Recovering and Repeating Marx
Remembering Marx's Birthday in the Age of Technofascism
On this May 5, Karl Marx’s birthday, we are confronted not only with the need to commemorate a thinker whose analysis remains vital, but also with the urgency of retrieval, of rescuing, repeating, and transforming what remains living in Marx’s thought for our present. For we live in an age in which capitalism has become planetary, extractive, algorithmic, and authoritarian. The commons have been plundered and privatized, democracy has been hollowed out, and the project of emancipation has been nearly swallowed by the consolidation of a new political form, what might best be named technofascism, a fusion of capitalist accumulation, surveillance infrastructure, and authoritarian governance. In this context, Marx must be rethought, not as an orthodoxy, but as a fragmented, evolving, and strategically incomplete legacy of critique, rupture, and imagination. We are here, then, repeating one of Étienne Balibar’s insightful suggestions from the early 1990s when he said: “Marx will still be read in the twenty-first century, not only as a monument of the past, but as a contemporary author - contemporary both because of the questions he poses for philosophy and because of the concepts he offers it.” (The Philosophy of Marx, p. 1)
The Young Marx and the Critique of Legal Fetishism
The path begins with the young Marx, the constitutional critic who exposed the fetish of the modern liberal state. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he showed how the legal structures of modernity merely formalize existing class divisions rather than transcend them. Marx was not yet the economist, nor yet the philosopher of Capital, but already a dialectician of the broken promises of bourgeois emancipation. Liberty and equality in the formal political sphere, he argued, were underwritten by economic inequality and domination in the material realm. It is here that we first encounter what Étienne Balibar later called Marx’s “antiphilosophy”, “which Marx's thought at one point intended to be, this non-philosophy which it certainly was by comparison with existing practice”, but which ended up producing “a converse effect to the one at which it was aiming” (Balibar, p. 5). For Marx aimed not at the construction of a system or an ontology, but at the critical exposure of one; not at the dogmatic repetition of philosophy, but at the painstaking job of wresting concepts like philosophy and ontology from their traditional definitions and rethinking them “in terms of the necessities of historical analysis.” (Balibar, p. 5) What Marx’s orthodox and dogmatic followers did with his project is, for the purposes of this reflection, something else.
But it is worth recovering Marx’s early critique in the context of today’s post-constitutional reality. When Trumpian populism, Orbanism, Bukelismo, and other forms of authoritarian and post-truth rule gain traction by claiming to “restore” the people while liquidating legality and due process itself, we begin to see that the form of liberal democracy, so long treated as “the end of history”, is now only one possible mask of domination among others. Marx already foresaw the limits of constitutional formalism: rights, without material power, are merely the alibi of exclusion.
The Commons, the Enclosures, and Capital’s Original Crime
Another thread worth repeating is Marx’s analysis of the primitive accumulation of capital. Here, we find not simply a phase of history, but a structure of violence repeated at every new frontier of capitalist expansion. As Rosa Luxemburg, Silvia Federici, and David Harvey have amply confirmed, enclosure is not merely historical; it is contemporary, structural, and global. It is inherent to the system of capital and expressive of its subjectivities.
In Capital I, recently translated again into English by Paul Reitter, Marx wrote in chapter 24 of the theft of the commons as a founding act of capitalism: the privatization of land, the destruction of peasant self-sufficiency, the transformation of the worker into “a free laborer” condemned to sell their labor-power and, to top it all off, “bloody legislation against the expropriated”. This is not a completed process or something that took place just as a historical prelude to capitalism. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, “once developed historically, capital itself creates the conditions of its existence” and even the meaning of its own past (Grundrisse, Penguin, p. 459-71). From the Amazon to the digital sphere, from indigenous territories in Canada and Latin America to the global algorithms of Uber and Google, we are still witnessing waves of enclosure, dispossession and “bloody legislation against the expropriated”. This is capital creating and recreating the conditions of its own ever more amplified and expanded existence where “every moment which is a presupposition of production is at the same time its result, in that it reproduces its own conditions” (Grundrisse, Penguin, p. 726). These cycles of repeated, expanded and legalized violence are endemic to the system of capital, to its very historicity, not merely the early stages in the development of commercial, then industrial, then Fordist and later globalized neoliberal capitalism.
As Franz Hinkelammert noted repeatedly throughout his writings, Marx’s critique of political economy is, at its heart, a defense of human life against the abstractions of the market. The real “fetishism” that Marx denounces, most forcefully in Capital I (chapter 1) and the Grundrisse (the chapter on capital), is the substitution of social relations with reified, quantified forms: commodities, money, and eventually capital itself. “The crude materialism of the economists who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations, is at the same time just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them” (Grundrisse, Penguin, p. 687). This is not just metaphysical criticism; it is determined resistance to the erasure of concrete and social life by abstract equivalence and value.
The “Gramscian Moment” and the Political Laboratory of Hegemony
No one grasped the unfinished political implications of Marx’s thought more deeply than Antonio Gramsci. Writing from Mussolini’s prisons, Gramsci reformulated the question of power not merely as a question of force but of hegemony – cultural, ideological, and institutional. Capitalism does not simply dominate; it educates, normalizes, seduces. It is internalized desire and, eventually, self-exploitation.
