Thatcher was wrong — There is something called society, and it is called capitalism¹

Maggie Thatcher, former British Prime Minister, once said:

‘Too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.’²

‘There is no such thing as society’? But there is. Society exists as an emergent effect of structured and patterned relations among individuals and groups as they produce and reproduce their lives. Individuals and groups can only act within the framework of social relations that constitute society. In essence, society is an ensemble of relations. As Marx observed, ‘[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’³.

These social relations, however, are unequal, oppressive, and exploitative. The society that exists today is a capitalist society—a society that Thatcher and her fellow-travellers have consistently defended, often at the expense of the common people, while blaming them for their suffering.

If it is true that ‘people must look to themselves first,’ then why does the government routinely bail out those individuals called capitalists? Why does it create markets for those people who own and control the military-industrial complex and other major industries? And if people are truly expected to ‘look to themselves,’ why are their struggles—through which they attempt exactly that—suppressed? For example, when British miners tried to ‘look to themselves’ during the 1984–1985 strike, Thatcher’s government violently suppressed them.

It is capitalism—its class relations and accumulation dynamics—that generates vast amounts of wealth both within nations and globally. Yet at the same time, it produces poverty in both absolute and relative terms. In fact, it requires poverty and thrives on it⁴. Capitalism produces and depends on massive socio-economic inequality as well as stark geographical disparities⁵. The ratio of average incomes between the global top 0.1% and the global bottom 50% has risen dramatically—from around 300 in 1820 to 900 in 1910, before stabilising around 500-700 between 1910 and 2020 (Fig. 1). Despite the enormous development of productive forces, the bottom 50% have not benefited proportionately.

Fig 1. Rising Inequality in the world
Source: World Inequality Report (2022)⁶

Inequality arises fundamentally from capitalist exploitation and the dispossession of direct producers, compounded by the shrinking of welfare benefits and social services provided by the capitalist state. Capitalists exploit workers through long hours and low wages, often below subsistence levels. In other contexts, they increase profits by employing productivity-enhancing methods of production. Moreover, capitalists subject people to secondary forms of exploitation—that is, exploitation beyond the sphere of production. Workers are also exploited in markets for land, credit, housing, and essential consumer goods such as food.

Capitalism is inherently crisis-prone⁷. A major illustration of this was the global economic crisis of 2007–2008. Partly because of this crisis-proneness, modern world capitalism is necessarily imperialist: advanced capitalist countries attempt to shift the effects of their crises onto politically and economically weaker countries, often with the complicity of the states in those countries⁸. The normal mechanisms of capitalism, combined with economic crises and imperialist practices, have severe adverse effects on the living conditions of the working masses worldwide, particularly workers and poor peasants in less developed countries.

The problems generated by capitalism are pervasive, yet they are particularly acute in less developed countries and in the most underdeveloped regions within these countries. In many underdeveloped areas of India, such as Odisha, capitalist ‘free’ market relations in land and labour coexist and interact with coercive production relations in certain localities, as well as with deeply undemocratic social structures, including casteism, patriarchy, and tribal hierarchies more generally.

The institutions of the state largely function as ‘instruments’ of property owners, including those whose primary objective is to subject natural resources and working people to cruel forms of commodification and ruthless exploitation—all in the name of development and export earnings⁹. There is an inverse relationship between democratic rhetoric and its actual content. Democratic values are largely absent in both the economy and polity: ordinary people have minimal real control over how resources and labour are utilised.

A massive rise in inequality undermines even the limited democracy that was previously possible under capitalism. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (2024) Democracy Index illustrates how global democracy has been weakening since roughly the mid-2010s. The Index is based on 60 indicators grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Countries receive scores from zero to ten in each category, with the overall index rating calculated as a simple average of the five category scores. The global average score, on a scale of 0 to 10, has dropped to 5.17—the lowest recorded since the index began in 2006—down from 5.55 in 2015¹⁰.

Fig 3. Declining democracy

Associated with growing inequality and declining democracy is the pervasive ‘cult’ of violence¹¹. Systemic violence manifests, for example, when people’s livelihoods are taken from them or when they lack the money to afford basic necessities, leading to starvation or poverty-induced diseases. Connected to this is what can be called ‘agentic violence’: in some contexts, ordinary people, often out of sheer desperation, resort to violence—which is generally unproductive in the long run. In response, and often pre-emptively, the state employs massive and disproportionate violence to suppress or control such acts.

