Sometimes just the suggestion of Karl Marx’s specter is enough to make headlines. Regardless of how you feel about her music, it was pretty iconic when Grimes broke up with Elon Musk and then posed for the cameras holding a copy of The Communist Manifesto. The stunt implicitly rallied the symbolic power of the manifesto against her ex-boyfriend, one of the twenty-first century’s best personifications of capital.

It is one thing to weaponize Marx and Friedrich Engels’s revolutionary pamphlet in a PR war between the megarich. It is quite another to read Marx and use his thought to criticize and change the existing order. This task is becoming more urgent — with inequality and class struggle on the rise — there is more interest in Marx’s thought now than there has been for decades. Yet for both new leftists and the more practiced alike, it can be a challenge to infiltrate Marx’s writings. It does not help that he wrote an extraordinary amount, especially for someone who died at the relatively young age of sixty-four. The English version of Marx and Engels’s collected works runs to fifty volumes, but even this is not their complete works.

Reading Marx, however, is a joy, and not just because his critique of capitalism is unsurpassed. His thought is fundamentally concerned with human freedom,  and his writings go well beyond the detail of economic exploitation under capitalism — they challenge all forms of social domination. He was a brilliant stylist whose oeuvre spans political journalism, philosophy, history, and political economy. His interests in literature, linguistics, science, mathematics, and anthropology fed into his major ideas and enrich his writing. While there is more than one way to approach Marx, it does help to have an overview of his key texts as well as their political, historical, and intellectual context.