Reading Marx

A new SocialistWorker.org series--aimed at providing a guide to reading the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels--gets underway.

Reading a little Hegel can provide a richer appreciation for how Karl Marx developed his own revolutionary theories.

As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx began to understand the power of wealth, and to develop a sympathy with the poor and oppressed.

While other philosophers took refuge in abstraction, Marx argued that philosophy alone was powerless to change the world.

Marx's writings on alienation contain some of his most moving critiques of capitalism's crippling impact on body and mind.

Just as Marx first identified himself as a communist in his writings, an uprising of textile workers broke out in Germany.

Marx and Engels' first joint book helped them work out their ideas about working-class revolution and the class struggle.

With The Condition of the English Working Class, Frederick Engels developed the Marxist understanding of the class that could transform society.

In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx provided a short, important sketch that points to the relationship between ideas and practice.

The German Ideology shows Marx and Engels' developing views on history, capitalism and working-class revolution.

In a short book critiquing an anarchist thinker, Marx clarified his understanding that there could be no individual or partial solution to exploitation.

Marx and Engels could sense the upheavals of 1848 ahead--and prepared by building organizations to stand for socialist ideas.

Marx and Engels summarized their ideas in the most famous revolutionary pamphlet of all times, published as the revolutions of 1848 began.