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1 . General overview of Marxism 2."The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!"-explain in reference to The communist Manifesto 3.How is Russian Formalism Related to Marxism? 4.What is the relevance of Marxism today 1. General Overview of Marxism Marxism is not a single doctrine but a vast, evolving tradition of thought and practice rooted in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. At its core, it offers a scientific analysis of history, society and economics -- what Marx called the "materialist conception of history" -- and a revolutionary programme for human emancipation. To give a general overview of Marxism is to trace its main pillars: historical materialism, the critique of political economy, the theory of class struggle, alienation and the vision of communism. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey have developed, refined and fought over these ideas, proving their enduring power. The foundation of Marxism is historical materialism, the idea that the way human beings produce their means of subsistence -- the "mode of production" -- fundamentally shapes the whole superstructure of law, politics, religion, art and philosophy. In The German Ideology (1845-46), Marx and Engels stated it bluntly: "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." They argued that to understand any society, you must first look at its material base: the forces of production (tools, technology, land, labour-power) and the relations of production (class relations, property forms). On this base arises a superstructure of institutions and ideas that, in the last instance, serves to reproduce the dominant mode of production. The famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy offers the classic formulation: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." This was a radical break from the idealism of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. It did not deny that ideas have power, but insisted that ideas must be understood in their material, historical context. Out of this materialist method emerges the second key concept: class struggle as the motor of history. The opening line of The Communist Manifesto (1848) declares, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." In each epoch, society is split between those who own the means of production and those who must work for them. Ancient society had masters and slaves; feudalism had lords and serfs; modern bourgeois society has capitalists (bourgeoisie) and wage-workers (proletariat). When the productive forces outgrow the existing relations of production, a period of social revolution ensues. The bourgeoisie itself played a revolutionary role, smashing feudal fetters and creating the world market, colossal cities and industrial production. But in so doing, it also created its own gravediggers -- the modern working class. As Marx wrote in Capital, Volume I, "The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour at last reach

a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." The third pillar is the critique of political economy, which Marx developed most fully in Capital (1867). Here Marxism moves from a broad philosophy of history to a scientific dissection of the capitalist mode of production. Marx began with the commodity, the "cell-form" of capitalism. A commodity is something that satisfies a human want and is produced for exchange. It has a twofold character: use-value (its qualitative usefulness) and exchange-value (its quantitative worth in the market). The secret of profit lies in what Marx called surplus-value. The worker sells his labour-power to the capitalist for a wage that represents the cost of its reproduction (subsistence). Yet the worker can labour for many more hours than are needed to reproduce that wage. The difference -- the unpaid, surplus labour -- is the source of capitalist profit. Capitalism is thus a system of exploitation concealed beneath the free wage contract. As the critic Terry Eagleton neatly puts it in Why Marx Was Right, "Capitalism is a system which requires some people to be poor and unemployed; it must constantly create poverty as part of its dynamic." Closely linked to surplus-value is the concept of commodity fetishism. In a famous passage from Capital, Marx shows that in capitalist society, the social relations between people take on the fantastic form of relations between things. The commodity seems to possess value inherently, as if by nature, when in fact its value is a crystal of socially necessary abstract labour. Fetishism makes the historically specific, exploitative relations of capitalism appear as eternal and natural. This insight has proved immensely generative for Marxist cultural criticism. Fredric Jameson, for example, in The Political Unconscious, uses the concept to analyse how literary form itself can fetishise social contradictions, turning historical pain into a seemingly autonomous aesthetic object. Fourth, the young Marx's analysis of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 remains one of the most humanly resonant aspects of Marxism. Under capitalism, the worker is alienated in four ways: from the product of his labour (which belongs to the capitalist), from the act of production (which is forced and monotonous), from his species-being (his creative human essence), and from other human beings (competitive isolation). Alienation is not a psychological mood but an objective structure of dehumanisation. Later Marxists like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse developed these insights into a full-blown critique of consumer society, where even leisure time is packaged and sold back to the worker. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse described how advanced industrial society creates false needs and absorbs all opposition, flattening the human subject into a consumer. Finally, Marxism offers a vision of a communist future -- not as a utopian blueprint, but as the "real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (The German Ideology). The Manifesto describes it as "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." This entails the abolition of private property in the means of production, the end of the division of labour that rivets each person into a narrow sphere, and the flowering of human capacities. Marx imagines a society where one can "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner" without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This is not a call for idleness but for the end of a world where work is a mere instrument of survival. Marxism has never been a monolith. In the twentieth century, Leninism adapted it to the conditions of the "weakest link" in the imperialist chain, leading to the Bolshevik Revolution. Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony -- the way ruling classes maintain power not just through force but through the consent manufactured by civil institutions like schools, churches and the media. This was a massive contribution to cultural studies, picked up by Raymond Williams, who spoke of "structures of feeling" and the way dominant, residual and emergent cultures continually struggle. Louis Althusser, in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, re-read Marx through structuralism, arguing that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects

