Karl Marx

Looks at the life of the father of Communism focusing primarily on the human side of the man rather than his works.

Twenty-first-century capitalism has little more to offer than a menu of despair: pandemics, deepening inequality, worsening depression, runaway climate change, intensifying authoritarianism and escalating militarism. Twilight Capitalism offers a wide-ranging analysis of the origins, implications and scope of the “combined” social crisis of 2020 and beyond. A compelling case is made that Karl Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism, along with his program of class-struggle socialism, is essential to understanding and addressing the most important social, economic and ecological problems of our time.

Gareth Stedman Jones returns Karl Marx to his nineteenth-century world, before later inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. He shows how Marx adapted the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into ideas that would have—in ways inconceivable to Marx—an overwhelming impact in the twentieth century.

“In 1968 we celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. We still have reason to hope for a concrete celebration in 2018” With a demonstrably thorough grasp of Marxist thought, and seemingly effortless literary flair, Ernst Bloch provides both the well-versed reader and the novice a truly enjoyable introduction to one of the most influential thinkers in history.

Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite 200 years having passed since his birth, his burning condemnation of capitalism remains of immediate interest. Now, more than ever before, Marx's texts can be read for what they truly are. In addition to providing a living picture of Marx the man, his life, and his family and friends - as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels - Sweden's leading intellectual historian Sven-Eric Liedman, in this major new biography, shows what Karl Marx the thinker and researcher really wrote, demonstrating that this giant of the nineteenth century can still exert a powerful attraction for the inhabitants of the twenty-first.

"Delving into Karl Marx's central works as well as his natural scientific notebooks, published only recently and still being translated, [the author] argues that Karl Marx actually saw the environment crisis embedded in captialism. [The book] shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx's critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world."--Page [4] of cover.

A chilling account of an evil ideology and the man whose nefarious thoughts made it possible.

“Absorbing, meticulously researched. . . . [Sperber] succeeds in the primary task of all biography, re-creating a man who leaps off the page.” —Jonathan Freedland, New York Times Book Review In this magisterial biography of Karl Marx, “likely to be definitive for many years to come” (John Gray, New York Review of Books), historian Jonathan Sperber creates a meticulously researched and multilayered portrait of both the man and the revolutionary times in which he lived. Based on unprecedented access to the recently opened archives of Marx’s and Engels’s complete writings, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life provides a historical context for the personal story of one of the most influential and controversial political philosophers in Western history. By removing Marx from the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century that colored his legacy and placing him within “the society and intellectual currents of the nineteenth century” (Ian Kershaw), Sperber is able to present a full portrait of Marx as neither a soothsaying prophet of the modern world nor the author of its darkest atrocities. This major biography fundamentally reshapes our understanding of a towering historical figure.