“Dialectical materialism” “historical materialism” “scientific socialism” and “marxism” are terms that have been defined and redefined so often that there’s no real way to know exactly what is meant unless the person using the word has explained how they intend it. If I had to define them, as I understand it, dialectical materialism is the application of the dialectic (i.e. very broadly and simplified a relational ontology, which marx derived from hegel, and epicurus) to reality as understood by “ascend[ing] from earth to heaven” (marx, german ideology articles, 1846) rather than the reverse. Historical materialism is (again rly simplified) the application of dialectical materialism to history (in a definition of history where history is understood to be the sum of literally everything). Scientific socialism is the refusal to build castles in the sky, how socialism should be built is decided based on the actual conditions rather than theoretical presumptions. Marxism can mean a lotta things, from the most restrictive “the literal thought of karl marx” to the very broad “the thought of anyone calling on marx’s abstractions and conceptual tools”. Marx used some of these terms, especially scientific socialism afaik but not in the sense of a concrete system through which everything is explained and abstractive categories fixed, usually as descriptive terms for what he was doing.

Engels had more of a tendency to use these sort of fixed terms, but not by much afaik. The standardization and formalization (and in a sense, invention) of first three terms came mostly with the post-Engels German left as I understand it (i.e. Kautsky and friends). Marxism-Leninism can be understood as Marxism as adapted to Russian material conditions and ‘standardized’ by Stalin. To an extent this entails ‘distortions’ because an actually existing socialist project is going to be much more riddled by contradictions than an abstract critique of the existing systems, but this should not be understood as “Stalin and Engels ruined Marxism,” rather imo they had differing interpretations of some things. I think their interpretations are wrong, but the vast majority of them are equally valid, or clearly understandable in the contexts they were in.

works consulted

Books (all of them have flaws to various extents etc etc read critically)

Anderson - Marx at the Margins; On Nationalism, Ethicity and Non-Western Societies

Bedford & Irving - The Tragedy of Progress; Marxism, Modernity and the Aboriginal Question

Carver - Marx & Engels; The Intellectual Relationship

Delphy - Close to Home; A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression

Federici - Caliban and the Witch; Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Foster - Marx's Ecology; Materialism and Nature

Gabriel - Love and Capital; Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Heinrich - Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society; The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work volume One

Kotkin - Stalin Volime One; Paradoxes of Power

Lewontin - Biology as Ideology; The Doctrine of DNA

Liedman - A World to Win; the Life and Works of Karl Marx

Marx - Capital Volume I

Marx - Capital Volume II

Marx - Capital Volume III

Marx & Engels - Letters on Capital

Churchill et al. - Marxism and Native Americans

Musto ed. - Marx and Le Capital; Evaluation, History, Reception

Musto ed. - Rethinking Alternatives with Marx; Economy, Ecology and Migration

Musto - The Last Years of Karl Marx; an Intellectual Biography

Ollman - Dance of the Dialectic; Steps in Marx's Method

Patnaik & Moyo - Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry; the Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era

Roberts - Stalin's Library; A Dictator and His Books

Saito - Karl Marx's Ecosocialism; Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Papers

Anderson - The 'Unknown' Marx's Capital, Volume 1; The French Edition of 1872-75, 100 Years Later

Hudis - The Third World Road to Socialism; New Perspectives on Marx's Writings From his Last Decade

Pinho - The Originality of Marx's French Edition of Capital; an Historical Analysis

Malm - Marx on Steam; From the Optimism of Progress to the Pessimism of Power

Meyer - Joseph Stalin and the Left; Reflections Occasioned by Stephen Kotkin's Paradoxs of Power

Deleixhe - Marx, The Irish Immigrant-Workers, and the English Labour Movement

Johnson - Farewell to The German Ideology

Williams & Chandler - 'Tussy's Great Delusion' - Eleanor Marx's Death Revisited

Anderson - Revisiting Marx on Race, Capitalism and Revolution

Mauro - Learning Dialectics to Grow Better Soils Knowledge, not Bigger Crops; A Materialist Dialectics and Relationality for Soil Science

Alvares - On Karl Marx's 'Ethnological Notebooks'

Beatty - The Two Irish Wives of Friedrich Engels; Recovering the Narrative of Mary and Lizzie Burns

Salas Perez - All Our Relations (of Production); Losing and Finding Marx in the Field of Indian Materialism

Anderson - Marx s late writings on non Western and precapitalist societies and gender