On March 24, in Melbourne, Australia, 35,000 teachers and education staff went on strike from their jobs in schools and marched to the city centre, closing schools across Victoria. I was one of the teachers who marched.
Among the crowd, I held a sign and wore a license plate that read, “Victoria—not the Education State”, a parody of the fact that the State considers itself the Education State in Australia. The crowd carried signs that ferreted out all the contradictions of being the education system with the best results in the country being the lowest paid and funded. In nice handwriting and literate gags.
From this position, I remember standing in the crowd, hearing ordinary conversations change. People who had spent months speaking in familiar language of compliance to a structure of workloads, reports, behaviour, staffing shortages, survival, were suddenly speaking another language: solidarity, leverage, collective strength, what we could do together.
Something shifted, not only politically but socially, as if beneath the routines of compliance another order of relation briefly surfaced, one in which cooperation appeared less as aspiration than as a latent fact of ordinary life. As a worker, union Sub-Branch organizer, teacher, colleague, and living being, it filled me with dignity and joy. Despite a loss of income, things felt lighter for a change.
And then the strike ended. People returned to schools, inboxes, deadlines, exhaustion. The old pressures closed back in.
What stayed with me was not the moment itself, but the harder questions it forced and would not let go:
How do you make that kind of transformation liveable?
How do you keep collective power from collapsing back into private coping?
How do you prevent conviction from becoming virtue signalling, or sacrifice from becoming burnout?
At these moments, we rarely turn to Marxism because it seems irrelevant. We are all now nearly universally told that Marxism is a relic, a Cold War prop, a dead inheritance.
While the relics of the past exist, I think the opposite is true, and more than that: I think Marxism has often been mistaken for a closed doctrine precisely when at its core is a method for tracing how domination of life is organized, how capacities emerge within it, and how those capacities might gather into forces capable of transforming the very conditions that formed them.
Marxism is a practice. Expecting it to explain why it is not a dead doctrine needlessly raises the stakes: either Marxism must transform everything at once at scale, or it is just a failure. The room for slow thinking, regathering, capacity building, creating organised counter-power (rather than destruction and spectacle) has been shattered by the forces that accrue to neoliberal and conservative triumphalism. But these conditions seem to be changing in the crises we face today and, what is more, Marxism has lost none of its relevance.
Wherever living human beings struggle over the conditions of life—work, land, dignity, survival, recognition, care, freedom—Marxism matters. Not because every struggle is secretly Marxist. But because Marxism offers a method for asking how domination is structured, how capacities form, how power can be organized, and how liberation can become durable. Marxism as a method cannot be denied. It contains lenses and tools that are still indispensable.
Marxism remains relevant across liberation movements too. Not as doctrine imposed from outside, as a liveable method remade in practice. For their part, Liberation movements—whether around labour, anti-colonial struggle, feminism, environmentalism, animal justice, trans survival, anti-racism, disability justice, or other struggles over the conditions of life—do more than register grievances. They can deepen understanding of power. They can develop capacities. They can help forms of struggle become durable.
In that sense, they may form a commons. Not because they are identical. But because they can preserve, share, and enlarge practical powers that no one struggle produces alone. They traverse, protect and operate in what I have called a commons of becoming that Capitalism never successfully encloses.
Marxism is not simply critique, nor simply organization, nor simply action, but a method through which critique, practical formation, and praxis can become mutually transformative. And they are not confined to one movement. They can be found, in different forms, wherever people struggle to understand domination, build capacities, organize and transform conditions together. They are movements that deepen each other.
I think that the search for transformation begins here. Because Marxism, at its deepest, is not a doctrine. It is a movement of thought and practice people can learn to live. In what follows I want to introduce a way of understanding Marxism that will help orient you to what Marxism is and what it does for us.
Marxism as a Practice: Three Functions and Their Condensation
Before naming the three functions separately, I want to suggest something stronger. Marxism can be understood not only through what these practical functions are, but through how they may condense.
By condensation I do not mean simple accumulation, as if more grievances or organizations mechanically become revolution. I mean a qualitative concentration in which critique, collective capacities, organizing and praxis begin reinforcing one another at a level they can no longer be contained within the ordinary reproduction of capitalist social relations.
