What capitalism actually is, why Marx is uncomfortably hard to dismiss, and where the Sri Lankan crisis sits inside the analysis.
Marxism is the structural critique of capitalism. It is not nostalgia for the Soviet Union, not a political position you have to vote for, and not necessarily a call for revolution. It is a lens — a way of reading organisations and economies that reveals what mainstream management thinking tends to hide: who owns, who works, who decides, who benefits, who absorbs the loss.
Vidal et al. (2015) argue that Marxist analysis is exactly what contemporary organisation studies needs to address the present moment — inequality, precarity, climate, the visible crises of capital. The Sri Lankan economic crisis is one such moment.
Fulcher (2004): capitalism is the system in which capital — money invested in order to make more money — becomes the organising principle of the whole economy. Trade existed for millennia before capitalism; merchants existed for millennia before capitalism. What distinguishes capitalism proper is that production itself is financed by capital investment, and the whole economy comes to depend on the continuous return on that investment.
This is why your house becomes a "real-estate investment," your education becomes "human capital," your social connections become "social capital." Conversion of assets into capital is the system's hallmark.
Capital invested in goods bought cheap and sold dear. Trade across distances. The Dutch East India Company, the spice trade, the early Atlantic economies. Capital existed; capitalism-as-system did not yet.
Capital invested in production. Wage labour at scale. Factories. Mass-production. The Industrial Revolution. A clear line of division emerges between owners of capital and those who sell labour for wages. Both the production and the consumption of goods are now mediated by wage labour.
Capital invested in capital. Derivatives, futures, options, structured products. Speculation as a profit centre. Not necessarily productive, but central to the operation of a capitalist economy. The 2008 crisis sat here.
Sri Lanka contains all three stages running at once: merchant operations (gem traders), industrial production (apparel, ceramics), and financial speculation (treasury bond markets, dollar-denominated debt).
Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) was the first comprehensive examination of market capitalism — and it predates industrial capitalism. Smith's central insight was the link between market expansion and the division of labour: extensive specialisation makes self-sufficiency impossible, which forces market exchange, which permits further specialisation, which produces greater efficiency and growth.
This is the optimistic origin story of capitalism. It is the one MBA programmes lean on. Marx's story begins where Smith's ends — by asking who benefits from the efficiency, and at what cost to whom.
Marx's way of understanding the world. Presented as a scientific method: discover the laws of historical development. Where Hegel sought the engine of history in ideas, Marx sought it in material conditions — who has what, who needs what, who controls production.
History, in Marx's reading, is the continual confrontation of dialectical conflicts in progress. Big social changes — feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to whatever comes next — are explained by conflicts between groups over material production.
Marx's model of society has two layers stacked. The economic base — how production is organised — sits underneath. Everything else — culture, law, religion, education, ideology, the state — sits on top, shaped by the base.
Ideology, consciousness, politics, state, legal systems, religion, education, ethnic and gender ideologies
Relations of production · Relations in production · Forces of production (land, labour, capital)
Orthodox Marxists argue the base determines the superstructure. Neo-Marxists are softer — they say the base shapes but does not fully determine; ideology, religion, gender, ethnicity have their own logics that can push back on the base. Most contemporary Marxist analysis sits with the Neo-Marxists.
Inside the economic base sit two sets of relations around the labour process:
How surplus value is created. The day-to-day work — who does what task, who supervises whom, how the production line runs. This is where Taylorism, agile methodology, and gig-economy algorithms all operate.
How surplus value is appropriated. Who owns the factory, who gets the dividend, who decides reinvestment, who decides layoffs. This is the deeper structural layer.
Most management training focuses entirely on the first (relations in production — how to make the labour process run smoothly) while leaving the second (relations of production — who gets what) completely off the table. Marxism puts it back on.
Marxist ontology of society is class struggle. The fundamental social antagonism that shapes everything else is the division of society into labour (those who must sell their labour-time to live) and capital (those who own the means of production).
If you accept that frame, work organisations are not neutral coordinating devices. They are productive social spaces in which labour is directly entangled with capital — every meeting, every KPI, every promotion-decision is a moment in the struggle for subordination of labour-power to capital.
Hence why there are so many laws protecting property, copyright, trespass, intellectual property, etc. The whole legal apparatus is constructed to keep the system from collapsing.
Marx's most famous analytical contribution: under capitalism, workers become alienated — estranged from what makes them human — along four dimensions.
The worker does not own what they make. The garment leaves the factory; the worker never wears it. The thing they create stands against them as someone else's property.
Work is not chosen, controlled or shaped by the worker. Pace, method, sequence are dictated by management or by algorithm. There is no creative or designing role.
Co-workers are competitors. The performance management system, the forced curve, the bonus pool turn fellow humans into rivals. Solidarity is structurally suppressed.
Estrangement from human-ness itself. The worker becomes a means to someone else's end; the capacity for creative, intentional, meaningful work — what Marx thought made us human — is reduced to wage-earning.
Under classical Marxism, capitalism continuously proletarianises — converts more and more people into formal subordination as wage labour. Self-employed craftspeople, smallholders, traditional vendors are mechanised out, absorbed into supermarkets, factory chains, platform companies. This is happening visibly in Sri Lanka right now — the wholesale collapse of small grocers into supermarket consolidation; small tea-leaf vendors into branded retail.
This is the exam question that appears almost every year. Are managers part of the working class? Marxist answer: yes, and no, and that is the point.
If you are now (or will soon be) a manager, this lens makes visible what your training is designed to obscure: you are not a neutral coordinator. You occupy a specific structural position. When you set a deadline, approve a leave, sign off on a layoff, you are acting as capital. When you yourself receive a "performance improvement plan," you are labour. Marxism does not require you to do anything about this; it requires you to see it.
Harry Braverman positioned the issues of class and history at the centre of the analysis of work. His key argument was that the real subordination of labour under capitalism happened not through machinery alone — as Marx had thought — but through Taylorism: Scientific Management, breaking work into measurable, controlled tasks, separating the planning of work from its doing.
Two consequences:
Where Braverman focused on conflict, Michael Burawoy asked the opposite question: why do workers cooperate? Why does the system reproduce itself peacefully most of the time? His answer is the concept of regimes of control: how factory-level discipline is organised in different historical and geographical settings.
Sri Lanka is described in the literature as having moved through colonial despotism (plantations under British rule), to politicised state capitalism (1956–77), to a particular form of politicised market capitalism — what Hopper et al. call crony capitalism. Recognising this is half the answer to any question about the Sri Lankan crisis.
The 2022 economic crisis — and its 2026 aftermath — is unreadable from inside mainstream management thinking. Functionalist analysis can describe the symptoms (forex shortage, inflation, energy crisis) but cannot name the structural causes. A Marxist reading sees:
Marx argued capitalism contains inherent contradictions that lead to its eventual downfall: wealth is socially produced but privately appropriated; crisis and depression are inevitable; over-production (especially of financial products) generates the next crisis; after each downturn, smaller firms die, larger firms consolidate, and the working class expands.
Glassman (2022) updates this for the present: Marxism today demands attention to "all the perverse permutations of class power and privilege" — imperialism, the racialisation and gendering of class, the rationalisation of class power across the US, UK, Canada, China, India, Russia, and the Global South.
Marxism appears every year. The recurring question is some variant of "is Marxism still applicable to contemporary organisations?" or "are managers a class?" — and the answer the marker is looking for is almost always yes, and here is why.