Almost every argument about Marxism that goes nowhere goes nowhere for the same reason: two people are using one word in two senses and neither has noticed. Somebody says communism and means a stateless society of associated producers; somebody else hears it and thinks of a twentieth-century party state. Somebody says value and means the labour embodied in a commodity; somebody else hears it and thinks of price. Somebody says ideology and means the systematic distortion of understanding by social position; somebody else hears it and thinks of any set of political beliefs, which is the ordinary English sense and which makes the claim being advanced sound either trivial or insulting.

A Marxism glossary that lists these words alphabetically with a definition apiece does nothing about that, because the problem was never the absence of definitions. The problem is that the terms come in near-neighbour pairs, and the useful knowledge is not what each word means but where the boundary between it and its neighbour falls. That is what this glossary supplies. It defines around seventy terms, organised by domain rather than alphabetically so that related vocabulary sits together, and after each definition it draws the boundary against whatever the term is most often confused with.

The organising claim is that nearly every misuse of Marxist vocabulary in public argument, in student writing, and in journalism is one of twelve specific collapses, and that naming which collapse is happening ends most of these arguments faster than any counter-argument does. Those twelve pairs are set out below in a single table, and the rest of the glossary works through the domains one at a time: the economic vocabulary, the vocabulary of history and method, the vocabulary of class and society, the vocabulary of ideology and culture, the vocabulary of politics and organisation, and finally the factional labels, which behave differently from everything else because most of them were coined by opponents.

Two conventions apply throughout. Where a term is not Marx’s own, the glossary says whose it is and when it entered the vocabulary, because a large share of the errors in circulation consist of attributing to Marx a word he never used. And where a term has an article of its own in this series, the entry defines it and points there rather than expanding, since a glossary that tries to be complete on every term stops being a glossary. For the orientation to the subject as a whole, rather than to its vocabulary, the complete guide to Marxism is the parent to this one.

The twelve confusion pairs

The pair	What separates them	What follows from collapsing them
Socialism and communism	In Marx’s usage they name two phases of one post-capitalist development, the first still distributing by labour contribution, the second by need; in twentieth-century usage they came to name two rival political movements	Reading every difference between social democratic and communist parties back into Marx, who drew no such party distinction
Means of production and mode of production	Means are the physical and technical inputs; a mode is the means combined with the social relations under which they are used	Treating a change of technology as a change of mode of production, which makes the theory technological
Use value and exchange value	Use value is a good’s capacity to satisfy a want; exchange value is the proportion in which it trades for others	Concluding that Marx thought useful things were valuable, which inverts the argument of the opening chapter of Capital
Value and price	Value is socially necessary labour time; price is the money form actually realised, which diverges from value systematically	Testing the theory by checking whether prices equal labour times, which no version of it claims
Alienation and commodity fetishism	Alienation is a relation of the producer to their activity and product; fetishism is an appearance in which relations between people present themselves as properties of things	Using fetishism as a synonym for consumerism, which is the commonest error in the whole vocabulary
Ideology and false consciousness	Ideology is a structural account of how ruling ideas arise and function; false consciousness is a phrase for individuals being mistaken about their interests	Attributing to Marx a theory of duped individuals, and attributing the phrase itself to him, when it appears in an Engels letter of 1893
Reification and alienation	Reification is the appearance of a social relation as a thing with its own laws; alienation is the separation of a producer from their own activity	Treating a term Lukacs developed in the twentieth century as Marx’s own vocabulary
Class in itself and class for itself	The first is a position within relations of production; the second is a collective actor conscious of that position	Assuming the second follows automatically from the first, which is what the theory denies
Proletariat and lumpenproletariat	The proletariat sells labour power; the lumpenproletariat is a specific and unflattering political category, not simply the poorest workers	Reading Marx as contemptuous of the poor, or as treating poverty rather than position as the criterion of class
Constant and variable capital	Constant capital transfers its value to the product; variable capital, spent on labour power, produces more value than it costs	Losing the entire argument about the source of surplus value, which rests on this asymmetry
Historical materialism and dialectical materialism	The first is a theory of society and historical change; the second is a general philosophical doctrine systematised after Marx’s death	Importing the three laws of the dialectic into an account of history where they do no work
Dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship in the ordinary sense	The phrase uses the nineteenth-century sense of class rule under emergency conditions, not the twentieth-century sense of personal despotism	Reading a nineteenth-century constitutional term through a twentieth-century political experience the term did not describe

The table is the argument of this article in compressed form and it repays being learned rather than consulted. Each row is a distinction that, once held, prevents a specific family of errors, and between them the twelve cover the great majority of what goes wrong when this vocabulary is used by people who did not acquire it from the texts.

Why do people misuse Marxist terms so consistently?

Because most of the vocabulary reached English through three filters: nineteenth-century translation choices, twentieth-century party codification, and Cold War polemic on both sides. Each filter changed some terms. A reader who learns the words from any one filter alone will use several of them in a sense the texts do not support.

That is not a complaint about ordinary speakers. It is an observation about how a technical vocabulary becomes a political one, and it explains why the errors are so patterned. They are not random misunderstandings; they are the residue of specific historical processes, and knowing which process produced which error is often more useful than knowing the correct definition.

The economic vocabulary

This is the most technical family and the one where imprecision does the most damage, because the terms form a chain and breaking any link makes the rest unintelligible.

A commodity is a thing produced for exchange rather than for the producer’s own use. The definition is relational rather than physical: the same loaf is a commodity when baked for sale and not when baked at home. Marx opens the first volume of Capital with the commodity for a structural reason rather than an arbitrary one, since everything else in the book is derived from features he claims to find in it.

Use value is the capacity of a thing to satisfy some human want, and it belongs to the thing’s physical properties and their relation to a need. Exchange value is the quantitative proportion in which one sort of thing exchanges for another. Value, unqualified, is the third term and is the one that causes trouble, because in Marx’s usage it is neither of the first two: it is the substance whose magnitude is measured by socially necessary labour time, of which exchange value is the outward form of appearance. Confusing the three is the entry point to almost every misreading of the economic argument, and the full treatment of use value, exchange value and value works through the distinction with the textual evidence.

Socially necessary labour time is the labour time required to produce a good under the conditions of production normal for a given society, with the average degree of skill and intensity prevailing. The qualifier does all the work. It means that a slow or incompetent producer does not create more value by taking longer, and it means that the measure is a social average rather than an individual expenditure, which removes at a stroke the objection that the theory implies wasted effort is valuable.

Labour power is the capacity to work, as distinct from labour, which is the exercise of that capacity. The distinction is the pivot of the whole system. What the worker sells is labour power, a commodity with a value like any other, determined by what it costs to reproduce it; what the buyer consumes is labour, whose exercise can create more value than the labour power cost. Everything Marx says about exploitation depends on this being a distinction rather than a synonym, and a reader who has not held it will find the argument about surplus value either mysterious or circular.

Surplus value is the difference between the value produced by labour and the value of the labour power purchased. It is not profit, and the difference matters: profit is a form in which surplus value appears at the level of the individual enterprise after distribution among capitals, rent, and interest, and the relationship between the two is the substance of a long technical dispute in the tradition. The complete guide to surplus value is the owner of this term and sets out the absolute and relative forms.

Constant capital is the portion of capital laid out on means of production, so called because its value reappears in the product without increase. Variable capital is the portion laid out on labour power, so called because it is the part whose magnitude changes in the process. The naming is not decorative; it encodes the claim that only one of the two is a source of new value, which is exactly the claim the whole system stands on and exactly the claim its critics attack.

The organic composition of capital is the ratio between these two, measured in value terms, insofar as that ratio reflects the underlying technical proportion between the mass of means of production and the amount of labour needed to set them in motion. The qualification distinguishes it from a simple value ratio that might change because prices changed rather than because technique changed, and the distinction is what makes the concept usable in the argument about the tendency of the profit rate.

