Marx

Marx is read more often as a political symbol than as the actual nineteenth-century German philosopher he was — which is a shame, because the philosophical work is sharper than the politics it inspired.

The early Marx is humanist and Hegelian. The 1844 *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts* introduce alienation — the worker estranged from the product of their labour, from the act of working, from other people, from their own species-being. Capitalism, in this view, isn't merely unfair distribution; it's a mode of production that severs humans from what makes them human. This is the Marx Christian humanists and humanistic Marxists still find indispensable.

The later Marx is the one most people half-remember. *Capital* (1867) is a structural analysis of how capitalism works — surplus value, commodity fetishism, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the historical specificity of "free" wage labour. The *Communist Manifesto* (1848), co-written with Engels, is propaganda in the technical sense — a call to action with theoretical scaffolding. The *Grundrisse* (notebooks from 1857-58, not published until the twentieth century) is where Marx's thinking is rawest and arguably most interesting.

Whether the twentieth-century regimes that invoked his name had much to do with what he wrote is contested. Marx himself once said, of certain French disciples: "I am not a Marxist." Read him as a diagnostic of capitalism's internal dynamics, and he holds up remarkably well — economists from very different traditions still mine *Capital* for its analytical apparatus, even when they reject the prescriptions.