This article is part of a short series on Marx, Weber and Durkheim for undergraduate readers. Each piece asks two questions: what does this theorist still help us explain about contemporary society, and where does their framework need updating or extension? The aim is to show both the continuing value of “classical” theory and why it cannot be used uncritically without later developments.
A courier waits outside a restaurant, phone in hand, watching the countdown on a delivery app. The platform classifies them as an independent contractor. The restaurant treats them as an external service. The customer sees only a moving icon on a map and a timer that promises speed and reliability. Beneath this apparently simple interaction sit investors, data centres, and algorithmic systems that allocate jobs, set prices, and evaluate performance. Work, risk and reward are connected here, but not evenly.
At first glance this scene looks very different from the nineteenth‑century factories that Karl Marx analysed. There is no foreman shouting on the shop floor, no steam engine, no assembly line. Yet the basic questions are strikingly similar. Who owns the key resources? Who must sell their labour power in order to survive? How is surplus produced and captured? And why do social arrangements that appear exploitative or unfair to many still feel normal, inevitable, or even desirable to those involved?
This article introduces Marx’s core ideas about capitalism, shows how we can interpret them in relation to contemporary capitalism and the gig economy, and considers what is and is not still useful in his framework. It then sketches some major theorists who have extended or reworked Marxist analysis, including Bourdieu and Diane Reay, before returning to the question of Marx’s relevance for understanding class, inequality and work today.
What Marx Said
Marx is often reduced to a few slogans about class struggle, the abolition of private property, or “workers of the world unite”. His critique of capitalism is in fact more systematic. It is built around an analysis of how a specific mode of production – capitalism – organises work, property and power in ways that generate both extraordinary wealth and deep inequality.
Class as a Relationship
For Marx, class is not simply a matter of income, lifestyle or occupational prestige. It is a social relationship rooted in control over the means of production – factories, land, offices, machinery, and, in contemporary conditions, platforms and data infrastructures (Marx, 1976). Those who own these means of production form the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. Those who do not own productive property must sell their labour power in order to live and constitute the working class, or proletariat.
Class positions are therefore relational rather than individual attributes. A person is a worker not because of their tastes or cultural identity, but because they are structurally dependent on selling their labour power to an employer who controls the means of production. A capitalist is someone who can live from profits generated by the labour of others. These positions – bourgeoisie and proletariat – only make sense in relation to one another and to the wider organisation of production.
This relational understanding cuts against everyday talk of “the middle class” or “aspirational consumers”. Such labels describe gradations of income or status within capitalism, but they can obscure the more fundamental divide between those who own productive assets and those who must work for them. For Marx, class is about the social relations of production, not just the distribution of goods or lifestyles.
Exploitation and Surplus Value
Marx’s most distinctive claim is that capitalism rests on exploitation. He does not restrict exploitation to cases of unusually low wages or illegal working conditions. Instead, he argues that exploitation is embedded in the ordinary operation of the wage relationship in capitalist firms (Marx, 1976).
The key concept here is surplus value. When a worker sells their labour power for a day, they receive a wage that covers, more or less, the cost of reproducing that labour power – food, housing, clothing, and so on. During that working day, however, the worker produces goods or services whose value exceeds the value of their wage. The additional value – the surplus – is appropriated by the capitalist as profit.
Crucially, this exploitation is structural. A firm that fails to generate surplus value will be outcompeted or go out of business. Even relatively generous employers, who pay above the legal minimum or provide benefits, are operating within a competitive system that requires profit to be extracted from labour time. Exploitation in Marx’s sense therefore continues even when formal labour standards are observed.
Commodification: Turning Life into Things‑for‑Sale
Marx also emphasises the expansion of the commodity form. A commodity is a good or service produced for exchange on a market, rather than directly for use. Under capitalism, more and more aspects of social life are drawn into commodity relations: housing, health, education, leisure, care and even social connections.
This process of commodification does more than increase the number of things available to buy. It alters how people experience their own lives and capacities. When access to basic needs depends on markets, individuals must treat their abilities, time and even personalities as things‑for‑sale. They become sellers not only of labour power but of flexibility, friendliness, emotional labour and 24/7 availability.
Ideology and Common Sense
Marx is also concerned with ideology. In his work, ideology does not refer simply to conscious lies or crude propaganda. It refers to the ways in which dominant ideas are rooted in and help stabilise dominant material arrangements (Marx & Engels, 1970). The organisation of production and property shapes what appears as common sense.
In a society where wage labour is taken for granted, it can seem obvious that adults should work full‑time, that unemployment is primarily a personal failing, and that firms are obliged to maximise shareholder value. These assumptions are rarely argued for explicitly; they are built into everyday language and institutional routines. Ideology works most effectively when people explain their own situations using the very categories that the system relies on.
