Every May 5, as spring unfolds across continents, admirers and scholars mark the birth of Karl Marx in 1818 in the historic city of Trier. This year, 2026, offers a moment not only for reflection but also for a deeper counterfactual. What would our world look like if Karl Marx had never drawn breath? Would the labour victories that gave us May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, have unfolded with the same global resonance? Would the 20th century’s great upheavals, from revolutions to welfare state reforms, have taken a markedly different path? And in our own time of widening inequality, climate crisis, and technological disruption, would we possess the same analytical tools to name and confront the contradictions of modern life?

Marx was no distant oracle. He was a man of fierce intellect and deep feeling, a devoted husband to Jenny von Westphalen, a grieving father who lost children to illness and poverty, and a tireless researcher who spent countless hours poring over books and factory reports in the British Museum. Exiled repeatedly for his journalism, he channelled personal hardship and philosophical passion into ideas that reshaped history. Far from a cold theorist, Marx saw human beings as creative and social creatures capable of building a world worthy of their potential. His thought, viewed through the long lens of history, reveals a thinker whose diagnosis of capitalism’s inner workings continues to illuminate contemporary struggles with remarkable clarity.

Born into a family of Jewish descent that converted to Protestantism amid discriminatory laws, Marx absorbed Enlightenment values from his lawyer father while witnessing the tensions of a Europe in flux after the Napoleonic Wars. University years in Bonn and Berlin immersed him in Hegelian philosophy, the idea that history unfolds through contradictions and development, which he would transform into a materialist framework rooted in real economic conditions.

By the 1840s, as revolutions stirred across Europe, Marx moved from philosophical critique to active engagement with the political movements of his day. Collaborating with Friedrich Engels, whose own observations of English factory life provided vivid empirical grounding, Marx forged a partnership that blended theory with lived reality. Together they produced works that would influence generations.

In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, they captured history’s driving force with striking clarity. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Feudal lords had yielded to the rising bourgeoisie. Now, industrial capitalism, with its immense productive powers, would face its own contradictions, including periodic crises, exploitation of labour, and growing inequality between owners and workers.

The pamphlet’s closing call spoke directly to the working class. Working men of all countries, unite. You have a world to win. Its influence spread rapidly, providing a rallying cry during the revolutions of 1848 and beyond. Das Kapital, with the first volume published in 1867 and later volumes completed by Engels after Marx’s death, deepened this analysis into a comprehensive critique.

Through meticulous study of classical political economy, factory reports, and historical data, Marx revealed how surplus value arises from labour. Capitalists pay workers wages for their labour power, but the value workers produce exceeds what they receive. This difference, extracted as profit, drives the system. Marx also explored how commodities acquire a mysterious character that obscures the social relations behind them, a phenomenon he called “commodity fetishism”. Capitalism generates alienation, separating people from their creative capacities, from one another, and from the full fruits of their toil.

Yet Marx celebrated capitalism’s achievements. It had globalised production, advanced technology, and demonstrated humanity’s ability to master nature on an unprecedented scale. The problem lay not in progress itself, but in a system that subordinated human needs and potential to endless accumulation. Historical materialism provided the overarching lens for understanding societal development.

Changes in the mode of production, meaning the forces and relations of production, shape social, political, and intellectual life. When productive forces outgrow existing relations, tensions build and create space for transformation. From the lens of history, this was no rigid formula but a flexible tool for understanding transitions across eras, from ancient societies through feudalism to capitalism.

Marx saw history as open-ended, driven by real human beings acting within material constraints rather than by predetermined fate. This perspective offered hope. Just as previous systems had given way to new ones, capitalism too contained the seeds of something beyond it.

The human cost of capital

Marx’s ideas found concrete expression in the labour movement. As a leader in the First International, formally known as the International Workingmen’s Association, established in 1864, he advocated international solidarity among workers. He argued that capital’s global reach demanded a coordinated response from labour. His writings and organising efforts helped elevate demands for shorter working hours and basic dignity on the job. The 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, where police violence met peaceful demonstrations for the eight-hour day, became a powerful global symbol.

