Marxism is a tradition of social analysis rooted in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. It examines how the production and distribution of material goods shape social relations, institutions, and consciousness.
Core concepts include historical materialism, which holds that material conditions of production drive historical change; class struggle, the conflict between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor; and surplus value, the difference between the value workers produce and the wages they receive, which Marx identified as the mechanism of capitalist exploitation.
Marxism is distinct from related traditions. Anarchism shares a critique of capitalism but rejects the state entirely, opposing the Marxist strategy of seizing state power as a transitional step. Autonomism draws on Marxist categories but shifts attention from party leadership to worker self-organization and the refusal of work.
Several critiques have challenged Marxism’s analytical framework. Cedric Robinson’s account of racial capitalism argues that capitalism has always been organized through racial hierarchies, not only through class, and that Marx’s framework underestimates the role of race in accumulation. Decolonial critiques, notably those of Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, challenge Marxism’s Eurocentrism and its tendency to treat Indigenous dispossession as a historical stage of capitalist development (so-called primitive accumulation) rather than as an ongoing structure of colonial power.
The essay From Science to Story: Reading the Late Marx as Morality in this school examines how Marx’s later work shifts from a scientific posture toward a moral argument about exploitation.
Marxism provides analytical tools that remain useful in this vault, especially the critique of value, accumulation, and commodity fetishism. However, its foundational assumptions — materialism as ontological ground, dialectics as a universal method, and a teleological account of historical progress — differ from the relational ontology at the center of this vault, which treats relations rather than material conditions as ontologically prior and does not assume a directional trajectory for history.