Getting Started with Marxism

An in-depth look at the process, plus advice I wish I'd received when I first started learning.

Statue of Marx and Engels

I’ve been actively applying Marxist critique for a little over a year now through my writing, but I began seriously learning about Marxism roughly four years ago after the COVID lockdown started. Looking for something to occupy my immense amount of newly-found free time, I began reading philosophy which quickly brought me to Marx. Although I didn’t understand every word or concept, the sounds they made hooked me in. It took months before I grasped the ideas that had eluded me at the beginning of the lovely journey I was on.

One of the things most surprising to me was how rich the Marxian tradition is. Beginning with Marx and Engels the literature spans from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the modern day, about 180 years. It was a daunting task figuring out where to begin. The worst, however, was getting lost with nowhere to turn and not a helping hand in sight.

This is often so debilitating it drives someone to give up learning the method entirely. I, for one, do not think it has to be so. I understand why people stop—the questions are numerous, answers can be inaccessible, and advice is often impractical. But there lay the beauty of Marxism: it is a living method kept alive through struggle.

Think of how great it is to ask a question so novel that no one has an answer yet. There are few better opportunities to learn through praxis, by actually applying the method. We learn by utilizing the lessons bestowed upon us by the ultimate teacher: failure. Those who choose to continue their study of Marx will eventually find out that, contrary to what has been said in the McCarthy era, Marxism is a human centered philosophy based on the simple yet beautiful belief that people change the world. While I’m not offering a guide as I believe it would defeat the purpose of learning and neuter the positive effects of the struggle, I think it’s entirely worthwhile to share what I wish I knew as I was just beginning to learn Marxism.

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Seek Truth from Facts

There’s a popular saying in China: “Seek truth from facts.” I take it to mean that the truth can be found through undogmatic scrutiny. Marxism, if it is to be living and breathing, has to operate with a flexibility that replaces what has been proven false. Searching for the truth about society’s ills, Marx put his world on trial, ruthlessly tearing apart the capitalist system in which he lived by subjecting it to the most thorough criticism it has ever received. Let us seek the truth about Marx and his life’s work through a thorough dive into the facts.

Marx did not try to topple capitalism, he did not try to build socialism, and he did not reduce all of society’s problems to the economy. You will hear these three barefaced lies more than you can possibly imagine, but they are nothing more than slanders of Marx bearing no basis in reality. Marx was not so concerned with politics or economics as he is oft said to have been, rather he was mostly interested in people and their relations—which, as it turns out, are deeply intertwined with economic and political systems.

Some might object and say: “What about The Communist Manifesto and Marx’s activities with the Communist League and the International Workingmen’s Association, don’t they prove you wrong?” A closer examination of this time period will prove this not to be so. I’ll begin by providing background information on the Communist League followed by placing Marx in context.

The Communist League was an international political party founded in June 1847 that lasted for five years. Its formation was the merging of Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Correspondence Committee and Karl Schapper’s and Wilhelm Weitling’s League of the Just. The groups came together behind the ideas Marx and Engels expressed in their writing. It was at this time that the members of the new League tasked Marx and Engels with establishing the policy of group in what would soon become The Communist Manifesto.

Marx, by the time he joined the League, had already established much of the foundation of Marxism through his writing. He had already espoused dialectical and historical materialism and had begun working on a deeper critique of political economy. Marx’s early work is largely focused on refuting idealism, mostly through Hegel and Bruno Bauer, and the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach. Throughout the 1840s he worked as a journalist throughout Western Europe for various radical newspapers meaning he had deadlines, editing responsibilities, and state censors—leaving him with little time for research. During this decade he studied the French Revolution of 1789, particularly the bourgeois Jacobins; this research was limited by the current events of the time.

The early 1800s was a time of upheaval in political and cultural thought throughout Europe as the Industrial Revolution roared across the continent. The 1840s were marked by revolutions one after another, most notably the Revolutions of 1848. Marx worked for radical newspapers bringing him in close contact with revolutionary events. All his research at the time would have been directed toward inciting the working class to rise and revolt, as his writing was. Much of his work was rushed by world events. Take, for example, the Manifesto, which Engels and Marx wrote between December 1847 and January 1848—racing to get the pamphlet to print, which happened in February as the revolution was beginning in France. Let us also remember that this is before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species (1859)—perhaps the main catalyst which drove Marx to study world history and the evolution of societies so closely. Darwin’s work also provided Anthropology the basis needed to begin carving out its place in the field of natural science, which Marx studied rigorously in his research for Capital and later projects.