Accumulation is the conversion of surplus value back into capital rather than into consumption, and it is the process that gives the system its dynamic character. Primitive accumulation, sometimes rendered as original or previous accumulation, is not a phase of that process but its historical precondition: the separation of producers from the means of production that had to occur before the process could begin. The final part of the first volume of Capital treats it, and the treatment is historical rather than deductive, which is why the guide to primitive accumulation reads differently from the theoretical chapters.

Immiseration, from the German Verelendung, names the claim in the chapter on the general law of capitalist accumulation that the process produces an accumulation of misery at one pole alongside an accumulation of wealth at the other. Whether the claim is absolute, meaning that workers’ living standards fall, or relative, meaning that their share falls while their standard may rise, is a genuine and unsettled question in the scholarship, and any confident assertion of one reading should be treated with suspicion. The reserve army of labour is the connected concept: the pool of unemployed and underemployed whose existence disciplines wages, treated at length in the dedicated article on the reserve army.

Realisation is the sale of the commodity, the moment at which value produced becomes value received, and the possibility that production and realisation come apart is one of the sources of crisis theory. Circulation is the movement of commodities and money through exchange, and the crucial claim about it is negative: circulation does not create value, it redistributes it, which is why the explanation of profit has to be sought in production.

The vocabulary of history and method

This family contains the terms most often attributed to Marx that are not his, so provenance matters more here than anywhere else.

Historical materialism is the claim that the way a society produces and reproduces its material life is the fundamental determinant of its structure and its historical change, and that legal, political, and intellectual forms are to be explained by reference to that productive base rather than the reverse. Neither Marx nor Engels used the phrase in the founding texts; Marx called his approach a guiding thread for his studies, and Engels wrote of the materialist conception of history before adopting the shorter name late in his life. The complete guide to historical materialism owns this term and sets out the six separable propositions it contains.

Dialectical materialism is a general philosophical doctrine about the nature of reality and the laws governing its development, of which historical materialism was later presented as the application to human society. It is not Marx’s term and it is not Engels’s coinage either in the settled form the textbooks give it; the attribution is genuinely contested in the scholarship, with the phrase associated in different accounts with Joseph Dietzgen and with its subsequent circulation through the Russian and German movements, and it acquired its canonical shape in the Soviet expositions of the twentieth century. Anyone who tells you confidently who coined it and when is reporting one side of an argument. The dedicated article on dialectical materialism sets out the competing attributions.

The mode of production is the unity of the productive forces and the relations of production, taken as a functioning system with its own logic of reproduction. It is the theory’s basic unit of historical analysis, and it is not the same as an economy or an economic system in ordinary usage, since it includes the property and authority relations rather than treating them as a separate political layer. The means of production are only the material and technical component, and collapsing the two is the second row of the confusion table.

The forces of production are the means, techniques, applied knowledge, and labour power by which a society transforms nature. The relations of production are the effective control over those forces and over the product, most often taking the form of property relations. The pairing is the apparatus without which the mechanism of historical change cannot be stated, and the treatment of the mode of production works through the boundary cases.

A social formation is a concrete society at a particular time, which typically contains more than one mode of production, one of them dominant. The term does more work in the later structuralist literature than in Marx, and its usefulness is that it prevents the analytical error of treating an actual society as though it were a pure specimen of a single mode, which no actual society has ever been.

Base and superstructure is the metaphor from the 1859 preface in which the totality of relations of production forms the economic structure, the real foundation, on which a legal and political superstructure rises and to which forms of social consciousness correspond. The metaphor is architectural and its limits are architectural: buildings do not react back on their foundations, and the whole subsequent argument about the theory concerns the qualification, stated repeatedly in Engels’s letters of the 1890s, that determination operates only in the last instance and that the superstructural elements act back on the base. The full account of base and superstructure is the owner of this term.

Contradiction in this vocabulary does not mean logical inconsistency and does not mean mere conflict. It names a relation in which two elements of a system are simultaneously mutually dependent and mutually undermining, so that the system’s normal operation generates the pressures that transform it. The relation between the socialised character of production and the private character of appropriation is the standard example. A reader who imports the logical sense will conclude that the theory is claiming a self-contradiction, which is not the claim, and a reader who imports the ordinary sense of conflict will find the term redundant.

Dialectic names a method of analysis in which things are grasped through their relations, their internal tensions, and their movement rather than as fixed and separate items. In Marx’s own statements the emphasis falls on the treatment of every historically developed form as in fluid movement and therefore as transient. The three-step formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which appears in almost every popular account, is not Hegel’s terminology in that form and is not Marx’s at all; it entered circulation through a nineteenth-century schematisation of Hegel and has been repeated ever since.

The negation of the negation is the Hegelian figure Marx uses at the close of the historical part of the first volume of Capital, where capitalist private property, itself the negation of individual private property based on the producer’s own labour, is in turn negated. It is a figure of argument in that passage rather than a law being applied, and Engels’s later exposition in his polemic against Dühring, which presents it as one of the general laws of dialectics, is a systematisation rather than a report.

Praxis is practical activity that is at once transformative of the world and self-transformative, and the term marks the claim that human beings make themselves through what they do rather than being fixed natures who then act. Its locus is the notes on Feuerbach that Marx wrote in 1845 and that Engels published after his death, and it is worth knowing that those notes are a private working document rather than a considered statement, since a great deal has been built on eleven short paragraphs.

Overdetermination is a later term, introduced into this vocabulary from psychoanalysis by Althusser, naming the situation in which an event is produced by a convergence of several determinations rather than by one, so that the economic determination never appears in a pure state. It is useful and it is not Marx’s, and using it as though it were is a frequent slip in student writing.

The vocabulary of class and society

The bourgeoisie is the class that owns the means of production and lives by the appropriation of surplus produced by others. The word is French in origin and originally denoted town-dwellers of a certain standing, which is why it carries a residue of the sense of respectable middle-class propriety in ordinary English usage, quite distinct from its technical sense. In the technical sense a person’s income level is irrelevant; what matters is the relation to the means of production. A highly paid manager who owns nothing productive is not bourgeois on this definition, and a small proprietor of modest means is closer to bourgeois than a well-paid employee, which is exactly the sort of result that makes the technical usage counter-intuitive and worth stating explicitly.

The petty bourgeoisie, also rendered as petit bourgeois or small bourgeoisie, comprises those who own their own means of production but do not principally live by employing others: the small proprietor, the independent artisan, the smallholding farmer, the self-employed professional. The category matters because the theory predicts its erosion, because that prediction is one of the empirical tests of the theory, and because it is the class to which a great deal of political behaviour has been attributed by later Marxists. The article on the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes handles the fate of the category and the argument about intermediate strata.

The proletariat is the class that owns no means of production and lives by the sale of labour power. The criterion is the sale of labour power, not poverty, not manual work, and not factory employment, which is why the frequent claim that the proletariat has disappeared usually turns out to rest on a definition Marx did not use. A wage labourer and a proletarian are the same thing in the technical vocabulary. The complete guide to class in Marxist theory sets out the full apparatus.

The lumpenproletariat is Marx’s term for a stratum he treats as detached from production altogether and available for political use by whoever pays. His usage, especially in the account of the coup of the early 1850s in France, is specific and unflattering, and the passages have been read as contemptuous, which they are. Two errors follow from mistranslating the category as simply the very poor: the first is the belief that Marx’s class scheme sorts by income, and the second is the belief that he despised the poorest workers, which conflates a political category with an economic one. The technical point is that this stratum is defined by its detachment from the relations of production, which is precisely what makes its political behaviour, on Marx’s account, unpredictable.

