What value does Marxism have in analyzing contemporary inequality?

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Sociology - Social System and Social Structure, grade: 2:1, London School of Economics (International Inequalities Institute), language: English, abstract: (Gramscian) Marxism helps us to uncover the systemic and epistemic conditions that create and reproduce inequalities by critically reflecting on the exploitative mechanisms that govern them and the institutionalized hegemonic power discourses that naturalize exploitation. It is therefore apt to debunk 'trickle-down' as the neoliberal elite narrative that it is and to place the working class individual, and its communal and class self-awareness, at the center of a solution to inequality. In order to do that, first the exploitative nature of the capitalist mode of production is sketched to attain an economic foundation for a socio-cultural argument and then it is shown that Gramscian cultural hegemony theory offers a more compelling explanation for the persistence of such a capitalist logic premised on exploitation, with no effective resistance by those which are exploited under it.