To understand this contradiction, not merely as misfortune, but as law one has to return to dialectical materialism, not as a theory, but as a forensic tool, a weapon sharpened by the whetting stone of time.
Marx’s dialectical materialism, developed in opposition to the Hegelian idealism of his day, proposing that history is not the product of abstract ideas but the outcome of material contradictions rooted in class struggle.
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” Marx writes, “but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).
This is not a poetic reversal, but a philosophical detonation. Consciousness is not sovereign, it is settled, shaped by relations of production, by who owns and who labours, by who commands and who obeys.
The relevance of this theoretical axiom in the current world order cannot be overstated.
The contemporary era, often mischaracterised as ‘post-ideological,’ is in fact a hyper-ideological moment, where neoliberalism functions not as a policy set, but as a total worldview, a view that naturalises inequality, obfuscates systemic violence, and elevates market logic to a near-theological status.
The myth of meritocracy masks the machinery of accumulation; the spectacle of philanthropy conceals the mechanics of extraction.
Marx did not predict this exact future, but he theorised the skeleton of its inevitability.
In Capital: Volume I (1867), Marx exposes the core mechanics of capitalist accumulation through the process of surplus value extraction.
The capitalist purchases labour-power at its exchange value (i.e., wages sufficient for subsistence) but extracts from it use-value far in excess of this cost.
“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Metaphysically it infers a grounded, materialist kind surplus value which is not a bonus, it is theft systematised, normalised, and legalised.
Ushering to the global digital economy where tech billionaires do not simply innovate but also extract value from a platformed precariat, a global underclass of gig workers and digital sharecroppers.
The logic of surplus extraction continues unbroken, only now its speed is algorithmic and its spatial reach planetary.
Private entities with huge warehouses, assembly lines, and algorithmic control are not rupturing from classical capitalism but its apotheosis.
The means of production have morphed, but ownership remains ossified. An elite class reproducing itself across generational and geographic lines.
The case of India illustrates this with clinical clarity. The state has receded not in power, but in purpose. It has gradually transitioned from a welfare distributor to a corporate facilitator with the passage of time.
The Adani Group, prominently targeted by the Congress leaders, whose rise paralleled and arguably depended on the political ascension of the current regime, amassed extraordinary capital through privatised infrastructure projects and regulatory leniency.
Land once collectively held is auctioned to private corporations. The public sector is gutted to enrich the private. And when dissent rises, the state reveals its true role, which is not of a neutral arbiter, but as executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie (The Communist Manifesto, 1848).
Marx’s understanding of the state as an instrument of class power rather than as a democratic abstraction explains why governments across the world, regardless of ideologies tend to converge in defense of capital.
From the police repression of labour unions in the Global South to the deregulation of financial markets in the West, the pattern is clear, the state functions to stabilise the conditions necessary for capital accumulation, even at the expense of human life.
One need only observe Gaza, where capitalism and colonialism coalesce violently.
The strip functions simultaneously as a site of containment and experimentation, surveillance, blockade, and ruin monetised by Western defense firms. Capitalism’s frontier is not only financial but also military.
Here, Marx’s critique of ideology becomes essential. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels wrote: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
This insight unmasks the role of media, education, and culture not as neutral institutions, but as ideological state apparatuses (to borrow Althusser’s refinement), which manufacture consent, discipline thought, and produce political inertia.
In a world where billionaires own media conglomerates and universities are beholden to corporate donors, intellectual labour is increasingly shackled. The truth becomes unspeakable not because it is unknown, but because it is not profitable.
Dialectics, however, offers not only diagnosis but also a method.
For Marx, history is propelled not by harmony but by contradiction. The capitalist system sows the seeds of its own crisis by developing the productive forces to a level where the relations of production become fetters.
Marx observed this in the periodic crises of overproduction; too many commodities, too little consumption not from scarcity, but from poverty.
In the 21st century, this contradiction persists with grotesque clarity.
