21st Century Marxism

A living, evolving theoretical tradition that applies Marx's method to the specific material conditions of the contemporary moment: digital monopoly capitalism, the climate crisis, the platform economy, and the resurgence of neofascism. It rejects the notion that Marxism is a relic of the 19th century, frozen in the pages of Capital, and instead treats it as a toolkit for diagnosing the present. 21st Century Marxism analyzes how Big Tech extracts data as a new form of primitive accumulation; how social media algorithms proletarianize attention; how the military-entertainment complex colonizes consciousness; and how the post-2008 world has normalized precarity as a permanent condition. It also delivers a devastating verdict on the contemporary right: that neoliberalism has exhausted its reformist facade and is decaying openly into neofascism, with the thin veneer of liberal democracy cracking across the Global North.

21st Century Marxism *Example: A 21st Century Marxist examines TikTok. They don't moralize about screen time. They analyze the platform as a digital factory: users perform unpaid labor generating content and data, which is algorithmically sorted and sold to advertisers. The "For You Page" is not entertainment; it is a continuous workflow. The dopamine hits are not pleasure; they are piece-rate wages. The theory further notes that this digital factory coexists with the resurgence of open white supremacy, seeing both as symptoms of a capitalism that can no longer stabilize itself through reform.*

by Dumu The Void February 12, 2026