Above photo: We have Elvis sightings, Jesus sightings, so why not Marx sightings?
What if Karl Marx were to experience an anastasis and rise from the grave today?
He might be both astonished and vindicated by the enduring relevance of his critique of capitalism in the modern world.
If Karl Marx were to experience an anastasis and rise from the grave today, he might be both astonished and vindicated by the enduring relevance of his critique of capitalism in the modern world.
Upon his first visit to a mall, how long would it take for him to get past the manufactured happiness that drives consumer culture and perverts his critique of production? Capitalism no longer simply estranges workers from their labor; it engineers desire, making consumption feel like fulfillment. The act of purchasing, of acquiring, is not just an economic transaction but an addiction, a temporary salve for an alienation that he once attributed to the separation from one’s own production. How long will it take for Marx to analyze this alienation as being a deeper dependency—one where identity, self-worth, and even momentary joy are tethered to the marketplace.
The Marx between Binaries
The conditions of the 21st century—marked by financialization, data capitalism, ecological crises, and the restructuring of labor through automation and AI—would demand a new theoretical framework that goes beyond the 19th-century dichotomy of “Capitalism” and “Communism.” These systems have become insufficient terms as they have been stretched, redefined, and misapplied across various historical and ideological contexts.
From the west’s perspective, “Communism” has been mislabeled to define authoritarian state models, and equally misapplied to neoliberal social democracies invoking “socialist” rhetoric, co-opted in ways that distort its original critique of capital. Additionally, today’s Capitalism has diverged from the industrial capitalism of the 19th century. Would Marx wonder why industrial-era motifs persist in contemporary analysis and discourse, obscuring the way capital now operates, particularly when it has become obvious that economies are neither Communism, nor Capitalism. The difference is measured against a regulatory sliding scale between the free-market and the protection of the general welfare of our planet and populations.
While factories and manufacturing continue to exist, value extraction has shifted toward financialization, platform economies, and algorithmic control.
Clinging to outdated industrial imagery makes it difficult to grasp the full scope of contemporary capitalist exploitation, which extends beyond production into data, debt, and even social interaction. Has communism become a fetishized cult, ignoring the historical materialism that is discourse and consciousness? We are dealing with platform capitalism, cognitive capitalism, surveillance capitalism, and financialized capitalism, all of which complicate the classical critique of surplus value extraction from industrial labor.
Exploitation as emojis
Eating at the food court, Marx reworks his entire analytical structure to account for the digital economy and data extraction. The ownership of data has created new forms of “primitive accumulation” where digital platforms extract value from human interactions, often without explicit wage-labor relations.
Marx is overwhelmed at first, not just by the sheer pace and scale of capitalist expansion, but by the degree to which his own critique has been absorbed, commodified, and even weaponized against itself. The spectacle of alienation—once rooted in factory assembly lines as the separation of workers from their labor—has transformed into emojis, disguising our humanity for our digital life. 
Consumption has become the new labor, with people producing value through their data, their attention, their emojis, all while believing themselves to be free agents in an economy that feeds on their very existence.
Automation and AI are the new forces of production. The industrial proletariat has largely been replaced by gig and knowledge workers, while automation has displaced the masses. Marx, however, finds the cracks forming in the disillusionment of workers, the resurgence of labor movements, the way capital struggles to sustain itself without crisis. He affirms that his analysis still holds, but that the terms of struggle have shifted. The question is not whether he can get over the spectacle, but how quickly he can transform it into a revolutionary momentum.
Marx’s Perverted Legacy
It might take him some time to adjust, but he recognizes that the contradictions he exposed in Capital have only deepened. The perversion of his critique is glaring—his face appearing on coffee mugs, T-shirts, and memes. The system he once sought to dismantle has not only survived but evolved to co-opt dissent, turning even radical thought into a marketable aesthetic. He would no longer be railing against the exploitation of factory workers alone, but against an economic machine that has blurred the lines between production and consumption, extracting surplus value from every human interaction.
He finds no solace in the countless online groups invoking The Communist Manifesto. The irony being that the critique of commodity fetishism has become fetishized, his likeness circulating as yet another reproduction of passive consumption.
Marx, now a reluctant participant in the modern economy, disguises his identity and enrolls in a community college class on Capital, eager to test how well his ideas have survived the passage of time. When he receives a C on his mid-term, he is flustered—less by the grade itself than by the realization that his own critique has been domesticated, reduced to an academic exercise rather than a call to action. His work has become misinterpreted, but how could it not be, the 21st century largely unfolded without him.