Class in itself and class for itself name the difference between a class defined objectively by its position in production and a class that has become a collective actor conscious of that position. The formulation as students learn it is not Marx’s own phrasing, and its currency owes most to the reading associated with Lukacs, projected back onto passages in which Marx says something adjacent but not identical. The precise treatment of the pair sets out what Marx actually writes and where the later formulation came from, and it is one of the highest-value corrections in the whole vocabulary because the phrase is so widely used and so rarely sourced.

Class consciousness is the awareness by members of a class of their shared position, interests, and antagonists. Two things about it recur in the literature: that it does not arise automatically from class position, which is the whole point of the previous pair, and that its content is a matter of dispute, since some accounts treat it as the accurate perception of an existing interest and others treat it as something constructed in the course of struggle. The article on class consciousness works through the difference.

Class struggle is the conflict between classes arising from their opposed positions in production, and in the theory it is the mechanism through which structural contradiction becomes historical change. The opening of the Manifesto states that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, a formulation Engels later qualified in a footnote to exclude the earliest societies, which is a small but genuine example of the founders revising a famous line.

Relations of exploitation and the rate of exploitation belong to the economic family but recur here, since exploitation in this vocabulary is a technical relation, namely the appropriation of surplus labour, rather than a moral judgement about mistreatment. Whether the technical sense carries an implicit moral charge is a real and live question in the scholarship and is not settled by pointing at the definition.

The vocabulary of ideology and culture

This family carries the heaviest load of ordinary-language interference, because several of its terms have escaped into general use with altered senses.

Ideology in the technical sense is not a synonym for political belief. It names a structural account of how the ideas prevailing in a society come to be those that suit its dominant class, and of how such ideas present a particular interest as a general one. The German Ideology, written between 1845 and 1846 and unpublished at the time, supplies the formulation about the ruling ideas of an epoch being the ideas of its ruling class. The later tradition splits over whether ideology is best understood as distortion, as the necessary form in which social relations appear, or as a material practice embedded in institutions, and the complete guide to the Marxist theory of ideology sets out the three readings. When someone says that everything is ideology, they are almost always using the ordinary sense, in which the claim is either trivial or unfalsifiable.

False consciousness is a phrase for the condition of holding beliefs about one’s situation that misrepresent one’s actual interests. It is not Marx’s phrase. It appears in a letter Engels wrote to Franz Mehring in 1893, describing ideology as a process accomplished with a consciousness that is false in the sense that the real motive forces remain unknown to the thinker. That provenance matters for two reasons: because attributing the phrase to Marx is a straightforward error a specialist will catch, and because the critique that the concept is condescending, treating people as dupes, is aimed at something the founding texts do not contain in that form. The article on false consciousness handles both.

Commodity fetishism is the appearance, under conditions where products are exchanged, of the social relations between producers as though they were properties of the products themselves, so that value looks like an attribute of a thing in the way that weight is. The account occupies the fourth section of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital. It is not a claim about consumers being obsessed with goods, and the routine use of the term to mean consumerism or brand attachment is the single most common misuse in the entire vocabulary. The guide to commodity fetishism owns this term and corrects the three standard misreadings.

Reification, from the German Verdinglichung, names the process by which a social relation takes on the appearance of a thing governed by its own laws, confronting people as an external and objective order. Marx uses cognate terms occasionally; the developed concept belongs to Lukacs and to the long essay on it in his collection of 1923, which built on the fetishism section and on Weber’s account of rationalisation. Treating reification and alienation as synonyms is the seventh row of the confusion table: alienation concerns the producer’s relation to their own activity and product, reification concerns the form in which social relations appear.

Alienation, from Entfremdung and the related Entäusserung, names the condition in which the producer’s own activity and its products confront them as an alien power. The manuscripts Marx wrote in Paris in 1844 and left unpublished distinguish four relations of alienation: from the product, from the act of production, from species-being, and from other people. Those four are not interchangeable and the distinction between them is the substance of the concept. The complete guide to alienation is the owner, and the manuscripts’ unpublished status until the twentieth century is part of why the term’s reception history is so unusual.

Species-being, from Gattungswesen, is the term in the same manuscripts for the distinctively human capacity to make one’s own life activity an object of consciousness and to produce universally rather than under the compulsion of immediate need. It is Feuerbach’s vocabulary being put to a new use, and it largely disappears from Marx’s later writing, which is one of the pieces of evidence in the long argument about continuity between the early and mature work.

Hegemony names leadership exercised through consent secured in civil society rather than through coercion alone, so that a dominant group’s outlook comes to function as ordinary common sense. The developed concept is Gramsci’s, worked out in the notebooks he wrote in prison between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s, though the word had a prior currency in Russian social-democratic debate meaning the leading role of a class in an alliance. The complete guide to hegemony is the owner, and the comparison of ideology, hegemony and discourse draws the boundaries between the three.

Superstructure as a standalone term, cultural production, and the culture industry belong to the extensions of this family rather than to its core. The last is the Frankfurt School’s term for the industrial organisation of cultural output and its effects on the character of that output, and it is not Marx’s and postdates him by a long way.

The vocabulary of politics and organisation

Every term in this family is contested, most of them have polemical histories, and several were coined as accusations. Handling them requires saying who uses them how rather than adopting one camp’s usage as neutral description.

The dictatorship of the proletariat names the political rule of the working class during the transition out of capitalism. The phrase appears in Marx’s critique of the Gotha programme, written in 1875 and published by Engels in 1891, and earlier in an 1852 letter to Joseph Weydemeyer. The word dictatorship carries its nineteenth-century sense, drawn from the Roman constitutional office, of emergency rule by a class under exceptional conditions, and it does not carry the twentieth-century sense of personal despotism with which it later became inseparably associated. That drift is genuine and consequential rather than a matter of prejudice, since the phrase was subsequently used to describe party states, and any account which claims the term is simply misunderstood is passing over the reason it is understood as it is. The dedicated article treats the history.

The withering away of the state is Engels’s formulation, in his polemic against Dühring, for the claim that the state as an instrument of class rule becomes superfluous once classes are abolished and gives way to the administration of things. It is not a claim that government ceases, and the distinction between the coercive apparatus and administration is what the formulation turns on.

A vanguard party is an organisation of the most politically developed workers and intellectuals, claiming to supply the leadership and theoretical clarity that the class will not spontaneously generate. The conception is Lenin’s, developed in the pamphlet of 1902 and later modified by him, and it is not in Marx. Whether it follows from Marx or breaks with him is one of the genuine unresolved debates in the tradition rather than a settled question. The article on the vanguard party sets it out.

Democratic centralism is the organisational principle combining free discussion before a decision with binding unity in carrying it out. It is a Bolshevik formulation, its practical meaning shifted substantially across the twentieth century, and describing it purely by its formal definition without describing how it operated is a form of euphemism. The dedicated article handles both the principle and the record.

Revisionism names the position, associated above all with Bernstein’s writings at the end of the 1890s, that the empirical predictions of the theory required substantial amendment and that a parliamentary and reformist road to socialism was both possible and preferable. In its origin it is a description; in its subsequent career it became an accusation, and within twentieth-century communist parties it functioned as a charge of political deviation rather than as a description of a theoretical position. Both uses are in circulation and they are not the same word doing the same work.

Opportunism names the subordination of long-term objectives to immediate advantage, and it too is a polemical term more often than a descriptive one. Sectarianism names the placing of a small organisation’s purity above the requirements of a broader movement, and ultra-leftism names the refusal of tactical compromises on principle. This trio acquired their canonical usage largely through Lenin’s polemic of 1920 against a tendency he regarded as an infantile disorder, and each of the three is used almost exclusively as a criticism of someone else.