If there is capitalism, can Marxism be far away?

No system of injustice goes unchallenged. Beyond the preoccupations of corporate-controlled mainstream media, people’s movements against the profit-driven system have been taking place. Consider, for example, the Arab Spring, the Indian farmers’ movement, ongoing protests against vote theft in India, the Occupy movements in the US and Europe, anti-genocide and anti-war campaigns, and struggles against dispossession and climate change. Even when suppressed, these movements leave a lasting impression on the radical imagination of the masses. Humans possess an irrepressible quest for justice and a desire for a humane world.

Many activists and movements have drawn inspiration from the critiques of capitalist commodification and development articulated by Marx and other progressive scholars. Ideologically, these protests—as well as recent economic crises—challenge the legitimacy not only of capitalism, including its neoliberal forms, but also of capitalist nation-states and global ‘state-like’ institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. This critique emerges in both wealthier and poorer countries alike.

There has indeed been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in a Marxist worldview, which, as Terry Eagleton describes, is the ‘most theoretically rich, politically uncompromising critique of [the capitalist] system’¹². This revival of an intellectually insurgent worldview has been facilitated by the collapse of the social relations associated with authoritarian ‘communism’ and related approaches, which had previously constrained the development of Marxism’s productive powers.

In this context, questions about alternatives to capitalism—beyond Keynesianism, social democracy, state bureaucratism, Third World nationalism, the idea of ‘socialism in one country at any cost,’ neo-populism, and similar approaches—are being posed anew. The role of Marxist intellectuals, whether in academia, the media, or ‘civil society,’ in fostering radical social change is now being actively discussed¹³. There have also been a series of important interventions rethinking political parties, democracy, and visions of viable socialism¹⁴.

More and more people are reading and re-reading Marx and Marxist thinkers in light of the world’s contemporary problems. Marxism is both a science and a guide to action, and it is far superior to non-Marxism, even though it must be updated as necessary¹⁵.  As Lenin emphasised:

‘We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, [Marxism] has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions…[A]n independent elaboration of Marx’s theory is especially essential for [today’s] socialists; for this theory provides only general guiding principles, which, in particular, are applied in England differently than in France, in France differently than in Germany, and in Germany differently than in Russia.’¹⁶

There has been an outpouring of Marxist discussions, including in journals such as Science & Society, the world’s longest continuously published Marxist journal, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in October 2011. Other prominent journals include Historical Materialism (from SOAS, London), Capital & Class, World Review of Political Economy, and Review of Radical Political Economics (from Cornell University), which publishes a substantial body of Marxist research. A significant part of this resurgence is also evident online, through platforms such as Radical Notes, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Monthly Review e-magazine, Sanhati, and wsws.org¹⁷.

In spite of bourgeois attempts to suppress Marxism, it has remained a vibrant source of intellectual inspiration. ‘[T]he single-most-frequently assigned author in American university classrooms today is the socialist revolutionary Karl Marx.’ For example, ‘At 3,856 classroom reading assignments, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto far outpaces every other work in the intellectual canon, except for Plato’s Republic, a close second at 3,573 assignments’¹⁸.  Lenin, Marx’s most important follower, also remains influential. Positive assessments of Lenin’s role in Russian history have risen by 27%, from 40% in 2006 to 67% in 2025¹⁹.

Figure 4: Rising popularity of Marxism
Source: Google Ngram viewer

The Google Ngram Viewer charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of  n-grams found in sources printed between 1500 and 2020 in Google’s text corpora in English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, or Spanish (Wikipedia).

A growing interest in Marxism coincides with a rising engagement with its political project—socialism and communism—much to the chagrin of right-wing and conservative observers (Fig. 1)²⁰. According to a recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov, 62% of Americans aged 18–29 hold a ‘favorable view’ of socialism, while 34% hold the same view of communism²¹. A 2023 Fraser Institute poll indicated that 45% of Americans aged 18–24 agree that socialism is the ideal economic system for the U.S. Similar trends are visible in Europe, Russia, and other parts of the world. For instance, ‘More than six-in-ten Russians agree with the statement ‘It is a great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists.’’ This represents an increase of 13% points since 2011²². 

