Classical Marxism

Classical Marxism here designates Marx and Engels’s work on capitalist society, class relations, and historical change. Marx’s commodity and labour analyses and Engels’s investigations of industrial life create a common field without making the two authors interchangeable.

Alienation questions people’s relation to their activity and products. Its treatment in the 1844 manuscripts differs from Capital’s analyses of value and commodity fetishism. Frankfurt thinkers inherit these as questions to investigate under changing conditions, not a ready-made explanatory template.

This current is neither an account of Soviet Marxism nor a summary of all later Marxisms. Continuities and changes connect early labour-history research with later work on culture and authority. The concept link opens Marx’s foundational context; Lukács’s reification is treated separately in the next current.

Entfremdung