Indeed, there is a noticeable difference in Marx’s early and later writing, but that’s no weakness; on the contrary, it directly contradicts accusations of dogmatism. I’ve heard some say that the young Marx is more humanist, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I think Marxism is a form of humanism and that can be seen through all Marx’s work, but the main difference, to me, is that the young Marx has more urgency while the mature Marx, no longer living in the midst of a revolutionary vacuum, becomes like one himself sucking up all the histories and new research that he can. In other words, Marx’s writing is always indicative of the time in which it was written.

We can observe how in the 1850s, after the Communist League disbanded and the revolutionary temperature began cooling down, Marx and Engels turned their attention to a more thorough examination of the political economists—Smith, Ricardo, Mill, etc.—and a study of the Utopian Socialists to give them the ammunition needed to resolutely distinguish their politics. It is also during the 1850s that Marx begins spending a lot of time in the British Museum reading room taking apart volume upon volume of histories, classics in political economy, and contemporary reports and studies.

It’s not fair or accurate to reduce Marx’s early activity to economic and political agitation. He was writing for the time he was in, trying to contribute to the revolutions happening across Europe while simultaneously grounding his ideas in world history. For these reasons, I think it’s wise to read his early work with a nuanced understanding that these writings come from a time of tension and change; and, in my opinion, the earlier work is useful to study how Marx came to the ideas that are best expressed in his later writing—especially Capital.

With that out of the way, we can turn to some practical advice.

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For the Beginner:

The greatest advice I can give to anyone just starting out with Marxism is to learn the historical context behind whatever text, concept, etc. that you’re working on. At it’s most basic, Marxism is about identifying and distinguishing between the things that are natural to us—like labor—and the things that are artificial—such as money. How do you do that? by studying history and placing things in their proper context. This is how you find yourself when you’re lost. I’ve attempted to show the value of historical nuance by using the early events of Marx’s life to refute charges of reductionism in the first part of this essay.

If you’re going to learn the method, you’ll have to learn how to read syntopically. This could be an entire essay in itself, so I will summarize the key ideas and allow you to explore the topic in greater detail if you so wish. Syntopical reading is the highest stage of reading. As the name suggests, it involves reading and analyzing multiple texts across the same and different topics to compare, contrast, and, ultimately, to synthesize ideas. You may have heard of the Zettelkasten note taking system before, this is essentially the same idea: through a close reading of multiple authors, we can generate new ideas.

You’ll notice that syntopical reading is simply what every great thinker throughout history has done. Marx read widely and always added his own thoughts and comments, allowing him to collect multiple notebooks filled with source material which he then used to synthesize his own original ideas through his writing. Always read with a pencil in hand ready to underline or mark the important bits and always, always summarize in your own words what you’ve just read. Write down the thoughts that come to you because they will soon fade and, as much as you say you will, you will not remember them, so capture them while they appear.

Keep a notebook close (or use an app like Obsidian) to jot down quotations important to you. It seems to be personal preference regarding the choice to classify notebooks by topic—I know Marx did. Be selective about what you write down from other authors, try to find the shortest excerpt that accurately does the work you need it to do. The most important thing regarding the collection of source material is that you go onto the next step, which is comparing and contrasting different ideas and viewpoints.

Synthesis is achieved through our own writing. It is here that we get to leave our mark, so to speak, through adding something novel to the discussion started by our predecessors. The more that we’ve read, the more we’ll have to say of our own. We can be most critical of our own ideas, something widely observed in Marx.

Let time work. There will be concepts that we simply struggle to understand. During these moments it is good to take a step back, endeavor upon a different idea, and allow space for the answer to find us. This is absolutely necessary, for, as I hope I’ve shown, it is far worse to have a misunderstanding of Marxism than it is to not understand it at all.