In our time, when technofascism cultivates popular consent through algorithmic propaganda, AI-driven narratives, and culture wars designed to consolidate a moral majority against subaltern others, Gramsci’s theory of the “integral state” becomes indispensable. The state is no longer a purely coercive machine: it is an ensemble of relations, extending into civil society, schooling, media, and even digital spaces.
Gramsci teaches us that a counter-hegemonic project must begin with articulation, the ability to assemble subaltern heterogenous demands into a new form of constituent power. In Latin America, this insight was not lost. Thinkers such as Mariátegui, Freire, and more recently Álvaro García Linera have developed a political Marxism that is historical, situated, and collective.
The Critique of Instrumental Rationality and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
While Gramsci worked in the shadow of fascism, the Frankfurt School confronted the complicity of modern reason with domination. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, the critique of capitalism became also a critique of instrumental rationality, of the way reason itself was bent into the service of domination.
In our own age, where AI, machine learning, and big data are deployed not to liberate but to police, extract, and manipulate, the Frankfurt School’s warning resonates again. Technological rationality does not guarantee progress; it can be reprogrammed for barbarism. As Trumpist America arms itself with surveillance capitalism and deploys border technologies against migrants and dissenters, the “administered world” Adorno foresaw finds its logical continuation and one of its most grotesque incarnations.
But the Frankfurt School also bequeathed a dialectical impulse: the need for negativity, rupture, and what Bloch called the “not-yet-conscious.” Even as reason is captured and coopted for the purposes of domination and colonialism, it still harbors a utopian trace, a rebellious impulse, the possibility of another world, glimpsed in art, in suffering, in resistance and in what Benjamin and Dussel reconceptualize as “Messianic time”.
Ideological State Apparatuses and the Riddle of Reproduction
Louis Althusser tried to rescue Marxism from both economic determinism and humanist idealism. His notion of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) showed how subjects are interpellated, i.e. formed, positioned and subjectivized, by institutions that reproduce class society. For Althusser and his students (Poulantzas, Rancière), the state is not merely the instrument of capital but also a teacher and a contradictory site of struggle.
Poulantzas, in particular, developed the concept of the “authoritarian statism” that eerily anticipates today’s technofascist regimes: democratically elected governments that centralize power, criminalize opposition, and fuse executive and technocratic control. Rancière, breaking from Althusser, insisted on the irreducibility of politics to structure, the moment of rupture, of dissensus, of the irruption of the uncounted.
We need both insights: the structural reproduction of class domination and the unpredictability and spontaneity of autonomous subaltern agency. Today’s crises, ecological, political, social, demand not only acute diagnosis but also audacious interruption.
Latin America Continues to Receive and Rework the Legacy of Marx
It is in Latin America that Marxism has perhaps undergone its most creative and existential transformations. From José Carlos Mariátegui’s “myth” of revolution grounded in indigenous communalism, to the dependency theorists like Gunder Frank, Theotonio dos Santos, and Ruy Mauro Marini who read Capital through the prism of global underdevelopment and imperialism, Marx became a weapon of historical self-recognition.
More recently, thinkers such as Néstor Kohan and Bruno Bosteels have traced the persistence of a decolonial Marx: one that refuses the Eurocentric linearity of history and insists on Marxism as a living tradition of struggle. Kohan reminds us that Marx must be thought not only as a philosopher or economist, but as a militant, an insurgent of possibility, whose thought can only be understood in and through practice.
The Latin American Marxist tradition teaches that class struggle is never abstract – it is racialized, territorial, historical. Today, when the planetary crisis reveals the deep entanglement of ecological collapse, extractive capitalism, and indigenous dispossession, this tradition is not a supplement to Marx but its necessary extension.
The Final Marx and the Task of Repetition
In recent decades, the recovery of Marx’s notebooks, letters, and late writings has shattered the myth of a “finished” Marx. As Marcello Musto and Kevin B. Anderson have shown, the late Marx was increasingly global, open-ended, and attentive to non-Western societies. He studied communal forms in Russia, China, India, and the Americas, not as archaic relics, but as potential starting points for alternative futures.
It is this “final Marx” – the Moor, el barbudo – that resonates most urgently today: a Marx aware of the diversity of historical trajectories, suspicious of Eurocentric progressivism, and committed to a radical politics that begins with what exists but seeks what is possible.
To repeat Marx, then, is not to repeat his words or formulas. As Seyla Benhabib and David Kolb once reminded us, it is to repeat the gesture of critique, of rupture, of praxis, to engage in the “critique of impure reason”. It is to remain faithful to the project of human emancipation against all forms of domination, including those that wear the mask of progress, order, or even socialism itself.
As capitalism mutates into new forms (surveillance, financialization, eco-destruction, and technopolitical manipulation) the task is not to preserve Marx as monument, but to animate him as method. We must read him through Gramsci’s politics, the Frankfurt School’s negativity, Althusser’s structuralism and rupture, and Latin America’s decolonial insurgencies.
We must return to Marx not to copy, but to invent – in the best of Zapatista and Chavista tradition The commons are being stolen again. The state is no longer neutral, if it ever was. The world is on fire. What we recover from Marx, as Derek Sayer would say, must become a weapon, a vision, a method.
To read Marx today is to say: another world was, and still is, possible, not as the result of the inexorable laws of historical development, but as the possibility of our political praxis and emancipatory articulations.