For instance, the real estate tycoons hoard properties as homelessness spikes. The economy grows, but life contracts. Here lies the absurdity, abundance generates deprivation.
Philosophically, this is the climax of alienation. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx articulates four dimensions of alienation under capitalism: alienation from the product, the labour process, our species-being, and from one another.
In a hyper-networked world, alienation has intensified instead of diminishing. The worker today does not recognise themselves in their labour.
The coder writing surveillance scripts for a defense firm is not free, but subsumed. The Uber driver chasing ratings is not autonomous, but atomised. The influencer commodifying their persona is not expressive, but exhausted.
The question begs the answer though, is there a way out?
Marx was not a prophet of utopia but a theorist of rupture. His vision of communism was not a blueprint but a negation. “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” (The Communist Manifesto).
In the age of climate collapse, automation, and rising authoritarianism, such a reimagining becomes urgent.
Yet the bounds today are not only material they are also perceptive. To recover Marx is not to fetishise the 19th century but to regain analytical clarity, to see the world not as it appears, but as it moves.
The resistance to such clarity is instructive. Academic institutions marginalise Marxist scholarship. Corporate media ridicules class analysis as outdated. Liberal punditry promotes superficial diversity while ignoring structural domination. But the contradictions multiply as ailments like climate crises, inflation, and authoritarianism continue to flourish.
Marx’s dialectical materialism remains the most precise cleaver to dissect the present.
To apply it today is not to idolise Marx, but to confront capital in its evolved, digital, or militarised form. I
n a world where a few men and oligarchs possess more wealth than half of the human population, the question is not whether Marx is relevant or not but whether his method and prophetic warnings of the risks of rampant capitalism were actually right or not?
To speak of Karl Marx today is not to resurrect a ghost, but to point to the structure of the house still haunted.
The foundation of global capitalism sanctified by techno-optimism, sustained by military-industrial liquidity, and made appealing by a spectacle is showing visible signs of internal rot.
While nations struggle under food inflation, housing insecurity, and widening income gaps, a handful of billionaires ascend through the stratosphere of wealth accumulation at historically unprecedented speeds, the German philosopher comes out alive like never before.
To understand this contradiction, not merely as misfortune, but as law one has to return to dialectical materialism, not as a theory, but as a forensic tool, a weapon sharpened by the whetting stone of time.
Marx’s dialectical materialism, developed in opposition to the Hegelian idealism of his day, proposing that history is not the product of abstract ideas but the outcome of material contradictions rooted in class struggle.
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” Marx writes, “but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).
This is not a poetic reversal, but a philosophical detonation. Consciousness is not sovereign, it is settled, shaped by relations of production, by who owns and who labours, by who commands and who obeys.
The relevance of this theoretical axiom in the current world order cannot be overstated.
The contemporary era, often mischaracterised as ‘post-ideological,’ is in fact a hyper-ideological moment, where neoliberalism functions not as a policy set, but as a total worldview, a view that naturalises inequality, obfuscates systemic violence, and elevates market logic to a near-theological status.
The myth of meritocracy masks the machinery of accumulation; the spectacle of philanthropy conceals the mechanics of extraction.
Marx did not predict this exact future, but he theorised the skeleton of its inevitability.
In Capital: Volume I (1867), Marx exposes the core mechanics of capitalist accumulation through the process of surplus value extraction.
The capitalist purchases labour-power at its exchange value (i.e., wages sufficient for subsistence) but extracts from it use-value far in excess of this cost.
“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Metaphysically it infers a grounded, materialist kind surplus value which is not a bonus, it is theft systematised, normalised, and legalised.
Ushering to the global digital economy where tech billionaires do not simply innovate but also extract value from a platformed precariat, a global underclass of gig workers and digital sharecroppers.
The logic of surplus extraction continues unbroken, only now its speed is algorithmic and its spatial reach planetary.
