ommodities. A world is quite literally built around them. But what are they, really? How do they define our lives? Are there any secrets contained within them? And what can they tell us about the course of history?

Karl Marx — one of perhaps the most influential thinkers in all of history. Has any other philosopher shaped not only ideas and culture, but movements, actions, revolutions, and world wars, the trajectories of entire governments, countries, and continents?

Understanding Marx is essential to understanding the political and economic waters we still swim in, and it leads to one very large question: do we still live in Marx's world?

He was reportedly a towering intellect. One contemporary said: "Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel fused into one person. Then you have Dr. Marx." Another described Marx as the kind of man who is made up of energy, will, and unshakeable conviction. His life was one of exile, secret societies, intense study, and poverty.

We will try to unpack his most important ideas and some of the most common critiques. Because most people misunderstand Marx. So let us at least misunderstand what he was truly trying to say.

Most would associate him with communism, about which he actually had very little to say. What he sought to understand was capitalism — commerce, markets, industrialisation, and technological progress. And, importantly, the question of what makes us truly human.

Marx absorbed and thought through all of the trends and ideas around him. But what was most new in his writing was the conviction that it was not thinkers who could change the world, but action by ordinary working people. To understand what that really means, we will have to travel across history — from churches and fields to factories and cities. We need to understand where Marx was coming from.

One: Inverting Hegel's Ideas

Marx was a great synthesiser of the trends, movements, and ideas around him. He was born in 1818 in Prussia — modern-day Germany — just after the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the spread of new liberal ideas about freedoms and rights. New sciences, industries, and factories were spreading across Europe. It was a time of unprecedented, dynamic change.

Change is central to Marx. And to understand change, there was no better person to turn to than Hegel.

Hegel had argued that all previous moments in history were the unfolding of ideas, concepts, and truth — dialectically moving and propelling us forward. I am going to have to simplify a little here, but for Hegel, this truth was an idea. Idealism: images, words, and concepts that led slowly across history to a greater understanding of the world and the universe, to political systems with more freedom. The source of all of this, ultimately, for Hegel, was God.

Hegel was still alive when Marx was young. But to young radical admirers, Hegel had become a dull, conservative, reactionary figure. He believed in progress, in rights and a certain kind of freedom. But he also believed in order, in monarchy, and in religion. To a younger generation, these were all oppressive forces. A loose group of young intellectuals called the Young Hegelians emerged, influenced by Hegel but determined to go further than that old master. They were far more republican, liberal, and democratic. Over time, most grew more radical still, tending towards revolution rather than reform. This was a century of reforms and revolutions — minor and major, successful and failed — from America to Germany and beyond.

The problem was that many radicals in Europe did not really know what to do. What to replace the old aristocratic system with. The French Revolution, for example, had in its most radical phases failed. The Young Hegelians began with religion. They believed it was oppressive, and they attempted to remove God from Hegel's system. Two thinkers in particular — Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach — were the most influential critics of religion of the time.

Hegel had argued that the unfolding of history was the product of God, revealing themselves through time; that we are all products of God's creation and slowly come to know the universal essence of the world better, and so in a way return to God, but expansively. But to the Young Hegelians, this positioned ideas as something above us, transcendent, unfolding down towards us. In other words, we imagine a God who is the all-powerful creator, directing and guiding us — but who is also entirely unreachable.

Feuerbach argued that when people did this, they were projecting. God is the sum total of the imaginative powers of our species, projected onto some all-powerful being. Instead, we should recognise this for what it is: our own imagination. "Religion is the dream of the spirit," he said. It actually disempowers us by displacing some of our thoughts onto some supreme unreachable being, rather than attributing them to us as a powerful species.

In his book on Marx, the political theorist Alexandre Kojève writes: "Feuerbach argued that Hegel had turned something that is merely the property of human beings — the faculty of thought — into the ruling principle of existence. Instead of seeing human beings as part of the material world and thought merely as the way they reflect that material world, Hegel had turned both man and nature into mere reflections of the all-powerful, absolute idea." In other words, by attributing our ideas to something outside the world — particularly a supernatural religious phenomenon — we alienated something within ourselves. It makes our thoughts not fully our own, not entirely originating in us. It falsely presents them as coming from God, in the form of commandments, origin stories, church authorities, or political power. And they thought this held us back.

Frederick Engels, Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator, wrote that Feuerbach "placed materialism on the throne again." He reminded us that ideas are the products of real, physical, human lives. They come out of us — out of our flesh. Bruno Bauer was even more radical. He argued that by asserting that the world was the product of God's will, we justified the world as it was. Poverty? God's will. Kings and despots? God's will. In short, religion obstructed change. It justified the world, for good and for bad. From Bruno Bauer, Marx would develop his famous idea that religion was the opium of the masses. It says: yes, life is hard, but that is God's intention. And don't worry — you'll be rewarded in the afterlife. Rather than, perhaps, encouraging a more progressive idea of history that actively sought change.

Now, here is an important point. These Young Hegelians were still, well, Hegelians. They still believed in the power of ideas. They simply thought you needed better ideas — more rational ones, more truthful ones — to replace the old, repressive, wrong ones. Another Young Hegelian, the early anarchist Max Stirner, argued that bad ideas were "spooks" — bad thoughts that haunt the mind.

But Marx criticised this approach. Two significant early works are relevant here: On the Jewish Question, published in 1843, and The German Ideology, published in 1845. It is all well and good advocating for religious freedoms, property rights, and liberal ideas like freedom of speech. But all of it ultimately leaves the real, physical, material lives of ordinary people untouched. For Marx, it was not enough, because "once the holy form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, the first task of philosophy in the service of history is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."

Many, including Hegel and Rousseau before him, thought the state could stand above society — a kind of neutral general interest, fairly negotiating between competing forces. But just as the Young Hegelians had criticised religion for presenting itself as elevated and neutral while actually being very much connected to power, Marx saw the same argument applying to the state. The French and American revolutions had claimed that everyone was equal in freedoms before the law, in speech, and that this political equality emancipated people. As the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski puts it in his book on Marxism: "purely political and therefore partial emancipation is valuable and important, but it does not amount to human emancipation."

But what does emancipation really mean? If some people have nothing, are starving, have no land, no means, no resources, and are taken advantage of in multiple ways — then we need to think carefully about what emancipation means. Marx wrote that a liberal revolution would liberate only "as an individual, withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprices, and separated from the community." A social revolution, by contrast, could offer genuine human emancipation. Marx knew that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a great step forward — but insisted it was not the final form of human emancipation.

He continued: "Just as the Christians were equal in heaven, but unequal on earth, so the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of society." Politics must become concrete. He asks: how can liberty simply mean the right not to be interfered with — the right to acquire as much property as possible? What does that kind of liberty mean if you have nothing?

Marx writes: "None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society — that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, separated from the community."

In our own time, where the inaccessibility of politics, the endless talking in parliaments and congresses, the debates and the distractions, the dramas, and the sensationalist press all pull focus away from the very real material issues in people's lives — the idea that we all have freedoms, can go where we want, say what we want, and vote as we please, but that in practice it all depends on what you have, on who is even on the ballot — there are so many more things that matter than formal rights alone. And this is what Marx was beginning to identify.

He was starting, in his own words, to "invert Hegel" — to bring his ideas down from the heavens to the dirty, gritty, physical, hard earth. In The German Ideology, Marx criticised his Young Hegelian contemporaries for believing that ideas can change the world on their own. This was ideology. It distorted thinking and concealed the real issues going on underneath. Kołakowski writes: "Ideology in this sense is a false consciousness or an obfuscated mental process in which men do not understand the forces that actually guide their thinking, but imagine it to be wholly governed by logic and intellectual influences" — ignoring all material, sensory, physical life.

For Marx, freedom and progress should be understood as quite literally power: domination over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives. Ridiculing idealism and the notion that ideas were primary, Marx quips: "Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water."

What he is saying is that gravity is not merely an idea in our heads that we can dispel through debate and then simply walk on water. Gravity is real. It is material. It is in the world. It acts upon us, rather than the reverse. And he is saying that there are other things — human things — like that too: that people moving about, eating, producing, doing things, working, shapes ideas, not the other way around.

Summing up his critique of the Young Hegelians, Marx famously wrote: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it."

Two: Alienation

The Romantics were another influence. Just a generation or so before Marx, they had argued that much about modern life, industry, and politics seemed to separate us from what they saw as a kind of natural wholeness. Marx was something of a Romantic in his early years, as were many others then and since. He wrote bad Romantic poetry in his twenties, and he came to the Romantics primarily through Hegel.

Hegel took from them the idea of unity and completeness — that a person should be able to develop themselves fully, three-dimensionally, in a relationship with the world around them rather than feeling disconnected from it. In other words, Romanticism was about a striving towards wholeness. It was about being at home in the world. The opposite of this was alienation: feeling estranged, disconnected. Hegel described individuals as being "in a torn and shattered condition."

Marx had a complicated relationship with this idea. When young, he despised Hegel and accused him of mystification and obscurantism. But he returned to him later, turned him upside down — and some argue, as we will come to, partly abandoned him in his later work. Understanding alienation is crucial, because it was fundamental to Marx's development and to many important ideas of his time and since, including many of the most powerful critiques of the modern world. So what exactly is it?

In his book on alienation, the philosopher Richard Schacht points to several definitions. According to one, alienation is "avoidable discontent." Another holds that it is "a feeling which accompanies any behaviour in which the person is compelled to act self-destructively." A third suggests that alienation points to "some relationship or connection that once existed, that is not true, desirable or good, and has been lost." But the word that appears most frequently in early Marx is "estranged" — hinting at something that is either no longer close but once was, or not close when it should be. Things being disconnected, separate, when they ought to be connected, integral.

It appears in several forms. First, money. Money is alienating because it is a stand-in for the real social relationships that are hidden beneath it. It disconnects us from them. It hides them. It conceals the social reality. It becomes what he calls an "alien medium." Instead of people themselves being the mediators, it separates us as a species. Money is, he writes, "man's estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind."

But labour is estranged and alienated too. What workers do all day is for someone else, on something for someone else. What they are doing is outside their control. They are estranged from it. Even their own bodies can become alien to them, as they are forced to sell their labour in order to stay alive. I think of it as a kind of zombie-like state on the factory line — doing something for no good reason to oneself except to afford to remain alive.

Marx says: "The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, something independent, which stands over and against it." Kołakowski writes: "The alienation of labour is expressed by the fact that the workers' own labour, as well as its products, has become alien to him. Labour has become a commodity like any other." On top of that, the division of labour means workers do not even work on or understand the entire production process — they are divided into small, disconnected fragments.

Marx writes: "Not only is the specialised work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up and transformed into the automatic motor of a detailed operation, thus realising the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body." Capitalism, he says, "converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity."