who misrecognise their real conditions of existence. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin) merged Marx with Freud and Weber to analyse the culture industry and the commodification of art. More recently, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity and A Brief History of Neoliberalism have shown how Marx's analysis of capital accumulation, crisis-tendencies and spatial fixes explains the globalised world of flexible accumulation and financialisation. Marxist feminism, from Alexandra Kollontai to Silvia Federici, has insisted that the reproduction of labour-power -- largely unpaid domestic work -- is a foundational site of exploitation, expanding the concept of base. Eco-Marxists like John Bellamy Foster have traced the "metabolic rift" in Marx's own late notes on soil science, demonstrating that capitalism's drive for infinite growth necessarily degrades the natural conditions of life. In sum, Marxism offers a totalising, dialectical method that connects the smallest detail of daily life to the vast movement of history. It refuses the separation between economics, politics and culture. It gives the oppressed a scientific understanding of their own misery, and it demands not merely interpretation of the world but its transformation. As Eagleton writes, "Marxism is a critique of capitalism -- the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of its kind ever mounted. To that extent, its moral and intellectual force remains undiminished." Whether one accepts its revolutionary conclusions or not, Marxism has become an indispensable language for any serious attempt to understand modernity, power and the human condition. 2. "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!" -- Explain in reference to The Communist Manifesto These ringing words are the final, clenched-fist peroration of The Communist Manifesto. They are among the most recognisable sentences in all political literature, and they condense the entire argument of the text into a poetic, militant call to arms. To explain this passage in reference to the Manifesto is to unpack the theory of history, class and revolution that precedes it, and to understand why Marx and Engels believed the proletariat was the first universal class capable of emancipating humanity as a whole. First, we must place the quotation in its textual setting. The final section of the Manifesto, "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties," has just reviewed the strategic alliances communists will form with other progressive forces in different countries, while always keeping the future revolution in view. Then comes the culminating paragraph: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" The phrase "nothing to lose but their chains" is a radical condensation of the Manifesto's earlier analysis of the proletariat's unique class position. Throughout the text, Marx and Engels argue that all previous revolutions were fought by one propertied class to replace another. The bourgeoisie overthrew the feudal aristocracy, but merely substituted a new form of private property and a new form of exploitation for the old. The proletariat, by contrast, owns no property at all. It is the only class that is totally "excluded from property" -- not land, not tools, not workshops. The worker's only possession is his labour-power, which he must sell daily in order to live. In the section "Bourgeois and Proletarians," the Manifesto explains: "The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as

in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests." The "chains," then, are the entire system of capitalist exploitation: wage-slavery, as the Manifesto repeatedly calls it. But they also include the ideological fetters -- religion, patriotism, the illusions of the "free" contract -- that prevent the worker from seeing his real situation. In the course of capitalist development, these chains become heavier and more visible. The worker is driven into factory barracks, subjected to the despotism of the machine, paid just enough to reproduce his existence. During crises, he is thrown onto the scrap-heap of the reserve army of labour. Unlike the peasant, who might have a small plot of land and a nostalgic attachment to a feudal past, the proletarian has absolutely no stake in the existing order. Therefore, he is the first class in history capable of demanding not the reform of society but its total abolition. As the Manifesto puts it, earlier classes sought to "roll back the wheel of history"; the proletariat alone "cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." "They have a world to win" flows directly from this. Because the proletariat is the most universal suffering class -- a class with "radical chains," in the young Marx's phrase from the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right -- its own liberation necessarily involves the liberation of all humanity from class rule. The proletariat cannot free itself without abolishing private property altogether, thereby ending the conditions that produce all class antagonisms. The victory of the working class means "the establishment of an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." This is the "world to win," a classless society where the immense productive forces unleashed by capitalism are harnessed for the common good, not for private profit. The Manifesto's earlier section lists the measures communists would take -- abolition of property in land, a heavy progressive income tax, centralisation of credit and transport, free