This development may remain latent for long periods. It may intensify in struggle. In rare moments, it may become revolutionary force.
What follows can be read as the practical elements of that development.
The Three Practical Functions of Marxism
Marx identified functions through which capital reproduces domination. This essay asks whether Marxism, as a practical method, has functions through which people develop capacities against it.
I think it does. Its core movement can be stated simply enough for entry, though each term opens onto a much deeper tradition:
- Learning to see clearly. Through immanent critique, Marxism helps people understand the social conditions shaping their lives.
- Learning to develop capacities together. Through practical formation—discipline, organization, ethical practice, and the building of shared powers—Marxism helps people build capacities with others.
- Learning to think in action. Through thought in action, praxis, Marxism helps people test, revise, and transform through struggle.
These are not stages one graduates through, but interlayered practical functions whose force lies precisely in how they strengthen or deepen one another.
The strengthening is to help these functions avoid the issues they face under pressure, so that critique without formation does not collapse nto spectatorship, formation without praxis does not harden into moralism, and praxis without critique does not dissolve into restless improvisation.
First Function: Critique, or Diagnosing Dominatio n
Marx’s infamous eleventh thesis in his Feuerbach helps us understand how critique functions to immanently organise against the current state of things:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
It’s not a rejection of thought, and in fact it’s a request to take interpretation to its next level in change. It’s also a demand that thought become liveable.
To change things, we must understand what we are changing. Interpreting clearly begins from what Marx said perhaps most plainly:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.
That is not fatalism. It is a starting point.
It means the pressures people feel in work, time, debt, care, housing, exhaustion, and mental life are not private accidents. They are shaped socially.
This is why Marx started with social relations, production and reproduction: our lives as they currently are, the way that we step into this world and survive in this world. This is why Marx studied capitalism as a historically specific mode of production, emerging through enclosure, colonialism, slavery, dispossession, and wage dependence.
By analysing Capitalism clearly, Marx found that people are separated from direct access to the means of life. So selling their own labour for a wage can come to appear as nature itself. His critique begins by showing it is a historical way of producing that creates a system of social relations.
Today, Marx’s critique resonates because so much suffering is still returned to people as personal failure. Burnout becomes failed resilience. Precarity becomes flexibility. Overwork becomes ambition. Distress becomes pathology. And the causes of all of this are hidden, obscured, in writers who use economic language to hide it.
Ideology confuses us about this, and is not only experienced as an abstract doctrine, but reinforced as a material force. Ideologies invite us into the practical reproduction of a world in which domination misrecognizes itself.
Marx called ideology a camera obscura, a social technology that makes reality appear inverted. That remains a powerful description. We experience this inversion constantly. We go to psychology and psychiatry for wounds that often have social conditions. We treat competition as necessity. We treat commodification as ordinary life. We mistake adaptation for freedom.
Critique begins by learning to see these inversions. An ordinary example matters here. When someone begins to realize their burnout is not simply personal weakness but tied to workload intensification, managerial control, and social pressures they did not create, they have already begun, however partially, to practice critique.
Liberation requires learning to perceive reality without illusions. But Marxism does not stop at critique. Because critique without capacities can become passive spectatorship.
Second Function: Capacity, or Developing Counter-Power
Learning to develop capacities together is why Marxism has always been, at its strongest, a practical education. This is where ethical practice belongs: not as a separate function beside praxis, but as part of capacity-building itself. Build virtue, don’t signal it. Build capacities, don’t merely announce them. Capacity names more than organization. It names the practical powers through which people become capable of acting otherwise.
Amílcar Cabral (1924—1973), agronomist and revolutionary organizer in the peripheries of the empire in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, was one of those Marxists who lived this problem. He treated political education as part of survival itself, arguing people had to learn reality together under conditions of struggle [1]. He lost his life in this cause. An everyday analogue in the imperial core is simpler, but also difficult for people embedded in social relations: a workplace delegate helping colleagues map how workloads are imposed, rather than treating stress as personal weakness. That too is practical consciousness in formation. But the unevenness of the experiences in the core and periphery in our global system is one of the most interesting histories that we can thank Marxism for in Global Systems Theory.