In On the Jewish Question, Marx writes that while humans are supposedly equal in the political realm, in everyday life "the worker quite degrades himself into a means and becomes the plaything of alien powers." But — and here is the key — according to Hegel, we produce, project, and create the conditions of our own alienation as a species, and by recognising that condition, we aim and work to overcome it. In other words, progress arises out of the discontent of alienation itself. The bad becomes the good. Negativity, alienation — it is part of us. We have to overcome it. And it drives us forward.

Kołakowski writes: "The greatness of Hegel's Dialectic of Negation consisted, in Marx's view, in the idea that humanity creates itself by a process of alienation, alternating with the transcendence of that alienation." But remember, Marx flips Hegel on his head. For Hegel, that process operates in the realm of ideas. For Marx, it is material — it is about the real conditions on the ground. Who is doing what, where, in what ways? It is how alienation confronts us in physical objects and processes: money, labour, bricks and mortar.

Kołakowski writes that "the true starting point is man's active contact with nature." And the philosopher Gajo Petrović says that "man is not only a natural sensuous being, but that specific being which self-produces itself through historical labour and through the dialectic of estrangement and reappropriation that characterises it." It is a process of creating our world, producing it, seeing problems in it, being alienated within it, and then working to address it, change it, revolutionise it, move through it. Dialectically.

In his early writings, Marx leaned heavily on the concept of alienation. Some argue he later abandoned it, on the grounds that it was not a sufficiently rigorous scientific or economic concept. Some, like the French philosopher Louis Althusser, argued that you can divide Marx into an early stage and a later, more mature one. Others, like David Harvey, disagree. Petrović also suggests that while the early ideas become more precise, reformulated, and substantiated, they are never truly abandoned. Kołakowski writes that "in the early work of Marx, everything is built around the contrast between human nature as it is debased, distorted, alienated, and as it should be."

But this raises a question: how can you possibly know what human nature should be? Surely everyone is different. You cannot derive an "ought" — a moral, normative claim about the world — from an "is" — a description of how the world currently is. If you could, would that not itself be a form of idealism? Positing an ideal out of the mind about what the world should look like — precisely what Marx should have been criticising in the Young Hegelians.

Marx's problem with alienation can be imagined like this. You say capitalism alienates us. I ask: from what? You say, from our natural selves. I say, like Adam Smith did, that it is natural — human beings have a natural desire to trade, exchange, and barter. You say it is not natural to spend all day working in a factory. I say it is not natural to wear clothes, or shoes, or to farm. And on we go. This is called the naturalistic fallacy: we draw an arbitrary dividing line between something natural and something unnatural, when in fact everything in some sense comes from the earth. Everything changes. Everyone is different.

Marx tried to work around this problem with the concept of species-being. For Marx, there is no magical, spiritual, natural human essence being repressed by modern society. Instead, he imagines human society as a whole at any given moment — everything humans are doing, arguing, being. He then contrasts the individual with that totality. He wrote: "The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations."

Our essence as a species — our species-being — is precisely that. We can recognise ourselves as part of a species, as part of a totality of our economic systems, cultures, politics, our history, and so on. What he is saying is that we carry an idea of our species in our heads, derived from the material reality of our species — what is actually happening, and what is possible — and so we can become estranged and alienated from it.

A natural society should not be something cooked up by philosophers, as Plato did in The Republic — designed, engineered, planned from above. It is a process that is happening right now. It is always happening. It is always moving. It is about that development, and how we relate to it. The philosopher Lloyd Easton writes: "Marx particularly warns against 'establishing society as an abstraction over against the individual.' The individual is a social being as the subjective, experienced existence of society."

What you need, then, is a philosophical process that moves from alienation towards a world in which everyone is in some way connected to, has some control over, and is served by material species-being — a world in which the individual and society are not estranged from one another but in development with each other. And it is around this time that Marx begins calling himself a Communist.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 — a set of notes not published until 1932, and perhaps the least catchy title of all time — Marx wrote that communism was "the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man. Communism, therefore, is the complete return of man to himself as a social, i.e., human being."

Communism should be "the achievement of a real community." Under communism, "the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or individual family and the interest of all" will, according to Marx, be overcome. Communism should be "the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species."

Again, many argue that this language of alienation and species-being was largely abandoned in his later works. But whether that is true or not, it was indisputably the driving force at the beginning — and the most influential commentators seem to agree that no clean break between the early and the late Marx actually occurred. Kołakowski holds that there is no discontinuity in Marx's thought, and that it was from first to last inspired by essentially Hegelian philosophy: social being estranged and alienated; individual development repressed; then recognition of that condition, reconciliation, return, and finally emancipation.

Three: The Economic Turn and Dialectical Materialism

For Marx, this new focus on material conditions, social relations, and physical life demanded a new method for understanding capitalism. The old philosophy simply would not do. He is fascinated by things that cannot be adequately captured by reflecting on ideas alone. What do machines produce? He borrows from Benjamin Franklin, for instance, the notion that human beings are a tool-making species — that this is what separates us from animals. Engels studies working conditions in and around his father's factories in Manchester, where he is employed. And Marx is working to bring philosophy down from the heavens.

For a long time, peasants in rural France and Germany had held a traditional right to collect wood and twigs from the forests for their fires. But in the 1820s, as enclosures were spreading and capitalism and property rights were expanding, laws were passed that ended these ancient rights. Recall that Hegel and Rousseau had argued the state — the government — could be a neutral representation of the general will, an unbiased arbiter of everyone's interests. But it was in these new wood-theft laws that Marx saw the obvious problem with that logic. The government, in banning the gathering of wood by poor peasants trying to keep warm, was taking the side of wealthy landowners against ordinary people. The state was becoming the vehicle of the propertied class — those who held economic power — and acting against "the poor, politically and socially property-less."

Engels later wrote: "I heard Marx say again and again that it was precisely through concerning himself with the wood theft law and with the situation of the Moselle peasants that he was shunted from pure politics over to economic conditions and thus came to socialism." It was in wood, in tools, and in material objects that the truth of alienation could be found. If peasants and labourers were evicted from the land; if all the countryside was enclosed into plots for the wealthy to farm; if the peasants had no tools, no machinery, no money of their own, no resources — what would happen? They would be forced to sell their own labour.

Here was a key and classical distinction. Those who had nothing, and the exclusive ownership of tools, machines, and the means of production, held one of the essential keys to prosperity, to flourishing, and to overcoming alienation. And this is what is special about human beings. As a species, we make tools — and the projection of an idea onto a material object that helps us survive better and better is central to our historical development.

Marx wrote: "The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness." We build, we fence, we enslave with chains, we engineer, we innovate. These are the things our lives are quite literally built around. They constitute our materiality, our material existence. They help us — or at least some of us — to overcome the limitations of flesh. And they have a dynamic, changing, shifting history. He writes: "Men have history because they must produce their life and because they must produce it, moreover, in a certain way. This is determined by their physical organisation. Their consciousness is determined in just the same way."

This is the foundation of Marx's materialism: that it is our material, physical, sensory, social, and reproductive lives that matter. This may seem accepted or even obvious today, at least in large part, but when economics was a very new field, all of this was genuinely novel. Most people at the time would have argued — and did argue — that it was leadership, intelligence, and great thinkers that determined the course of history and people's lives. Napoleon: a great military strategist. Plato: the great philosopher. Religion: the teachings of divine scriptures and prophets. Marx argued the contrary. The economy mattered most. It determines everything else. He wrote: "Men developing their material production and their material intercourse alter, along with this their real existence, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness."

This drew him towards the nascent field of economics, and his brilliance would lie in combining economics with philosophy. The newspaper he had edited in Germany had been shut down. He had moved to Paris but been expelled. Now in exile in Britain, he spent months in the British Library poring over economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, filling notebook after notebook. He borrowed several concepts we will return to, but he was immediately critical as well. From his Hegelian assumptions, Marx believed that everything was connected — that no man was an island.

Adam Smith, trying to understand the logic of the new commercially driven society developing across Europe and America, started from an assumption not of pure altruism but of individual self-interest. He wrote: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." In other words, selfishness could create value. Marx found this deeply unsatisfying. He wrote: "Production by an isolated individual outside society is as much an absurdity as is the development of language without human beings living together and talking to each other." He called people like Smith "Robinson Crusoes" because they assumed each person was like Robinson Crusoe on his own island — productive without any influence from wider society.

Kołakowski writes: "Marx criticised the political economists because they tended to present society as a collection of isolated individuals lacking any real relation to one another, so that 'the limbs of the social system are dislocated.'" Another tendency that immediately dissatisfied Marx was their habit of naturalising commercial society as timeless. Smith, for example, thought human beings had a natural tendency to "truck, trade and barter," and that the market was the natural result. Again, like Hegel, Marx found this absurd. History clearly changed over time. Capitalism had emerged from somewhere specific. He wrote: "Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them: artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions. Those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions." They fail to see that there was nothing natural about any of it.

Human societies changed over time, and human life was embedded in that society, in a context. He wrote: "The sensuous world around him is not a thing given directly from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society — and indeed a product in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one."

This is how Marx proceeded: economics plus Hegel. The idea of development, change, and progress was very much the intellectual fashion of the day. In 1859, for example, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution. Marx later wrote: "Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organisation of society, deserve equal attention?"

The key was to try to understand how capitalism unfolded as a system. It was not that the lion and the deer, or the worker and the capitalist, were simply in competition with each other, separate from each other. They were part of the same totality, the same system, and that system kept developing and changing in a connected way. Dialectically.

He was, in effect, comparing biological organs to economic organs — flesh and plants to machines and industry. He summarised his method like this: "My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject under the name of the Idea, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the Idea. With me the reverse is true. The ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man and translated into forms of thought."

Four: The Communist Manifesto (1848)

There is one final influence we have not yet fully addressed: the Utopian Socialists. These were a diverse group of movements and thinkers that emerged from the Enlightenment ideal of progress, reason, and rights — the idea that you could, in short, plan and design a society in which the needs of everyone could be fairly met.

The first was François Noël Babeuf and his Conspiracy of Equals. Babeuf and his followers planned a coup during the French Revolution, aiming to implement absolute equality in France. Their manifesto declared: "We aspire to live and die equal as we were born. We want real equality or death. This is what we need. And we'll have this real equality at whatever cost." Spoiler alert: it did not end well for him.

After the French Revolution came two figures: Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Saint-Simon distrusted democracy and the mob, but as an Enlightenment figure he believed that society could be organised in everyone's interests by men of science — that the state could, through technocrats, plan society from the top down. He was, by modern standards, an elitist figure. Charles Fourier, on the other hand, argued that rational communes could be organised around universal principles of psychology, based on different personality types who could each perform different kinds of work. Fourier was an eccentric and influential character who believed that the ideal commune would contain exactly 620 people.

