NEW ESSAY: Rethinking Power: From Marx Through Critical Theory​to the New Paradigm of Complexity

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

When faced with conflict, we often reach for blame. It feels natural to look for a culprit—someone responsible for harm, someone who caused things to go wrong. This instinct shapes everything from personal arguments to political struggles. Yet across cultures and centuries, thinkers have repeatedly questioned whether suffering can really be explained so simply. Again and again, they have asked why life together produces pain at all, and whether the problem lies not in particular people but in deeper patterns of human existence.

Across both Eastern and Western traditions, thinkers have offered strikingly different explanations for why harm exists. Some located suffering in desire and attachment; others in failures of virtue, imbalance, fear, or inequality; still others in divine order, moral corruption, or the limits of human reason. Philosophers debated whether human beings are fundamentally good or dangerous, free or constrained, responsible for their actions or shaped by forces beyond their control. What unites these otherwise divergent approaches is not agreement about human nature, but a shared effort to explain suffering in general terms. Even when thinkers viewed humans as deeply flawed, they tended to locate the source of harm in recurring moral, psychological, social, or structural conditions—not in the moral failure of particular groups of people singled out as uniquely to blame.

Yet for all their depth, these reflections largely remained within scholarly, philosophical, or religious conversations. They influenced how people thought, but only indirectly how societies organized themselves. There was not yet a widely shared public framework that translated these insights into a broadly accessible explanation of social conflict—one capable of naming injustice at scale and mobilizing collective action. That shift would come later, with Karl Marx.

Marx offered a way of explaining suffering and conflict that was at once simple, compelling, and politically actionable. By framing social life in terms of struggle between classes—between those who benefit from existing arrangements and those who are harmed by them—he provided a language that could travel far beyond philosophy. His ideas inspired revolutions, shaped political regimes, and informed experiments in social organization across the globe, from the Soviet Union to China and beyond. The consequences were mixed and often tragic, particularly where abstract ideals were imposed on real human lives. At the same time, Marxist ideas also helped fuel movements for labor rights and social protections that many now consider essential.

Whether embraced or rejected, Marx’s influence is difficult to overstate. His framework did something earlier traditions had not: it turned suffering into a political problem with identifiable causes and possible remedies. In doing so, it transformed how societies talk about harm, injustice, and responsibility—and laid the groundwork for later theories that would place power at the center of social analysis.

Continue reading here.

[This essay will be included in Newsletter#22.]