Reform and revolution as a pair name the strategic dispute over whether the existing state can be used to achieve a transformation or must be broken and replaced. Permanent revolution is Trotsky’s formulation about the telescoping of bourgeois and socialist tasks in a late-developing country. Socialism in one country is the counter-formulation associated with Stalin. Each of these is owned by a later article in this series, and each is unsafe to define in one sentence without saying whose sentence it is.

Praxis, agitation, and propaganda carry technical senses in this family that differ from ordinary English. Propaganda in the older movement vocabulary meant the detailed exposition of many ideas to a few people, while agitation meant the presentation of one idea to many; the ordinary English sense of propaganda as deliberate falsehood is a twentieth-century development and reading it back produces nonsense.

Socialism, communism, and the phases

This is the first row of the confusion table and it deserves its own treatment, because it is the most searched distinction in the entire vocabulary and because the honest answer is more complicated than either of the two standard ones.

In Marx’s own usage the two words are not a pair of rival systems. The critique of the Gotha programme distinguishes a first phase of communist society, emerging from capitalism and still bearing its birthmarks, in which distribution is according to labour contribution, from a higher phase in which the division of labour and the antithesis between mental and physical work have gone and distribution can proceed according to need. Marx does not call the first phase socialism. That labelling is Lenin’s, in the pamphlet he wrote in 1917 on the state, and it is from there that the schoolroom formula of socialism as the lower stage and communism as the higher entered general circulation.

Complicating this, both words had prior careers. Socialism in the middle of the nineteenth century covered a wide field of movements, many of which Marx and Engels attacked at length, which is why the Manifesto contains a whole section classifying and dismissing varieties of socialism. Their adoption of communist rather than socialist as a self-description in the 1840s was a deliberate act of differentiation from those currents. The relationship then reversed over the following decades, with socialist becoming the ordinary term for the movement and communist being revived as a party name after the split in the international movement during and after the First World War.

The practical consequence for a careful writer is that neither word can be used without specifying whose usage is meant. In Marx’s usage the two name phases. In twentieth-century political usage they name rival parties and traditions, one broadly parliamentary and the other not. In ordinary contemporary usage socialism frequently means a large welfare state within a market economy, which is neither of the above and which Marx would not have recognised under that name. Saying which usage you mean costs six words and prevents the most common of all the arguments in this field.

The factional labels

Labels behave differently from concepts. Most of them were applied by opponents, several have never had a settled definition, and their referents shift by decade and by country. The rule for all of them is to say who is using the word and in what sense rather than to offer a definition as though the matter were settled.

Marxism-Leninism is the doctrinal synthesis codified after Lenin’s death and expounded most influentially by Stalin, presenting a unified body of philosophy, political economy, and strategy, with dialectical materialism as its philosophical foundation and the vanguard party as its organisational principle. Whoever uses it is asserting a continuity that others deny, which is why the phrase is a claim rather than a neutral description.

Stalinism is used in three distinct ways that are worth keeping apart: as a description of a system of rule characterised by concentrated personal power, terror, and the subordination of the party to a leadership; as a name for a body of doctrine, principally the theory of socialism in one country and the associated codification of dialectical and historical materialism; and as a term of political abuse within the left, where it functions to mark an opponent as authoritarian. Nobody has ever used it as a self-description.

Trotskyism names the current descending from Trotsky’s opposition, defined by the theory of permanent revolution, the analysis of the Soviet state as a degenerated workers’ state, and opposition to the doctrine of socialism in one country. Unlike most labels in this family it is used as a self-description, though its internal divisions are numerous.

Maoism, or Mao Zedong Thought in the formulation used within the Chinese party, names the body of doctrine associated with the peasantry as a revolutionary base, protracted people’s war, and the theory of contradiction as applied to socialist society. As with the previous entries, the doctrine and the historical record of the states associated with it are separate questions and must be argued separately.

Western Marxism names the current that developed in Western Europe from the interwar period, characteristically philosophical rather than economic in emphasis, concerned with culture, consciousness, and method, and distanced from the parties. The term owes its currency to Merleau-Ponty’s use of it in the 1950s and above all to Perry Anderson’s survey published in 1976. The complete guide to Western Marxism sets out the boundary cases.

Neo-Marxism is the loosest label in the family and rarely repays use. It is applied to almost any twentieth-century development that retains Marxist categories while abandoning some classical commitment, and because the abandoned commitment differs by author, the term carries little information. Where possible, name the current rather than the prefix.

Post-Marxism names the position that retains Marxist concerns while abandoning the class-based theory of political agency, associated above all with the work Laclau and Mouffe published in 1985 on hegemony and socialist strategy. The prefix is intended seriously: the position holds that the theory’s economic determination of political identity cannot be sustained. The article on post-Marxism treats the argument.

Analytical Marxism names the current that submitted Marxist claims to the standards of analytical philosophy and mainstream social science, associated with a group of scholars who met from the late 1970s and with Cohen’s reconstruction of the theory of history. Its distinguishing move was the rejection of dialectical method as a source of insight, which is why the complete guide to analytical Marxism treats it as both a defence and a dismantling.

Cultural Marxism is a contested term with a specific and polemical history, and its meaning depends entirely on who is speaking. This glossary defines it only as a pointer: the history of the term sets out its origins, its academic and its polemical uses, and who employs it in which sense. Using it as though it were a straightforward descriptive category, in either direction, is not available to a careful writer.

Marxist and Marxian are worth separating because the distinction is real and is used deliberately in academic writing. Marxian generally signals the use of Marx’s analytical apparatus without political commitment to the movement, which is why economists working on value theory and on the profit rate often prefer it. Marxist generally signals both the apparatus and the commitment. Neither usage is universal, and some writers use the pair without any distinction at all, so the safest practice is to notice which a source is using rather than to assume.

What the translations did

Several of the difficulties in this vocabulary are translation artefacts rather than conceptual problems, and knowing which is which saves a great deal of confusion.

Aufhebung is the Hegelian term Marx inherits, rendered variously as supersession, sublation, transcendence, and abolition. The German carries three senses at once, of cancelling, preserving, and raising to a higher level, and no English word carries all three. Translations that render it as abolition alone make Marx sound purely destructive; translations that render it as sublation preserve the technical sense at the cost of intelligibility. When a passage turns on the word, a careful writer names the German.

Wertform, the value form, is the term at the centre of the opening chapter of Capital and of a whole later interpretive tradition. Older English translations handled the value-form material less carefully than later ones, which is one of the reasons the value-form reading was slower to develop in English than in German, and it is a case where the choice of translation materially affects what the reader can see in the text.

Verkehr in the early writings covers commerce, intercourse, communication, and traffic in a way no single English word does, and the translation choice in a given passage can make the argument look economic or social depending on which sense is foregrounded.

Labour and labor, socialisation and socialization, are spelling variants rather than differences of sense, but they matter for searching, since the standard English translations of the major works use the British forms and a reader searching the American forms will get a different set of results.

The general point is that a term’s difficulty is sometimes located in the German and sometimes manufactured in English, and the two require different responses. The guide to Marx in translation sets out which editions handle which terms best and is the place to go before quoting anything where the wording carries the argument.

Terms people think are Marxist and are not

Several items of vocabulary are routinely attributed to this tradition and belong elsewhere, and correcting the attribution is worth doing because the errors travel.

The phrase about religion being the opium of the people is genuinely Marx’s, from the introduction to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, but the surrounding sentences, which describe religion as the sigh of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world, are almost always stripped away, and stripping them reverses the passage’s sense from diagnosis to contempt.

The formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is not Marx’s and is not Hegel’s in that form. It reached general circulation through a nineteenth-century summariser of Hegel and has proved impossible to dislodge.

The line asserting that democracy is the road to socialism is attributed to Marx constantly and has no located source in his writings. Treat any circulating quotation you cannot trace to a work as unverified rather than as probably genuine.