Over in England, and later America, Robert Owen argued that human character was shaped by its environment, and called for a focus on educational reform and co-operatives. It was in Owen's Co-operative Magazine in 1827 that the term "socialist" was most likely first used. Finally, during the 1848 revolution, Louis Blanc argued for a dictatorship of the proletariat, without which he believed the forces of reaction — foreign, aristocratic, monarchical — would simply retake power. He wrote that a provisional government should regard itself as "dictators appointed by a revolution which had become inevitable and which was under no obligation to seek the sanction of universal suffrage until after having accomplished all the good which the moment required."

What made all of these thinkers utopian was the belief that you could conceive and conceptualise, as if by idealistic design, a rational planned commune or society — a utopia — and build it the way an engineer designs and builds a structure. This utopianism is what Marx ultimately rejected, though he still had one foot in this tradition.

In 1836, a group of German exiles in Paris and London formed a Communist League of the Just. Marx joined them, and they renamed themselves the Communist League in 1847. Marx and Engels produced a manifesto in 1848 — and at almost exactly the same moment, by complete coincidence, a revolution broke out in Paris that then spread across Europe. These revolutions differed from place to place, but communism was also, for the first time, being taken somewhat more seriously.

In 1848, Marx and his fellow Prussian Engels wrote a short book that was to have a profound effect on world history. The Communist Manifesto began with these famous lines: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals, German police-spies." It continued: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman — in a word, oppressor and oppressed — stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

The manifesto is short — the best introduction to Marx you are likely to find, and reasonably easy to read. Written to be popular, it contains most of Marx's most important early ideas. It ends with those famous lines: "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains."

It was in this early period that Marx arrived at the next major piece of his puzzle. The bourgeoisie and the ruling classes could never be philosopher-kings or leaders in Plato's or Hegel's sense, because no one stands above and apart from the system — like a God looking down, pulling strings. The rulers are part of the system. They benefit from it. And so change necessarily has to come from elsewhere: from the proletariat, the workers who must sell their alienated, estranged labour, who experience money as alienation, who work materially, physically, at ground level. They are the agents of change.

Petrović writes: "The proletariat is the class that lives through the most complete negation, and which therefore becomes itself the subject able to deny all existing relations." This is why the call of the manifesto and the slogan of the Communist League was "Working men of all countries, unite." And it was through this that Marx argued that material conditions produce ideas, but that ideas can in turn influence and alter material reality. Marx wrote: "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses."

For Marx, this was not a moral argument. It was a historical, economic, dialectical one — a scientific one. A matter of forces. One class was growing richer; the other was being impoverished. Reactionary aristocrats and despotic monarchical governments were clinging to power across Europe, using increasingly repressive tactics. The continent was becoming a pressure cooker once again. Marx believed that real revolution would come. He wrote: "Revolution is possible only in the periods when both these factors — the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production — come into collision with each other. A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis."

The manifesto drew all of these early themes together. However, while it was initially printed thousands of times, it fell into relative obscurity for over twenty years before becoming more influential in the 1870s. And in those twenty years, crises and slumps came and went. Marx kept thinking revolution was right around the corner. But capitalism — railways, factories, steamships, and colonialism — kept on expanding. Trade unions began organising for the first time, having previously been banned in many countries, and socialists and anarchists formed the International Working Men's Association in 1864, now shortened to the First International. And so, as he waited for revolution, Marx sat down to write his magnum opus: a comprehensive analysis of the entire system.

Five: Capital

At this point, Marx is working with some of the most modern ideas available to him. He knows he wants to ground his work materially, but he needs a concrete place to begin. Because for Marx, capitalism is dynamic, dialectical, in motion. He knows it is transformative. For this reason, it is important to remember that Capital: A Critique of Political Economy — Das Kapital, or simply Capital, published in 1867 — is not meant as a universal theory but as a snapshot of European capitalism of the period and the societal issues Marx believes emerge from it.

It is a hugely ambitious, wide-ranging book, full of references to literature, economics, philosophy, and the politics and culture of the time. Furthermore, it is only the first of three volumes — the second and third were left in notes at Marx's death and compiled by Engels. And on top of that, there were originally meant to be six volumes, covering things like land, the state, and the world market. It is therefore impossible to do full justice to any of it here. Most of Marx's detractors do not deny that Capital is a masterpiece. Agree with its conclusions or not, reading and understanding it remains indispensable for understanding the modern world.

The themes are varied, but the most important are these: the question of what we value, and why; what gives things their monetary value, and how do we assess their usefulness? Then labour and work: what motivates them, what lies at their root? Then capital and wealth, and how they function and circulate. And then the forces, the movements, the contradictions that arise from the relationships between all of these.

The simplest way to understand what Marx is saying is this: capital is an impersonal force — like gravity, or meteorology, or mathematics. It has a life of its own. Which is precisely why Marx believed that what he was doing was science. It was not speculative in the sense of philosophers thinking up ideas in dusty studies. Capital is full of references to statistics and factory routines. It is rich and dense with descriptions of how craftsmen use different instruments, drawing on pamphlets and parliamentary debates. All of this was very rare for the time. In this sense, it is a very modern kind of history, drawing extensively on evidence from nineteenth-century capitalism.

Marx was a man of the Enlightenment — perhaps one of the last great Enlightenment system-builders — inspired by figures like Newton and by the idea that there are recognisable scientific forces, laws of motion, at play in both the natural world and in human societies. The key for Marx was to search around, to peel away, to zoom in, to interrogate — as astronomers and scientists do — in order to find the kernel, the hidden truths at the very core of history itself.

Six: Commodities

So where does Marx begin? With something that is all around us, at the core of capitalism and all of our lives — something we cannot do without, and that may contain secrets. The commodity.

What is it, then, this mysterious thing we call a commodity? It is not obvious from the surface of things. They are all so different from each other. A bus ticket is nothing like an iPhone. A DVD is nothing like a carefully crafted table. But Marx wants to find a concept, a definition of sorts, that unites them all.

The most obvious thing he identifies first is that despite all these differences — one being food, another a toy — they all have a use to someone. They all have a use value. That is one dimension of a commodity. But they also have a price and an exchange value, and that is something they all have in common. What Marx finds immediately interesting is that neither of these values is actually in the commodity itself — you cannot find them anywhere by simply examining it, by taking it apart. They are not inherent in it. So these values must come from somewhere else.

He writes: "We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish. It remains impossible to grasp as a thing possessing value."

So everything has a price tag on it. But where does that price come from? Perhaps just from usefulness — from how useful we find each commodity. But everyone finds different things useful. Diamond rings are not particularly useful, but they are certainly expensive. Water is very useful, but it is very cheap. I might hate Picasso and find his art useless to my aesthetic pleasure, yet I would hardly turn down someone giving me a free Picasso painting, because I know it is worth something to someone else. Its value is not simply its use value to me.

So on what is the mysterious exchange value based? Marx points out that if I offer my three apples for your three onions, there must be some common metric — some shared basis — on which we are making our appraisal. Why is it that all commodities are comparable if they have nothing else in common? There must be something that allows us to place them on the same plane and measure them against each other. We need, in effect, a ruler — a measuring tape.

The simple answer is that the price, or the exchange value, is the cost of producing the item. The phone costs more than the apple because it is more difficult to make: it requires more infrastructure, more machines, more skill, more elaborate supply chains. If I sell you a cake, I add up the cost of all the ingredients and add a little more for my labour. But we run into an infinite regress. What determines the cost of flour? The cost of the machines in the phone factory? The cost of the wood?

Marx says that at the foundation, what all commodities have in common is that they are products of labour. Commodities, he says, are "congealed quantities of homogenous human labour." And by homogenous, he means: this is the value, this is the common unit that unifies the heterogeneity and diversity of such a wide range of commodities. He writes that commodities "have values only insofar as they are all expressions of an identical social substance: human labour."

What he means is: yes, my cake is based on the cost of flour, sugar, bowls, and so on. But at every stage of their production, human labour produced each component — the flour, the sugar, the bowls, the electricity. Even the factory walls were built by someone, who had to travel to the factory and had to eat. And so on and so on. The sugar cane had to be farmed. Exchange value is, therefore, the totality of all of that accumulated labour: the total value of the long chain of production that came before the commodity.

What Marx has immediately arrived at is the social value hidden behind the price tag. He says the object "has a phantom-like objectivity." In his influential guide to Das Kapital, David Harvey writes: "Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly, yet they have an objective presence." What he means is that they objectively existed: the process objectively happened. We can connect this back to Marx's idea of species-being. The value is something social, not individual. Otherwise, how would you ever arrive at something called a fair price, a correct price — something to judge your offer against?

When you reject the price of something, you often say something like: "I could have made it for less than that." In saying this, you are invoking a labour theory of value. It is a kind of hidden pattern that connects you to the rest of society. Like Hegel before him, it is not the thing in its particularity and singularity — the commodity, this particular toy — that holds an essential truth within it. It is the relationships between things that really matter.

Seven: The Labour Theory of Value

Why does this matter? Value is a difficult idea to grasp, but it sits at the heart of almost everything. What we value is what we want more of — what we are less willing to give away. Does how we value food differ from how we value friendship, or democracy? Does value differ across different political and economic systems? If we can get to the bottom of how and why we value things, we can use that as the basis for good arguments, good philosophy, and good economics.

Marx encountered the labour theory of value while reading the classical economists. The Scottish economist Adam Smith had first used the idea to describe how wealth came from production and industry rather than from land alone. But he also attributed it to capitalist investment and rent. The British economist David Ricardo went further, arguing that "all value comes directly from the amount of labour time needed to produce a good."

Ricardo, though interested in ensuring that land and industry were put to productive rather than wasteful use, did not take the next logical step: asking why, if labour creates value, capitalists grew rich while labourers remained poor. That step was left to Marx.

So for Marx, the more effort something requires, the longer and more difficult it is to produce, the more labour it takes — the more value it has. But there is a problem. I might be very slow at making this box of cereal. I might be bad at it. And a competitor might do it better, quicker, and more easily. Despite this, they will likely sell it at a higher price. So despite my labour time being greater, the product of my shoddy work is worth less. Surely this contradicts the labour theory of value.

For Marx, remember, value is a social phenomenon. Things may have different use values — I might find something useful that you find useless. But when we are thinking about what something is worth to society, to everyone on average — about what price can actually be obtained for it, and about what is going on behind the scenes of that calculation — the relevant concept is what he calls socially necessary labour time, defined as "the labour time required to produce any use value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society."

Petrović puts it this way: "Why socially necessary? Because empirically it can happen that a slow or incapable producer takes more time than a skilled and quick one to make the same object — say, a chair. It would make no sense to say that an inefficiently produced chair is worth more, and thus Marx makes value equal to the average labour time which is needed to produce a given good."

When we come together to judge values socially, we are not concerned with how long it took any particular individual manufacturer. We are walking along a line of market stalls all selling the same products, comparing them in the aggregate, appraising them against each other, averaging everything out. Marx writes: "The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange."

