Comment: “Marx’s work could be seen as a compound of three elements-Green philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.” (Lenin) (1999)
The triad comes from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin‘s short essay “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (Prosveshcheniye, March 1913), written for the thirtieth anniversary of Karl Marx‘s death. Lenin calls Marxism “the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century”: German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. Accurate as genealogy, the triad undersells, as a “compound”, how far Marx transformed each source.
The Three Sources and What Marx Made of Them
| Source | What Marx took | What he rejected | Component part |
|---|---|---|---|
| German philosophy | The Hegelian dialectic; Ludwig Feuerbach‘s materialism | Idealism; the state as reason realised | Dialectical and historical materialism |
| English political economy | Adam Smith‘s and David Ricardo‘s labour theory of value | Capitalism as natural and permanent | Surplus value; Capital (1867) |
| French socialism | Common ownership; revolution; class as actor | Utopian blueprints and appeals to conscience | Class struggle; scientific socialism |
- Philosophy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s dialectic, Marx wrote in the afterword to Capital‘s second edition (1873), stood on its head and had to be turned right side up. Feuerbach’s materialism was static; the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (1845) demands that philosophy change the world. The outcome is the 1859 Preface’s materialist conception of history.
- Political economy. Smith and Ricardo grounded value in labour but stopped short. For Lenin, where bourgeois economists saw relations between things, Marx found relations between people: profit is unpaid labour. Capital is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy.
- Socialism. Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 supplied the goal and the method. In his letter to Joseph Weydemeyer (5 March 1852) Marx disclaimed discovering classes. His addition was that class struggle leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat and then to a classless society.
Limits of the Formula
- Synthesis, not compound. Each source enters only after critique; the originality lies in fusing philosophy, economics and politics into one theory of praxis. Louis Althusser (For Marx, 1965) went further, finding an epistemological break in 1845 that left the sources behind.
- Omissions. Friedrich Engels‘s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Robert Owen (British, not French), Epicurus (Marx’s 1841 dissertation) and Lewis Henry Morgan‘s anthropology also fed the work. Leszek Kołakowski (Main Currents of Marxism, 1976–78) traced its deepest root to a Romantic, Promethean vision of humanity reconciled with itself.
- Canonisation. The same essay declares that “the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”. Pedigree became a warrant for a closed system, the certainty Karl Popper attacked in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
- European provenance. A frame inherited partly from Hegel and classical economics gave Marx’s 1853 articles on British India their thesis of Asian stagnation. Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 1956) showed the method works once freed from it.
Conclusion
Lenin’s triad is the best short map of Marx’s origins, and explains why Marxism is at once a philosophy, an economics and a politics. Its weakness is tidiness: it obscures both the critical transformation that was Marx’s real achievement and the European boundaries of his sources.