The claim that from each according to ability, to each according to need is a slogan Marx coined is a half-truth: he uses the formulation in the critique of the Gotha programme, but the phrasing has a prior history in French socialist writing, and Marx is invoking a known formula rather than minting one.

Late-stage capitalism as an internet idiom descends distantly from the term late capitalism used in twentieth-century Marxist economics, notably in Mandel’s work, where it named a specific periodisation with a specific content. The idiomatic usage carries none of that content and functions as an expression of exasperation, which is a legitimate thing for a phrase to do but is not a theoretical claim.

Material conditions as ordinarily used means roughly circumstances, whereas in the technical vocabulary it means the productive forces and relations under which a society reproduces itself. The ordinary usage is not wrong, but an argument that slides from one to the other has equivocated.

Which words in this vocabulary are not Marx’s own?

A large share of them. False consciousness is Engels’s, from an 1893 letter. Dialectical materialism, reification, hegemony, interpellation, and the ideological state apparatuses all postdate Marx. Class in itself and class for itself, in the form students use it, is a later formulation projected backwards. Historical materialism as a name is Engels’s late usage.

The reason this matters is not antiquarian. A tradition of a hundred and sixty years accumulates vocabulary, and each addition was made to solve a problem the earlier vocabulary could not handle. Reification was introduced because the fetishism section needed extending to bureaucratic and legal forms. Hegemony was introduced because the theory of the state could not explain the durability of consent in societies with dense civil institutions. Relative autonomy was introduced because the determinism objection had landed. Interpellation was introduced because a theory of ideology as false belief could not explain how ideology operates through practices rather than through propositions.

Reading the vocabulary as a record of successive repairs is more accurate than reading it as a fixed doctrinal lexicon, and it changes what an attribution error costs. Attributing hegemony to Marx does not merely get a fact wrong; it erases the reason the concept exists, which is that something in the earlier account was not working. A reader who knows which problem each term was invented to solve understands the tradition considerably better than one who has learned the definitions in alphabetical order.

The same reading explains why several terms have rivals. Reification and alienation overlap because they were introduced at different times to handle related problems. Ideology, hegemony, and discourse overlap because each represents a different generation’s attempt to explain why subordinate groups so often accept arrangements that disadvantage them. Where two terms in this vocabulary compete, there is nearly always a live theoretical disagreement underneath, and the comparison of ideology, hegemony and discourse sets out the most important of these.

Words that escaped the tradition

Some of this vocabulary is no longer the tradition’s property, and pretending otherwise is a losing argument. Bourgeois functions in ordinary English as a mild insult meaning conventional, materialistic, and concerned with respectability, a sense that has nothing to do with ownership of the means of production and that predates the technical usage in French. Alienation is now a general term for feeling disconnected, used in psychology and in ordinary speech without any reference to production. Dialectical is used loosely to mean something like nuanced or two-sided. Praxis appears in education and in professional training with a sense closer to reflective practice than to anything Marx meant. Capital in ordinary business usage means funds available for investment, which is precisely the thing Marx’s definition of capital as self-expanding value in motion was designed to displace.

The honest position on these is that the ordinary senses are legitimate English and are not errors. What is an error is switching senses inside a single argument, and that is the actual complaint a careful writer is making when they object to loose usage.

How do you tell a technical usage from an ordinary one?

Ask whether the word is doing work that a plainer synonym could do. If replacing alienation with disconnection, or ideology with beliefs, or dialectical with two-sided leaves the argument unchanged, the usage is ordinary. If the substitution destroys the argument, the term is carrying technical content and needs its technical sense.

The test is quick and it settles most disputes about whether an objection to someone’s vocabulary is worth making. Applied to a sentence claiming that modern work is alienating because people feel disconnected from their employers, the substitution leaves everything standing, so the technical sense was never in play and correcting it achieves nothing. Applied to a sentence claiming that a rise in wages cannot eliminate alienation because alienation concerns the relation of the producer to their activity rather than to their pay, the substitution destroys the claim, so the technical sense is essential and a reader who imports the ordinary one will misunderstand it.

A second test works on written sources rather than on arguments. Look at what the writer contrasts the term with. Technical usage almost always sits inside a contrast, because these terms were introduced to mark distinctions, so a passage using value will normally be distinguishing it from price or from use value, and a passage using ideology in the structural sense will normally be distinguishing it from opinion or from conscious deception. Ordinary usage floats free of any contrast. That single observation identifies which register a source is writing in faster than reading its definitions, and it works even on writers who never define their terms at all.

Is insisting on the technical meanings just pedantry?

Not if the objection is correctly framed. Nobody owns a language, and ordinary usage of these words is legitimate. The complaint that carries force is narrower: an argument that uses a term in the ordinary sense to establish a premise and in the technical sense to draw a conclusion has equivocated, and equivocation is a fault regardless of who owns the word.

The pedantry objection is worth stating at full strength before answering it, because it is a good objection and the answer is not a dismissal. The strong version runs like this. Words mean what usage makes them mean. Several of these terms entered general English more than a century ago and have developed independently since. Insisting that everyone use a nineteenth-century technical sense is both futile and a rhetorical move, since it lets a specialist declare an opponent’s argument void on grounds of vocabulary rather than substance, and that manoeuvre is used constantly in these debates by people who are not otherwise interested in precision.

All of that is correct and should be conceded. The reply distinguishes two claims that get run together. The first is that ordinary usage is illegitimate, which this glossary does not assert and which would be indefensible. The second is that arguments switching between senses mid-argument are equivocations, which is a claim about argument rather than about vocabulary and which holds whoever is doing the switching. The commonest example is an argument that begins by noting most people now use socialism to mean a generous welfare state and concludes that Marx therefore favoured a generous welfare state, or its mirror image, which begins by noting that communism named a stateless society of associated producers and concludes that the states that called themselves communist have no bearing on the assessment of the theory. Both moves are the same fault in opposite directions, and naming the fault is not pedantry.

The practical test is whether the distinction changes what follows. If insisting on the technical sense of a term alters the conclusion of the argument, the insistence is doing work. If it merely corrects a word while leaving the argument intact, it is pedantry and should be dropped.

Which definitions are worth memorising

For anyone being assessed on this material, a small number of these entries are worth holding verbatim and the rest are worth holding as distinctions. The verbatim list is short: labour power as the capacity to work distinguished from labour as its exercise; socially necessary labour time with the qualifier about normal conditions and average skill; surplus value as the difference between the value produced and the value of the labour power purchased; the mode of production as the unity of forces and relations; and commodity fetishism as the appearance of social relations between producers as properties of things. Five definitions, each under thirty words, and between them they unlock most of the technical material on any syllabus.

Everything else is better held as a boundary than as a definition, because assessments on this vocabulary almost never ask what a term means and almost always ask how it differs from something else. A candidate who can state the difference between value and price, between ideology and false consciousness, and between class in itself and class for itself is better equipped than one who has memorised thirty definitions and no distinctions.

The trap specific to this material is provenance. Marks are lost, at every level from school through to postgraduate work, for attributing to Marx a term he never used, and the four that catch candidates most often are false consciousness, dialectical materialism, class in itself and class for itself, and reification. Each of them appears in the standard revision material without an attribution, and each of them has one. Writing the correct attribution in three words costs nothing and signals reading. Keeping a personal term list with the provenance attached to each entry is the form of note that actually survives to the examination; you can save your notes and build a citation-linked reading list free on VaultBook and keep the confusion pairs alongside the definitions, which is what turns a glossary from something you read into something you can use.

Which terms derail a class, and in what order to introduce them

For anyone teaching this vocabulary, three terms reliably produce trouble and the trouble is predictable enough to plan around.