That value is socially necessary labour time forces all producers into a single system. Each has to compare with the others, compete in the market, keep pace with the latest innovations. If I take too long making an inferior product, it will not sell — I will be undercut by the person on the next stall. This is precisely Marx's method at work: that dialectical reversal, the turning of Hegel on his head. He has gone out and looked at the world materially — at work products, physical goods, and factories. And from that empirical study in the library, having assembled vast, diverse, heterogeneous ideas and exchanges, he has identified one single, homogeneous, abstract concept: the labour theory of value.

He writes: "Concrete labour time becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour." And remember, labour itself has a value. If I employ ten workers, I need to pay them enough to feed them, shelter them, and ensure they have enough energy to work. That amount paid to them must be reflected in the price, or the value, of the end product. It has to be transferred. Their labour, their energy, goes directly into the product. So the value of labour is the cost of maintaining that labour.

If all of the food, shelter, and costs that enable a worker to function come to £100, and they produce 100 small toy bottles, then all else being equal, these are worth £1 each. Marx writes: "If the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this absolute zero. It's only through the fact that labour needs things that their labour power costs a certain amount." That cost then transfers into the commodity.

Eight: Money and Commodity Fetishism

Once we have a universal measure that unites all commodities — the amount of labour embodied within them, the socially necessary labour time — that unit, that appraisal, can be represented or symbolised by something else: money. Just as in Hegel, one shape develops logically into another. The idea that an object can have an exchange value based on how much labour went into producing it can develop into the idea of money to represent that value. Importantly, what we have here is movement, dynamism, development.

Marx writes: "The money form is merely the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other commodities." In other words, money is that social value abstracted — all of that socially necessary labour, in its reality, its physicality, its movement, its activity, condensed into an abstract number, an abstract value, and represented by a unit: money.

But money does something else as well. It measures value, but it also provides a kind of lubricant that enables exchanges to happen more easily. Money is both a measure of value and a means of circulation. However, just as there is a contradiction between use value and exchange value — between what an object's usefulness is to you and what it is worth on the market — there is also a contradiction within money itself. Its function as a measure of value is different from its function as a means of circulation, because money can be saved, hoarded, hidden, and stashed. If someone took it all, there would be no means of circulation left whatsoever.

Harvey writes: "What happens to the circulation of commodities in general if everybody suddenly decides to hold on to money? The buying of commodities would cease and circulation would stop, resulting in a generalised crisis." You can hoard grain, bread, or milk — but money is obviously different. It lasts longer, it is more efficient, everyone wants it, and it does not spoil. It is here that capitalism, for Marx, really starts to take flight. People want money not just to pay for the necessities of life — they want it for its own sake. Modern society, Marx writes, "greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life."

Here we have accumulation at the root of it all — the possibility of some people lending money to others, commanding interest rates, growing richer. We have what Marx calls "primitive accumulation": the building up of capital itself, large stocks of disposable money. Petrović says: "The same attitude which appeared manic in the hoarder becomes iron-clad rationality in the capitalist. The capitalist incarnates an insatiable desire for gain."

Marx uses a formula. It used to be that a commodity would be exchanged for money in order to buy another commodity: sell an apple to buy a chair. C for commodity, M for money, C again for a new commodity: C-M-C. But under capitalism, this begins to reverse. Money can be used to buy commodities to sell for a profit — more money. Instead of C-M-C, we get M-C-M: money-commodity-money. Instead of a new commodity being the goal — selling the apple to obtain a chair — money itself becomes the goal.

But Marx points out a curious fact. If you are swapping a number of apples for chairs, they can both be worth exactly the same, and you still get what you want from the deal — the apple or the chair. He says: "Where equality exists, there is no gain." But if you are using money to buy commodities to make a profit, where does the extra money come from — at the end, in that second M of M-C-M? Why would you perform the exchange if no gain was going to result? If C-M-C is zero-sum — each commodity worth the same, you simply exchanging one for another you need — why is M-C-M positive? Why is the goal that the last M should be greater than the first? And where does that surplus come from?

Marx says that under capitalism, for the first time, this appears as a mystery. He writes: "Capital is money. Capital is commodities. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs." Now, recall: all value must come from labour — from people putting work into things. But when we really start to use money, value becomes mysterious, as if taken over by money itself, as if money had magical powers and were the source of value rather than meaningless pieces of paper or chunks of metal. Marx calls this commodity fetishism.

He says there is a magic of money that conceals what is going on underneath — that conceals the very human work that lies beneath. He calls it "a riddle to be solved." And with Marx, there is always something going on under the surface of concrete things. He is always moving from particular stuff towards broader, universal social phenomena. Commodities, he says, are "sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible and social." He writes: "The mysterious character of the commodity form consists simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things."

Under capitalism, you can buy a fashionable new shirt, but the objective conditions of its production can be entirely hidden: sweatshops, unethical practices, environmental devastation happening elsewhere, beneath the surface. And money conceals all of it. Commodities appear on shelves as if by magic. Petrović puts it like this: "Fetishism would be that attitude according to which commodities are endowed with value as if it belonged to them by nature, rather than because of the specific modality of their production."

Commodities and money are hieroglyphs to be decoded and understood, curtains to be drawn back and peered through. There is always something real, something material, something physical, something comprehensible behind them. But we forget this far too easily. Marx writes: "It is, however, precisely this finished form of the world of commodities — the money form — which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly."

So what is going on behind the surface? How does the capitalist lay a golden egg? Why does the last M in M-C-M magically contain more money than the first?

Nine: Surplus Value

To uncover the secret, to peel back the layers, to dispel the illusion of commodity fetishism, we have to go somewhere philosophy does not ordinarily tread. Marx says we have to go into "the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold hangs the notice: No admittance except on business." We have to go through the factory doors.

Let us visit a typical factory. It is only here that the riddle of profit can be solved — that we can understand how value can apparently be created from nothing, emerging like a golden egg. After all, value can only be generated by people doing work, by labouring.

In factories, people work together at machines to produce many of the goods that help us live more easily. If someone has a hoard, a windfall of money, what can they do with it to increase it? How can they enlarge that last M in the M-C-M cycle? The capitalist searches for a commodity that can expand in value — and finds it, most obviously, in people themselves.

Bringing together wood, nails, wire, whatever is needed to make a new product, I also need labour to help me do it. In this sense, labour power is a commodity like any other. I can go to the market and buy my wood, and under capitalism, I can also go to the market and hire labour.

The products made in a factory require a great deal of planning, preparation, and work on the part of many people. Marx writes: "The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour, in other words, labour power." To purchase or rent labour power, the labourer must be free to sell it — freed from servitude as a peasant or slave, for instance. They must also have nothing and need something: a means of subsistence. On one side stand those who have access to estates with vegetable patches, fields, forests, and woods. On the other, after feudalism and slavery are abolished, stand those who have been driven from the land, prohibited from collecting wood or using common land to grow food or graze animals.

Marx writes: "Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their labour power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development." What Adam Smith described as a natural tendency to "truck, trade and barter" is not natural at all — it is historical. It developed, it changed, and so it cannot be natural.

Now here is the core of Marx's argument. Labour power is a commodity like any other. The labourer, searching for work, needs a certain level of sustenance: food, shelter, welfare. That itself must be provided, at least in part, by the labour power of other labourers. So the value — or cost — of labour power is the value or cost of producing all of the energy that sustains that labourer. Meaning labour power is comparable to any other commodity. It has a value, and that value, like every other commodity, is determined by the labour theory of value: by how much labour — food production, building shelter, collecting water, and so on — goes into sustaining and energising the worker who does the work.

So the capitalist has capital and can spend it on raw materials, supplies, and labour power. They combine it all together. And Marx assumes that all of this is purchased at the correct price — that the value of everything is determined by how much labour went into making it. If it costs me five dollars to acquire the energy, sleep, and shelter necessary to hammer nails for one hour, that is what an hour of my labour power is worth: five dollars. But labour power is combined with the wood and the nails, and the capitalist sells the resulting product on. And again, they sell it on for a profit — the final M in M-C-M must be greater than the first. Where is this surplus coming from? If the labour theory of value is correct, it can only come from labour.

Here is the key. Marx argues that there is a gap between what it costs to sustain the labourer over the course of, say, a working day and what the capitalist actually gets out of the labourer in labour power over that same day. And this gap is precisely where surplus value comes from.

In the first part of the day, the labourer works in exchange for wages that cover the cost of sustaining them — what Marx calls "reproducing the labour." In the second part of the day, the labourer continues working, but is now generating value that goes not to covering their own subsistence but to sustaining the capitalist. It is here, Marx argues, that the capitalist extracts more value from the worker than the worker is being compensated for. They extract surplus value, and that is where profit comes from.

He writes: "Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker — free or unfree — must add to the labour time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labour time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production."

So he argues that human beings are capital like everything else: material, muscle, machinery that can be bought, sold, and hired, their energy put to use. But human beings are a special type of capital: variable capital. Humans are fleshy, muscly, malleable, mouldable, and inventive — highly variable in the ways they can perform. The capitalist can push a human to work harder, faster, differently, squeezing more energy out of them. Unlike nails or buildings, human beings are variable.

Machines, by contrast — spinning wheels, hammers, factory equipment, buildings, metals, and raw materials — are constant capital. They move, spin, weave, hammer, and operate at a pretty constant and inflexible rate. Machines have made all kinds of new things that people need, and have produced them in such quantities that prices can fall and everyone can buy them. Their value is the amount it costs to produce them, and they pass that value into the end product. The nails contribute to the total value of the table, for example. But they cannot create value out of thin air. The value they transmit is constant. Any new value must come from elsewhere — and it is human labour that is variable. It can change in speed, efficacy, duration, strength, and dexterity.

Machines do not vary. They do not go on strike or fall sick. They cannot be shouted at, disciplined, or threatened. They are predictable. But if you can get more work out of a worker or a group of workers, you can get more value into the final product. You can extract more surplus value. Labour — variable capital — can be organised in different ways. Workers can be made more productive by dividing them up and having them perform smaller, more repetitive tasks. Their lunch breaks can be shortened. You might even provide meals if you think that will give them more energy and increase their output. The point is that it is all variable.

Harvey writes: "Surplus value arises because workers labour beyond the number of hours it takes to reproduce the value equivalent of their labour power. How many extra hours do they work? That depends on the length of the working day." As we will return to, Marx spends many pages in Capital describing the struggles of the English working class to shorten the length of the working day. In the nineteenth century, the capitalist class in the Midlands factories did everything they could to lengthen it — employing women and children in dirty and unsafe conditions, cutting costs, and extracting the maximum from labour. Marx calls all of this "petty thefts of the workers' time," "the petty pilfering of minutes," "the snatching of minutes."