In 1889, the Second International declared May 1 as International Workers’ Day, a direct outgrowth of the emphasis on cross-border solidarity that Marx had championed. What began as demands for reasonable hours evolved into a worldwide commemoration of labour’s dignity and collective power. Today, that legacy lives on in movements for living wages, gig worker rights, and union revival across many countries. From warehouse workers facing intense monitoring to global supply chains where exploitation remains hidden, Marx’s insight that labour produces value while capital extracts it continues to resonate. His thought humanises these struggles. Work should not deform the spirit or exhaust the body, but enable human flourishing through creative and cooperative activity worthy of our species being.

Viewed through the lens of history, Marx’s framework helps explain our era’s turbulence with striking relevance. Globalisation, described in the Manifesto as capital’s drive to nestle everywhere and settle everywhere, has created unprecedented wealth alongside staggering inequality within and between nations. Climate change exemplifies a core contradiction. Capitalism’s imperative for endless growth and short-term profit collides with planetary ecological limits. His analysis of commodification illuminates contemporary phenomena from data extraction by technology companies to the financialisation of housing and health care.

In an age of artificial intelligence and automation, Marx’s concern with alienation gains fresh urgency. When algorithms dictate labour rhythms or when creative work is scraped for training models without fair compensation, workers risk further estrangement from their own capacities. At the same time, Marx celebrated technology’s liberatory potential if harnessed democratically rather than for private profit. A society guided by his insights might prioritise shortening the working week, sharing productivity gains broadly, and directing innovation toward human and ecological needs.

Even cultural and political polarisation carries echoes of Marx’s ideas. He understood ideology as a set of ideas that often naturalise existing power relations. In today’s information landscape of echo chambers, algorithmic feeds, and contested truths, this prompts critical awareness of how economic power shapes public narratives. From the lens of history, movements for racial, gender, and environmental justice, while extending beyond classical Marxism, frequently intersect with class analysis. Intersecting oppressions often thrive under economic systems that divide people and prioritise profit. Marx’s internationalism speaks powerfully to migration crises, global pandemics, and supply chain fragility. Crises respect no borders. Neither should solidarity among working people and concerned citizens.

A world without Marx

Without Marx, history would not have stood still. Material conditions would still have driven conflict and change. Pre-existing socialist currents, trade unions, and reformers would have advanced workers’ causes. Yet the absence of his synthetic vision, a powerful fusion of philosophy, economics, and history, would likely have Left progressive movements more fragmented and less equipped with a coherent critique of capitalism as a total system. Revolutions might have been narrower or more easily contained.

The ideological contours of the Cold War, patterns of decolonisation, and even the development of welfare states as partial responses to radical demands could have shifted in important ways. In our own time, without Marx’s analytical tradition, responses to inequality, automation, and ecological breakdown might lean more toward temporary charity or technocratic adjustments rather than deeper structural questioning. We would still feel alienation and injustice, but perhaps lack one of the sharpest languages for articulating them and imagining alternatives on a systemic scale. Marx helped millions see themselves as active participants in history rather than mere spectators. That shift in consciousness remains one of his most profound contributions.

Marx was, above all, a humanist who believed deeply in humanity’s capacity for emancipation through conscious collective action. He endured exile, financial hardship, and personal loss not as an ascetic but as a man convinced that a better world was possible, one in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. His thought, far from a relic of the nineteenth century, offers living tools for addressing 21st-century challenges. These range from reimagining the nature and purpose of work amid artificial intelligence to building sustainable and equitable global systems that prioritise human dignity over unchecked accumulation.

On May 5, as we remember his birth, we honour a thinker whose ideas, forged in the fires of industrialising Europe, continue to illuminate our present and future. Through the long lens of history, Marx reminds us that meaningful change is possible when careful analysis meets solidarity and bold imagination. In a world still wrestling with the contradictions he diagnosed so powerfully, his call endures not as rigid dogma but as an invitation to create a society worthy of our highest human potential. The birthday of this remarkable thinker invites us to reflect on how much we have inherited from him and how much work remains to fulfil the emancipatory promise at the heart of his vision.

Harjeet Singh is an Assistant Professor (History), Akal University, Punjab

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