Blog post

Marx's Revenge: How Class Struggle is Shaping the World

Alyssa Goldstein28 March 2013

Marx has appeared, of all places, in the Business and Money section of Time Magazine. In this week's issue, Michael Schuman describes how class struggle, rather than being rendered irrelevant by the spread of global capitalism, continues to impact our world in significant ways—and he cites Chavs author Owen Jones and Jacques Rancière (author of Aisthesis, The Intellectual and His People, Proletarian Nights, and many other works) to help him make his case. 

With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx's biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world's wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole," Marx wrote.

A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.

Visit Time Magazine to read the article in full.