Another example of how a famous Marxist understood these issues is Rosa Luxemburg (1871—1919), revolutionary and theorist, who argued the mass strike was not merely a tactic but a school through which people became capable [2]. I certainly found myself learning on the teacher’s strike. Other examples might be tenants who begin by contesting mould or repairs sometimes discover, through organizing, capacities for wider action they did not know they possessed.
These examples matter not because they offer saints. They do not. They show something else. That Marxism has often been lived as attempts—uneven, contradictory, sometimes extraordinary, sometimes disastrous—to develop practical consciousness and capacity. Not moral virtue. Developed powers, strike funds, mutual aid, political education, tenant organization, and shared infrastructures of survival. It doesn’t stop there; it has also built collective memory, democratic correction, and historical learning.
When workers build a strike committee, when tenants organize repairs collectively rather than each pleading alone, when people create mutual aid around food, childcare, or transport, capacities are developing. These are small forms, but they matter.
One danger is clear, however. Capacity without critique can harden into bureaucracy or moralism. The functions of Marxism are also disciplines that must be carried out through ruthless self-critique.
Third Function: Praxis, or Transforming Conditions
Praxis names the experimental movement through which critique and capacities are tested, revised, and transformed historically.
These are not supplements to Marxism. They are part of how Marxism becomes liveable. Walter Rodney (1942—1980), Guyanese historian and activist, treated theory as something sharpened socially, in contact, not held above people [3]. Rodney helps show “praxis” is not only exposing ruling-class practical consciousness, but developing another one through struggle.
I want to illustrate why praxis matters, a term often held obscure, and how it works with critique and capacity-building. Praxis is a way of taking knowledge into battle, learning to think in action. A comrade recently reminded me of Philip Sidney (1554—1586)’s reflections on praxis in An Apology for Poetry. Sidney, a writer, courtier and colonialist in Renaissance times matters here not as a Marxist, but because he helps reveal that ruling classes cultivate practical consciousness too.
Years ago, while doing research, I visited Penshurst Place, the Sidney family estate. What began as literary interest became, unexpectedly, a small exercise in historical materialism. When I entered via a National Trust pass, the estate first appeared as inherited beauty, pastoral order, Arcadian ideal. But reading into its history, another picture emerged: land transferred through the dissolution of monasteries, village life displaced through enclosure, common life broken under landed power. Beneath the harmony of the scene stood dispossession.
While I confess to a durable fascination with the baronial hall I first entered at Penshurst, by studying it’s history I changed how I understood Arcadia itself, and this has remained with me, just as durable. Arcadia not simply as literary ideal, but as ideological form: a promise of order whose beauty can obscure the lives made unliveable beneath it. I began to decode the enclosure, displaced labour, colonial projection, class power.
Sidney’s wider colonial world sharpens the point. The West Country Men did not merely imagine order; they helped organize domination materially. Enclosure, expulsion, cheap labour, imperial projection. The ruling classes, in other words, have long had a praxis of their own.
Land Back shouldn’t be just a settler colonial fight. This remarkable quote from Michael Gleeson quote in Behind the Privet Hedge caught my eye:
In his 1987 book English Cottage Gardens, Edward Hymans, wrote that, ‘between 1760 and 1867 England’s small class of rich men, using as their instrument Acts of Parliament, which they controlled through a tiny and partly bought and paid for electorate, stole seven million acres of common land, the property and livelihood of the common people of England.’
That is what Penshurst Place place taught me. Praxis is not only something radicals require. It is also how ruling power reproduces itself. And without historical understanding, that practical consciousness slips from view, even as we continue living inside its walls. Understanding forces of history such as the enclosures, a pattern that has reproduced around the world, is part of what Marxism does. It teaches us to read appearances through the social relations that produce them.
And once seen that way, one can trace how such promises mutate. What Sidney cast as harmony through order reappears as other promises of adaptation. Not every ideology is Arcadia. But Arcadia can be read as a model of how historical materialism works: beginning from an ordinary object, tracing the relations beneath it, and revealing how domination can survive as aspiration.
