Marxism Timeline

The failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution, along with the failure of socialist movements to resist the outbreak of World War I, led to renewed theoretical effort and valuable contributions from Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg towards an appreciation of Marx's crisis theory and efforts to formulate a theory of imperialism.

Image source: Russian Revolution of 1905

With the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks took power from the Russian Provisional Government, establishing the first state governed on Marxist principles.

Image source: October Revolution

In 1919, the nascent Soviet Government established the Communist Academy and the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute for doctrinal Marxist study and to publish official ideological and research documents for the Russian Communist Party.

Image source: Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute

The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, conflicted with the Kuomintang over the country's future, eventually leading to decades of civil war and the establishment of a Marxist state in China.

Image source: Chinese Communist Party

With Lenin's death in 1924, there was an internal struggle in the Soviet Communist movement, mainly between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, in the form of the Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev and the Left Opposition, respectively.

Image source: Leninism

The People's Republic of China (PRC) was declared in 1949 following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong, establishing a major Marxist-Leninist state.

Image source: Chinese Communist Revolution

In 1959, the Cuban Revolution led to the victory of Fidel Castro and his July 26 Movement, establishing a Marxist-Leninist state in the Western Hemisphere.

Image source: Cuban Revolution

In the People's Republic of China, the Maoist government undertook the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 to purge Chinese society of capitalist elements and achieve socialism.

Image source: Cultural Revolution

The reformist Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985 and sought to abandon Leninist development models toward social democracy.

Image source: Mikhail Gorbachev

Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms, coupled with rising levels of popular ethnic nationalism, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991 into a series of constituent nations, all of which abandoned Marxist–Leninist models for socialism, with most converting to capitalist economies.

Image source: Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The theoretical development of Marxist archaeology was first developed in the Soviet Union in 1929, when a young archaeologist named Vladislav I. Ravdonikas applied Marxist principles to archaeological interpretation.

Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Image source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Living in Britain when he wrote his most notable work, The Black Jacobins (1938), C.L.R. James was an anti-Stalinist Marxist and so outside of the CPGB, offering a major Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution.

Image source: The Black Jacobins

A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946, becoming a major centre of British Marxist historiography.

After some members, including E.P. Thompson, left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works.

The work of Peter McLaren, especially since the turn of the 21st century, has further developed Marxist educational theory by developing revolutionary critical pedagogy, as has the work of Glenn Rikowski, Dave Hill, and Paula Allman.

Image source: Marxism

According to a 2007 survey of American professors by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, 17.6% of social science professors and 5.0% of humanities professors identify as Marxists, while between 0 and 2% of professors in all other disciplines identify as Marxists.

The early 21st century saw the election of socialist governments in several Latin American nations, known as the 'pink tide'; dominated by Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, it also included Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

Image source: Pink tide

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declared himself a Trotskyist during the swearing-in of his cabinet two days before his inauguration on 10 January 2007.

Image source: Hugo Chávez

At the turn of the 21st century, only China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam remained officially Marxist–Leninist states, although a Maoist government led by Prachanda was elected into power in Nepal in 2008 following a long guerrilla struggle.

Image source: Pushpa Kamal Dahal

For Italian Marxist Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala in their 2011 book Hermeneutic Communism, 'this new weak communism differs substantially from its previous Soviet (and current Chinese) realisation, because the South American countries follow democratic electoral procedures and also manage to decentralise the state bureaucratic system through the Bolivarian missions.'

Image source: Hermeneutic Communism