public education -- all transitional steps towards a society in which "the public power will lose its political character," because government will become the administration of things, not the coercion of persons. Crucially, the paragraph explicitly states that this transformation requires "the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Violence is not glorified; it is recognised as historically necessary because no ruling class ever voluntarily surrenders its power. The Manifesto repeatedly shows that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, an armed body of men serving the interests of property. When the class struggle intensifies, the state reveals its repressive core. Thus the open declaration of force is a gesture of honesty, a refusal to dupe the workers with parliamentarian illusions. The final cry -- "Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!" -- is the logical culmination of the internationalism that runs through the entire pamphlet. For Marx and Engels, capital is a global system. The bourgeoisie has created a world market and drawn every nation into the web of commodity exchange. "National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible," they write. The worker has no country in the real sense, for his labour is exploited wherever capital finds it most profitable. The Manifesto therefore insists that the proletariat must organise not as a national but as an international class. "United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat." The famous slogan is at once a sociological truth (the proletariat's real conditions are the same everywhere) and a strategic imperative (without international solidarity, the bourgeoisie will divide and conquer, using nationalism and war to set workers against one another). The sentence "nothing to lose but their chains" resonates across later Marxist writings. Antonio Gramsci, reflecting on the Bolshevik Revolution, called it "the revolution against Capital," precisely because it was carried out by workers who had supposedly "nothing to lose" in a country where capitalism was still embryonic. He saw in that slogan the voluntarist, collective will that could shatter even the most deterministic predictions of

socialists who waited passively for economic maturity. The line also echoes in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which translated the call into the anti-colonial context, where the colonised peasant and lumpenproletariat, stripped of everything, become the agents of a new humanity. More recently, the critic Terry Eagleton has argued that the Manifesto's closing is a piece of extraordinary rhetorical power precisely because it fuses scientific analysis with prophetic poetry. In his book Why Marx Was Right, Eagleton notes that the proletariat's "chains" are both literal -- the grinding poverty and overwork of the Industrial Revolution -- and metaphorical -- the invisible chains of ideology. The "world to win" is not a promise of consumer plenty but the prospect of human beings becoming the conscious subjects of their own history for the first time. To understand this passage in full, then, is to grasp the Manifesto's entire argument: history is class struggle; the bourgeoisie has simplified that struggle into two great hostile camps; the proletariat is the uniquely revolutionary class because it is totally dispossessed; its victory will abolish class society forever; and this requires the organised, international unity of workers, openly fighting for the overthrow of all existing conditions. The phrase is not merely a slogan but the necessary conclusion of a system of ideas, offered to a class that can finally break the chains that have bound humanity since the end of primitive communism. 3. How is Russian Formalism Related to Marxism? The relationship between Russian Formalism and Marxism is one of the most productive -- and tense -- dialogues in twentieth-century literary theory. At first glance, they appear antithetical: Formalism insists on the autonomy of the literary text, its literariness, whereas Marxism insists that literature is determined, in however mediated a fashion, by its socio-economic base. Yet the two traditions, born in the same cauldron of revolutionary Russia, have been in constant, often hidden, negotiation. The story of their relation is not simply one of official Soviet repression of a "decadent" formalism, but a deeper intellectual current in which Formalist insights were absorbed, criticised and ultimately transformed by a sophisticated Marxist literary criticism. Russian Formalism emerged in the years just before the 1917 Revolution. Two main groups -- the Moscow Linguistic Circle (founded 1915, with Roman Jakobson) and the St. Petersburg-based OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language, with Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Yury Tynyanov) -- set out to create a genuine science of literature. Their founding gesture was a defiant negation of all the criticism that reduced literature to biography, psychology, sociology or philosophy. Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Device" (or "Art as Technique") introduced the concept of ostranenie (defamiliarisation). Art's purpose, he argued, is to make the stone stony again -- to break through the automatism of perception and restore a vivid, palpable sensation of life. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to prolong the difficulty and duration of perception. Jakobson, in his 1919 On Modern Russian Poetry, defined the object of literary science as "literariness" -- that which makes a given work a literary work. This meant focusing not on what literature says but on how it says it: the devices, the sound-texture, the play of forms. On the face of it, this programme stands in blunt opposition to the Marxist insistence on content, social determination and ideological critique. And indeed, as the Bolshevik state consolidated, Formalism came under fierce attack. Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), while acknowledging the Formalism school's "ardour and intelligence," lambasted its neglect of the social content and function of art. For Trotsky, the Formalists' notion of art as a self-enclosed system of devices was a "superstition of the word," a form of idealism that ignored the way every word is saturated with social and historical struggle. He insisted that "the form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it...