I return to a Sidney line that surfaced for me through an exchange with a comrade:
Not gnosis but praxis should be the fruit.
Read this one way, Sidney is saying something simple and demanding: do not stop at knowing the your interests. Build the capacities to live it. In that sense, Sidney appears here as a builder of a new society—though one tied to ruling-class order. Sidney belonged to colonial ruling networks, which makes the phrase double-edged. Even ideals can organize domination. In effect, the labourer is invited to imagine a path into harmony through service to an ordered world. That promise—however literary—became part of a larger colonial imaginary. We are still living among its descendants.
That is why I take Penshurst Place seriously as an everyday example. My own visit became a moment of class consciousness because it revealed how ruling-class praxis can survive as tradition, aspiration, even tourism. And this story is a small model of historical materialism in practice.
The point is not to imitate Sidney’s Arcadia, but to ask what it would mean to become builders otherwise, toward communism. I use it not romantically but practically. Knowledge alone is not the point; what matters is what thought becomes in social practice. That is almost a prefiguration of the Feuerbach thesis.
I come back to the point that Capitalists know the truth of revolutionary praxis. They practice it themselves, usually in quiet or in plain sight. And they do in order to secure their material interests, to enclose the labour that supports them. That matters because it proves the point: praxis is not owned by the left. It is a social capacity. The question is which class develops it, for what ends.
Milton Friedman, the economist and intellectual inspiration for the Heritage Foundation, provides one example. Capitalists have often been better at praxis than Marxists. Friedman did not merely interpret markets; he helped build institutions, train cadres, circulate doctrine, wait through crisis, and turn crisis into opportunity. That is praxis. It is ruling-class practical consciousness organized over time. And, as he wrote:
That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. (Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1982, xii-xiv)
Marxism suggests a similarly long-term, practical consciousness, in which alternatives move from impossible to required for he social conditions of the time. Capitalists, of course, secure their interests in crisis and by developing cycles of crisis. Employers strategize collectively, investors coordinate politically, landlords defend rents, media owners reproduce narratives. This too is class consciousness in practice. Not activism for its own sake. But thought tested through practice. Practice revised through history. History read experimentally.
Marxism has long pointed out that workers need their own forms of praxis for their own interests, their own organisations and parties, and has always found a way to learn from defeat and crisis. When a group of workers loses a campaign, studies why, changes tactics, rebuilds trust, and returns better organized, that too is praxis. Not failure followed by resignation. Failure becoming learning. Or when a union rank and file tests one strategy, finds it cannot be sustained materially, revises toward another form workers can actually live, that too is praxis.
Praxis matters because in transforming conditions, people are themselves transformed. This is what makes Marxism empirical in a deeper sense. It learns. It corrects. It absorbs defeat. It begins again.
This too belongs to the tradition of Marxism. Different Marxists take fresh approaches, returning to the method. A variety of these approaches exist, from Marx’s ruthless criticism of all that exists, Rodney grounding theory socially, Cabral returning to the source, or Che Guevarra experimenting under conditions. But these are just some names. People do it all the time and there are no simple great men of history around; there are shared capacities and collective actions with which we can do great things.
Praxis is learning to study, contest, and undo the practical consciousness of domination itself. The dangers of praxis are that without critique dissolves into improvisation, while praxis without capacities burns out, and praxis without organisation and discipline has no focus on building power.
Condensation: How Practical Capacities Become Historical Force
These three functions of Marxism matter because when they are interlayered and overcome their weaknesses, and by achieving material change, they may become genuine counter-power. And counter-power, if gathered, generalized, and sustained, may help generate conditions for class consciousness, dual power, and revolutionary transition.
Some definitions:
Counter-power = organized capacities outside or against domination
Class consciousness = shared understanding of structured conditions and collective interests
Dual power = competing institutions or forms of coordination that begin to rival the existing order.
Class consciousness is a shared understanding of structured conditions and collective interests. It should be understood in a broader setting, as subjectivity transforms itself. Not only is it a narrow industrial identity, or a single social group discovering a pre-given historical role. It is also a growing practical awareness, across linked struggles, that conditions of life are structured together, that capacities can be shared, and that liberation requires organized transformation across those relations.