Private entities with huge warehouses, assembly lines, and algorithmic control are not rupturing from classical capitalism but its apotheosis.
The means of production have morphed, but ownership remains ossified. An elite class reproducing itself across generational and geographic lines.
The case of India illustrates this with clinical clarity. The state has receded not in power, but in purpose. It has gradually transitioned from a welfare distributor to a corporate facilitator with the passage of time.
The Adani Group, prominently targeted by the Congress leaders, whose rise paralleled and arguably depended on the political ascension of the current regime, amassed extraordinary capital through privatised infrastructure projects and regulatory leniency.
Land once collectively held is auctioned to private corporations. The public sector is gutted to enrich the private. And when dissent rises, the state reveals its true role, which is not of a neutral arbiter, but as executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie (The Communist Manifesto, 1848).
Marx’s understanding of the state as an instrument of class power rather than as a democratic abstraction explains why governments across the world, regardless of ideologies tend to converge in defense of capital.
From the police repression of labour unions in the Global South to the deregulation of financial markets in the West, the pattern is clear, the state functions to stabilise the conditions necessary for capital accumulation, even at the expense of human life.
One need only observe Gaza, where capitalism and colonialism coalesce violently.
The strip functions simultaneously as a site of containment and experimentation, surveillance, blockade, and ruin monetised by Western defense firms. Capitalism’s frontier is not only financial but also military.
Here, Marx’s critique of ideology becomes essential. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels wrote: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
This insight unmasks the role of media, education, and culture not as neutral institutions, but as ideological state apparatuses (to borrow Althusser’s refinement), which manufacture consent, discipline thought, and produce political inertia.
In a world where billionaires own media conglomerates and universities are beholden to corporate donors, intellectual labour is increasingly shackled. The truth becomes unspeakable not because it is unknown, but because it is not profitable.
Dialectics, however, offers not only diagnosis but also a method.
For Marx, history is propelled not by harmony but by contradiction. The capitalist system sows the seeds of its own crisis by developing the productive forces to a level where the relations of production become fetters.
Marx observed this in the periodic crises of overproduction; too many commodities, too little consumption not from scarcity, but from poverty.
In the 21st century, this contradiction persists with grotesque clarity.
For instance, the real estate tycoons hoard properties as homelessness spikes. The economy grows, but life contracts. Here lies the absurdity, abundance generates deprivation.
Philosophically, this is the climax of alienation. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx articulates four dimensions of alienation under capitalism: alienation from the product, the labour process, our species-being, and from one another.
In a hyper-networked world, alienation has intensified instead of diminishing. The worker today does not recognise themselves in their labour.
The coder writing surveillance scripts for a defense firm is not free, but subsumed. The Uber driver chasing ratings is not autonomous, but atomised. The influencer commodifying their persona is not expressive, but exhausted.
The question begs the answer though, is there a way out?
Marx was not a prophet of utopia but a theorist of rupture. His vision of communism was not a blueprint but a negation. “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” (The Communist Manifesto).
In the age of climate collapse, automation, and rising authoritarianism, such a reimagining becomes urgent.
Yet the bounds today are not only material they are also perceptive. To recover Marx is not to fetishise the 19th century but to regain analytical clarity, to see the world not as it appears, but as it moves.
The resistance to such clarity is instructive. Academic institutions marginalise Marxist scholarship. Corporate media ridicules class analysis as outdated. Liberal punditry promotes superficial diversity while ignoring structural domination. But the contradictions multiply as ailments like climate crises, inflation, and authoritarianism continue to flourish.
Marx’s dialectical materialism remains the most precise cleaver to dissect the present.
To apply it today is not to idolise Marx, but to confront capital in its evolved, digital, or militarised form. I
n a world where a few men and oligarchs possess more wealth than half of the human population, the question is not whether Marx is relevant or not but whether his method and prophetic warnings of the risks of rampant capitalism were actually right or not?