How to Read Marx

Emphasizing the Romantic heritage and modernist legacy of Karl Marx’s writings Peter Osborne presents Marx’s thought as a developing investigation into what it means concretely for humans to be practical historical beings.Drawing on passages from a wide range of Marx’s writings and showing the links among them Osborne refutes the myth of Marx as a reductively economistic thinker. What Marx meant by “materialism” “communism” and the “critique of political economy” was much richer and more original philosophically than is generally recognized. With the renewed globalization of capitalism since 1989 Osborne argues Marx’s analyses of the consequences of commodification are more relevant today than ever before.Extracts are taken from the full breadth of Marx’s writings including Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto to Capital.