’s philosophy, essence is a contradictory process of development, unfolding through reflection, appearance, and actuality. Marxist thought adopts this idea to argue that the truth of things is not immediately given to the senses, contrary to positivism and empiricism.
The middle class is a broad category for the classes that sit between the ruling bourgeoisie and the working proletariat in capitalist society. It includes small business owners, professionals, small farmers, and white-collar workers. Its members have mixed interests, sharing some traits with both major classes, and neither major class can win without gaining their support. The term is objective, based on position in production relations, not on what people call themselves.
Ideology is a system of concepts and views that helps people make sense of the world, but it also hides the social interests behind those views. It tends to be complete and internally consistent, so it resists change even when faced with contradictory experiences. Marxists study ideology to expose the social interests and contradictions it masks, though they note that all social views contain some ideological element. Marxism itself, while critical and self-critical, can become an ideology if treated as a closed system.
Substance is a philosophical term for the fundamental entities that exist independently and have their own cause within themselves, as opposed to changeable attributes. For example, Descartes argued that thought and extension are two distinct substances. Spinoza proposed a single substance underlying all reality, though this view drew criticism. Later, Hegel used the term to describe a stage in the development of actuality.
Production and consumption are two sides of the same process of sustaining human life, but in capitalist society they are split apart by the social division of labour. Under these conditions, people do not produce directly for their own needs; instead, they must earn money to buy what they consume, while the goods they produce are sold on the market. This separation is mediated by distribution and exchange, which are not outside production but part of the relations of production. When this mediating system fails to keep production and consumption in balance, economic crises can occur.
Reason is the human capacity to analyze and combine ideas into knowledge. In Marxism, it is understood not as a purely mental power but as the internalized, subjective form of practical social activity. Marxists see reason as rooted in material, sensuous human practice, not as independent of it. It allows us to grasp not just passing impressions but the necessary connections in the world.
Phenomenology is the study of the structures of consciousness and the ways we experience things. In philosophy, it refers to a tradition founded by Edmund Husserl that aimed to establish a scientific foundation for philosophy by examining subjective thought independently of any external object.
Pacifism is the absolute rejection of the use of violence on moral grounds. It is typically a personal stance adopted before or outside politics, often based on religious belief, rather than an outcome of political education. Although some pacifists may permit personal violence in exceptional circumstances, the position is generally absolute. The term was coined by Emile Arnaud at the 10th Universal Peace Conference in 1902.
In Marxism, fetishism is the belief that commodities (goods produced for exchange) possess human-like properties or powers, when in reality their value stems from human labor and social relations. It describes how social relationships between producers appear as relationships between the products themselves, hiding the social character of labor. This illusion is fundamental to capitalist production and is a form of reification.
The Gold Standard is a monetary system in which a country’s currency value is fixed to a specific weight of gold, and the central bank holds gold reserves to guarantee that paper money can be exchanged for gold on demand. This allows currencies of different countries to have stable exchange rates based on their gold content. The system was widely adopted by major economies in the late 19th century, but it collapsed during World War One and was eventually abandoned by 1937 due to economic crises and insufficient gold to support growing trade.
Sublation is a key concept in dialectics, meaning to supersede or put an end to something while also preserving it in a transformed way. For instance, an old idea is not simply disproved but is contained and raised into a new, higher principle. It comes from the German word aufheben, which carries this dual sense of canceling and preserving.
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s system of Logic, ‘Life’ is the first subdivision of the Idea and is treated as a purely logical category, not a biological or psychological concept. It consists of the dialectical relation between the Living Individual and the Life Process, which are synthesized in the Genus. Life is negated by Cognition, and the unity of both constitutes the Absolute Idea.
Knowledge which affirms something, rather than denying, negating, or disproving something. It is usually associated with the ‘positive sciences,’ which accumulate factual understanding about the objective world.
Teleology is the philosophical concept of purposive activity directed toward an end or goal. It contrasts with mechanical and chemical processes, which lack intention. In Hegel’s logic, teleology is a stage of objectivity involving subjective ends, means, and realized ends.
The Absolute Idea is the central concept in Hegel’s philosophy, representing the totality of all logical development and the world spirit that drives history. For Hegel, it is like a deity that clothes itself in historical events. Marx rejected this concept because he saw history as made by people, not by an abstract idea. The Absolute Idea is an unattainable ideal of complete self-conscious knowledge of the world.
Authority is power exercised by a person or institution recognized as having the social position to verify what is true or right in a culture or organization. It is a necessary part of social life, but its legitimacy depends on accountability; authority that is not accountable is authoritarian. In working-class organizations, the highest authority is the assembled membership, and delegated authority is temporary and recallable.
Constant capital is the part of a capitalist’s investment spent on materials, tools, and machinery, whose value is simply transferred to the final product without creating new value. Variable capital is the part spent on wages to buy labor-power, and it is the only part that can create new value, because workers can produce more than the value of their own wages. The distinction shows that profit comes not from machines or materials but from exploiting workers’ labor, and it is central to Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
Socialisation is the process by which activities and relationships move from a private or restricted domain into a broader sphere of action. In capitalism, it often means transforming private businesses into public enterprises or moving domestic labour into the general economy. It can also involve commodification, outsourcing, and privatisation as capital develops. The key idea is that needs are met by the whole social division of labour rather than by isolated individuals.
The unity of opposites is a dialectical concept meaning that any thing or idea is best understood by considering it together with its opposite, rather than in isolation. Everything contains its own opposite, and full understanding requires seeing both sides and the conflict or unity between them. This term was used by Marxists like Engels and Lenin to explain the dialectical method of analysis.
In Marxist philosophy, method refers to how new knowledge is produced, especially the dialectical method developed by Hegel. This approach finds internal contradictions in existing concepts (thesis), shows how they turn into their opposites (antithesis), and then become a richer concept that combines both (synthesis). Hegel’s method is typically contrasted with his ‘system,’ which is the fixed arrangement of concepts. Marxists adopt this method as the critical and revolutionary core of Hegel’s philosophy.
The lumpenproletariat is a term coined by Marx for the class of outcasts and degraded elements in industrial society—such as beggars, prostitutes, criminals, and the chronically unemployed. In times of crisis, this group can grow and be exploited by demagogues and fascists as a mass base. It is sometimes translated as the ‘dangerous classes.’
Utilitarianism is an ethical doctrine that judges an action as right if it increases the total amount of human happiness, or ‘utility.’ It is a form of consequentialism, meaning it looks only at results, not at moral rules or duties. Developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism expresses the values of capitalist (bourgeois) society, seeing good in commerce and market exchange. Different versions try to define and measure ‘utility’ in various ways.
Theism is a belief system centered on a god. This god is understood as a supernatural being. According to theism, this god intervenes in and controls the affairs of the world.
Epicureanism is a philosophy developed by Epicurus in ancient Greece. It holds that all living things seek pleasure and avoid pain, and it describes nature as it is rather than prescribing how to live. It is atheistic, teaches that death is nothing to us, and adopts atomism with the addition of atomic swerve. It emphasizes knowledge of natural phenomena to free people from fear and superstition.
In Marxist/dialectical philosophy, ‘reality’ doesn’t just mean the physical world as opposed to ideas. Instead, it refers to the process of something becoming actual or realized, moving from potential to concrete existence. In dialectics, ‘reality’ is another word for ‘actuality’.
Relativism is a philosophical approach that strongly emphasizes the relativity of knowledge, claiming that there is no objective basis for truth and that no statement can be considered more true than another.