Capitalism has shifted its focus of domination from the factory and workplace, where it has largely won due to the global victory of neoliberalism, to the conditions of life, and class consciousness is evolving to make these the focus of our struggles. Class consciousness can deepen through labour struggles, but also through anti-colonial struggle. This broadening does not abandon class relation, but asks how multiple struggles may become articulated through it.
In moments of heightened struggle, these practical functions may condense. Critique, practical formation, and praxis may gather into counter-power. Counter-power may deepen into class consciousness. Class consciousness may generate dual power. And revolutionary transition may be understood not as miracle, but as this condensation becoming historical force.
In that sense, the transition toward communism can be read as the uneven, contested development of these capacities across different settings. Class consciousness can deepen through labour struggles, but also through anti-colonial struggle, feminist struggle, ecological struggle, trans survival, disability justice, and movements against domination wherever they develop shared understanding, practical capacities, and durable counter-power.
When we come to understanding how revolution become livable, we must understand that a revolution is not only an event of rupture. It is not merely downing tools for a sustained period to win better workplace conditions. It may instead be understood as a condensation of capacities that can no longer be contained as labour-power for capital that rupture the general conditions of an entire society. These are rare events, and rarely happen and appear spontaneous while they are the result of a sustained history of struggles that has no single coordinator.
And if so, the transition toward communism does not begin after that moment. It begins, however partially, wherever such capacities are being formed. That does not mean every movement automatically tends there. It means Marxism can help ask how they might.
The three functions of Marxism matter not only separately, but in how they may condense. Condensation is not about quantity, but is the formation of quality and material counter-power, and its appearance at the right place and right time. There are different ways condensation shapes history: latency, activity, and revolutionary. Marxist analysis helps us identify the conditions under which these functions become revolutionary, not just active or latent.
Latent Condensation
Even under ordinary conditions, capacities form. A worker recognizing burnout as structured rather than personal. A tenant meeting becoming shared political understanding. A visit to Penshurst Place becoming a story of Marxist functions. These may appear small. Marxism suggests they are not.
They are latent condensations: practical powers forming beneath ordinary life. Life under capital may begin becoming life against it where such capacities begin to condense, however unevenly. And that unevenness is not accidental. It reflects the uneven development of capitalism itself, which generates different pressures, struggles, and practical possibilities across social life.
Active Condensation
In heightened struggle, these capacities may begin strengthening one another. Critique deepens into practical consciousness. Capacities thicken into counter-power. Praxis becomes shared experimentation.
What surfaced in the teachers’ strike, I now think, was one such moment. Not revolution. But active condensation. Active condensation does not yet rival the social order. It names struggles intensifying, linking, and reinforcing one another in ways that exceed isolated resistance, without yet generating durable alternative institutions.
Revolutionary Condensation
In rare moments, this composition can deepen. Counter-power stabilizes. Class consciousness generalizes. Dual power emerges.
And what appears as revolution may be understood not as miracle, but as the historical condensation of practical capacities into transformative force.
And where they begin to gather, something else can emerge. Class consciousness often names this, because it is not merely a private realization in the head, but capacities achieved in the reorganisation of life.
Clara Fraser (1923-1998), socialist feminist and trade unionist, posed the problem in strikingly practical terms. One reason she called herself a revolutionary, she said, was that revolution might involve a saving of human energies otherwise squandered in endlessly defensive struggle. Rather than endlessly expending “hundreds of billions of man hours and woman hours” fighting to defend one reform here, another there, with none of it stable (and in fact Capitalist cycles ensuring they are beaten back), the revolutionary problem is how the conditions reproducing the exhaustion of this fight might themselves be transformed.
Fraser matters here because she helps clarify something often missed. Revolutionary transition is not only a question of rupture or seizure. It is also a question of whether collective capacities can overcome the exhausting instability of merely defensive struggle. In that sense, her insight belongs to the problem of liveability itself.
