Karl Marx
Making the relationships organizing our lives visible.
Marx studies capitalism as a historical form of production and power. His work joins philosophy, economics, social inquiry, journalism, and political engagement; extensive manuscripts require distinguishing ongoing research from published books.
How can we transform social relationships we have learned to treat as natural?
Biography
Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818 into a family of Jewish origin that had converted to Protestantism. After studying in Bonn and Berlin, he worked within the Young Hegelian intellectual milieu and completed a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus. An academic career became unlikely in a repressive political setting. Work at the Rheinische Zeitung led him to examine censorship, poverty, and conflicts over wood gathering. These investigations helped shift attention from philosophical criticism alone toward the legal and material conditions of social life. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843 before they moved to Paris and encountered new political networks.
02 /Philosophy
Economic institutions have histories. Studying them means asking how they emerge, reproduce, and change without reducing every event to one cause.
03 /Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
04 /Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
A first reading.
What does a commodity conceal?
Enter the first chapter without conflating price, usefulness, and value.
Capital, Volumes I–IIIActing within inherited history
Read a coup through institutions, classes, and representations.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis BonaparteWhat does changing the world mean?
Read the eleven Theses as a problem of practice and knowledge.
Theses on Feuerbach