Of course, not all those who support socialism—a significant minority at present—necessarily agree with or are fully aware of the Marxist conception of socialism²³. For Marxists, a socialist society is envisioned as a prosperous, modern, egalitarian, and sustainable society that is democratic in all spheres of life, both economic and political, and free from imperialism, capitalism, predatory wars, and genocide. It is also a vision of society without racial or patriarchal oppression. Indeed, the reimagining of socialist visions has increasingly incorporated extensive considerations of race, caste, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and disability. These forms of social oppression and discrimination are important in their own right, but they are primarily significant because of the ways in which capitalism subordinates them to its logic. Capitalism advances its accumulation projects by exploiting these sources of oppression, designating certain working subjects as less than average workers who can be paid lower wages. Moreover, capital politically dominates workers and peasants by dividing them along these non-class lines.

A notable feature of the resurgence in Marxist research is the increasing appeal of Marxist dialectics as a holistic framework for understanding the capitalist world²⁴. This approach emphasises both unity and difference from the standpoint of radical transformation. By employing dialectical analysis, we can examine various forms of exploitation and social oppression as interconnected, forming a concrete and integrated whole.

At a time when neoliberalism—both in theory and practice—is in crisis, and the turbulence of capitalist economies has become part of daily life, reading Marx and those engaged in the genuine Marxist tradition is extremely relevant²⁵. Indeed, Marx is arguably more relevant now than in his own time. One key reason is that the tendencies he theorised, such as globalisation and proletarianisation, are being expressed today in fuller and more consequential forms, producing major challenges for humanity.

‘[T]his historical moment, the one we’re living in now, is the best not the worst, the most not the least appropriate moment to bring back Marx… Marx is more relevant than ever, because he, more effectively than any other human being then or now, devoted his life to explaining the systemic logic of capitalism.’²⁶

The situation in the more underdeveloped regions of India—and in similar regions of other countries—caused by capitalism and its cousin, imperialism, raises several pressing questions for Marxists. Why are these regions so impoverished despite being rich in natural resources and the labouring capacity of their workers and peasants? Why must they suffer from the consequences of climate change when they are not primarily responsible for it? How does capitalism exploit undemocratic social and economic relations? What explains the inability of the political and intellectual elite to meaningfully assist the suffering masses? And why do the majority of people lack access to nutritious food, decent housing and clothing, quality education and healthcare, as well as other essential amenities such as safe drinking water and electricity?

These and many other questions can be fruitfully explored only if we possess an adequate understanding of capitalism itself—the logic of capital—and the ways it operates in concrete circumstances through the actions of multiple capitals. Only Marxism can provide such an understanding. A proper grasp of Marx and his legacy also clarifies that the Marxist vision is one of a society that is authentically democratic, and that Marxism has little to do with secretive political activity aimed at harming individuals as individuals. People are bearers of social relations; what needs to be transformed is the system of social relations, not the individuals who occupy positions within it.

To understand the world, sense-data alone are not sufficient. We need theory, because many important aspects of reality are not immediately accessible through empirical observation. A given process—such as poverty—must be related to many other interconnected processes within the system, and only theory, particularly Marxist theory, enables this understanding. To grasp the world from the standpoint of the majority—the working masses—we require a theory grounded in their perspective. Radical transformation toward social, economic, and ecological democracy and justice is impossible without a radical theoretical framework. Marx and his legacy provide precisely such a theory.

Marxist Reading Groups

Changes in objective conditions require corresponding changes in consciousness, and the latter must be actively cultivated. This is the work of culture—a culture that accurately reflects the interests and ideas of the majority of people. Organising Marxist educational activities—such as Marxist reading groups, lecture series, and conferences—is an important cultural task in the present moment. Such a task cannot normally be conducted within the four walls of academia, given its class character²⁷.

Like any practical activity, Marxist educational work takes specific social forms. One such form is the reading group, which played an important role in the ideological preparation for the socialist movement in Lenin’s Russia. The aim of Marxist reading groups in different contexts is to promote a counter-hegemonic culture and foster a tradition of radical theoretical imagination. These groups, consisting of interested academics, activists, workers, peasants, and anyone committed to critically understanding the current situation with a view toward its radical transformation, could meet regularly to read Marxist and other progressive literature of both classical and contemporary significance. Discussions should be conducted in a comradely and non-sectarian manner, avoiding interpretations framed solely from the standpoint of a given ‘sect’ rather than the interests of the global working class. Reading and discussion should be explicitly connected to the world around us, drawing theoretical implications for political practice.