Limits of the Nineteenth‑Century Frame
Marx’s analysis gives us a powerful conceptual toolkit, but it is also situated and partial. He wrote in the context of heavy industry, where large factories, long shifts and overt class conflict were central to everyday life. Service work, care work and digital labour do not fit this picture straightforwardly.
Marx’s texts contain important remarks on colonialism, race and gender, but these typically appear at the margins of his main argument. They do not amount to a systematic account of how racialised exploitation, patriarchy and empire are built into capitalist development. Later Marxist, feminist, anti‑racist and decolonial thinkers have argued that this reflects the standpoint of a European male writer embedded in a particular imperial moment, and that it leaves crucial forms of domination under‑theorised.
Finally, Marx sometimes presents capitalism as a historical stage on the way to socialism. This can easily be read as a teleological narrative, in which history is assumed to move in a progressive direction, culminating in the overthrow of capitalism by a revolutionary proletariat. The survival, mutation and globalisation of capitalism over the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries suggest a more open, contingent trajectory.
These limitations do not invalidate Marx’s critique. They do, however, mean that his work requires interpretation, extension and, at points, revision rather than straightforward repetition.
When Marx Was Writing
Marx was born in 1818 and died in 1883. He developed his major works during a period of rapid industrialisation, particularly in Britain, where he spent much of his later life as a political exile. The factories, workshops and slums of nineteenth‑century Manchester and London – with long working days, child labour and minimal welfare provision – shaped his understanding of capitalism and class.
Many of the texts we cite today, such as the Penguin edition of Capital, Volume I or modern English translations of The German Ideology, were published long after Marx’s death. They are later editions, compilations and translations of manuscripts and books originally written between the 1840s and 1870s. This is important context: Marx was analysing a specific historical phase of capitalism, centred on industrial production in Europe, even though his concepts have since been applied to very different times and places.
How We Can Interpret That Today
How can Marx’s framework help us make sense of contemporary capitalism, particularly digital platforms and gig work, without forcing anachronistic comparisons between factories and apps?
From Factories to Platforms
Following Marx, a first step is to pose familiar questions in unfamiliar settings. Who owns the crucial assets? How is labour organised and controlled? Where does surplus value come from? In what Marx called the capitalist mode of production, these questions orient us to the structure of power.
In what some authors term platform capitalism, the central assets are often software systems, data infrastructures and network effects rather than physical machinery (Srnicek, 2016). Consider app‑based food delivery. Riders provide their own bikes or scooters and smartphones. The platform owns the app, the brand, the customer relationships and the data. Customers pay the platform. The platform then pays riders a fee per delivery.
Out of that fee, riders must cover their equipment costs, fuel, unpaid waiting time and often their own social security contributions. Viewed through Marx’s lens, we can see exploitation in a recognisable sense: riders generate more value than they receive back in pay, and the platform captures the surplus as profit. At the same time, the forms of control differ from the archetypal factory. Algorithms allocate jobs, adjust pay, set routes and rate performance; a human manager may never be physically present (Rosenblat, 2018).
Flexibility, Risk and Ideology
Marx’s approach also helps us interrogate the language used to describe gig work. Platform labour is frequently justified in terms of flexibility, autonomy and entrepreneurship. Riders are framed as micro‑business owners who can choose when to log on and off. Public discourse often links platforms to innovation, consumer choice and urban efficiency.
From a Marxian perspective, this discourse can be read as ideological. It reframes a structural dependence on platform work – shaped by wider labour market conditions, welfare regimes and immigration policies – as an individual lifestyle preference. The risks of fluctuating demand, ill‑health or accident are shifted onto workers but presented as the natural price of freedom and flexibility. Ideology here operates through everyday narratives of choice and responsibility rather than through explicit political doctrine.
Commodification and Data
The expansion of commodification that Marx diagnosed is intensified in digital capitalism. Labour power is still sold, but detailed data about the performance of that labour is also treated as a resource for profit. Platforms collect fine‑grained information about riders’ routes, speeds and responsiveness, as well as customers’ ordering habits and locations.
Zuboff (2019) argues that this marks the rise of surveillance capitalism, in which human experience itself becomes raw material for data extraction, prediction and behavioural control. In this context, Marx’s concepts of exploitation and commodification remain useful, but they need to be extended to cover forms of expropriation that go beyond the wage relation, including the appropriation of data and attention.
Gig work under algorithmic management therefore illustrates both the strengths and the limits of Marx’s original analysis. It reveals enduring patterns of class, exploitation and commodification, but it also forces us to ask new questions about consent, subjectivity and digital forms of control.
What Parts Are Still Relevant
Despite the historical distance, several elements of Marx’s analysis remain central for sociological understandings of capitalism.
