The People's Free School

Origins: Dialectics, Marx, and the Workers' Movement

5 min read

Where did socialism come from? Not as a finished blueprint but as a method and a movement, hammered out over a long nineteenth century of philosophy, revolution, and defeat. This theme is the first of a three-part series on enacted socialism, and it covers the beginning: Hegel’s dialectic and Feuerbach’s materialism; the young Marx forging historical materialism out of and against them; the revolutions of 1848 and the Communist Manifesto; the seventy-two days of the Paris Commune; the First and Second Internationals; the great mass parties and the argument that split them, reform or revolution. It gives the socialist tradition its foundations before the next themes follow it into power. The economics Marx built lives in How Capitalism Works and the theory of the state in The State, Strategy, and Power; this theme is where the ideas and the movement are born.

The series

This is Part 1 of three on the socialist tradition and its states, read best in order:

  1. Origins: Dialectics, Marx, and the Workers’ Movement (this theme), the idea and the movement before power.
  2. Revolution in Power: the USSR, China, and the Eastern Bloc, the revolutions that seized the state and what became of them.
  3. Socialism and National Liberation: the Global South, Cuba, the Sahel, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

How to use this theme

This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.

  • Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
  • Historical: How did this come to be?
  • Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
  • Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
  • Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?

A session does not need to use all five lenses. Because the primary texts here are short, this theme rewards reading one aloud together, the Theses on Feuerbach, the opening of the Manifesto, a few pages of Reform or Revolution, and arguing it out.

Anchor questions

These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script.

  • What did you first hear about Marx or socialism, and who told you?
  • What is a dialectic, and what does it mean to say history moves by contradiction?
  • Marx said he turned Hegel right side up. What did he keep, and what did he invert?
  • Why does a defeated experiment like the Paris Commune still matter so much to this tradition?
  • Reform or revolution: is that still the real choice, or a false one?
  • What did building this movement actually involve, and what can organizers still learn from it?

Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document).

Single-session entry point (2 hours). Open experiential: what people first heard about Marx and socialism, and the feeling attached. Watch a short piece together (“Political Theory: Karl Marx”, noting its liberal framing to argue with). Read the Theses on Feuerbach aloud, all eleven, and dwell on the last. Close on: reform or revolution, and is that the real choice? See the single-session template.

Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential: our own inheritance about socialism, plus the Commune through Lissagaray or Watkins’s film. Week 2 theoretical: Hegel and Feuerbach, the dialectic and its materialist turn. Week 3 theoretical: the young Marx, the 1844 Manuscripts, Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology. Week 4 historical: 1848, the Commune, the First International. Week 5 historical and practical: the mass parties, the Erfurt Program, and how the movement organized. Week 6 liberatory: reform versus revolution, Bernstein against Luxemburg, held open. The Marxists.org study guides and the Ithaca DSA syllabus can structure the reading. See the six-week template.

Weekend intensive. Compress the arc into a Friday-through-Sunday structure: Saturday on the philosophy (dialectics and the young Marx), Sunday on the movement (1848, the Commune, the Internationals, reform versus revolution). A screening of The Young Karl Marx on Friday evening or La Commune on Saturday works well. See the weekend-intensive template.

Status

First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. Known gaps: standalone material on the First and Second Internationals, and a beginner-friendly walk-through of the dialectic. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.