They are living people, with a crystallised psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious." This was the classical Marxist objection: Formalism smuggles in the abstract bourgeois individual under the guise of "perception" and evades the fundamental question of whose perception, in whose interest, and to what end. However, the relation is far more nuanced than simple rejection. The Formalists themselves were children of a revolutionary epoch, and their insistence on the specificity of the artistic device was itself a materialist, almost anti-idealist gesture. They wanted to study literature the way a chemist studies compounds, not as a vague expression of the author's soul. Moreover, later Formalist theory, especially Tynyanov's work on literary evolution, introduced a dynamic, systemic view. In "On Literary Evolution" (1927), Tynyanov argued that literature evolves not as a peaceful succession of great works but as a struggle between systems, where devices are constantly automated, and new forms "deform" the dominant norms. The literary system is not isolated from the "extra-literary series" (social life, economics), but correlates with them in complex, shifting ways. This was a decisive opening towards a Marxist sociology of literary form. The first major synthesis between Formalism and Marxism was attempted by the Bakhtin Circle, particularly Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov, in the late 1920s. In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), Medvedev subjected Formalism to a rigorous critique but also sought to salvage its "sound core." He acknowledged that Formalism had correctly identified the material specificity of literature -- language. But, he argued, the Formalists treated language as a "system of abstract grammatical categories," whereas every utterance is an ideological phenomenon saturated with social evaluation. For Medvedev, the literary work is a fully ideological construction in which the formal devices are themselves shaped by the social horizon of the genre. A novel's plot, for instance, is not a neutral arrangement of motifs but a specific way of evaluating and organising time, causality and human agency -- all deeply ideological. Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) complemented this by developing a sociolinguistic theory of the "sign as the arena of class struggle," directly targeting Saussurean abstract objectivism, with which Formalism shared some common ground. The suppression of independent thought under Stalin meant that this promising synthesis was buried in the USSR. But the relation between Formalism and Marxism was re-opened in the West from the 1960s onwards, with the rise of structuralism and a renewed interest in the early Soviet debates. The key figure here is Fredric Jameson, whose 1971 book Marxism and Form explicitly aimed to introduce the best of Continental Formalist and structuralist thought into Anglophone Marxism. Jameson argues that Marxism desperately needs the Formalists' concern with the how of literature. Vulgar Marxist criticism, which simply reads off a work's ideology from its content and class origin, is blind to the fact that ideology is encoded in form itself. The example of ostranenie -- the making-strange -- is for Jameson a potentially revolutionary act: it breaks the petrified, naturalised surface of capitalist common sense, making us see the world as historical and changeable. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson's famous slogan "Always historicise!" is a direct Marxist-Formalist fusion: formal analysis is the privileged entry point into history, because literary forms are "sedimented content" -- they carry within themselves, in their very structure, the contradictions of the modes of production out of which they arose. For instance, the realist novel's omniscient narrator can be read as the formal equivalent of the bourgeois confidence in a transparent, knowable world. Terry Eagleton, in Criticism and Ideology (1976), takes a similar line. He develops a materialist theory of literary production that treats literary texts as works produced out of the raw materials of language, ideology and generic conventions. The writer, like a worker, transforms these raw materials through specific literary "means of production" (techniques, styles). Form is thus never a free choice but a historically determined field of possibilities and constraints. Eagleton explicitly credits the Russian Formalists with alerting Marxism to the productive, transformative character of literary practice, not just its reflective or expressive function.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Frankfurt School also grappled with form. Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, while deeply Marxist, is strangely Formalist in its insistence that art's social truth lies in its form, not in its explicit message. For Adorno, a formally challenging work like those of Beckett or Schoenberg is more politically truthful than a socialist realist novel because it negates, in its very monadic structure, the false coherence of the administered world. This is a Formalist-Marxism of a thoroughly dialectical kind: the work's autonomy is a "determinate negation" of society. Of course, the tension never fully disappears. A purely Formalist approach, rigidly separated from social content, risks becoming a sterile taxonomy of devices. A pure Marxist content-analysis risks the "vulgar sociology" that turns literature into a mere class-symptom. The most vital Marxist criticism today, from