Capitalism as a System, Not Just a Market
First, Marx encourages us to treat capitalism as a social system, not just as a collection of markets, firms or technologies. It is a mode of production that structures relations between classes, shapes state institutions and influences culture. This systemic perspective pushes us to look beyond surface changes – from factories to platforms, from high street shops to online marketplaces – and to ask how underlying relationships of class and exploitation persist through these transformations.
Structural Exploitation
Second, the idea of structural exploitation remains analytically powerful. It reminds us that injustice in capitalism is not only a matter of bad employers, individual greed or weak regulation. It is built into a competitive system that requires profit to be extracted from labour on an ongoing basis. This helps explain why reforms within capitalism, while important for people’s lives, often encounter hard limits.
Commodification and Insecurity
Third, Marx’s account of commodification clarifies contemporary experiences of insecurity and precarity. When basic needs such as housing, care and education are organised as markets, people must continuously perform well as sellers of labour or services. This generates chronic anxiety and competition, even when headline unemployment rates are low.
Gig work is an obvious illustration, but similar dynamics appear in higher education, the cultural industries and other sectors where short‑term contracts, performance indicators and self‑branding structure everyday life. Marx’s focus on the commodification of labour power provides a starting point for analysing these developments.
Ideology Embedded in Practice
Fourth, Marx’s insight that dominant ideas are rooted in dominant material relations remains relevant. Ideology operates not only through speeches, manifestos or media content, but also through institutional routines and technologies. The way apps present work options, the categories used in welfare and migration systems, and the language of “employability” and “skills” all help to normalise precarious arrangements.
Seeing ideology as embedded in practice helps explain why many people defend or tolerate systems that appear to harm them. The interpretive frameworks they use to make sense of their lives – what counts as a good job, a realistic aspiration, a responsible choice – are already shaped by the logic of capital.
What Parts Are Less Useful Today
Other aspects of Marx’s framework are harder to apply directly and require careful supplementation.
Industrial Bias
Marx’s central empirical reference point is the industrial workplace: factories, mines and textile mills. These remain vital in global supply chains, particularly in the Global South, but many workers in the Global North are employed in services, care or digital sectors. The temporal rhythms, forms of control and subjective experiences of these jobs differ from those of nineteenth‑century industry.
Concepts such as the working day, the factory regime or even the factory as the paradigmatic site of struggle can be stretched to fit service and platform work, but they do not capture everything that matters about affective labour, digital surveillance or work that bleeds into leisure and domestic life.
Limited Treatment of Race, Gender and Empire
Marx wrote about colonialism, dispossession and slavery, but these analyses sit at the edges of his main argument. He did not develop a sustained account of how race, gender and empire structure capitalist social relations. Subsequent scholarship has demonstrated that capitalism has always relied on racialised labour, patriarchal divisions of work and imperial extraction (Fraser, 2014).
A Marxism that ignores these dimensions risks reproducing some of the blind spots of its founder. It can universalise the experience of a white, male, European industrial worker and treat that experience as the normative form of proletarian life, marginalising other histories and subjectivities.
Teleology and Historical Direction
Marx’s suggestion that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction can easily be read as implying that socialism will eventually replace it. After a century marked by revolutions, counter‑revolutions, welfare state compromises and neoliberal restructuring, it is difficult to sustain such confidence. Treating Marx as a guide to inevitable futures is less useful than treating him as a source of conceptual tools for analysing open and contested presents.
A Narrow Focus on Waged Work
Finally, Marx’s emphasis on waged industrial work can lead to an underestimation of unpaid and reproductive labour, such as care work in households and communities. Feminist theorists have argued that this labour is essential to the reproduction of labour power but is often invisible or devalued in economic accounts (Fraser, 2016). In platform capitalism, unpaid activities such as rating drivers, performing emotional labour for customers, or creating content for social media can also generate value and data.
These limitations have prompted other theorists to extend, revise or criticise Marx’s framework in order to address gaps around culture, subjectivity, reproduction, education and the state.
Other Theorists Who Have Extended Marx
Several influential thinkers rework or build on Marx in ways that are particularly useful for sociological analysis of contemporary capitalism.
Gramsci rethinks Marxism to explain why domination often operates through consent rather than constant coercion. His concept of hegemony highlights how “common sense” and civil society institutions – schools, media, churches and associations – help stabilise unequal arrangements (Gramsci, 1971). Hegemony is not simply trickery from above; it involves the active participation of subordinated groups in making sense of their own situation. This is helpful for analysing how entrepreneurial language around gig work becomes widely accepted.
Lukács focuses on how capitalist social relations encourage people to see social processes as fixed, thing‑like realities. His notion of reification captures how metrics, ratings and algorithms come to be treated as neutral authorities rather than as the outcomes of human decisions embedded in particular interests (Lukács, 1971). When workers say “the algorithm decided”, they are expressing a reified relation: a social process appears as an impersonal thing.
