The Nexus Archive
Socialism and Political Economy
Marx
The Anatomist of Capital · Industrial Modernity, 1818-1883
Marx studies class, labor, capital, ideology, and revolution as the hidden machinery of modern society.
- Class struggle
- Capital
- Alienation
- Ideology
- Historical materialism
Start with The Communist Manifesto
Life
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary theorist. His work analyzes capitalism, class conflict, alienated labor, ideology, and historical change, most famously in The Communist Manifesto and Capital.
The question
“Who benefits from the way society is built?”
Argued against
Capitalist exploitation, class rule, ideology, and political freedom detached from material life.
Why Marx matters
Marx gives Nexus one of modernity's most consequential critiques of economics, power, and social order.
Where to start
The Communist Manifesto The most direct first source, with Friedrich Engels handled by the source and quest threads.
Works
- The Communist Manifesto Treatise · Intermediate Marx and Engels's short revolutionary argument about class struggle, capitalism, bourgeois society, and communism.
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte History · Brutal Marx's political history of the 1848 French Republic, class factions, Bonapartism, and the coup that made Louis-Napoleon emperor.
Quests with Marx
- Wealth & Society A study of wealth as moral pressure, social order, labor, class, and exchange. Wealth & Society Quest