On Marx

It’s been a while since I read any Marx or dealt rigorously with his ideas, so I picked this up to refresh myself systematically. Its account of his life and thought gets the point across well, and since I’m most familiar with the later Marx (as I think most of us are), the discussion of his intellectual formation was especially welcome. The book veers off toward the end, where the author appraises Marx’s legacy none too positively. It’s a fair case to make, but I don’t quite agree with the conclusions. He’s right that the Communist regimes of the twentieth century were total failures, but that doesn’t diminish Marx’s strength as a critic of the capitalism he saw in the mid-nineteenth century; and while the working class hasn’t faced the total immiseration Marx predicted, he was right that neoliberalism has led to a re-monopolization of the Western and the global economy. Still, it’s a good book for getting a clearer sense of what Marx is all about.