Ignore Marxism if you prefer barbarism

Marxism offers a scientific framework for analyzing social and environmental problems under capitalism, grounding its approach in reason and evidence while rejecting empiricism, atomism and idealism — an approach increasingly urgent amid attacks on science.1 Its political economy reveals how social structures — especially, structures of relations of property, production, and exchange — produce effects unevenly across time and space, generating suffering rooted in capitalism, imperialism and the state, and reinforced by the oppression of women and marginalized groups. 

At the same time, Marxism emphasizes human agency: people can identify and use openings within social structures to challenge the constraints they impose. Going beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries, it treats the core pillars of society — economy, politics, culture, nature and the body — as interconnected and operating across local, national and global scales, while promoting internationalism and anti-imperialism. Capitalism is understood as a contradictory totality, generating crises — economic, democratic, environmental, and health-related — through exploitation, dispossession, financialization, and class differentiation. The state protects capitalism through consent and coercion, and it is also a terrain of struggle where demands are pressed.

Marxism advocates a de-colonization of the mind in the class sense — de-bourgeoisfication of consciousness. It advocates for a specific type of demands to be made on the system — these are transitional such as housing, employment and automatically inflation adjusted living wages for all. Radical and critical, Marxism links analysis to action, connecting struggles for democratic, social and ecological rights to the broader fight for a truly democratic, peaceful and environmentally sustainable society beyond capitalism, imperialism, racism and exploitation. Powerful but evolving, Marxism, grounded in dialectical materialism and its rigorous theories of value, surplus, accumulation, crisis and the class character of the state and consciousness, develops further through self-critique and critical engagement with non-Marxist ideas, without compromising its fundamental principles.

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Marxism represents the ripest product of humanity’s finest intellectual traditions. Marxism is scientific and comprehensive because of its materialist and dialectical commitment. It is critical. It is radical. It is a tool for radical change.

Marxism provides an explanation of the world’s problems under capitalism based on reason and evidence, with the aim of preparing ordinary people for radical social transformation. Precisely for this reason, Marxism has often been met with skepticism and hostility, constantly having to defend its legitimacy and relevance. Non-Marxist thinkers often ignore, distort or vilify it.

The comprehensive scope of Marxism includes four main components: philosophy, social theory, political economy, and political and cultural theory. In particular, Marxism is armed with: a dialectical and materialist philosophy; a social theory — called historical materialism — focussed on the primacy of class relations; the centrality of the political economy of (crisis-ridden) production and exchange; political theory including class character of the state and of ideas, and advocacy of popular struggle for self-emancipation.

Marxism’s philosophy of materialist-dialectics is one that rejects irrationalism, superstition and idealism.2 This is important given the right-wing attacks on the scientific world outlook today. The relational worldview of Marxist philosophy encourages its adherents to see things (or objects) in the world in terms of their contradictory and necessary relations/processes, which are manifested as things. It also rejects empiricism, eclecticism, atomism and methodological individualism.

Marxism’s materialist conception of history examines the relation between objective forces and class-subjectivity, including individual thought and action.3 Contrary to the charge of structural determinism, Marxism explains humanity’s problems in terms of structures of relations/processes (capitalism, imperialism, the state, etc.) without neglecting human agency. In Marxism, to possess agency is to make use of opportunities that structure the present to go beyond the constraints that structures impose. Even enslaved men and women fight for their liberty.4

Marxism analyzes an object in terms of its content and (varying social-spatial) forms. The content versus form distinction is fully mobilized by Marxists when they comprehensively examine society at multiple historical levels: class relation, capitalism (or feudalism, slavery, etc) as a form of class relation, specific forms of capitalism (and specific forms of other class societies such as slavery and feudalism), and capitalism (or other forms of class society) as it operates in a specific time and place.

Marxist political economy provides a multi-layer understanding of society and its relationship with nature: it examines social relations (of production and exchange) that set up certain mechanisms, which in turn produce certain effects — problems — that are experienced by people unevenly in time and space. These mechanisms are those of: commodification (of all use values and labour); competition (among commodity producers); monopolization (development of monopolies); class differentiation; proletarianization; exploitation; alienation; crisis-formation; national oppression (imperialism); globalization (or, universalization of capitalist relations); uneven (and combined) development; and so on. 