Thousands of progressive individuals are engaged in the theoretical and political struggle for justice. Often, however, there are deep divisions among them in terms of theory, politics, and methods of struggle—including, interestingly, debates over whether poor countries such as India are predominantly capitalist²⁸.  A thorough understanding of Marx and his legacy may reveal that these divisions are not as fundamental as they appear, and that there is far more reason for unity than for fragmentation. At the very least, these differences should be discussed in the context of theoretical debates grounded in the foundations laid by Marx.

Marxist reading groups should not only engage with radical academic literature but also encourage the creation and discussion of radical art in its various forms, reflecting on it through a theoretical lens.

I may also draw on personal experience. With the help of colleagues and students, I organise a monthly Marxist reading group. We read significant texts, both classical and contemporary, and discuss them critically. Typically, one person or a team of two leads the discussion. Following their introductory remarks, the entire group engages with both the text and the remarks, assessing them on intellectual grounds—identifying the causal processes under capitalism and their effects on people—as well as on political grounds, considering the lessons the text offers for the struggle against capitalism. Some of the outcomes of these discussions are subsequently published in academic journals. This reading group operates under the auspices of the Marx Center, formally called Marxist Studies in Global and Asian Perspectives (MSGAP) (https://marxiststudies.blog.yorku.ca/). The members of the reading group are playing a key role in organising the upcoming Marx Conference in September 2025, expected to be the first in a series of biennial conferences (https://marxiststudies.blog.yorku.ca/power-marxist-thought-conference-2025/).

In the next section of this essay, I focus on the Marxist lecture series as an educational activity. The question arises: if a group of Marxists, based in a particular region, aims to organise a lecture series, what should it consider doing? What follows is one possible model. There are, of course, many other ways to organise such a series, and a wide range of topics could be discussed beyond those suggested here.

Marxist Lecture Series

Context

Society operates simultaneously at multiple scales—local, regional, national, and global. Across these levels, ordinary women and men—those who depend on wages or salaries for their livelihood, as well as non-exploiting small-scale producers such as peasants—confront severe and persistent problems. These include poverty, economic insecurity, dispossession, social discrimination, state repression, and environmental degradation.

If we are to imagine and work toward an alternative society—one that is democratic in both economic and political life, and that is grounded in solidarity and care rather than exploitation, competition, alienation, and the commodification of everything—then we must begin with a scientific and critical understanding of the existing society.

Society rests on four interrelated foundations: the economy, politics, culture, and the environment. Each of these dimensions changes over time and varies not only between countries but also within them. To grasp society in all its complexity—and to transform it—we must rigorously understand each of these dimensions and their mutual relations.

Society does not float in thin air. It is always grounded in – it is constituted by – not only multiple scales but also places and regions. Social processes and social change take shape in particular locations, and often, transformative developments begin in small places, i.e. at the local level. Yet no place exists in isolation: each is connected to other places and to the broader society. The study of any specific place—whether examining the processes that generate suffering or the struggles that ordinary people wage against them—both requires and enriches the study of the broader social system of which that place is a part. 

Marxism offers the most rigorous and comprehensive framework for describing and explaining the contemporary world, as well as for envisioning an alternative one. Precisely for this reason, it has long been distorted, dismissed, or opposed by academics, politicians, and ideologues across the political spectrum—from the right and the centre to many who call themselves ‘progressive.’ It is therefore essential to engage with Marxism carefully and adequately. At the same time, Marxism must also remain open—willing and daring to learn from non-Marxist ideas wherever necessary and possible.

The primary aim of the lecture series should be to help participants engage with the fundamental concepts of Marxism, understand how these concepts provide a scientific and critical lens for interpreting the world, and explore how they can guide efforts to transform society in radical ways.

The lecture series is intended for progressive teachers and students in colleges and universities, as well as for the youth and activists and activist-scholars. Participation will be by invitation only, and attendance will be limited to a select number of participants.

