Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were champions of women’s liberation, both in theory and in practice, in public and in private.1 Important work has already been published exploring both Marx’s and Engels’s writings about women and the family, and developing… Continue Reading
A review of Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), £22.32 Kohei Saito’s book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism is based on extensive and painstaking research.1 As well as Marx’s published… Continue Reading
There is currently a welcome call to “decolonise” universities and academia.1 This is about more than demanding the removal of statues of old imperialists. The movement sets out to end the dominance of conservative white men as the repositories of… Continue Reading
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sketched what has come to be known as the gravedigger thesis, widely believed to propose that the objective conditions of capitalism would inevitably produce a revolutionary working class which would overthrow… Continue Reading
Marx’s return Karl Marx’s reputation has changed significantly in the 35 years since the centenary of his death in 1983. I wrote The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx to mark that anniversary against the background of the huge explosion of… Continue Reading
A review of Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Penguin, 2016), £35 In 1972 the Cambridge historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote a foreword to the English edition of Werner Blumenberg’s useful biography of Karl Marx. Here he criticised… Continue Reading
A review of Lucia Pradella, Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings (Routledge, 2014), £90 In this pioneering book Lucia Pradella examines Marx’s research notebooks that have been published for the first time in recent… Continue Reading
Abigail B Bakan and Enakshi Dua (eds), Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories (University of Toronto Press, 2014), £22.99 Significant sections of the left have argued that Marxism is an inadequate tool to discuss how racism works—often… Continue Reading
A review of Heather A Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Brill, 2012/Haymarket, 2013), £85.29/£19.99 Heather Brown has written an important study of Marx’s writings on women’s oppression.1 She situates her book in the current… Continue Reading
A review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty–First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), £29.95 In January, Oxfam’s “Working for the Few” report tore apart the idea that wealth “trickles down” and revealed that just 85 billionaires now own more… Continue Reading