These mechanisms in turn produce major problems confronting humanity, including absolute and relative material deprivation or immiserization; diseases of poverty; economic slow-down and precarity, subjugation of women and minorities, endless wars, resource depletion and catastrophic climate change, as well as a turn to right-wing authoritarian politics and culture. Marxism says that capitalism not only produces these problems; its contradictions also prompt ordinary men and women to imagine an alternative future and to fight for it.

Marxism moves beyond the common tendency to analyze the world through the narrow lenses of individual academic disciplines. Instead, it offers a uniquely interdisciplinary — particularly political-economic — framework that provides a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental pillars of society: economy, politics, culture, nature and the body, as well as their interrelations and of the ways in which these pillars are subjected to what Leon Trotsky called the universal law of uneven development, both in time and in space. Marxism’s comprehensive character lies in its multi-scalar approach: it examines society and its relationship with nature at local, sub-national, national and global scales. The international scale has ultimate primacy.

Marxism recognizes capitalism’s ability to develop productive forces and yet Marxism is not blind to global capitalism’s unevenness. Many non-Marxists accuse Marxism of Eurocentrism, one that is relevant mainly to Europe and its geographical outposts around the world. The fact of the matter is that Marxism is useful to the world at large, to the North and to the South.

Marxism’s comprehensive nature is also indicated by the fact that, armed with its materialist-dialectical philosophy, Marxist political economy firmly places the emphasis on the capitalist economic system as a totality as being behind humanity’s problems. This totality is constituted by: commodity production, which is exploitative and operates in relation to, and alongside, exchange and financialization, class differentiation and preliminary accumulation (in its modern forms). Vladimir Lenin said: “Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism” (italics added).5

Marxism’s dialectical approach treats capitalist society not as harmonious but as full of objective and systemic contradictions, which drive change and cannot be resolved as long as capitalism exists. There are at least six of them. There are contradictions between: a) socialized production of use-values and their appropriation by private owners, b) the national-scale framework of the capitalist state and global-scale character of the capitalist economy, and above all, c) the development of productive forces and capitalist social relations of production and exchange.

From these three contradictions arise several additional ones. First is the contradiction between human beings’ social-emotional need for harmonious interaction with others to flourish, and the competitive, antagonistic relations — including hatred or anti-love — towards fellow human beings that capitalism promotes. These competitive relations appear not only in the workplace and labor market, as Marxist theory of alienation has suggested, but also in social hostility toward minorities, who are wrongly blamed for broader societal problems.

Second is the contradiction between capitalism’s need for a healthy, educated labor force and the exhaustion of that same force under the system: workers are burdened with reproductive work and insufficient wages to meet all their needs.

Third is the contradiction between capitalist production and exchange, which requires the physical environment as a means of production and as a space for waste, and the environmental degradation that capitalism inevitably causes. With respect to the last, not only Karl Marx, as widely recognized, but also Lenin have advanced the theory of metabolic rift.

All the contradictions mentioned above have huge implications for understanding economic development, wars and health and environmental crises. These contradictions fundamentally make it impossible for humanity to meet their social-ecological and emotional needs and to live in peace. So, these objective contradictions propel class struggle between common people and the large-scale owners of land and capital, a struggle which is uneven across time and space in its intensity, but which is inevitable, even if its actual outcome is not.

Contrary to much of the non-Marxist thinking, according to which the state is class-neutral, Marxist political theory insists that the capitalist economic system is fundamentally protected by the state, which uses a spatially and temporarily varying combination of three strategies: meagre concessions, consent (capitalist ideology), and coercion. By unpacking the true nature of the state, Marxism aims to remove the unreasoning trust that most people currently have in the ability of the state, run by their favorable political parties or bureaucrats and assisted by actors in civil society (for example many NGOs) to solve their problems.

To Marxism, the state is a class state and there is a limit to what it can do for the masses in a significant and durable manner and without politically weakening the masses through its so-called concessions. The state is a problem. It is not a solution. But it is also a terrain for, and of, people’s struggle — for people to make demands. These demands must include transitional demands that reflect the needs of the people (for example, employment for all with an automatically inflation-adjusted living wage for all) even if the ruling class says it cannot meet these demands.6

Marxism is a critical social science. It has served as a tool of critical explanation, and explanatory critique, of the world and of the ideas about it. It is ruthlessly critical of everything existing, including itself. It treats important ideas about how a society fundamentally operates (its basic tendencies) as ultimately reflecting class interests. Ideas, more or less, socialist or bourgeois.