If a single capitalist gets more end products — more tables — from their workers in one working day for the same wages, they can either sell them more cheaply than their competitors, or at the same price and keep more profit. But the logic of capitalist competition is such that if you do not do this, your competitor will. This is fundamental to Marx. He is not dogmatic enough to argue that this happens everywhere all the time, or that capitalists are purposefully cruel and evil. His argument is only that there is a logic, a motivation, a force that compels capital to operate this way — or else someone else will do so elsewhere and produce a cheaper product.

He writes: "The influence of individual capitals on one another has the effect precisely that they must conduct themselves as capital." Capital is a total system with a logic of its own, independent of individual capitalists. There is downward pressure on wages and pressure to increase productivity — not to grow rich, but simply to keep up. Marx writes: "The minimum wage is the centre towards which the current rates of wages gravitate." There may be some cultural expectations about minimum wages, about safe working conditions, and there may be regulations and oversight and persistent journalists that push wages up slightly and advocate for better conditions or more holiday time. But ultimately, there is a force exerting downward pressure on wages.

If a capitalist pays their workers more than all of their competitors, out of the goodness of their heart, the end product costs more and they eventually go out of business. If they shorten the working day while the competitor lengthens it — becomes more productive, makes a cheaper product — they go out of business. This is why individual capitals converge into a single, homogeneous capital, and why capital becomes an inhuman force. It has a magical effect on all who operate under its logic, compelling them into the imperatives of capitalist production.

Das Kapital is full of literary references — Shakespeare, Romantic influences — that appear throughout. Marx writes things like: "Capital has a voracious appetite"; "a werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour"; "the vampire will not let go while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited"; and that "capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." He is calling machines "dead labour" because their value comes from the living labour transferred into them when they were made. Capital is a book of flows, of energy transfer — of how value moves dynamically through the world, dialectically; of how the workers' labour power is alienated and taken from them, and how that flow of energy and value moves inexorably from the working class into the capitalist class.

Ten: Forces, Relations, Bases, and Superstructures

We will return to that relationship between labour and capital, because that is the crux of it — the Hegelian contradiction. One pulls on the other, creating discord. But we need to supplement this with a few more fundamental concepts. Remember, Marx is trying to be scientific. He looks around, observes what happens consistently, and builds from that empirical work upwards into broader concepts. Looking specifically at nineteenth-century capitalism, two main concepts he identifies are the forces of production and the relations of production.

The forces of production are the material components — the buildings, tools, technology, instruments, and factories — of any given society. The relations of production are the social relationships that underpin the division of ownership and labour in any given society: the classes, the relationships between them. Who owns, and who does not? How is society organised? Combined, these constitute a mode of production. In The German Ideology, Marx wrote: "A certain mode of production or industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a productive force."

Importantly, Marx points out how these modes of production have changed across history. There was primitive communism, where tribes and early societies held resources broadly in common. There was slavery, where one class is held in bondage to labour and another is free to trade them. There was the feudal mode, where peasants are tied to the land, produce their own means of subsistence, and are obliged to provide for a lord in exchange for hypothetical protection and access to his land. Then there is the bourgeois mode: capitalism. These modes change throughout history, each, Marx writes, being replaced by a new one "corresponding to the more developed productive forces and hence to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals" as contradictions emerge within each mode. One mode is replaced by another in a distinctly Hegelian way.

This is why Marx is a materialist and not an idealist. When you look at the development of societies across history, it is not the ideas of individuals that matter most to the majority, but the type of economic system — the mode of production — that has the greatest influence on how they, and we, live our lives. And classes — peasants, lords, slaves, proletariat, kings, the bourgeoisie — are at the root of this. Kołakowski writes: "Classes arise when the direct producers have been separated from the means of production, which have become the monopoly of a minority."

But what about ideas? Surely they have their place. Marx calls all of this the economic base, and argues that there is a superstructure built on top of it. The base is the economic relations and forces of production: slaves farming, computers, serfs, the forces of production and the class divisions. The superstructure arises from that base in the form of norms, political assumptions, laws, and even culture and art. Marx writes: "The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. This mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

Now the superstructure aims to justify the economic structure. Wages being kept low? Well, we have to be productive, or else the competition will beat us. Capitalism is harmful? Look around — "I had no choice but to shoplift the baby food." "I understand that, but property is property. Have you not read your John Locke, young lady?" Marx writes: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations — the dominant material relations grasped as ideas."

And one of the biggest superstructural myths, Marx argues, is that the bourgeoisie have the power to tell stories about their own thrift, ingenuity, and creative genius — about how value comes from their prowess, their ceaseless revolutionising of technology, their inventiveness.

Eleven: Technology and Productivity

Like money, like commodities, we often see machines as magical things. We fetishise them. We think they can do things, create things, produce things out of nothing. We forget that they conceal social relationships, processes, and physical lives — real things that have happened to people and that people have done — beneath the surface. One compelling advantage of Marx's theory of history is that it explains technological development. It explains why the Industrial Revolution appeared to take off at the same time as capitalism. Other theories — such as the view that innovation results from individual genius — struggle to account for the broader historical patterns of technological progress as convincingly as Marx does. Technological development is not peripheral to his theory: it is fundamental to it, and central to how he understands history as moving forward.

We have seen that one way for capitalists to extract surplus value is to try to lengthen the working day, to improve the efficiency of labour by dividing workers into smaller tasks, or to increase the intensity of work through discipline — in short, finding ways of making labour more productive by extracting more from it in the same amount of time. But there is another way of increasing productivity: technology. All of the spinning wheels, water frames, and engines of the Industrial Revolution were making labour more efficient. You could produce more clothes, for instance, in the same amount of time, employing fewer workers.

Importantly, the machines still require labour. They are all built by people. They need attending, loading, maintenance, and oversight when something goes wrong. But they are all what Marx calls "labour-saving devices." They make work more productive, and so more value can be extracted from the same quantity of work. Marx writes: "Machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and by shortening that part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part — the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means of producing surplus value."

Through technological innovation, we get more or better end products from less labour power. Less labour power means lower wages must be paid. Competitors can then be undercut, and more profit flows to the innovative capitalist relative to others in the same industry. Marx says: "The individual value of these articles is now below their social value" — in other words, they have cost less labour time than the great bulk of the same article produced under average social conditions.

Now something interesting happens. Competitors must either copy, keep pace with the innovation, or go out of business. When competitors adopt the new machinery, the first capitalist can no longer undercut them, and they compete on price once again, bringing profits back down to where they were originally. So the first-mover capitalist has the advantage when they innovate — but this advantage does not last long. They are racing against the clock. And so the search for new innovation, new technology, and new labour-saving devices continues without pause.

Marx writes: "The extra surplus value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalised, and with it the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes." We can see the dialectical dynamic at work here: the particular actions of one actor feed into a generalised, universal process that draws everyone in, which in turn acts back upon each particular actor, which returns to the universal — and so on.

He continues: "Capital therefore has an immanent drive and a constant tendency towards increasing the productivity of labour in order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself." This shows how capital becomes an inhuman, alien, vampire-like force. It compels people to search out labour-saving methods, to improve technology, to innovate, to compete, to attempt to underpay, to discipline workers. And it compels others to follow, copy, keep up — or go bankrupt. If you do not pursue productivity and efficiency, your competitor will. Capitalism becomes a race against the clock.

It is all about incentives, pressures, and forces within the total system. This is precisely why Marx believed what he was doing was science, in the same way Newton studied gravity: laws of attraction, forces that act on people, pushing them to behave in certain ways. Even after a machine has been paid for, there is an incentive to run it as intensively as possible until it wears out, rusts away, or is replaced by something better. Imagine the complexity and ingenuity required to get a water frame or a steam engine running properly in a nineteenth-century factory. Once it was running twenty-four hours a day, the compulsion to find workers to keep it operating as continuously as possible — to extract as much from the machine as possible before it broke down — must have been overwhelming.

Marx writes: "Competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation." But notice a new stage of development as they compete to keep up: we now have larger, bigger, more technologically advanced companies. As technology improves, any industry requires more capital, more initial outlay, simply to enter the field. The barriers to entry rise. Some cannot keep up, cannot copy, cannot innovate — and either go bankrupt or get absorbed into more successful, larger businesses. And importantly, fewer workers are needed to produce the same output as they are progressively replaced by machinery.

Kołakowski puts it like this: "Concentration takes place when capitals grow in size through the accumulation of surplus value. Centralisation, on the other hand, involves the absorption of smaller by bigger capitals. The process of competition itself encourages this trend, because the more efficient firms are able to undercut their rivals and take them over. But economic recessions speed up the process by enabling the surviving capitalists to buy up the means of production cheaply."

I think Marx answers a fundamental question about modernity here. Why does technology — which is, after all, a labour-saving device — not make our lives easier? Why doesn't it make us freer? Why aren't we all fishing and playing guitar while machines do our bidding? Only Marx provides a compelling structural answer. It is because machines owned by a few extract productivity from the rest. The motivation to increase productivity is the drive to sell more and sell cheaper. So while capitalism makes some things cheaper, workers — and that is most of us — are also commodities subject to the same forces: the same downward pressure on wages, on time, on hours, on the demand to improve productivity. It becomes a vicious circle.

Marx writes simply that "the machine is a means for producing surplus value." He contrasts the old artisan tradition — the woodworker who makes use of a tool — with the new factory, in which the machine makes use of the worker. Machines quite literally dominate and absorb living labour power. Technology is, then, a double-edged sword. It can improve our lives; but it spurs competition, drives concentration, raises barriers to entry, makes it harder for smaller producers to compete, and progressively displaces more and more workers. Where capitalism begins in small-scale artisan workshops, it ends in highly advanced, labour-trampling, inhuman, surplus-value-extracting global technological conglomerates. Capital relentlessly preys on whatever it can find, drawing surplus into larger and larger piles, bigger and bigger factories, always seeking new terrain. Anything that can be commodified will be. In short: all that is solid melts into air.

Twelve: Class Struggle and Revolution

We too often think of history as causal and linear — one thing causing the next, like a row of dominoes. Dialectical thinking takes a different approach. Instead of a simple linear axis — calculator, microchip, computer, smartphone, VR, AI — or serf, slave, peasant, proletariat, bourgeoisie — we have a dialectical one, in which at any given point, there is a mutual relationship between elements, and when there is incongruence, incompatibility, or friction between them, transformation is forced. It is what Hegel called sublation. In other words, it is not simple linear progress along one axis, but multiple axes interacting mutually, with forces between them.

We have seen how the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are at odds. They contradict one another. One wants higher wages, the other lower. One wants to go home; the other wants higher productivity. In the Grundrisse — an unpublished manuscript of economic thinking — Marx wrote: "The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms." The technology owned by the bourgeoisie is at odds with the wages of the worker. Machines put people out of work and create a reserve labour force. The instrument of labour strikes down the worker.

