There Is One Marxism: Against “Western”, “Eastern” and “Third-World” Marxism By Nikos MottasThe recurrent attempt to divide Marxism into “Western,” “Eastern,” “Third-World,” or other geographically marked variants reflects a deeper theoretical retreat from Marxism as a scientific worldview and a revolutionary method. Such distinctions implicitly transform Marxism from a universal theory of capitalist society and class struggle into a set of culturally conditioned perspectives, shaped primarily by geography rather than by objective social relations. From a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, this approach is fundamentally mistaken. Marxism is one, not because it ignores historical and national specificity, but because it rests on objective laws of social development that operate globally wherever capitalism exists. This point was already clear to Engels, who repeatedly stressed that socialism is not a moral doctrine or a national tradition but the scientific outcome of material analysis. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels insisted that Marxism arose not from abstract ideals but from “the material conditions of life,” and that its conclusions follow necessarily from the development of capitalist production. A science grounded in material conditions cannot be regionally plural in its foundations. Either the laws of motion of capitalism exist, or they do not. If they exist, then Marxism, as their scientific expression, must be theoretically unified. Marx and Engels did not present Marxism as a “European interpretation” of society. They formulated a materialist conception of history grounded in modes of production, class relations, and exploitation. These are not regional phenomena. Capitalism, once established as a world system, imposes its laws universally, albeit in uneven and contradictory forms. Marx’s stated aim in Capital was to uncover “the economic law of motion of modern society.” A law of motion is not culturally relative; it applies wherever the social relations it describes prevail. To speak of multiple Marxisms is therefore to imply multiple capitalisms governed by fundamentally different logics, an implication that collapses under any serious analysis of the world market.
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