Reading Marx today: alienation, commodity fetishism and who owns the machine

The difficulty in writing about Karl Marx is that nobody is neutral about him.

For the whole of the twentieth century Marx was read not as a philosopher but as a banner. States were founded in his name, millions died in his name, universities split in his name.

That is the worst thing that can happen to a thinker: to be found right or wrong, but never to be read.

Today, with most of that political freight behind us, Marx is being read again. And what is being read this time is not a programme but an analysis.

A method and four concepts#

Marx's lasting contribution is not a description of the society to come — he almost never attempted one. What lasts is a set of concepts for how capitalism works.

1. Alienation#

A concept of the early work, and above all of the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Marx describes four separate ruptures.

The worker is alienated from the product: what he makes is not his, and it confronts him as an alien power.

The worker is alienated from his own activity: work ceases to be self-realisation and becomes a departure from the self.

Human beings are alienated from their species-being: what marks us out is that we can plan our production and transform it consciously, and wage labour takes that away.

And human beings are alienated from one another: relationships turn into relations of competition.

The strength of the concept is that it is psychological and existential as much as economic. It was through this concept, indeed, that Marx had one of his most fruitful twentieth-century encounters — the encounter with existentialism. That meeting also lies behind the "digital existentialism" theme to be discussed at the North American Sartre Society meeting we announce elsewhere on the site today.

2. Commodity fetishism#

This section of the first volume of Capital is probably Marx's most original philosophical contribution.

The thesis is this: under capitalism, relations between people appear as relations between things.

The price of a commodity presents itself as though it were a natural property of the object. Behind the price stand labour, organisation, a supply chain, relations of power and a good deal of bargaining. The person looking at the product sees none of it. He sees a number.

Marx calls this fetishism: something made by human hands appearing to hold power in its own right.

The concept transfers to algorithms without adjustment. A recommender system, a credit score, a hiring filter — each looks objective, technical, impersonal. Behind each lies the question of who gathered which data, which criterion was chosen, and who was left out.

The feature on labour process theory we publish today is an attempt to break that invisibility.

3. Labour power and surplus value#

Marx's most technical intervention in classical economics: the employer buys not labour but labour power — a capacity, for a fixed stretch of time.

The gap between the cost of reproducing that capacity and the value it produces is surplus value.

Economists have largely given up the quantitative side of the theory. The conceptual core stands: how much of a working day belongs to whom is a political question, not a technical one.

4. Historical materialism#

The most disputed part, and the most misunderstood. In its crude form it is read as "the economy determines everything", and in that form it cannot be defended.

The more defensible version runs like this. A society's mode of production sets serious limits on which ideas are thinkable within it. Feudal society has no concept of a career; where there is no wage labour there is no unemployment.

This is not determinism. It is a thesis about conditioning.

New readings#

Over the past twenty years work on Marx has opened out in three directions, and none of them belongs to the classical quarrel.

Ecology. The idea of the metabolic rift in Capital — the break capitalist production introduces into the exchange of matter between human beings and nature — has been rediscovered in the argument over the climate crisis. Marx's reading in agricultural chemistry and his notes on soil fertility make it possible, unexpectedly, to read him as a thinker of the environment. The reading is not uncontested: his optimism about the development of the productive forces sits awkwardly with the idea of ecological limits.

Republicanism. A newer reading places Marx not inside liberal theories of freedom but inside the republican tradition. There, freedom is not the absence of interference but the absence of domination: that a master treats you well does not mean you are not a slave, because what counts is his standing power to interfere at will.

Marx's critique of wage labour recovers its point on this reading. The trouble is not only low pay. It is that the worker is structurally exposed to the employer's arbitrary decision.

That makes it a surprising extension of the republican tradition we traced this week in our Cicero feature: a line running from Rome to Machiavelli and on to Marx.

The sociology of work. The third direction is the most concrete: the platform economy, algorithmic management, casualised employment, work processes underwritten by artificial intelligence. Here Marx is used not as an ideology but as a toolbox.

The serious objections to Marx#

An honest portrait has to carry the objections as well.

The theory of value. The power of the labour theory of value to explain prices commands little assent within economics. The transformation problem, of which Marx himself was aware, is not counted as solved.

Predictions that failed. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the polarisation of the classes, the expectation that revolution would come in the most advanced capitalist countries — none of it happened as forecast.

A thin theory of the state. Marx wrote almost nothing about the institutional shape of a socialist society. Some of the twentieth century's catastrophes were born in that gap. They cannot be charged directly to him; but the gap itself is in the work.

An assumption about human nature. Marx assumes that when conditions change human beings will change radically too. That optimism has no experimental support.

So why is he still read?#

Because the question he asked has not been settled.

"Who produced this value, and who took it?"

That question can be put without any ideological commitment. And in 2026, in a world where artificial intelligence models are trained on text, code, images and music made by millions of people, it is sharper than ever.

It sits at the centre of the arguments now running over creativity and copyright. Where does the value of a text produced by a model come from? From the company that trained it, from the millions who produced the training data, or from the user who ran it?

Marx has no answer ready. But that the question can be asked at all is largely his doing.

A closing note#

To read Marx is not to be a Marxist.

The measure of a thinker is not whether you accept his conclusions. It is whether he forces you to see something you had not seen.

Marx does that. Look at a product, and he makes you ask about the labour behind it; look at a technology, and he makes you ask about the property relation behind it; look at an order that appears "natural", and he makes you ask about the historical conditions holding it up.

Once acquired, the habit is not lost.

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Karl Marx was born in Trier on 5 May 1818 and died in London on 14 March 1883. Principal works: the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 · The German Ideology (with Engels) · The Communist Manifesto (with Engels, 1848) · the Grundrisse · Capital, volume I (1867).