Even if this displacement is transitional and more work is eventually found, there is at least a period of unemployment, a period of crisis for displaced workers. Not only does this happen because of technology — it can actually benefit the capitalist. If there is a reserve labour force, it becomes harder for workers to negotiate for higher wages, because there is always someone else willing to work for less, just to work at all. Capitalists extract ever more value from fewer and fewer workers. Workers are displaced and squeezed. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie continue revolutionising production, building different machines, finding new markets — so new jobs may be created.

It is not the case that absolute poverty for the proletariat is inevitable, though it is certainly possible. What will happen is that as the bourgeoisie accumulate more and more capital, more and more machines and technology, and as more people are put out of work, the proletariat will be relatively impoverished compared to the bourgeoisie. Petrović puts it this way: "Marx can thus conclude by claiming that the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is to constantly produce, in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, an excess of workers — a reserve army whose poverty increases as the power of wealth grows."

These conclusions are, of course, bleak. Appropriately so, because Marx aims to demonstrate, among other things, how capitalism is socially unsustainable. This relative immiseration means increasing concentration into larger monopolies on the one hand, and more fragmentation and discord on the other. Each tendency is incompatible with the other. Engels wrote: "Productive forces are concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, whilst the great mass of the people are more and more becoming proletarians and their condition more wretched and unendurable in the same measure in which the riches of the bourgeois increase." Add to this the unpredictability of capitalism — its booms and busts, overproduction, crises, gluts, market instabilities, contradictions, further bankruptcies and buyouts, mass unemployment — and you have an explosive situation.

All of this is the apex of the arguments in Capital: a tendency towards catastrophe. A key concept here is the tendency of the overall rate of profit to fall. Profit comes from labour, and there is increasingly less labour involved in the same lines of work as more and more machines, technology, and infrastructure replace it — what Marx calls the organic composition of capital. The rate of surplus value being extracted can only decrease over time. Doing business becomes harder. Being a proletarian becomes harder still. And again, there is the contradiction, the irony: by improving productivity and investing more and more, the capitalist class is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

Marx writes: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

What we have is a pressure-cooker society, scaled up. Let us recap the ingredients in this explosive mixture. First: the division of labour fragments workers into performing meaningless, single, repetitive tasks — alienating and dehumanising them. Then: the downward pressure on wages and the relative impoverishment of the proletariat relative to the bourgeoisie; a reserve labour army with no work. Then: booms and busts, overproduction, layoffs, takeovers, recessions; bigger and more monstrous companies that are impossible to compete with; concentration, monopolisation, centralisation. And finally: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

All of this pulls in two directions. On the one side: accumulate, accumulate, as Marx says. On the other, emerging out of the chaos, something develops — a class consciousness: a privileged position, a unique conscious state arising from the material conditions of all of this, a perspective that understands its own place in history. In one word: the proletariat.

Harvey puts it well: "This is typical Marx. There are countervailing tendencies at work — concentration on the one hand, subdivision and fragmentation on the other. Where is the balance between them? Who knows? The balance between concentration and decentralisation is almost certainly subject to perpetual flux." The capitalist will outsource, subcontract, lay off, divide and conquer. If the proletariat does not unite, all of this will "mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of attraction in his work and turn it into a hated toil, estrange from him the intellectual potentialities, distort the conditions under which he works and subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness. They transform his lifetime into working time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital."

The only option for the proletariat is to join together and fight. Engels writes that "for protection against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together. They have to co-operate. They have to join in union." It is not inevitable. But all the forces, all the incentives, push workers towards uniting. They have the numbers, after all, to overthrow the existing system.

There are longstanding debates about whether Marx was a determinist — whether he believed in the inevitability of immiseration, of revolution, of the course of human history itself, as if we are all merely puppets on a grander stage. I think he walks a fine line, and in his later work he largely tried to avoid deterministic formulations. As Harvey says, there is not much explicitly causal language in Capital — just incentives, pressures, and dialectical relationships that create interesting pressure cookers, with culture, politics, personal beliefs, and many other factors adding to the complexity.

He writes, famously: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." None of this is a universal, inevitable schema that everyone is fated to live through. There is simply too much dynamism, too much change, too many variables and contingencies. Marx himself even complained about those who tried to turn "quite my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself."

True to dialectical form, Marx says: "Circumstances create people in the same degree as people create circumstances." But the circumstances, the pressures, the forces are all pushing the proletariat towards overthrowing the current state of affairs and replacing it with something new.

Thirteen: Communism

Marx famously had very little to say about what he thought a communist society would actually look like. He was emphatic only that the proletariat needed to organise, overthrow the current system, and do so themselves. He believed this would require revolution, though he thought it might be peaceful in some places. Beyond that, he left few specific details. And there was a particular reason for this.

As we have seen, he believed the proletariat possessed a uniquely privileged point of view that no other group in society shared. Capitalists are compelled to act in the ways we have described by the imperatives of the market. Politicians are compelled to act by the power of capital. But the proletariat, working in factories, can experience all of this directly — can feel their own immiseration, feel their alienation, and understand what negates them. They understand industry, science, and technology, and crucially, because of their proximity to one another, they have the capacity to organise and change things.

Because of this, Marx believed it should be left to the proletariat themselves to determine the best course of action. He was, in a sense, a rationalist. He believed that a better society could be organised rationally to the benefit of all rather than a few. But he did not believe that a rational society could be planned in advance, as the Utopian Socialists had attempted. This is another expression of his dialectical thinking. He did not believe in dogmatic, rigid, static systems or in universal sets of ideas fixed in advance. Engels criticised those who did otherwise and tried to "reduce the Marxist theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy which workers are not to reach as a result of their own class consciousness, but which, like an article of faith, is to be forced down their throats at once and without development."

The proletariat had to develop on their own. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: "Communists should not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement" because "they have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole." And Engels writes that "the masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can have the opportunity only when they have a movement of their own — no matter in what form — so long as it is their own movement, in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn to profit by them."

However, Marx and Engels did leave some clues as to what they thought a communist society could look like. Marx stated simply that "we call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." First, they famously argued for a dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat would need to establish "a class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally." The word "dictatorship" carries connotations today that it did not carry at the time. Their reading of revolution was shaped by the experience of the French Revolution, which had been attacked by reactionary forces — both domestic and foreign — by the church, the aristocracy, civil war, and the monarchies of Europe. The bourgeoisie also held political power. Any immediate popular democratic vote would therefore, in many cases, simply return the old regime to power. This is why they argued for a limited emergency dictatorship — not of a single person, but of the proletariat as a class.

Looking at how revolutions had ended and democratic procedures had been suppressed across Europe, Marx believed that a violent revolution was very likely. But he equivocated and changed his mind on this. In a speech, for example, he said that "there are countries such as America, England and Holland, where the working people may achieve their goal by peaceful means."

What would happen once the revolution was secured? There are a few clues, though it must be remembered that these are scattered remarks rather than a systematic programme. The overarching image is of the proletariat working it out themselves, building on their particular experience of the system from the position they occupy. Marx pointed to the short-lived Paris Commune, which existed for a couple of months in 1871, when Parisian workers took control of the city during the Franco-Prussian War before being quickly defeated. Marx wrote: "The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms." He continued: "Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elected, responsible and revocable." Wage labour and capital were to be abolished.

Marx knew this would be difficult because society "is in every respect — economically, morally and intellectually — still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges." Because of this, he believed communism would develop in stages. At first, he said: "Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour, and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labour."

Petrović identifies the first steps through the scattered writings like this: "Landed estates are to be expropriated, inheritance rights abolished, strongly progressive taxation instituted, credit and transport nationalised, public factories built and equal liability to work for all members of society imposed, together with education of all children in national institutions at the expense of the nation." So at first there would be a mix of social-democratic reforms, equalisation of labour and reward for work, and the planning of industry in the interest of all.

Kołakowski writes: "The decisions about how much social labour to devote to various tasks would depend not on the blind workings of competition, but on a collective and democratic assessment by the associated producers in the light of the needs of society." But after a period of time, a higher stage of communism should be reached — which Marx describes as follows: "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

At this point, Marx believes, most people will want to work rather than being compelled or incentivised by monetary rewards — that each will contribute according to their abilities, and that each will take only what they need from the common stock. And thereafter, the state would wither away. Engels writes: "As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production — with the collisions and excesses arising from these — are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary."

Finally, it is important to note that Marx never sought to promote absolute equality at the expense of individuality. He believed that having access to resources, and contributing to how those resources were produced, would allow individuals to flourish fully — and that genuine creative individuality would reach a new and higher level. He called it "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." In Engels' words, it is "humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom."

After the First International collapsed in 1876, Marx withdrew from political life.

Fourteen: Conclusion

He spent his remaining years on further volumes of Capital, which he would never finish, and which were later published from his notes by Engels. In 1883, his daughter died. Marx then caught a cold and died quietly in his sleep. Engels wrote: "Mankind is shorter by a head, and that the greatest head of our time."

Summing up, analysing, or critiquing Marx's body of work is a vast task, well beyond the scope of this already lengthy guide. His influence on the world is, I think, testament to the breadth of his insight. Whether you agree with him or not, much of that influence rests on his analysis of the relationship between labour, capital, and technology in Das Kapital. Many of his other insights — on alienation, revolution, and socialism — were already circulating and would likely have continued to do so without him. So what you make of Marx really depends on appraising those central arguments in Capital, and if anything, the jury is still out. A more comprehensive appraisal will follow on the second channel. But for now, let me point towards some of the most common points of contention and the most frequently raised criticisms.

First, the labour theory of value is probably the most criticised component. Neoclassical economists emphasise the subjective nature of value — to put it simply. There is also a famous "transformation problem" in the Marx literature: the problem of translating labour values into actual numbers for profits and prices, which should be possible if the labour theory of value is correct, but which seems in practice not to work cleanly. All of this means the labour theory of value is wrong at worst and limited at best. However, even granting the criticisms, it remains undeniable that labour is at the core of production. And so how much labour goes into making something is at the very least one major component of the answer to the question of value — and that alone makes Marx's insights genuinely important.

Harvey writes, for example: "I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labour inputs. It's not that at all. It's a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for a socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image."

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall has also been repeatedly criticised. This is a key marker of whether capitalism can sustain itself over time. Marx's contention was that because more technology would extract profit from fewer workers, the rate of profit would fall and capitalism would lurch from crisis to crisis. The debate over this continues — as, of course, does capitalism. Marx would not be surprised. Capitalism's ability to transform itself is, as we have seen, one of its most distinctive features. Yet despite the dynamism, I think Marx would still recognise the world we live in today — which goes a long way towards showing the enduring influence and insight of his work. Inequality, crises, banking crashes, squeezed wages, the speed of technological change, automation, global corporations, alienation: we are still very much in Marx's world.

There is also the debate over actually existing socialism — the failures of centrally commanded economies, the USSR, state capitalism. Yet many who follow Marx today would argue that these were not socialist in any genuinely Marxist sense. Marxism, Kołakowski writes, "was socialism from below. It foresaw the working class liberating itself through its own activity and remaking society in its own image. Socialism in the Eastern Bloc, however, was based on the denial of the self-activity of the workers and the denial of popular democracy."

