How to change the World

This book, a collection of many of core writings in this field from 1956 to 2009, is essentially a study of the development and popularization of Marxism by the late Karl Marx and the venerable Frederick Engels. It is not a history of Marxism in the traditional sense, although its core comprises two chapters I wrote for a very ambitious multi-volume Storia di Marxismo published by the house of Einaudi in Italian (1978-82) in which I had I was coplanier and co-editor. These revised, sometimes considerably rewritten and supplemented by a chapter on the period of Marxist recession and crisis in the 1980s. In addition it contains some further studies in what I believe is the tradition of “the reception” of Marx and Marxism; an essay on Marxism and labour movements since the 1880s, an initial version of which was originally given as a lecture in German to the Linz International Conference of Labour Historians; and three introductions to particular works: Engels’ Condition of the Working Class, the Communist Manifesto, and Marx’s views on pre-capitalist social formations in the important set of 1850s manuscripts known in their published form as Grundrisse. The only post-Marx/Engels Marxist specifically discussed in this book is Antonio Gramsci. About two-thirds of these texts have not been published in English.