Capital, Volume IV: The Spectre of Exhaustion
Undeterred, he begins sketching out Capital, Volume IV, a necessary expansion to account for the machinations of late capitalism and its neoliberal evangelists. He directs his ire at Samuelson, whose neoclassical synthesis has buried the labor theory of value under a mess of equilibrium models and market fundamentalism. He sees neoliberalism not as a natural extension of capitalism but as its desperate mutation—a doctrine designed to prolong the lifespan of an exhausted system through privatization, financialization, and the ideological policing and co-option of every alternative system that gains traction.
Yet, even in his frustration, he finds himself drawn to thinkers who speak to the problems he sees unfolding. Piketty’s analysis of inequality intrigues him—not just for its empirical depth but for the way it confirms his central thesis: that capital, left unchecked, concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Marilyn Waring’s feminist critique forces him to reconsider the blind spots in his analysis, particularly around the unpaid labor of household work that sustains the entire system.
Marx asks how digital technologies have further transformed the hidden economies of household labor. In his original analysis, unpaid domestic work—mostly performed by women—was essential yet invisible to capital. But now, with the rise of platform economies, automation, and subscription-based services, even household chores have been absorbed into the circuits of accumulation.
Where once domestic labor was an unaccounted input to production, it is now increasingly commodified. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, and even emotional labor have been outsourced to gig workers, app-based services, and AI-driven solutions. A household that once functioned as a unit of unrecognized economic activity is now a fragmented node in a vast network of microtransactions—groceries delivered, laundry outsourced, meals pre-packaged, childcare administered through digital surveillance.
Does this restructuring make household labor more visible to capital, or does it simply extend the logic of exploitation further into private life? If work that was once unpaid is now performed through precarious gig work, does that represent progress, or does it merely shift the burden from one form of invisible labor to another? He considers whether these transformations warrant a new accounting framework—one that recognizes both the persistence of unpaid labor and the commodification of once-private tasks.
But then another question arises: in automating the mundane, does capital further erode the conditions for solidarity? When household labor is no longer a shared struggle but a privatized transaction, does it dissolve the very conditions that once made class consciousness possible? The household, once an overlooked site of labor reproduction, has now been absorbed into the economy in ways even he had not foreseen. This, he realizes, is not just about production and consumption—it is about the totalizing nature of capitalism itself.
As he drafts new chapters, he no longer writes for the industrial worker alone but for the gig worker, the care worker, the digital subject whose surplus value is extracted invisibly. He is determined that Capital IV will not simply diagnose the system but provide a renewed vision for its dismantling.
His first chapter is a new call to arms, but this time, the specter that haunts capitalism is not communism—it is the realization that capitalism itself has exhausted its illusions, that its crises are no longer aberrations but the defining feature of its existence. The marketplace is no longer a space of competition but of enclosure, where capital does not innovate but extracts, where even the resistance to capital is absorbed and resold.
And so, much like the spectre that opens The Communist Manifesto, he manifests that image into something more insidious, more omnipresent. He titles his new chapter “The Spectre of Exhaustion:”
This spectre is not a movement yet, not a revolution, but a recognition—a growing, inescapable realization that capitalism has reached a threshold where it can no longer justify itself. The ceaseless drive for profit has led not to prosperity but to precariousness, not to abundance but to artificial scarcity, not to liberation but to an algorithmic prison. Workers no longer toil just in factories but in every moment of their waking lives, their value extracted from keystrokes, biometric data, emotional engagement, and the illusion of choice.
Capitalist growth is inextricably conjoined to the destruction of the planet. He ponders new frameworks that integrate ecological accounting with historical materialism. He explores whether emerging post-Western economic systems (BRICS+, Belt & Road, alternative financial institutions) can transform this present iteration of capital accumulation. Was it historical trauma or disinformation campaigns that removed people from the last vestiges of the commons to become rentiers of their humanity?
In this new volume, Marx maps out the terrain of late capitalism’s contradictions, from the gig economy’s erosion of class solidarity to the financialization of the most basic human needs. He outlines how neoliberalism, once paraded as capitalism’s final victory, has instead accelerated its decay, creating a monster that can only sustain itself through crisis, austerity, and the commodification of every possible interaction.
Unlike before, the proletariat is no longer easily defined. The new class struggle is not confined to a factory but to digital networks, to climate refugees, to the millions locked in debt peonage, to those whose labor is invisible yet foundational. The chapter ends not with a solution, but with an inevitability: that when exhaustion reaches its peak, when no further value can be extracted, the system will simply collapse under its own weight, and die of terminal indigestion.
Marx smirks. This time, he is determined to get an A.