There are also criticisms about how little Marx said about the practicalities of communism — about how societies could function without money or without a state apparatus.

Marx's relevance is difficult to escape. And if you can move beyond the framing of having to be a Marxist or an anti-Marxist, a capitalist or a socialist, it becomes undeniable that his work contains insights that remain relevant and analyses of forces that remain very much with us. He would want his readers to read and critique. He would want not to inspire followers, but to inspire change. He was, emphatically, not a dogmatist. He would want to inspire a different kind of thought — fluid, active, creative — and, importantly, action.

Towards the end of his life, he said: "All I know is that I am no Marxist. God save me from my friends."

I will end with a passage from a letter of Marx's called For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything That Exists. He writes: "We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: 'Here is the truth, kneel down before it.' We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to the world: 'Cease your struggles, they are foolish.' We will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to."

Who could plausibly imagine socialism as a beneficial construct? It is a discordant union of elements that should never be applied—akin to drinking bleach in hopes of curing thirst. Yet despite all of this according to recent data, 70% of American millennials indicate a high likelihood of casting their votes for a socialist agenda, and surprisingly, a third of this demographic view communism in a positive light. The term `socialist` has gained considerable momentum over the recent years. It`s likely that an increasing number of your acquaintances might self-identify with this description. Possibly, it`s even one of these individuals who forwarded you this article. This article aims to elucidate the meaning people associate with when they label themselves as `socialists.` I will strive to cover as much context as efficiently as possible to provide an enhanced understanding of a term that is frequently heard but seldom comprehensively explicated.

Let`s commence. The quintessential idea that aligns all socialists is the pursuit of maximizing freedom for every individual, irrespective of their identity. In a broad sense, socialists aspire for individuals to possess rights that ensure their freedom – the rights to education, healthcare, food, and shelter, to participate in and constitute democratic entities, and the right to free time and leisure. These rights amplify our freedom, enabling us to thrive and lead fulfilling lives. However, it`s insufficient for these rights to merely exist in legal documentation. Individuals must have the capacity to exercise these rights. If one theoretically has the freedom to an education but cannot feasibly reduce their working hours to attend classes, then they`re bereft of the genuine freedom to education. While the law asserts your freedom, in practice, you`re deprived of its enjoyment. Consider this analogy: We may have missed a multitude of potential Einsteins because poverty hindered them from realizing their full potential. The possession of freedom and the actual capacity to exercise it is critical. This core concern with freedom isn`t surprising. Every political ideology aspires to maximize or guarantee freedom in some capacity. If the United States had its own ideology, perhaps termed `Americanism`, its proponents would assert its focus on freedom. To be fair, capitalism did become the predominant way of life globally because, at least in part, it enabled certain individuals to enjoy greater freedom than before. Preceding capitalism, we had an alternative social system - feudalism.

Envision medieval fortresses, banquet tables laden with lavish spreads straight out of a George R.R. Martin novel - pigs with apples in their mouths, and individuals bearing intriguing monikers like Torf. In feudal society, the fraction of the population that enjoyed freedom was minuscule. Kings and other nobility constituted this elite echelon; everyone else resided under their dominion, typically devoid of considerable freedom. After all, nobles were the proprietors of all land within their kingdoms. Consequently, if you lacked noble status but desired shelter, wished to evade absolute destitution, and sought a modicum of security, you were compelled to cultivate the noble`s land. This was an advantageous arrangement for the nobility, given that after you had completed all the arduous labor - agriculture and related tasks - they would levy their taxes, requisitioning the fruits of your labor, whether it was grain, meat, or the monetary profit acquired from their trade. However, the reign of feudalism wasn`t eternal. The advent of capitalism catalyzed the transformation of feudal society into an entirely novel configuration. Over a span of a few centuries, merchants acquired increased autonomy from feudal lords, evolving into a new class of comparatively free individuals. Nobles relinquished a significant portion of their power, both progressively and via violent revolutions. The number of free individuals proliferated from a mere few hundred nobles to thousands of individuals not necessarily belonging to elite bloodlines. Capitalism emerged, and its operations are discernible in today`s world.

In a capitalist society, your employer represents this new group of liberated individuals. Analogous to the nobility of the bygone economic era, he enjoys substantial freedom to dictate his actions. Many of his decisions permeate down and inevitably impact you. In the rapport between the two of you, the power predominantly resides with him. For instance, your remuneration is not contingent upon the quality of your performance but is decided by your employer. He possesses this liberty. Either directly or indirectly, your employer hires and dismisses personnel according to his preference. You labor for him, dedicating your days to creating something he can subsequently market. This process enables him to generate profit. Irrespective of his personal disposition, his profit estimation mandates considering variables such as his dependency on you and the competition for your job. The more desperate these job seekers are - perhaps due to the threat of homelessness - the more leverage he gains to depress your wage. Thus, higher rates of homelessness or poverty could be advantageous for him. Your salary is not determined by your dedication or the value of your work, but by your replaceability. You can protest against such exploitation of your wages, but there`s a nagging apprehension that too much resistance might place you among the multitude fighting for your job.

Under feudalism, individuals were obligated to cultivate the noble`s land and surrender the yield of their labor. They had limited alternatives and virtually no freedom to act otherwise. Labor the land, or you face significant hardships. Presently, you are required to fulfill corporate, industrial, or service industry roles, surrendering your time and whatever you produce during your shift to the capitalist. Theoretically, you enjoy the freedom to abstain from work, choose your employer, and negotiate with them. However, akin to how serfs required shelter and sustenance, earning money through employment in the capitalist industry is essential for survival. It`s also evident that the power dynamics between you and your employer are skewed. In the nascent phase of this new economic system, most workers were forced to dedicate a substantial portion of their lives - 12 hours a day, six days a week - to their employers, often from a tender age and under atrocious conditions. It was only recently that we managed to slightly ameliorate these conditions.

The impediment to further progress today stems from the fact that capitalism didn`t represent a significant departure from feudalism. The dynamics of dominance and coercion remain largely unchanged; the only difference is that the group possessing freedom is marginally larger - a few thousand as opposed to a few hundred - and membership is not necessarily contingent on birthright. Despite its shortcomings, this system has not been entirely detrimental; generally, living standards have seen an improvement under capitalism. For numerous individuals, capitalism constitutes a net advancement, albeit in select aspects, relative to its predecessor. Yet, akin to feudal society, capitalism has begun to show signs of obsolescence. The narrative of elevating living standards under capitalism has always been fraught with discrepancies, and lately, capitalism has begun failing even those who initially reaped decent benefits from it. A couple of generations ago, employment assured a comfortable lifestyle, encompassing homeownership, sufficient income to sustain a family, college tuition, and healthcare access. One wasn`t completely liberated, but the living conditions were not severely compromised. This is no longer the prevailing reality.

The small fraction at the summit of the social hierarchy has been granted abundant freedom to retain the revenue you generate for them by laboring in their offices, storefronts, and factories. Consequently, there`s little left for you. Today, high school and college graduates, who once could look forward to stable employment and sustainable wages, are increasingly struggling. Approximately 40-50% of college graduates are either unemployed or are engaged in jobs that don`t necessitate a diploma. They are encumbered by debts that drastically outweigh their earnings, and this narrative pervades the entire economy. For instance, an Amazon employee would need to work for 58 years to accumulate the annual earnings of Jeff Bezos, and that`s just his salary. If dividends are included, multiple lifetimes of daily work would be needed to match Bezos` single circumnavigation of the sun. Evidently, an upgrade is overdue.

Socialists scrutinize this historical progression and pose two questions: Can a superior mechanism produce the same results as capitalism? If so, what is it? In other words, how can we retain the appealing aspects of capitalism - like elevated living standards - while eliminating the undesirable components - such as exploitation, power imbalances, and drastically uneven distribution of these escalating living standards? A fundamental solution for socialists is rooted in the ownership of entities like corporations. The argument suggests that as long as one, or a few individuals, hold ownership of our society`s productive enterprises, they can make decisions that benefit themselves, not the wider population. Your employer, given the freedom, will employ his power to limit yours. He will perpetually strive to suppress your wages, extend your working hours, and degrade your working conditions since it is cost-effective and maximizes his profit. Simultaneously, he must balance that with what other capitalists may offer in terms of better conditions, hours, or wages. Each improvement he makes is constrained by his profit margins. If an action is unprofitable, even by a fraction, he cannot pursue it. He cannot risk a rival company undercutting his business by being more ruthless.

Consequently, the only options available are those that enhance his wealth, even if that leads to your impoverishment or overall degradation. Socialists assess these incentives, seeking ways to reform them. Rather than prioritizing capitalist profit, how can we create incentives that benefit the community at large? This could mean expanding the options beyond those that solely enrich the top tier. There are numerous ideas on how to achieve this, ranging from centralized planning to free association between communes, worker cooperatives, or cybernetic management. Despite the diversity of these ideas, they all converge on the notion that the most effective method to discern which ideas benefit everyone the most is through collective decision-making. Grant everyone control over the ideas we wish to implement and how. Instead of a select few dictating the rules, everyone should have a say over things like their working conditions - essentially, control over tasks, performed by everyone, for everyone. This concept opposes the dominion of a self-proclaimed class of millionaires and billionaires who command everyone else.

You instinctively understand the effectiveness of this concept. Reflect on how many times your employer made a decision that you knew was erroneous, but you had to bear the consequences. How often were you told that a raise or day off was unaffordable due to budget constraints, even as the company recorded record profits? How frequently were decisions shrouded in secrecy until they became problems? While you might not always have solutions to every issue faced by your company. Yet, if the decision-making of those in power is superior, why is it conducted in secrecy? Why does it always favor them and not you? Socialists recognize that this system doesn`t necessarily increase freedom or fairness. Freedom is a two-way street: I can`t exercise my liberty if you can obstruct it. I am not free if you make all the decisions for me. When something only impacts you, you should have the freedom to do as you wish, but when things such as my livelihood are involved, it is only fair that we all have a say. It is increasingly clear to the younger generation that their prospects of leading a decent life are less secure than they were in the past. Ultimately, whether you thrive or lead what we may call a normal life, despite your hard work, is largely a matter of luck.

Despite witnessing how our current capitalist society is steering us down a regrettably restrictive path - limiting our freedom, benefiting from high unemployment, poverty, and low wages - we may hesitate, or even feel fear, to resort to socialism as a solution. We can identify the flawed incentives and inherent economic instability of capitalism, yet feel unsure about the next steps. After all, history hasn`t definitively proven that an alternative system is effective - or so we`ve been led to believe. Contrary to popular belief, developing countries experienced superior performance during the era of state-led development compared to subsequent periods of market-oriented reform. Although state intervention resulted in some spectacular failures, most of these countries exhibited faster growth, more equitable income distribution, and fewer economic crises than during periods of market-oriented reform.

