Engels transformed Marx’s work into systematic Marxism after his death

Evidence

This was a key moment, and role, for it “marked the transition, so to speak, from Marx to Marxism and provided the formative moment of all the leading Marxist interpreters of the Second International and most of the leaders of the Third” (Stedman Jones). Marx had laid the foundations, above all in his work on the capitalist mode of production. But he left “no comparable political theory of the structures of the bourgeois State, or of the strategy and tactics of revolutionary socialist struggle by a working-class party for its overthrow” (Anderson 1976). Nor did he provide any systematic general statement of historical materialism as a “world view.” Engels attempted to repair both omissions—a task which gives the general sense “of a completion, more than a development, of Marx’s heritage” (Anderson 1976). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 498

Categorization

• XREF: The Marx-to-Marxism transition is crucial for the reader’s aim of seeing these essays as economic thought; connects to Second/Third International debates.