And perhaps communism, at its most grounded, can be understood as the durable reproduction of those condensed capacities as new social relations. It is the difficult, experimental practice of making the Marxist functions durable, not as a model imposed in advance but as a historical process in which new relations are built, tested, corrected, and made liveable through struggle itself.
A revolution is not a miracle, but can be analysed as the historical condensation of practical capacities into transformative force. Revolutionary condensation begins where those capacities become durable enough to generate dual power: not simply intensified struggle, but competing forms of social coordination capable of pressing toward transition.
Communism as the Durable Reproduction of Condensed Capacities
Marx wrote that communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Read this way, communism is not a distant perfect society, but the difficult reproduction of condensed capacities as new social relations. As the Hungarian Marxist Pannekoek put it, again to paraphrase, it is not a question of a perfect social system, but a change in the methods of production.
Capitalism of course is not merely an economy. It is a total social system that colonizes the conditions under which choices are made. It shapes work, time, thought, care, even what appears realistic. Which is why Marxism matters. Not because capitalism is a metaphysical evil. But because clear sight into a power system can help organize life out of domination. It’s a movement from grievance toward shared cause, from isolated coping toward organized capacities, from adaptation toward cooperation and from life under capital toward life against it.
Marx and Engels wrote that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. That is not a narrow class slogan. It is a relational principle. It suggests liberation is deepened, not diminished, when struggles recognize themselves in one another. And perhaps this is also why Marxism remains a global, universal method across so many different movements and ideologies. Not because it erases differences among struggles. But because it offers ways to connect them without dissolving them. No liberation struggle is alien to Marxism, because Marxism begins from the social conditions through which living beings struggle to become free.
If social being is foregrounded seriously, it cannot finally be reduced to human beings treated in isolation from the web of life through which they live. The conditions of life are ecological conditions too. Labour is always entangled with land, energy, bodies, food, species, and worlds humans do not create alone. Capitalism creates a “metabolic rift” here that Marx identified through the exhaustion of soils and workers.
Environmental movements have often generated recognition of these pressures. What they sometimes lack is a method for connecting recognition to durable counter-power. Marxism can help there too. Not by absorbing ecological struggle into class reduction. But by helping connect ecological survival, social reproduction, and liberation as related terrains of struggle.
Ecological struggle often appears to stand outside Marxism, when in fact many of its deepest questions are Marxian questions:
Who controls the conditions of life?
How are living systems subordinated to accumulation?
What capacities are needed to defend and transform the conditions of shared survival?
Perhaps this is what people are looking for when they say Marxism feels obscure, dead, or redundant. Not another theory. But a way to discover that Marxism may already be latent inside questions they are asking:
Why does life feel so pressured?
Why does private success feel hollow?
Who has power in the world to change things?
Who owns the infrastructure we rely on for life, and why?
Marxism begins, perhaps, when those questions stop appearing private. And becomes liveable when people begin answering them together. Before closing, I would return to the kinds of questions Marxism teaches people to ask, because in some sense they gather the three practical functions again.
What conditions are shaping our lives? Who benefits from those conditions? That is critique, learning to see clearly and deepening toward power.
What capacities do we have to change the conditions around us? That is practical formation, learning to build powers with others.
How can the capacities we build become durable transformation? That is praxis, and the problem of transition.
These questions matter because they are not abstractions. They help people move from pressures that appear private toward conditions understood socially, from grievance toward shared cause, from isolated coping toward organized capacities.
And perhaps that is why Marxism matters still. Not because it gives ready-made answers. But because it helps people ask better questions about life, power, and what it might mean to transform the conditions they share.
I think back to that day in Melbourne, walking among teachers who had briefly ceased appearing as isolated employees and began appearing as a collective force. At the time, I understood it as a strike. I now think I was glimpsing something else as well: a fleeting concentration of critique, capacity, and praxis that made another way of living appear, however briefly, liveable.
Clara Fraser was right that endless defensive struggle squanders human energies. The question is whether those energies can be organized otherwise. I think that was the question glimpsed in the teachers’ strike too. It’s a question that Marxism poses.
Perhaps that is where life under capital begins becoming life against it.