Althusser shifts attention from production to reproduction. He asks how institutions such as schools, media, law and the family function as ideological state apparatuses that produce subjects who fit the requirements of the system (Althusser, 1971). This perspective helps us see how education, welfare and employment law encourage people to understand themselves as flexible, self‑reliant workers or entrepreneurs, and how they internalise particular norms of productivity and responsibility.
Habermas brings in questions of communication, legitimacy and the public sphere. He distinguishes between the system of markets and bureaucracies and the lifeworld of everyday interaction, and explores how the former increasingly colonises the latter (Habermas, 1987). He also examines how modern states manage legitimation crises when inequality, austerity or corruption become too visible (Habermas, 1975). His work directs attention to the communicative work required to maintain public support for capitalist restructuring.
Bourdieu is not usually classified as a Marxist, but his concepts of habitus, field and different forms of capital are deeply indebted to Marx’s concern with class, power and reproduction (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986). He shows how economic capital interacts with cultural and social capital to produce durable class advantages, especially through the education system. Bourdieu’s work allows us to trace how class is lived and embodied, not only how it is positioned in the labour market.
Diane Reay draws on Bourdieu’s framework in explicitly class‑conscious ways, analysing how working‑class children and families experience schooling and how middle‑class privilege is reproduced through everyday practices, emotions and institutional arrangements (Reay, 2005, 2017). Her work brings a contemporary, UK‑focused and often feminist Marxist sensibility to questions of class, identity and education, making visible the affective and psychic dimensions of class inequality.
More recent writers extend Marx into new terrains. Srnicek (2016) analyses platforms as infrastructural businesses that rely on data, network effects and the ability to position themselves as essential intermediaries. Zuboff (2019) shows how surveillance, prediction and behavioural nudging become central to accumulation in digital capitalism. Fraser (2014, 2016, 2019) emphasises capitalism’s dependence on unpaid care work, public power and ecological systems, arguing for an expanded conception of capitalism that includes its “hidden abodes”. Together with Bourdieu and Reay, these thinkers offer ways to update and complicate Marx’s insights for the age of platforms, mass education and planetary crises.
Why Marx Still Matters
Is Marx still relevant? Taken as a complete and final theory of society, the answer is clearly no. His work leaves out crucial dimensions of race, gender and ecology, and it was written in and for a very different technological and political moment. It cannot simply be applied unchanged to platform capitalism, the gig economy or the climate crisis.
As a starting point for analysing capitalism, however, Marx remains extremely valuable. He directs attention to class relations, structural exploitation and the expanding reach of commodification. He encourages us to see capitalism as a system that shapes not only incomes and working conditions but also common sense, institutions and everyday experience. These insights are still necessary if we want to understand why work can be both celebrated as flexible and experienced as precarious, or why technological innovation so often goes hand in hand with intensified inequality.
Later theorists – from Gramsci and Lukács to Habermas, Bourdieu, Reay, Zuboff, Srnicek and Fraser – do not replace Marx so much as supplement, revise and challenge him. They help to fill in his blind spots and adapt his concepts to new forms of work, power and crisis. Reading Marx today therefore works best not as an act of loyalty to a nineteenth‑century figure, but as a way of gaining access to a critical toolkit that can be expanded, contested and reshaped.
For students trying to make sense of capitalism and the gig economy, Marx is still worth reading closely. He does not provide ready‑made answers, but he offers questions and concepts that remain central: Who owns what? Who has to sell their labour power, and on what terms? How is value produced, appropriated and justified? And how do people come to accept arrangements that appear to work against them? These questions continue to matter, perhaps even more urgently, in a world organised around apps, platforms and data.
References
- Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans.). Monthly Review Press.
- Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1979)
- Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood.
- Fraser, N. (2014). Behind Marx’s hidden abode: For an expanded conception of capitalism. New Left Review, 86, 55–72.
- Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117.
- Fraser, N. (2019). The old is dying and the new cannot be born: From progressive neoliberalism to Trump and beyond. Verso.
- Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart.
- Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation crisis (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press.
- Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press.
- Lukács, G. (1971). Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat. In History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics (R. Livingstone, Trans., pp. 83–222). Merlin Press. (Original work published 1923)
- Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume I (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1867)
- Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The German ideology (C. J. Arthur, Ed.). Lawrence and Wishart. (Original work published 1845–1846)
- Reay, D. (2005). Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class. Sociology, 39(5), 911–928.
- Reay, D. (2017). Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes. Policy Press.
- Rosenblat, A. (2018). Uberland: How algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. University of California Press.
- Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform capitalism. Polity.
- Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile.
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