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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. ==Derivation of the term== 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),〔Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, International Publishers, New York, 1992, p92ff〕 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:
In the Communist Manifesto,〔Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume One, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1983, p120.〕 Marx and Engels no longer talk of the Communists simply as theoreticians, but emphasise that this one facet of their activity:
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. Thus, in a review of ''Capital'', Marx's life work, which Engels wrote for the ''Rheinische Zeitung'',〔Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 20, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1985, p210〕 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." In other reviews and correspondence Marx and Engels emphasise over and over the importance of this theoretical work for arming the working class. 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. Thus we find Marx writing to Sorge in October 1877,〔Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters to Americans, International Publishers, 1969, p116-117〕 following the fusion of the German Social Democrats with the Lassalleans, complaining about the reintroduction of utopian socialism into the movement ("which for tens of years we have been clearing out of the German workers’ heads with so much toil and labour") by "a whole gang of half-mature students and super-wise doctors who want to give socialism a “higher ideal” orientation, that is to say, to replace its materialistic basis (which demands serious objective study from anyone who tries to use it) by modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Freedom, Equality and Fraternity." As their influence persisted, Engels remarked in a similar vein:
Less pithily Marx and Engels explained their position to the party leaders:
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