Value is the first, because students arrive with the ordinary sense firmly installed and hear the technical claim as an obviously false statement about prices. The productive move is to refuse the definition initially and instead ask the class what makes two different things comparable at all, which is the question the concept was invented to answer. Introducing the answer after the question has been felt works; introducing it as a definition to be accepted does not.

Ideology is the second, because the ordinary sense is so dominant that the technical claim sounds either trivial or like an accusation directed at the student personally. The move that works is to ask whether there are any beliefs so ordinary in the class’s own society that nobody argues for them, and then to ask who benefits from their being unarguable. That question surfaces the structural sense without anyone having to be told they are deluded, which is the reaction that ends the discussion.

Communism is the third and is the one that carries the most emotional freight, since students bring the twentieth-century political referent and cannot hear the technical sense over it. Naming the ambiguity explicitly at the start, and being clear that the historical record of the states that used the name is a separate question that the course will treat separately and honestly, is more effective than trying to defer the political question, which will surface anyway and will surface as an interruption.

The introduction order that works runs from the economic vocabulary to the vocabulary of history and method to the vocabulary of ideology, rather than beginning with the political terms. The reason is that the economic terms are the least emotionally loaded and the most clearly defined, so the class establishes the habit of technical usage on easy material before applying it to material where they hold positions. Starting with communism and revolution reverses this and produces a term-long argument about the twentieth century in which no vocabulary is ever established.

For writers and researchers using these terms in print

The people most exposed by this vocabulary are those who have to use it under deadline without having studied it, which is a large share of journalists, policy writers, and general non-specialist authors. Three practices reduce the risk substantially.

Verify provenance before attributing any term to Marx. The failure mode is specific: a term that has become inseparable from Marx in general usage turns out to belong to Engels, to Lukacs, to Lenin, or to a twentieth-century codification, and the error is the kind a specialist reader will notice immediately and a general reader will never notice at all, which is exactly the profile of an error that survives into print. The four highest-risk terms have been named above and there are others; the operative rule is that if you did not encounter a term in a text you have read, do not attribute it to an author you have not checked.

Never quote a line you cannot locate to a work. The volume of fabricated and misattributed material circulating under Marx’s name is unusually high, and several of the most quotable lines attributed to him have no source. The safe practice is to cite the work and the part or chapter, and to treat an unlocatable quotation as unusable regardless of how widely it circulates.

Distinguish the doctrine from the record in every sentence where both appear. Writing that a policy is Marxist because a state calling itself Marxist did something similar is a category error that has migrated into a great deal of general-purpose commentary, and its mirror image, writing that a state’s actions have no bearing on the theory because the theory says otherwise, is the same error running the other way. Both need separate arguments, and the sentence that keeps them apart is usually a short one.

Where the term is contested, say who uses it in which sense rather than choosing. That applies with particular force to revisionism, to state capitalism, to totalitarianism, and to cultural Marxism, all of which carry polemical histories, and a piece that adopts one camp’s usage as neutral description has taken a side without telling the reader it has done so.

Correct usage in summary

The whole of this glossary reduces to four operating rules.

Name the sense. Where a term has an ordinary and a technical meaning, say which you are using, in the sentence where you first use it. This costs almost nothing and prevents the majority of unproductive arguments about this vocabulary.

Name the source. Where a term is not Marx’s, say whose it is. The tradition is a hundred and sixty years of argument by many people, and treating all of it as Marx’s flattens the intellectual history and produces attribution errors that are easy to avoid.

Hold the boundary, not the definition. The twelve confusion pairs carry more usable knowledge than seventy definitions, because the questions that actually arise are questions about differences.

And do not let a vocabulary dispute substitute for an argument. Precision in these terms is worth having because it lets a disagreement be about something, not because winning a point about wording settles anything. A person who uses socialism loosely may still be right about what they are arguing, and a person who uses every term correctly may still be wrong.

What remains genuinely unsettled in this vocabulary is worth naming too. Whether exploitation as a technical term carries an implicit moral judgement is disputed. Whether immiseration was meant absolutely or relatively is disputed. Whether the value form reading or the labour-embodied reading captures what the opening chapter of Capital is doing is disputed, and the complete guide to the labour theory of value sets out both. A glossary that presented these as settled would be more convenient and less accurate.

The crisis and accumulation vocabulary

These terms belong to the economic family but form a sub-group of their own, and they are the ones most often encountered by readers arriving from economics or financial journalism rather than from political theory.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall names the argument in the third volume of Capital that a rising organic composition of capital exerts downward pressure on the general rate of profit. Three features of the term are routinely lost. It is a tendency rather than a prediction of steady decline. It is stated together with a set of counteracting influences in the same part of the text, so any argument that ignores those influences is arguing against a text that does not exist. And the volume in which it appears was assembled by Engels from manuscripts after Marx’s death rather than prepared for publication by Marx himself, which is a fact about the status of the argument that any careful user of the term should know.

Overproduction names a crisis in which more has been produced than can be sold at prices realising the expected profit, and it is a claim about the relation between production and effective demand rather than about physical excess. Underconsumption names the different claim that the restriction of workers’ consumption relative to productive capacity is itself the source of crisis. The two are frequently used interchangeably and they are rival explanations, with Marx’s own relation to the underconsumptionist position being a matter of long dispute.

A realisation crisis is one in which value has been produced but cannot be converted into money through sale. A disproportionality crisis is one arising from the unplanned relation between sectors producing means of production and those producing consumption goods. Naming which mechanism is being claimed is the whole of clear writing about crisis theory, since the tradition contains at least three distinct accounts and the arguments between them are the substance of the field.

Finance capital is Hilferding’s term for the fusion of banking and industrial capital under the direction of the banks, and monopoly capital names the analysis of an economy dominated by large firms with administered prices rather than by competitive price-taking. Imperialism in this vocabulary is not simply the acquisition of colonies but a stage of capitalist development characterised by the export of capital and the division of the world among great powers, a formulation associated above all with Lenin’s pamphlet of 1916 and drawing on earlier work by Hobson and Hilferding. The complete guide to Marxism and imperialism owns the term.

Uneven and combined development names the observation that late-developing societies do not repeat the sequence of the early developers but combine the most advanced techniques with archaic social forms, producing distinctive political consequences. Dependency and unequal exchange name related later analyses of the relations between industrialised and peripheral economies. Each is owned by a later article in this series and each is a substantial theory rather than a term, so a single-sentence definition is a pointer rather than an account.

The vocabulary of later Marxist theory

A reader encountering this tradition through university social science will meet a second layer of vocabulary that postdates Marx entirely and that is often presented without any indication of its date.

Relative autonomy names the claim that the state and other superstructural institutions operate according to their own logics within limits set by the economic structure, rather than functioning as direct instruments. It is a formulation of the structuralist Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s and it is one of the tradition’s principal attempts to answer the determinism objection.

Interpellation is Althusser’s term for the process by which ideology constitutes individuals as subjects by addressing them, and the ideological state apparatuses are the institutions, including education, family, religion, and media, through which he argued ideology is materially reproduced, as distinct from the repressive apparatus of police, army, and courts. The article on Althusser treats both.

Articulation names the joining of distinct elements into a unity that does not derive necessarily from any of them, and it is central to the cultural Marxism of the British tradition and to post-Marxist theory. Subaltern entered this vocabulary through Gramsci, denoting groups subordinated within a social order and lacking their own coherent political voice, and it was subsequently developed by a school of South Asian historiography into something considerably more specific.

Organic intellectual, war of position, war of manoeuvre, and civil society are all Gramscian and are all frequently used without attribution. The organic intellectual is the thinker who arises from and articulates the outlook of a class rather than standing above the fray; the two wars name the strategic difference between the frontal assault appropriate where the state stands alone and the protracted struggle for position appropriate where it is buttressed by a dense civil society.

