Karl Marx and the Contract You Can’t Refuse

Why “I agree” may not mean what we think it means

On winter mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, a bearded exile copied figures from factory inspectors’ reports while his coat, sometimes pawned to pay the rent, decided whether he could sit there at all.¹ He was cataloging a puzzle: Why did people who were legally free so often live as if compelled? Why did a century of charters, constitutions, and contracts produce cities where twelve-hour shifts still felt like fate? The man was Karl Marx, and he believed the social contract wasn’t a promise; it was a story we tell to ignore where power actually lies.

Marx—part political economist, part pamphleteer, the friend who always had a radical newspaper in his pocket—was obsessed with one question: if modern society is built on consent, why does it feel like coercion? His answer begins not with philosophers around a hypothetical campfire, but with a ledger: who owns productive assets, who must sell labor to live, and who pockets the difference when commodities are sold. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” he and Engels wrote, a line that reads less like prophecy than like a spreadsheet heading.²

Here’s the engine of his critique. Social contract theory imagines political authority justified by agreement among equals. Marx replies: equality in the town square is canceled by inequality at the factory gate. In the labor market, the worker “agrees” to a wage because the alternative is hunger. That is consent under duress. He called the gap between legal appearances and material reality “ideology”—the way rules, customs, and even common sense mask exploitation. If liberal society is a marketplace of contracts, Marx asks us to notice the starting stacks of chips. An elegant analogy: imagine a poker game where one player begins with the casino’s bankroll and everyone else starts at zero; the rules can be fair while the outcomes are not.

The mechanics are precise. In production, workers create more value than they are paid—the surplus accrues to owners as profit. Under exchange, everyone looks equal: two parties swap equivalents, each “free” to walk away. But walk where? Private property rights restrict access to the means of making a living. The law’s even-handedness hides the asymmetry of exit options. You can vote every two years; you must eat every day. That temporal mismatch, Marx argues, is the quiet engine of domination.³

A short experiment in Paris

In 1871, after France’s defeat by Prussia, Parisian workers and National Guard units refused to hand over their cannons. They declared the Commune, electing delegates subject to instant recall, paying officials a worker’s wage, and separating church from state. For seventy-two days, the city tested a different answer to the question “Who rules?”—one grounded not in a contract with a distant sovereign but in ongoing, revocable consent within workplaces and neighborhoods.⁴ The French state crushed the experiment in the “Bloody Week”; thousands died. You don’t have to endorse the Commune to see the stress test: when people tried to align political equality with economic power, established institutions responded as if a breach of contract had occurred—and enforced the old terms with artillery.

So what is the “Marx move” for today?

It isn’t to shout “revolution” at the nearest office park. It’s a mental model for reading any social contract claim, from a constitution to a click-through.

• Ask who owns and who must sell. Ownership of code, capital, or data is the modern factory gate. If one side cannot refuse the deal without risking subsistence—health care, housing, visa status—the contract is structurally tilted.
• Follow the defaults. The party that sets the “default” (the terms you accept by doing nothing) is exercising power before any consent occurs. Defaults are the quiet scepters of the digital age.
• Measure exit, not just voice. You can file a complaint or vote every few years, but can you leave the platform, the job, the supplier, without severe penalty? Exit costs reveal the truth of consent.

This perspective reframes everyday debates. Gig workers “choose” flexible schedules—until algorithmic penalties make refusal costly. Tenants “agree” to rent hikes where vacancy rates and wages diverge. Citizens click “I accept” on privacy policies no one has time to read, while their data is transformed into bargaining chips they do not hold. None of this means contracts are meaningless; it means their justice depends on background conditions—the distribution of assets, the structure of markets, and the credibility of exit.

Marx also warns about moral complacency. If we treat politics as a neutral umpire atop the economy, we excuse harms as mere side effects of private agreements. But when private arrangements systemically generate insecurity, the umpire is part of the game. That’s why debates over antitrust, collective bargaining, housing supply, or universal benefits are not “economic” sideshows to the “real” work of politics. They are the preconditions for consent to count as consent.

How to use this lens today

When you hear “the people consented,” run a quick audit: 1) Could they reasonably refuse? 2) Who set the default? 3) Who benefits if nothing changes?

If the answers point to the same actor, you’re not looking at a contract among equals—you’re looking at organized dependence dressed in legal prose. Marx doesn’t end the conversation; he starts it in a different place: the shop floor, the server farm, the landlord’s ledger. We might still want contracts—indeed, better ones. But we should sign with eyes open, and, where needed, renegotiate the room in which “I agree” is spoken.