‘The evils are uncontrolled’: Marx’s Capital as a form of witnessing for child public health

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Date
2026-05-15
Authors
Balfe, Myles
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Oxford University Press
Published Version
10.1093/pubmed/fdag037
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Abstract
Karl Marx was one of the three founders of modern Sociology, along with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. In this short article I examine his magnum opus, Capital1 as an important, if underrecognized, work of Public Health. Capital is increasingly being recognized as a work of the humanities/social sciences with important lessons for the health professions2. It is a literary as well as a Sociological masterpiece. Its profound influence on the world stemmed at least in part from its literary power, from its horrific descriptions of workers being destroyed and exploited by capitalist entities. Marx noted in Capital that ‘political economy was studied…with the greatest success by medic[s]’. More particularly, I think that he felt that it was studied with the greatest success by health professionals with a strong Public Health ethos.
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Keywords
Children , Work environment , Young people , [SocietyPoliticsEthics]
Citation
Balfe, M 2026, '‘The evils are uncontrolled’: Marx’s Capital as a form of witnessing for child public health', Journal of Public Health, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 387-390. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdag037
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https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105040852139
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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/19007
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School of Society, Politics and Ethics
Copyright
© 2026, the Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Faculty.of Public Health. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and re production in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.