“How is Marxism relevant to developing nations? Will it be able to establish classless societies?” (1985)
Karl Marx expected socialism to grow out of mature industrial capitalism, yet every revolution made in his name happened in agrarian, colonised or semi-colonial societies. Marxism’s value for developing nations therefore lies in its later adaptations: as a lens on dependence and exploitation it is highly relevant, while as a route to a classless society its record is poor.
Relevance as an analytical tool
- Imperialism: V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) extended class analysis globally. Monopoly capital exports capital and exploits colonies, so the “weakest link” can break first.
- Dependency theory: Paul Baran (The Political Economy of Growth, 1957) and Andre Gunder Frank (“The Development of Underdevelopment”, 1966) argued that surplus flows from satellite to metropolis. Underdevelopment is therefore a product of capitalist incorporation, not an original state.
- World-systems theory: Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World-System, 1974) placed nations in a core–semi-periphery–periphery division of labour, explaining why political independence did not end economic subordination.
- Peasants as revolutionary class: Mao Zedong relocated the revolutionary subject from factory workers to the peasantry.
- Internal inequality: the class lens exposes concentration within developing nations. For India, Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi (2024) estimate that the top 1% held 22.6% of national income and 40.1% of wealth in 2022-23, the highest levels in their series.
- Indian practice: Kerala’s Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1969 abolished landlordism and gave tenants ownership, laying the base of the Kerala model of high literacy and health at low income. A. R. Desai used class analysis to explain India’s capitalist path of development.
Can it establish classless societies?
Evidence against:
- New class: Milovan Djilas (The New Class, 1957) showed that party bureaucracies in socialist states became a ruling class controlling state property.
- Market turn: China’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping from 1978 and Vietnam’s Đổi Mới (1986) kept communist parties in power but restored markets, private capital and wide income gaps.
- Violent routes stall: the Naxalite movement, from Naxalbari (1967) to its Bastar phase, drew on real grievances of landless and tribal people. It could not build a classless order. By April 2026 the Union Home Ministry said no district remained Left Wing Extremism-affected, after sustained security operations and development schemes.
- Structural objections: Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) held stratification to be functionally necessary. Ralf Dahrendorf traced conflict to unequal authority, which survives abolition of property.
- Caste and community: in South Asia, caste, religion and ethnicity cut across class. B. R. Ambedkar warned that a proletarian revolution would not by itself annihilate caste.
Evidence for partial success: land reform, literacy drives and public health in Kerala, Cuba and early socialist China sharply reduced inequalities of condition even without abolishing classes.
Conclusion
Marxism is indispensable for diagnosing developing societies, from global dependency to domestic wealth concentration. As a blueprint, it has produced reduced inequality or new hierarchies, not classlessness. Its lasting legacy lies in redistributive reform through democratic means, of which the Kerala land reform is the clearest example, not in the stateless utopia of The Communist Manifesto (1848).