Karl Marx was born on the 5th of May, 1818, in Trier, in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. He died in 1883, never having seen a socialist revolution, largely broke, and outlived by most of his ideas, or so it seemed at the time. History complicated that epitaph considerably. The 20th century involved a long debate about Marx’s meaning and relevance, which continues. In Bangladesh’s Ashulia’s garment districts, Dhaka’s gig economy, and rice fields where ‘agricultural labourer’ hides harsh conditions unknown to Marx’s Capital or Lenin’s manuals, the debate takes on urgent significance. Yet, the Marx used here by leftists and academics often falls short of this urgency.
Marx remains indispensable at a structural level. This is not sentiment or anniversary rhetoric. The basic analytical apparatus of Capital, surplus value, the commodification of labour, the tendency of capital to produce and exploit surplus populations, the systematic relationship between profit and dispossession, these are not relics. They describe a real aspect of how the past and current global economy operates, including in Bangladesh.
The garment sector employs over 4 million, mostly biological women, and makes up about 80% of exports. It exemplifies Marx’s concept of absolute surplus value: wages at a subsistence level, extended hours through coercion, and the threat of unemployment to discipline workers. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse that killed over 1,100 was not mere negligence but a natural outcome of a system prioritising cost-cutting down the supply chain, even risking workers’ lives. Marx would understand this setup immediately.
So yes, I dare to say Marx is not obsolete. But being ‘not-obsolete’ is different from being sufficient. And it is sufficient that the Bangladeshi left claims, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, when it applies Marxist categories wholesale to conditions that Marx never anticipated and that his framework was not designed to address.
The precariat concept is useful but should be used cautiously. Guy Standing defines it as a class-in-formation marked by job insecurity, unstable income, and a lack of occupational identity, and distinguishes it from the traditional working class because it lacks collective identity, workplace solidarity, and institutional ties such as unions or long-term contracts. Marx’s framework anticipated the precariat as a reserve army of labour, essential to capitalism’s discipline of workers by maintaining unemployed or underemployed pools that suppress wages and resist conditions. For him, the precariat is an expanded, institutionalised reserve army.
When the Bangladeshi Marxist left engages with these groups, it tends to classify them within the traditional class framework instead of questioning whether it needs revision. Consequently, political programmes focus on nationalisation, factory organising, and proletarian vanguard, even though relevant workers are informal, mobile, and sceptical of institutions that historically excluded them. A theory that does not fit its object is not simply inadequate; I would even say it actively misleads.
There is a related issue that is both analytical and political. Marx’s framework was created within and mainly for Western European industrial capitalism. His view of colonialism was genuine but incomplete. He saw that the colonial periphery was being systematically exploited to support metropolitan industrial growth; his writings on British rule in India illustrate this. However, he also controversially described colonialism as a violent yet progressive force of history, bringing the ‘locomotive of history’ to societies he believed lacked one.
This underpins Marx’s view of history and shapes the relevance of Marxist theory to countries like Bangladesh. If capitalism replaced feudalism as the inevitable stage creating the proletariat, then colonial processes, destroying artisanal industries, restructuring agriculture for export, and creating wage-dependent labour via land dispossession were part of history. The Bangladeshi Marxist who adopts this framework also inherits its hierarchy: the West (physical and philosophical) as the development model, Bangladesh as a country in catch-up, and local oppressions, social classes, patriarchy, and land dispossession as feudal remnants to be swept away by capital.
Thinkers within the decolonial tradition argued that colonialism was not a disrupted or delayed version of European development but a fundamentally different historical experience, one that created specific forms of economic dependency and cultural dislocation. Political subjecthood that classical Marxism could not adequately theorise. Bangladesh’s economic structure, which is undeniably deeply integrated into global value chains as a low-wage supplier, lacking ‘technological self-sufficiency’, and shaped by the specific demands of foreign buyers and international financial institutions, is a product of this colonial and neo-colonial history, not simply of capitalism in the generic Marxist sense.
What this means concretely for the Bangladeshi left is that the frameworks for understanding who is oppressed and by what mechanism need to be more capacious than orthodox Marxism allows. The 70-year-old landless woman in a coastal district of Satkhira, displaced by saline intrusion or her 30 years old neighbour whose period cycle is changing due to the long exposer of saline water to her body, is itself the downstream consequence of global carbon emissions for which she bears no responsibility, her oppression is real, it intersects with class, but it cannot be adequately theorised through a framework designed to describe 19th-century Lancashire. The young man taking local train from Narsingdi to Dhaka to find work that does not exist in formal terms but sustains him in the informal economy, his precariousness is structured by capital, yes, but also by the specific geography of the neo-colonial nation-states’ underdevelopment, by migration patterns, by the failure of rural infrastructure, by ethnicity and by gender hierarchies that shape who gets to migrate and on what terms.
Bangladesh’s left parties, including the Communist Party of Bangladesh, various factions of the Workers’ Party, and numerous smaller groups, often characterised by their tendency to fragment, have generally responded to this complexity not through modern ideological shifts but by becoming increasingly irrelevant. Their rhetoric still echoes the language of 1917, with only occasional updates reflecting the 1970s. Their analyses of Bangladesh’s economic situation tend to identify imperialism correctly as a force but then struggle to articulate a politics adequate to its contemporary forms, which do not arrive with colonial administrators and gunboats but with trade agreements, conditional lending, and the supply chain decisions of European and American fast-fashion corporations.
Marx was not a dogmatic Marxist; he changed his mind and revised Capital multiple times. Later, studying Russia’s communal land system, he considered that Russia could reach socialism without capitalist industrialisation, through its peasant traditions. This was a major revision, driven by reality rather than theoretical pride.
The honest use of Marx in Bangladesh today is the Marx who insisted on looking at the actual conditions of actual people rather than forcing reality to fit the theory and educated intellectual phallus. It is Marx who asked, in the first pages of Capital, that we begin not with abstractions but with the commodity, the thing, as it actually appears in social life.
Applied here, that method demands that we ask what the actual conditions of Bangladeshi workers are: not what the theory tells us they should be, but what they reveal when we look carefully. It demands that we take seriously the forms of oppression that do not reduce to class, ethnicity, gender, religion, and ecology as superstructural epiphenomena but as structuring forces in their own right. It demands that we be honest about what Marx’s framework can and cannot explain, rather than defending the framework against the evidence.
However, the most meaningful tribute is not mere reverence. He despised those who reduced his ideas to dogma. One can imagine he would have made some uncomfortable remarks about the Bangladeshi left parties that commemorate him annually, have large posters of his face in their office, yet are largely unprepared for the societal changes they aim to achieve for the rest of the year.
The writer is a researcher and anthropologist
