In the years after Karl Marx's death, Friedrich Engels wrote that a rising socialist movement could now advance by means other than violent insurrection. This didn't mean an embrace of existing institutions — rather, it meant recovering the mass democracy experimented with during the French Revolution.
Franz Mehring joined the fledging socialist movement in Bismarck’s Germany and became one of its most brilliant propagandists. From his historical writings to his biography of Karl Marx, Mehring left behind a vital body of work for Marxists to draw upon.
Generations of workers critiqued wage-labor in the name of republican liberty.
Life under capitalism is the experience of horror — and there is no better guide to it than Karl Marx.
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
Why Marx loved work — and we should, too.
Yolanda Díaz, labor minister in Spain’s first left-wing coalition since the 1930s, writes on why The Communist Manifesto is still today the sharpest critique of capitalist society.
Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago today. We should thank him for helping out his friend Karl Marx — but also for the critique of capitalism he produced in his own right.
David Riazanov was a brilliant scholar who pioneered the study of Marxism while playing an active part in Russia’s revolutionary movement. But Ryazanov and the Marx-Engels Institute he founded both fell victim to Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.
The Invention of Marxism is a rich group biography of the founding generation of socialists, who introduced millions to Karl Marx’s ideas. Even where it falls short, its details still charm and provoke interest.
Composer Hanns Eisler was a lifelong communist and self-described Jacobin. His music provided the soundtrack for both the tragedies and triumphs of German antifascism.
Anwar Shaikh is one of the world’s leading radical economists, whose work has challenged the way we think about capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Shaikh gives a concise overview of the ideas set out in his landmark book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises.
100 years ago today, Chinese students launched the May Fourth Movement. While Chinese officials invoke the movement to reinforce the status quo, a new generation is rediscovering its insurgent roots.
Karl Marx was an analytically rigorous theoretician. But his 1853 article “The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery” is a good reminder that he was also motivated by white-hot outrage about injustice.
The rich used to eat, dress, and even speak entirely differently from the masses. Today they wear T-shirts and sneakers just like the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean we’re all equal. It only lays bare the real source of inequality: actual money.
Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write one of the most important books about the making of Karl Marx’s Capital, paving the way for a revival of Marxist economic theory from the 1960s.
More than any other thinker in the postwar era, Noam Chomsky has embodied Karl Marx’s favorite dictum: “nothing human is alien to me.”
Blending Kierkegaard with Hegel and Marx, Martin Hägglund’s This Life offers a new generation of socialists a guide to living a life of radical political commitment.
In his book The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels linked the “world-historical defeat of the female sex” to the rise of class exploitation. Engels helped lay the foundations for a Marxist understanding of women's oppression.
The German socialist philosopher Erich Fromm sought to explain the social psychology of right-wing authoritarianism after the Nazis drove him into exile. His work is full of valuable insights that can inform struggles for political and economic freedom today.