Marxist orthodoxy derived its core concepts from Lange’s conventional materialism

Evidence

It could be said, schematically, that what has happened is this. One starts from the dogmatic presupposition that historical materialism is straightforward traditional materialism slightly revised and corrected (corrected by the “dialectic”, which therefore becomes absorbed as a chapter of formal logic and not as a logic of its own, that is a theory of knowledge); and one then studies in Lange what traditional materialism was, and concepts of this materialism are represented as the concepts of historical materialism. So that it could be said that the major part of the corpus of concepts that goes under the label of historical materialism have as their founder and fountainhead none other than Lange. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1616

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Frankfurt School sources on how orthodox Marxism ossified versus critical theory’s re-reading of Marx.