Marxism is critical of the existing world for its various inadequacies including the fact that it fails to meet the interests (needs) of the masses. Marxist critique is from the standpoint of society of the future and the future of society (the socialist transformation that the contradictions in the present-day society point to). And it is critical of existing ideas about the world on both philosophical and scientific grounds, and on the ground that the ideas of the ruling class and its organic intellectuals ultimately reflect the interests of the ruling classes and of their state (or of top layers who manage the affairs of the state).

To a large extent, the ideas of the ruling class are ruling ideas which have colonized the minds of many. Marxism advocates a de-colonization of the mind in the class sense — de-bourgeoisfication of consciousness. It is not enough to dispossess the capitalist class and its state. A revolution of culture and consciousness is also necessary.

Marxism is not only critical but also radical. “Theory … becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as … it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter”; that is, it explains people’s problems in terms of their roots in class relations, production and exchange, character of the state, and so on (Marx).

Marxism not only describes and explains the social-economic world but also points to what is to be done about the various injustices and problems. Marxist politics is much more comprehensive than any alternative political program in that it advocates struggles for general democratic rights and those of women and minorities, and struggles for economic and ecological concessions, as part of the fight for proletarian state power — to expropriate capitalists and large landowners — and establish a truly democratic society beyond the rule of capital, a society without imperialism and racism and genocide, a society based on love, care and solidarity.

The outcome of class struggle can lead either to a society that is qualitatively better than the one we live in, or to social and ecological barbarism. Only a Marxist political vision can guide the exploited and oppressed toward choosing socialism over such barbarism.

Marxism matters because of its insistence on the unity between ideas and practice.7 While practice informs ideas, ideas also inform practice. Marxism not only intellectually engages with the world as it is. It also presents a vision of a future post-capitalist society that is prosperous, egalitarian, popular-democratic, solidaristic, sustainable and peaceful.

Marxism is a powerful body of ideas, but it is not infallible. It must constantly evolve through self-critique and critical engagement with non-Marxist work. Marxism cannot dismiss the possibility of learning from other perspectives, especially since general social processes operate in concrete contexts and produce concrete effects about which Marxists may not always be fully aware. At the same time, in engaging with non-Marxist thought, Marxism must remain grounded in its core philosophical and political-economic principles — and in its revolutionary purpose.

Intellectual work is not necessarily the same as academic work. And, Marxism excludes academicism, that is “the belief in the self-contained importance of theory” (Trotsky).

“It is impossible to genuinely master Marxism if you do not have the will for revolutionary action. Only of Marxist theory is combined with that will and directed toward overcoming the existing conditions can it be a tool to drill and bore. And if this active revolutionary will is absent, then the Marxism is pseudo-Marxism, a wooden knife which neither stabs nor cuts”.8

Raju J Das is Professor at York University, Canada. His recent books include: Marxist class theory for a skeptical world; Marx’s Capital, Capitalism, and Limits to the State; Contradictions of capitalist society and culture; The challenges of the new social democracy; and Theories for Radical Change. His edited book, The Power of Marxist Thought (with Robert Latham and David Fasenfest) was released in July 2025. Das serves on the editorial board and on the manuscript review committee of Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis. More information about his work is available at rajudas.info.yorku.ca

• 1

  This article draws on Das, R. 2025. Marxism and non-Marxism in the world of ideas: A dialectical view, Critique, 53:2. A much shorter version of the text of this Links article was delivered by the author at the inaugural session of the Power of Marxist Thought Conference at York University, Toronto on September 26 2025. 

• 2

  ‘The philosophy of Marxism is materialism…[which] has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition’ and indeed to all forms of idealism as such’ (Lenin, V. 1913. The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm).

• 3

  ‘Only the materialist conception of history can … open up the possibility for a broad, coherent, and intelligent view of a specific system of social economy’. (Lenin, V. 1998. Book Review: A. Bogdanov. A Short Course of Economic Science. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1898/feb/bogdanov.htm)

• 4

  On this, see an excellent recent book by McNally (McNally, D. 2025. Slavery and capitalism: A new Marxist history. Oakland: University of California Press.)

• 5

  Lenin, 1913. op. cit.

• 6

  The transitional demands stem ‘from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat’ (Trotsky, 1938). These demands link the immediate demands to the task of seizing power. (Trotsky, L. 1938. The transitional program https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm)

• 7

  ‘Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished’ (Lenin, 1913, op. cit.).

• 8

  Trotsky, L. 1973. Problems of everyday life. New York: Monad press, pp. 114-115.