Moreover, it is not true that all affluent countries have achieved their wealth through free-market policies. Most of today`s wealthy nations - including Britain and the US, allegedly the epitomes of free trade and free markets - achieved their affluence through protectionism, subsidies, and other policies that they now caution developing nations against. These insights come from economist Ha-Joon Chang in his book `23 Things They Don`t Tell You About Capitalism` - a compelling read if you`re interested. Not a socialist himself, Chang provides a candid account of capitalism`s shortcomings. So what does this mean? Is socialism simply when the government does stuff? The answer is no. For starters, such a question implies a litany of unpalatable scenarios. If you find the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) frustrating, imagine a world where all services are managed like the DMV. If you believe the government is already exploiting you, imagine it wielding even more power. Clearly, a world with an all-powerful DMV-style government isn`t what socialists desire. Nobody in their right mind would advocate for that. The problem lies in the deceptive framing of the question. What counts as `the government doing stuff”? Sometimes government programs are methods for wealth redistribution - like Social Security, welfare, public libraries, and food stamps.

Other times, they`re basic services that all governments, regardless of economic model or ideology, provide - like fire departments, garbage disposal, sewer systems, or streetlights. This list also includes institutions like the police, the military, the FBI, the CIA, courts, and prisons. Regardless of your political standing, there will be aspects of this list that you dislike and others that you endorse. When you suggest that socialism is synonymous with `the government doing stuff`, and you`re predisposed to be skeptical of the term, your mind naturally gravitates towards whatever aspect of government involvement you detest, or deem least effective. Hence, the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) and authoritarian associations.

Regardless, this interpretation is not what socialism represents. Socialism is a system in which the means of production - the factories, farms, and offices that essentially produce for the economy - are owned collectively and subjected to democratic decision-making rather than being controlled by a select few. While governments may coordinate this communal ownership, they aren`t the only means to do so. However, there`s a more profound issue with this perspective. Our conception of government isn`t fixed or devoid of context.

As humans, we struggle to imagine a world dissimilar to our present reality. Thus, we often find it challenging to envision how our governments could function differently from how they currently operate under capitalism. We are all familiar with this scenario: corporations investing billions to sway elections, public services operating on shoestring budgets and generating immense frustration, elected officials failing to perform their duties while earning substantial salaries and shrugging off responsibility, and elections invariably choosing the lesser of two evils. The conventional perception of government that we all inherit is one of inefficiency, unresponsiveness, corruption, and elitism. It predominantly serves a privileged 1% class, offering mere scraps to the remainder of the population. The fundamental promise that socialists uphold is that we can revolutionize this system - that we can genuinely attain a democracy that isn`t deplorable or out of touch. By actively involving individuals in the democratic process at their workplaces and divesting billionaires of their massive corporate powers to lobby against democracy, we can coordinate the production of goods and services to align with our needs and desires, rather than solely for the profit of a select few. While profit-driven markets occasionally meet these expectations (even a broken clock is right twice a day), they frequently fall short in fulfilling our wants and needs.

This discrepancy explains why housing remains unaffordable for many, why homelessness rates are persistently high, why education remains inaccessible to millions, and why healthcare costs continue to surge.

Despite evident demand, capitalism struggles to provide adequate supply. The task assigned to socialists is to fulfill the promises of capitalism that capitalism itself fails to deliver: to offer you and your loved ones the security, stability, and quality of life you deserve and that we are capable of providing to everyone - if not for the exploitation of a few individuals in power who prevent the establishment of a liveable baseline for all.

In brief, socialism isn`t about the government dictating everything. You get to decide what gets done. You participate more directly than before in decisions that affect your daily life. Socialists aren`t against competition or innovation, but we object to these concepts being used as pretexts to drive most people towards poverty and a select few towards extravagant wealth. Still, one might argue, this all sounds well in theory, but socialism doesn`t work in practice, right? To address this, we must acknowledge that socialism, like capitalism, exists on a spectrum of policies and ideas. There is no purely capitalist or socialist experiment. Claiming that `socialism doesn`t work` is as misguided as stating `capitalism doesn`t work.` More fundamentally, it`s not as though we can conduct a valid experimental comparison between the two economic models. We can`t isolate two countries, control for all their differences, and let them function according to each economic model. No two countries are identical, start from the same conditions, or exist in isolation. Comparing country A with country B doesn`t provide a definitive conclusion. Socialist experiments have often been implemented in countries that were initially poorer and had to navigate a global economy dominated by capitalist adversaries. If we were to equate these economic models to a scientific experiment, it would not meet the criteria for publication due to its lack of control groups and variables. However, we can examine the historical records of nations that have mostly pursued socialist economies and evaluate their success rates given their circumstances.

A notable example is Salvador Allende`s socialist Chile. Salvador Allende was a socialist who won the Chilean presidential election of 1970. Although his presidential term was rather brief (the reasons for which will be discussed shortly), Allende introduced transformative changes to Chilean society. He increased wages, leading to a roughly 22% rise in real wages during the first full year of his presidency. Allende also lowered taxes, leading to 35% of Chileans no longer being taxed. Furthermore, he curbed inflation, reducing it by over 10 points. Allende initiated significant housing programs, which resulted in the construction of tens of thousands of affordable homes across the country. Education was another sector that received a substantial boost, with enrolment growing at all educational levels. Universities, in particular, became free, leading to an enrolment increase of nearly 90%. Under Allende`s leadership, hospitals and other medical centers were established across the country, particularly in underprivileged rural and poor areas. He also extended maternity leave from six to twelve weeks. Consequently, Chile experienced a significant decrease in poverty, allowing more people to enjoy their lives fully. Interestingly, this new economy was largely organized through Project Cybersyn, a decentralized network of computers that collected anonymous, self-reported, and voluntary updates from workers in productive enterprises across Chile to identify areas needing resource redirection. The democratic economy in Chile was highly responsive to changes, and Chileans benefited immensely. In the first year, GDP grew by 7%, production by 13%, and consumption by 11%. By ousting capitalist enterprises, not only did the Chilean economy serve more people, but it also performed better overall.

However, this kind of response was not universally embraced. The Church Commission report on Chile provides an insight into this. This report is one of the only documents released by the American government to the public that outlines the extent of its intelligence agency`s intervention in a foreign country. According to the report, covert American activity played a role in nearly every major election in Chile between 1963 and 1973, with the 1964 presidential election being the most significant example. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spent over 2.6 million dollars (equivalent to 24 million today) to support the opposition`s election. The CIA financed over half of the Christian Democratic candidate`s campaign. Propaganda, which was relatively inexpensive, was the CIA`s most extensive covert action in Chile. They not only purchased propaganda individually but also subsidized Chilean media organizations friendly to the United States on a larger scale. The CIA even supported or founded friendly media outlets that might not have existed without their backing. The covert efforts of the United States to affect Chile`s political trajectory reached its peak in 1970. The CIA was instructed to foster a military coup in Chile to prevent Salvador Allende from coming to power. In essence, the White House, intelligence community, multinational corporations, and military spent millions trying to thwart a popular candidate from winning a democratic election. When their efforts fell short, they invested another set of millions to overthrow the leader who had improved Chile by nearly every conceivable measure. Their first coup attempt in 1970 was unsuccessful, but their endeavors bore fruit three years later. Allende was overthrown as president, choosing to take his own life rather than being captured when the Chilean army, fueled by CIA funding, seized the presidential building.

What ensued was a new phase of an American puppet government that imprisoned, tortured, and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Allende`s story is far from unique. We see similar patterns around the globe wherever socialist alternatives began to flourish. We don`t have the capability to turn back time and try this again. We can`t definitively know if things would have unfolded differently if, by some historical accident, socialism had become our global economic model when capitalism was born. But we can still strive to envision what we can do from this point forward. Without a doubt, this article won`t have addressed all your questions. Imagining a different world is a complex task, and there are numerous concerns to address. It`s typically easier to question something in the future than to critically evaluate our current system. However, if we applied the same level of scrutiny to our present society as we do to the future, would we still choose it?

For further understanding, I`ve provided a link below to a short pamphlet composed by Verso and Jacobin magazine. It provides answers to most questions people have when first introduced to socialist theory. It addresses concerns about human nature, property, authoritarianism, laziness, and other typically concerning topics in a fair manner, offered by those who envision a socialist future. I am one of those individuals who believe that a better world is possible. You`ve likely seen exaggerated portrayals of socialists on TV as the red scare never truly dissipated. However, I hope this article shows that we are, in fact, ordinary people. We just believe that our current system isn`t functioning, and it`s time for a change.

Sources

• Socialism 101
  • The A B C's of Socialism
  • Socialism 101
  • The Difference Between Socialism, Communism, and Marxism Explained by a Marxist
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• 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
  • 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism
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• Grad student statiscits
  • 41% of Recent Grads Work in Jobs Not Requiring a Degree
  • Half Of College Grads Are Working Jobs That Don't Require A Degree
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• US's Report on Intervention in Chile
  • COVERT ACTION IN CHILE 1963-1973
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• Chilean Statistics and Project Cybersyn
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende#Presidency
  • Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile (Full Documentary by Plastic Pills)‍
    

Appendix of Sources:

1. "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: This foundational text of socialist thought outlines the principles of communism and critiques capitalism. It's a concise and powerful read that provides insight into the socialist perspective on the flaws of capitalist systems.
2. "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty: While not exclusively about socialism, Piketty's work delves into economic inequality and the dynamics of wealth accumulation, which are central concerns for socialists. It offers a detailed analysis of how capitalism perpetuates inequality.
3. "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" by Ha-Joon Chang: Despite the title, this book provides valuable insights into capitalism's shortcomings and challenges some commonly held beliefs about free markets. It's written in an accessible style and offers a critical perspective on capitalist ideology.
4. "The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality" by Bhaskar Sunkara: Sunkara's book explores the history of socialism, its core principles, and its relevance in addressing contemporary issues such as economic inequality, climate change, and political corruption. It offers a compelling argument for socialist alternatives.
5. "Why Marx Was Right" by Terry Eagleton: Eagleton defends Marx's ideas against common criticisms and misconceptions, arguing that many of Marx's insights remain relevant today. It's a thought-provoking exploration of Marxist theory and its potential implications for society.
6. "The Case for Socialism" by Alan Maass: This book provides a comprehensive introduction to socialist ideas, addressing common questions and concerns about socialism while advocating for a more just and equitable society. It's a useful resource for those seeking to understand socialism's principles and goals.

These sources offer a diverse range of perspectives on socialism, from foundational texts to contemporary analyses. Whether you're new to socialist ideas or looking to deepen your understanding, these books provide valuable insights into the theory, history, and potential of socialism as a political and economic alternative, All of the above mentioned book were used as a Source Material for this Blog

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