Theoretician (Marxism)

In Marxism, a theoretician is an individual who observes and writes about the condition or dynamics of society, history, or economics, making use of the main principles of Marxian socialism in the analysis.

The term, "theoretician" as used by Marx, originally had a much more specific meaning, where the theoretician is tied very closely to working class, and is part of the working class clarifying its struggle and expressing its interests. In The Poverty of Philosophy(1847), Marx remarks that "Just as the economists" - referring to the classical Political Economists - "are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class." In other words, they are partisan thinkers on the side of the working class.

When capitalism was relatively immature and the struggle of the working class undeveloped, their thinking took utopian forms and they would "improvise systems and go in search of regenerative forms". However, as capitalism matured and the independent class struggle of the proletariat developed, "they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece". Once they grasp that poverty is not simply poverty but that it has "a revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society", science - Communist thinking, to the extent that it incorporates this subversive side - "has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary."

Marx contrasted this scientific, partisan role of the proletarian theoreticians, with the superficial neutrality of Proudhon, who attempted to rise above both Political Economy and Communism:

"He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and the proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism."

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels no longer talk of the Communists simply as theoreticians, but emphasise that this one facet of their activity:

"The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."

To the extent that they are theoreticians, they are 'practical theoreticians', not abstractly analysing society in general or some facet of it, but devoted to understanding and clarifying "the line of march" of the proletarian movement. Henceforth, this was the task which Marx and Engels, the pre-eminent Marxist theoreticians, set themselves.

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