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.