Lecture Topics

1. Marxist Philosophy of Science and the World
   • Materialist dialectics 
2. Theory of History and Society, and its relationship with Nature
   • Historical materialism
3. Political Economy
   • Core concepts: commodity, value, surplus value, two forms of exploitation in production, technical change and accumulation, secondary exploitation, class differentiation and modern forms of primitive (preliminary) accumulation (or, ‘dispossession’), imperialism, and crisis (of profitability)
   • Development/underdevelopment, geographically uneven development, and intra-, and international migration
   • Political economy of a specific country and its regions
   • Poverty and inequality in a specific country and its regions 
4. Class Exploitation and Special (Non-Class) Oppression
   • General theory of class and class struggle
   • Caste, gender, and class: theoretical considerations and country-specific issues
5. Capitalism, the Environment and Class and Social Dimensions of Health
   • General mechanisms 
   • Specific conditions in a country and its regions
6. The State and Radical Political Transformation
   • Theory of the state
   • The state in a particular country and region²⁹
   • The state and political strategy; Conceptions of revolution; progressive views from particular countries and regions.  
7. Overview and Conclusion
   • Major criticisms of the Marxist worldview
   • Marxist responses

Learning Outcomes and Delivery Methods

By the end of the lecture series, participants will be able to:

• Analyse the nature of society and the world, and evaluate how knowledge is produced and used in social change.
• Explain major historical transformations, including the rise of capitalist relations from pre-capitalist structures.
• Understand class and the intersections of class with gender, caste, and indigenous identity.
• Evaluate how capitalism functions and its impact on people and the environment.
• Critically assess the nature of the state, its democratic form, challenges, limits, and potential for transformative intervention.
• Engage with major criticisms of Marxism and develop informed responses.
• Reflect on how Marxism can help unlearn entrenched assumptions and ideologies.

Delivery

The lecture series should ideally be conducted by a Marxist speakers’ collective to be drawn from within a given country and, where possible, from outside. No prior knowledge of Marxism is required of participants; the only expectation is a genuine curiosity to understand the world in a scientific and critical manner, with the aim of contributing to a more humane society.

The mode of delivery may be hybrid. Lectures could be scheduled every other week over a period of approximately 20 weeks.

Participants would be expected to engage with pre-assigned readings circulated in advance. To help ground theoretical concepts in real-world contexts, lectures should draw on newspaper reports and video clips. Each session should conclude with an interactive discussion to consolidate learning and encourage critical engagement.

Conclusion

There are objective reasons for people’s suffering. These reasons lie in the mechanisms through which capitalist social relations operate, and they exist independently of whether we understand them correctly. However, recognising these causes alone is not sufficient to transcend them.      Indeed, Marxist philosophy avoids an objectivist approach—according to which objective conditions by themselves will bring about or prevent desired changes in society—and instead adopts a materialist approach. This materialist approach is necessarily a class-based approach because it reflects existing class contradictions and views society as being in constant motion. In The Economic Content of Narodism, Lenin distinguishes between the two approaches:

‘When demonstrating the necessity for a given series of facts…, the objectivist always runs the risk of becoming an apologist for these facts: the materialist discloses the class contradictions and in so doing defines his standpoint. The objectivist speaks of ‘insurmountable historical tendencies’; the materialist speaks of the class which ‘directs’ the given economic system, giving rise to such and such forms of counteraction by other classes.’³⁰

People who suffer must become conscious of these reasons and aware that their interests are fundamentally incompatible with those of capitalists and the capitalist state. What is required to transform capitalism is class—or socialist—consciousness. This consciousness serves as the raw material for people’s socialist organisation in its various forms. When large swathes of the exploited acquire class consciousness, that awareness becomes a material force capable of challenging and resisting the structures of capitalism. This is precisely the standpoint of the exploited classes in all class societies. Recognising and adopting this standpoint is a crucial element in the development of class consciousness, and the cultivation of class consciousness is an inherently conscious educational process. As Marx memorably noted: 

‘The weapon of [theoretical] criticism cannot…replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force [i.e. the force of the organization and self-activity of the masses]; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it …becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter [i.e. the root of the sufferings of the masses]’.³¹

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References

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29. The state rules through coercion, concession, and consent, which must be studied. We must understand, among other things, state–media relations, and state’s role in education, as well as its coercive and welfare measures. We must also understand state’s (everyday) interaction with lower classes and oppressed groups, including women, lower castes, and indigenous peoples. ↩︎
30. Lenin, V. 1899. The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr. Struve’s Book
    (The Reflection of Marxism in Bourgeois Literature). Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/narodniks/ch02.htm ↩︎
31. Marx, K. 1843. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
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