Social reproduction names the work of producing and maintaining the people who do the producing, including the unwaged labour of care and household maintenance, and the theory built around it is one of the tradition’s most substantial modern developments. It is not a synonym for reproduction in the biological sense and it is not simply another term for housework.

The vocabulary used to describe socialist states

Terms in this family are contested at their core, and using any of them commits the writer to a position whether they intend it or not.

State capitalism names the analysis that the economies of the twentieth-century socialist states remained capitalist in essential respects, with the state occupying the position of the collective employer and the fundamental relation of wage labour to capital preserved. It has been advanced from several directions, including by critics inside the tradition, and it is a substantive thesis rather than a description.

Degenerated workers’ state is the Trotskyist formulation for a society in which capitalist property relations have been abolished but political power has passed to a bureaucratic layer, and deformed workers’ state is the parallel term for those where the transformation was never under working-class control in the first place. Both terms encode a whole analysis and neither is available for neutral use.

Actually existing socialism was in origin a phrase used within those states to distinguish their reality from ideal projections, and it is now used by outside analysts to name the historical form as a subject of study rather than as an achievement or an indictment. It is the least loaded term in this family, which is why the scholarly literature uses it.

Command economy, central planning, and the nomenklatura system belong to the descriptive vocabulary of these societies rather than to Marxist theory proper. Marx wrote almost nothing about how a post-capitalist economy would be administered, which is one of the most consequential silences in the corpus and is the origin of the calculation debate that developed in the twentieth century.

The rule for all of these is the one stated earlier and repeated because it matters most here: the theory and the record require separate arguments. A vocabulary that builds the verdict into the term makes that separation impossible, which is precisely why so many of these words were coined.

How to check a term yourself

The method that resolves nearly every question of this kind has three steps and does not require access to a research library.

Ask first whether the term appears in a work Marx published in his lifetime, in a manuscript published after his death, in Engels’s writing, or in the later tradition. That single question sorts the vocabulary into four categories with very different authority, and a surprising number of disputes evaporate once the category is established. The published works are a short list; the manuscripts have complicated editorial histories; Engels’s expositions are authorised but are expositions; and the later tradition is argument rather than source.

Ask second what the term is being contrasted with in the passage where it appears. Almost every technical term in this vocabulary was introduced to mark a distinction, and recovering the contrast recovers the meaning far more reliably than any definition. Value is introduced against exchange value, labour power against labour, class for itself against class in itself. A definition detached from its contrast is the form in which these terms go wrong.

Ask third whether the ordinary English sense of the word is doing any work in the argument you are reading. If it is, and if the argument depends on the slide between senses, the argument has a fault that has nothing to do with whether its conclusion is correct. That is the diagnostic that this glossary exists to make available, and it is worth more than any of the individual entries.

For anything requiring an exact wording, the further step is to check the edition, since the standard English translations differ and the difference occasionally carries the argument. The guidance on which edition of Marx to use sets out the choices and the passages where they matter.

Terms that changed meaning inside Marx’s own writing

A final complication, and one that almost no glossary acknowledges: several of these words do not have one settled sense in Marx, because he used them across four decades and changed his mind.

Alienation is the clearest case. It carries enormous weight in the Paris manuscripts of 1844, largely disappears from the vocabulary of the 1850s and 1860s, and reappears in altered form in the mature economic work, where the emphasis falls on the domination of the producer by their own product as an objective process rather than on the estrangement of a human essence. Whether this constitutes a break, a development, or a change of vocabulary is the substance of one of the tradition’s longest arguments, and a glossary entry that gives a single definition has silently taken a side in it.

Civil society moves in the opposite direction. In the early writings it carries the sense inherited from Hegel and from the political economists, meaning the sphere of private economic life. In Gramsci it means something close to the opposite, the sphere of associations, churches, schools, and press standing between the economy and the state. A reader who carries one sense into a text using the other will find the argument incoherent.

Class itself is used with varying precision. In the historical writings on France it is used flexibly, with fractions, strata, and political groupings distinguished in ways the compressed theoretical statements do not accommodate. The famous chapter on classes at the end of the third volume of Capital breaks off after a page, so the promised systematic treatment does not exist, and every account of Marx’s theory of class is therefore a reconstruction from scattered material rather than a report of a stated doctrine.

The practical rule is to date the usage. Saying that Marx uses the term in this sense in the early writings and in that sense in the mature economic work is more accurate and, in written work, worth more credit than any confident single definition. It is also the honest position, since the alternative is to pick one sense and present the tradition’s arguments about the others as though they were errors.

One more word, and the surprise inside it

Capitalism itself is worth a separate entry, because its status in the sources is not what most readers assume. Marx overwhelmingly writes of the capitalist mode of production, or of capitalist production, rather than using the bare noun, which appears only rarely in his work and which acquired its general currency later, partly through the very tradition he founded and partly through the wider social science of the following decades. The preference is not stylistic. Writing of a mode of production keeps the two components, the forces and the relations, in view, whereas the noun invites the reader to treat the thing named as a single object with a personality, which is the habit that produces sentences about what capitalism wants.

Two practical consequences follow. The first is that a great deal of writing which attributes intentions to capitalism is, on the theory’s own terms, badly formed, since the whole point of the analysis is that the outcomes arise from a structure of relations rather than from anyone’s design, and the account of commodity fetishism explains precisely why the structure presents itself as though it had a will. The second is that a writer wanting to be precise can simply follow Marx’s own preference and write of capitalist production or of the capitalist mode of production, which costs one word and eliminates the personification at source.

The same observation applies in smaller measure to several other nouns in this vocabulary. The state, the market, and even class are all abstractions naming sets of relations, and all three attract the same slide into agency. A tradition whose central methodological claim is that social relations appear as things has an unusually strong reason to watch its own nouns, which is one of the more elegant ironies in the field and one of the few pieces of advice in this glossary that transfers directly to writing about anything else.

A last note on what a glossary of this kind cannot do. Definitions settle usage; they do not settle arguments. Knowing that exploitation names the appropriation of surplus labour rather than mistreatment tells you what the word means and tells you nothing about whether the relation it names is unjust, which is a separate question the tradition itself divides on. Knowing that value is socially necessary labour time tells you what the theory claims and nothing about whether the claim is true, which is a matter for the evidence. The value of precision here is that it lets the real disagreements be located, and locating a disagreement is not the same as resolving it. What a careful vocabulary buys is the ability to be wrong about something definite, which is the precondition of ever finding out, and it is worth considerably more than the appearance of expertise that a memorised list of definitions provides.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between Marxism, socialism and communism?

Marxism is a body of theory; socialism and communism are names for post-capitalist social arrangements and, later, for rival political movements. In Marx’s own usage the last two name two phases of one development: a first phase still distributing according to labour contribution, and a higher phase distributing according to need. He does not call the first socialism; that labelling comes from Lenin’s writing of 1917 and entered general circulation from there. In twentieth-century political usage the two words came to name competing parties and traditions, one broadly parliamentary and the other not. In ordinary contemporary usage socialism often means a large welfare state within a market economy, which is none of the above. Say which usage you mean.

Q: What is the difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

The criterion is the relation to the means of production, not income, occupation, or manners. The bourgeoisie owns productive property and lives by appropriating surplus produced by others. The proletariat owns no productive property and lives by selling labour power. Two consequences are counter-intuitive and worth stating. A very highly paid employee who owns nothing productive is a proletarian on this definition, while a struggling small proprietor is closer to the other category. And the ordinary English sense of bourgeois, meaning conventional and concerned with respectability, is an entirely separate development that has nothing to do with ownership, which is why arguments using both senses talk past each other.

Q: What is the lumpenproletariat?

