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.

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."

Thus, in a review of Capital, Marx's life work, which Engels wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung,[3] he emphasised its importance for the German Social-Democrats, describing "the present book as their theoretical bible, as the armoury from which they will take their most telling arguments."

By contrast Marx and Engels were extremely wary of the role of what may be described as 'professional theoreticians', however learned, who were only tenuously familiar with their theory and not tied to the struggles of the working class.

As their influence persisted, Engels remarked in a similar vein: "we have ... quite given up all traffic with the people who want to smuggle this nonsense and these arselickers into the Party ...