critics like Franco Moretti (with his "distant reading") to Caroline Levine (with her study of "forms" in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network), continues to draw on Formalist attention to patterned, deviced textuality while insisting that forms are always already social and political. Levine's book explicitly reads Formalist concepts back into political theory, arguing that literary forms collide and overlap with social forms outside the text. In sum, Russian Formalism and Marxism are related through a dialectic of contradiction and incorporation. Formalism provided Marxism with a tool-box for the immanent analysis of texts, compelling Marxist critics to recognise that art is not a passive mirror but a set of active, defamiliarising techniques that re-organise perception. Marxism, in turn, historicised those techniques, revealing their ideological preconditions and effects. The journey from Shklovsky's "making it strange" to Jameson's "political unconscious" is a continuous, if jagged, line of intellectual filiation. The refusal of the best Marxist critics to dismiss Formalism outright but instead to aufheben it -- to negate, preserve and raise it to a higher level -- has yielded some of the richest literary criticism of the past century. 4. What is the Relevance of Marxism Today? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, one might imagine that Marxism, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumphalist "end of history" proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama, belongs to the museum of discredited doctrines. Yet the reality is precisely the opposite. We live in a moment of cascading crises -- financial meltdowns, pandemic-exposed inequality, climate catastrophe, the rise of a new techno-feudalism, and the resurgence of far-right populism -- and the most penetrating framework for understanding these interconnected disasters remains that of Karl Marx. Far from being dead, Marxism is arguably more relevant than at any time since the 1930s, precisely because the world has come to look so much like the one Marx diagnosed. From the spectacular concentration of wealth to the precarious gig economy, from the commodification of intimate life to the metabolic rift with nature, capital's contradictions are unfolding with brutal clarity, and a new generation is reaching for the toolkit Marx left behind. The most immediate evidence of Marxism's relevance is economic. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) is not a Marxist work in its policy prescriptions, but its central empirical finding -- that the rate of return on capital (r) has been persistently greater than the rate of economic growth (g) -- confirms Marx's fundamental law of capital accumulation. Wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, not because of personal greed but because of the impersonal logic of a system based on private ownership of the means of production. The spectacular growth of billionaire fortunes during the COVID-19 pandemic, while millions lost their jobs and livelihoods, is a practical demonstration of the Manifesto's insight that capital "has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'." David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism lay out with great

precision how the crisis of 2008 was not an anomaly but a structural feature of a system that is driven by an endless need for compound growth, constantly hits barriers in the market, and displaces its contradictions geographically and temporally through "spatial fixes." Harvey's Marxism gives us a grammar to understand housing bubbles, austerity, and the financialisation of everyday life not as accidents but as necessary symptoms of over-accumulated capital seeking profitable outlets. Beyond macro-economics, Marxism provides the sharpest lens for analysing the transformation of work. The "proletariat" has not vanished; it has mutated. The old industrial working class of the Global North has been partly replaced by a vast, informalised, precarious workforce -- what Guy Standing calls the "precariat" -- in both the Global South and the gig economies of the West. A worker driving for Uber or delivering for Amazon Flex is waged labour in its most naked, hyper-exploited form, stripped of every benefit, every security, every trace of a stable social contract. Marx's concept of the reserve army of labour is perfectly operational: the gig platforms rely on a constant oversupply of workers to drive wages down. The "chains" the worker wears today are digital, the algorithmic boss tracking every movement, but the relation remains capital's purchase of labour-power for surplus extraction. As Slavoj Žižek has argued in Trouble in Paradise, these new forms of work are not an escape from capitalism but a return to its classic nineteenth-century reality, without the welfare-state mediations that the twentieth-century class compromise temporarily provided. The digital realm offers another striking confirmation of Marxist concepts. Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism analyses how tech giants like Google and Facebook have turned our personal experience -- our desires, fears, social interactions -- into raw material for commodification. This is commodity fetishism raised to a new power. When we scroll through social media, we do not see the labour we perform for free, producing the data that is then packaged and sold as prediction products. The social relation between millions of users and the platform monopolists appears as a natural, convenient feature of digital life. As Marx said of religion, so we might say of the algorithm: it is "the heart of a heartless world," an apparent personalisation that masks a vast apparatus of exploitation and surveillance. Here, Marxist analysis merges with a critique of the cultural industries, extending Adorno and Horkheimer's insights into the culture industry into the algorithmic age. Marxism's relevance is also ecological. The climate crisis is not a generic "human" problem; it is a crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Marx himself, in the chapter on "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry" in Capital, described how capitalism creates a "metabolic rift" in the interaction between human society and nature. Capitalist agriculture, oriented entirely to profit, robs the soil of its nutrients and concentrates them in polluted cities. Today, this rift is global. The imperative of endless growth on a finite planet is a terminal contradiction. Eco-Marxists like John Bellamy Foster, in Marx's Ecology and The Ecological Rift, and Jason W. Moore, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, have drawn on Marx's late notebooks to show that Marx had a sophisticated understanding of how capital systematically degrades the natural basis of all life. The solution, Marx suggested, can only be a society of "associated producers" rationally regulating their metabolism with nature. In the face of a political class incapable of even modest emissions reductions because of fossil-capital interests, the Marxist argument that the problem is systemic, not a matter of individual consumer choices, becomes profoundly compelling. As Naomi Klein argued in This Changes Everything, capitalism and a stable climate are fundamentally incompatible. The ideological and political landscape of the 2020s also calls for a Marxist diagnostic. The decade saw a massive resurgence of anti-capitalist political movements, from Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and the indignados to Black Lives Matter and the global climate strikes. Each of these movements, in different ways, articulates a critique of what the Occupy slogan crystallised: the 1% versus the 99%. The language of class, exploitation and systemic injustice, long banished from polite politics, has returned. Young people in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to numerous polls, express more positive views of socialism

than of capitalism. The electoral insurgencies of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, while unsuccessful, demonstrated a mass appetite for a programme that breaks with neoliberal orthodoxy. All these phenomena are unthinkable without the Marxist tradition that gave the world the very concept of a political movement of the dispossessed. The theoretical toolkit Marxism provides is unmatched for tracing connections. It refuses to separate economics from culture, climate from class, gender from capitalism. Marxist feminism, in the lineage of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, has shown that capitalism has always depended on the unwaged, devalued reproductive labour of women, and that the modern attacks on public services and social reproduction -- cuts to healthcare, childcare, education -- are a continuation of primitive accumulation. The concept of intersectionality, while often articulated in a liberal key, has deep roots in the Marxist understanding that capitalism operates through the division and hierarchisation of the working class along lines of race, gender and nation. Racism, from this perspective, is not a cultural hangover but a structural tool of accumulation, a way to create a lower stratum of labour and to divide potential resistance. The Marxist historian C. L. R. James made this argument powerfully in The Black Jacobins, and it remains essential for any serious anti-racist politics today. It is true, of course, that the Marxist project of centrally planned economies failed in the twentieth century, often with catastrophic results. But as Eagleton emphasises in Why Marx Was Right, Marx himself would have been the first to subject those regimes to a ruthless critique, and one of his core tenets is that revolution must be democratic in the deepest sense. Marxism is not a state religion but an ongoing critical method. It is at its most vital when it is a "ruthless criticism of all that exists," including its own historical embodiments. It is a way of asking questions: who owns and controls the resources of society? Who does the work? Who reaps the rewards? Who pays the costs -- in poverty, pollution, military service -- for the lifestyle of the few? These questions, far from becoming obsolete, have become inescapable. Marxism's relevance today, in short, lies in its unique capacity to name the system. Neoliberalism naturalised the market, making capitalism seem as inescapable as the weather. Marxism demonstrates that it is a historically specific, internally contradictory system created by human beings and therefore capable of being transformed by them. In a world staggering under the weight of inequality, mass displacement, ecological breakdown and wars for resources, the final words of the Manifesto -- "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win" -- have shed their antiquated ring. They sound less like a prophecy from 1848 and more like a sober assessment of the emergency of our time. As the crises deepen, Marxism endures not as a dogma but as the most rigorous, humane and revolutionary method for understanding a world desperately in need of change.