Marx’s term for a stratum he treats as detached from production altogether, without a stable relation to the productive process, and therefore available for political use by whoever pays. His usage, particularly in the account of the French coup of the early 1850s, is specific and unflattering. Two errors follow from reading it as simply the very poor: it makes his class scheme look like a sorting by income, which it is not, and it makes him look contemptuous of the poorest workers, which conflates a political category with an economic one. The technical point is that the category is defined by detachment from the relations of production, which is what makes its political behaviour, on his account, unreliable rather than merely wretched.

Q: What does praxis mean?

Practical activity that transforms the world and, in doing so, transforms the person acting. The term marks the claim that human beings make themselves through what they do rather than possessing fixed natures that they then express. Its locus in Marx is the set of notes on Feuerbach written in 1845 and published by Engels after Marx’s death, where the point is that the question of objective truth is a practical rather than a scholastic question. Two cautions. Those notes are a private working document rather than a considered statement, and a great deal has been built on eleven short paragraphs. And the word now has an independent life in education and professional training, with a sense closer to reflective practice.

Q: What is constant capital and variable capital?

Constant capital is the part of capital laid out on means of production, so called because its value reappears in the product without any increase. Variable capital is the part laid out on labour power, so called because its magnitude changes in the process, since the labour it purchases can produce more value than the labour power cost. The naming encodes the central claim of the system, that only one of the two is a source of new value. Losing this distinction loses the entire argument about the source of surplus value, which is why it is the tenth row of the confusion table. Neither term refers to fixed and circulating capital, which is a different distinction about turnover.

Q: What does revisionism mean in Marxist debates?

Two different things depending on who is speaking. In its origin it describes a position, associated with Bernstein’s writing at the end of the 1890s, holding that the theory’s empirical predictions required substantial amendment and that a parliamentary and reformist road was both possible and preferable. In its subsequent career inside twentieth-century communist parties it became an accusation, functioning as a charge of political deviation rather than as a description of any particular theoretical claim. Both uses remain in circulation. A writer using the word without saying which sense is meant is likely to be understood in the second sense by some readers and the first by others, which is a reliable source of confusion.

Q: What is the difference between a Marxist and a Marxist-Leninist?

Marxist is the broad term for someone working within the tradition descending from Marx. Marxist-Leninist denotes adherence to a specific doctrinal synthesis codified after Lenin’s death and expounded most influentially by Stalin, combining a philosophical foundation in dialectical materialism, the theory of imperialism, and the vanguard party as the organisational principle. The narrower term therefore commits its user to positions that many Marxists reject, including the party form and the account of the transition. Whoever uses the compound is asserting a continuity between Marx and Lenin that a substantial part of the tradition denies, which is why the label is a claim about intellectual descent rather than a neutral description.

Q: What does dialectic actually mean in plain English?

A way of analysing things through their relations, their internal tensions, and their movement rather than as fixed and separate items, on the assumption that a system’s normal operation generates the pressures that change it. In Marx’s own statements the emphasis falls on treating every historically developed form as in fluid movement and therefore as transient. What it does not mean is the three-step formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which is not Marx’s and is not Hegel’s terminology in that form; it entered circulation through a nineteenth-century schematisation and has been repeated in textbooks ever since. If a source presents the three-step formula as the dialectic, it is reporting a summary rather than a source.

Q: Which Marxist terms are most often misused?

Six account for most of the damage. Commodity fetishism, used to mean consumerism, when it names the appearance of social relations as properties of things. Ideology, used to mean any set of political beliefs, when it names a structural account of how ruling ideas arise. Alienation, used to mean feeling disconnected, when it names a specific relation of a producer to their own activity and product. Value, used to mean price. Dialectical, used to mean nuanced. And dictatorship of the proletariat, read through the twentieth-century sense of dictatorship rather than the nineteenth-century sense of emergency class rule. Each misuse is patterned rather than random, and each traces to a specific route by which the word entered general English.

Q: What does bourgeois mean when used as an insult?

In that use it means conventional, materialistic, preoccupied with respectability and comfort, and it has almost nothing to do with the technical sense. The insulting usage is older than Marx and originates in French, where the word denoted town-dwellers of a certain standing and acquired its pejorative colouring from artistic and aristocratic contempt for that stratum. The technical sense refers only to ownership of the means of production and carries no implication about taste or character. The two senses coexist in English, both are legitimate, and an argument that establishes a premise using one and draws a conclusion using the other has equivocated, which is the actual complaint behind most objections to loose usage.

Q: Is it Marxist or Marxian?

Both are used, and the distinction, where it is observed, is that Marxian signals the use of Marx’s analytical apparatus without political commitment, while Marxist signals both the apparatus and the commitment. Economists working on value theory and the profit rate often prefer Marxian for exactly this reason, as do historians who use the categories without adopting the politics. The distinction is not universal, however, and a substantial number of writers use the two interchangeably or use Marxist for everything. The safe practice is to notice which convention a source is following rather than to assume, and to state your own convention once if the difference matters to your argument.

Q: Which terms did Marx not actually use?

More than most readers expect. False consciousness appears in a letter Engels wrote in 1893, not in Marx. Dialectical materialism is a later coinage with contested attribution and does not appear in his work. Reification as a developed concept belongs to Lukacs and the essay he published in 1923. Class in itself and class for itself, in the form students learn it, is a later formulation projected back onto adjacent passages. Historical materialism as a name is Engels’s late usage rather than Marx’s, who described his approach as a guiding thread. Hegemony in its developed sense is Gramsci’s. Interpellation and the ideological state apparatuses are Althusser’s. Attributing any of these to Marx is a straightforward error that specialist readers notice immediately.

Q: What does material conditions mean?

In ordinary usage it means roughly circumstances, and in that sense the phrase is unobjectionable and nearly empty. In the technical vocabulary it means the productive forces and the relations of production under which a society reproduces its material life, which is a considerably narrower and more contentful claim. The difference matters because arguments frequently begin with the technical sense, establishing that the organisation of production shapes institutions, and then slide to the ordinary sense, concluding that circumstances influence outcomes, which nobody disputes and which establishes nothing. Watching for that slide is one of the more useful habits available to a reader of writing in this tradition.

Q: What does late capitalism mean?

In the scholarly literature it names a periodisation, associated principally with Mandel’s work in the 1970s, identifying a stage of capitalist development with specific features concerning technology, the role of the state, and the international organisation of production. The phrase has since acquired an entirely separate life as an idiom expressing exasperation at absurd or dysfunctional features of commercial life, and in that usage it carries none of the periodising content and makes no theoretical claim. Neither usage is illegitimate. What is worth noticing is that the idiomatic version implies a stage theory it does not defend, since calling something late presupposes knowing where the sequence ends.

Q: What is a social formation?

A concrete society at a particular moment, understood as typically containing more than one mode of production with one of them dominant, rather than as a pure specimen of a single mode. The term does considerably more work in the structuralist literature of the twentieth century than in Marx himself. Its value is that it blocks a common analytical error, namely treating an actual historical society as though it embodied a mode of production in its pure theoretical form, which no society has ever done. Most societies described as feudal contained substantial commodity production, and most described as capitalist contain persisting forms of household and subsistence production alongside wage labour.

Q: How should a journalist use this vocabulary in print?

Three rules cover almost all the risk. Verify provenance before attributing any term to Marx, because several of the terms most firmly associated with him belong to Engels, to Lenin, to Lukacs, or to a twentieth-century codification, and that error survives into print precisely because general readers never catch it. Never quote a line you cannot locate to a named work, since the volume of misattributed material circulating under his name is unusually high and several famous lines have no source. And keep the doctrine and the historical record in separate sentences, because the move from what a state did to what a theory says, in either direction, is a category error that requires its own argument rather than a transition.