Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a 19th-century German philosopher who had a huge impact on world history with his formulation of communism as a way of combating the horrors of the capitalism that had resulted from the Industrial Revolution. Our interview about Marx and Marxism is with political theorist Terrell Carver of the University of Bristol. The best place to start with Marx is by reading The Communist Manifesto. Written with his friend, Friedrich Engels, it is short and clear (in contrast to his later work, Capital). If you’re new to Marx, there’s also a nice comic book, Introducing Marx: A Graphic Guideby the Mexican cartoonist and intellectual, Rius, which puts him in context. Our most recommended biography of Karl Marx is Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) by Jonathan Sperber. For a biography that’s more focused on his philosophy, there’s also Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973) by David McLellan.

Books by Karl Marx

Of course, this list should really include the works of Marx. But The Communist Manifesto doesn’t have much to do with what I thought Marx was, or what anyone else thought Marx was afterwards. It’s just a piece of old-fashioned politics. And Das Kapital is one those books that people claim to have read, but no one has really read it to the end. Still, it accumulated into a creed.

The best books on Communism recommended by Robert Conquest

Interviews where books by Karl Marx were recommended

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