Karl Marx – From Marxianism to Marxism

Abstract

Firstly, this paper will define the two main concepts in the title “Marxianism and Marxism”, because one of them, Marxism, is a term frequently met in the writings about Marx, while the other, namely Marxianism, designates the actual work of Marx. Secondly, the main objective of this paper is to observe the difference between the two terms with examples from Marx’s work, his theories and the way they were applied by his followers, the twentieth century communists. And to narrow the area we will discuss only how the Marxianism was interpreted in Stalin’s regime. We will see to what extent Marx's ideas were followed when applied in real life. In our research, we will see that we can talk about a degradation of Marx’s ideas and that this degradation occurred gradually. They have been degraded with the passage of time and after going through the minds of others who changed his ideology in order to meet their own interests and ideas, as Stalin’s ideology did. Regarding the results we expect from our research, we want to see if nowadays Marx can be held responsible for the extreme forms of twentieth century communism and, if not, what happened to the theory of Marx and most important how was it changed.