Karl Marx

About the book

About the author

Reviews 

"The latest in the Who the hell is . . . series, Manus McGrogan’s Who the hell is Karl Marx . . . and what are his theories all about? is a nifty little primer on how to think with Marx in the 21st century. McGrogan does not hide his great admiration for Marx’s ideas—the book is dedicated the memory of Leon Trotsky—but nor does he extol Marx’s thought uncritically. Instead, McGrogan places Marx within his intellectual milieu and traces the development of his key concepts that continue to draw readers to his work today.

In the first chapter, McGrogan provides a brief biographical overview that situates Marx’s life within the economic and political tumult of the 19th century. Chapter two focuses on key theorists and traditions that shaped Marx’s thought from his early years as a student of law and philosophy in Germany to his later life as a journalist and revolutionary in London. The central chapters of McGrogan’s book elaborate on three themes in Marx’s thought: “history as class struggle,” “capitalism and crisis,” and “the fight for socialism.” With a minimum of jargon, McGrogan shows how these themes emerged through dialogue with contemporary theorists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, and most importantly Friedrich Engels, and through Marx’s careful observations of key world events, from labor struggles in Europe to the American Civil War.

For students and activists alike new to the world of Marx, these three chapters offer what pedagogists Jan Meyer and Ray Land famously referred to as “threshold concepts,” previously inaccessible perspectives that reveal the world anew. In his conclusion, McGrogan hints at the enduring power of Marx’s thought to illuminate key events of the 21st century such as the 2008 global economic crash, the 2011 Arab Spring, and the ongoing French yellow vest movement. Were he writing this chapter today, in April 2020, McGrogan would no doubt suggest how we might view global inequalities exposed by the Coronavirus pandemic through a Marxist lens. The book’s greatest utility, however, lies in its ability to help newcomers think with Marx about the world on their own."

Dr Ron Haas | Texas State University, USA

"Karl Marx wanted to do two things at once: he wanted to understand how change happened in a complex, shifting world. He also wanted to give working people the tools to change things for themselves.

The first meant he used an array of complicated theoretical analyses and was willing to turn existing understandings of society on their head or inside out. The second meant he made an effort to make his ideas easy to understand, even where those ideas, because they ran so hard against the prevailing wisdom, looked confusing: As Karl said, 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.' So Marx wrote both his dense, three-volume analysis of political economy, Capital, and his popular 50-page pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.

We go through a bit of a cycle where Marx periodically gets declared 'outdated' because his view of capitalism as a system riven by crisis and class conflict are 'old-fashioned.' Then capitalism has another crisis and lots of new readers get interested in old Karl. Since the 2008 financial crisis we have been in one of the Marx-is-interesting phases. Marx wanted to both look deeply into the tangled way change happens and have a straightforward explanation for working people on how to make change happen. But another way many mainstream commentators like to divert people away from Marx is to put him in the 'difficult theory' box. Socialist historian Manus McGrogan has done us all a service with his new book, Who the Hell is Karl Marx?, which pulls Karl right out of that 'difficult' box into an accessible summary of his life and ideas.

McGrogan’s 115-page book is a very economical explanation of Marx’s concepts, how he got them and what he did with them. It is in the new series Who the Hell is…? which aims to 'look at the lives and cultural influences of some towering intellectuals — as well as their most groundbreaking ideas — to see how it all fits together.' The series aims to 'deconstruct their academic jargon into plain English, so you don’t have to.'

If you know anyone who’s off to university, this would be a great gift, because there is a strong possibility they will be taught about the 'difficult' Marx, where McGrogan makes an effort to make the 'difficult' understandable. One of the features of the socialist movement is that we are all students and don’t depend on universities for our educations, so this is equally a good book for everyone interested in Marxism as a theory of change.

McGrogan opens up Marx’s more powerful analytical tools — like the 'dialectic,' with its movements from 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' and explains how this is really a theory of conflict and change, inherited from philosophy, but sharpened by his personal experience of revolution. He shows what 'base and superstructure' mean as a way of analysing society, how 'the history of class struggle' means more than just a Victorian battle between top-hatted gents and flat-capped blokes.

The book is short and sharp, but does not oversimplify Marxism. It’s also nicely illustrated with pictures from Marx’s own time. I’d particularly recommend the book to the very large number of people who have been pulled into politics around Jeremy Corbyn: I think there is a very popular understanding of business and politics around Corbynism which sometimes tends to the conspiratorial, to an idea of rich people buying off politics.

McGrogan’s book is a useful reminder of how Marx saw this as a social process, driven by class interests, not an individual corruption. McGrogan writes as somebody who is sympathetic to Marx, but unsympathetic to the (now dismantled) communist-bloc countries, so a couple of his asides might annoy those who do see them as some fulfilment of Marx’s hopes, but the overwhelming focus of the book is Marx himself, his writings and his activism, rather than subsequent debates about what is the 'best' version of Marxism."