Marx’s turn to philosophy

Biographically, it is tempting to categorize the protagonist’s youth as a storm-and-stress period followed by setbacks, disappointments, and compromises, leading to the anticlimactic moderating of youthful passions in light of the “prose of reality” (Hegel). Sperber provides us with a version of this arch-bourgeois Bildungsroman in his tripartite sequencing of Shaping, Struggle, and Legacy. Warren Breckman’s and David Leopold’s influential studies of Marx’s high-energy years as a student and political journalist departed from such a model and read Marx’s early writings and their Young Hegelian environment as worthy of appreciation regardless of what they may portend for Marx’s subsequent development.Footnote ⁴ Origins are not spontaneous leaps into existence, but occur negatively, in addressing and opposing a given intellectual discourse. Origins can be studied without teleological foreshadowing. In line with this logic, Heinrich’s biographical volumes are not meant to each represent self-contained periods in Marx’s life; rather, they follow pragmatic considerations of length and the biographer’s pace of research.

Similarly, When Spinoza Met Marx does away with the notion of intellectual biography as meaningful only if read along a trajectory of influences. Instead, Matysik blurs the hierarchy between primary and secondary sources by telling a “love story” of nineteenth-century thinkers being affected by reading Spinoza or Spinozist texts. The Marx we encounter in Matysik’s innovative study is only one figure among equals, and what connects these equals is their similar experience in coming to terms with their own actions as non-teleological but transformative activity conditioned by natural necessity: “The great error that Spinoza sought to dispel was the idea that humans are in any way distinct from nature, in any way capable of transcending or dominating it, in any way capable of freedom from causal determination” (Matysik, 9). Matysik’s egalitarian group portrait is remarkably diverse, and it includes young Marx’s friends Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, and Bruno Bauer, as well as lesser-known (Johann Jacoby and Jakob Stern) and famous (Georgi Plekhanov) protagonists of the socialist movement.

In contrast to Matysik’s focus on the young Marx’s Spinozian network, Saito’s reconstruction of Marx as a degrowth thinker draws heavily on his late anthropological and natural-scientific studies. Nonetheless, Saito stresses that Marx’s early humanist concept of alienation is indispensable for ecological thought in our time. It is, however, in their assessments of method that Matysik’s nonhumanist green materialism and Saito’s endorsement of Marx’s “anthropocentric” approach as logically irreducible for the sake of recognizing the “non-identity of nature” (Saito, 129) diverge most sharply. While Matysik draws inspiration from New Materialist suspicions of individual agency as conceptually reducing the embodied vicissitudes of “activity,” Saito insists on retaining “the anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene discourse” (116) because it reflects the young Marx’s insight that our interchange with nature—“man’s inorganic body”—is mediated through labor, a teleological act. In short, Matysik breaks with all teleology; Saito, on the other hand, retains teleology in the concept of labor as the practice that shapes how humans are situated in nature, a position that extends from the young to the mature Marx, who in Capital defined human labor as “purposeful activity” that “realizes a goal.”Footnote ⁵

It has become the standard for serious Marxist scholarship to draw on the rich trove of materials made available in the still-incomplete Marx–Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA ²),Footnote ⁶ and Heinrich makes more conscientious use of it than previous biographers, probing and correcting entrenched claims and narratives. Heinrich’s fastidiousness has slowed down his initial publication schedule. The first volume has already seen an expanded second edition, and the publication of the second volume has been postponed several times. To give an incomplete catalog of Heinrich’s corrections of the biographical record, they include rebutting that after the family’s hesitating conversion to Protestantism, Marx’s father Heinrich broke with his Jewish relatives (66); that Marx was socially isolated growing up in Trier (114); and that Bruno Bauer had a unilateral influence on Marx—rather, their friendship was one of mutual influence.Footnote ⁷

Importantly, Heinrich proposes that Marx stopped writing poetry not because he judged his lyric outpourings to be of poor quality, as Franz Mehring and subsequent biographers assumed, but rather because he underwent an experience of embarrassed self-recognition. When Marx came across Hegel’s criticism of the “beautiful soul’s” longing, he felt that he, too, had placed an “abstract ought” over the need to “plunge into reality” (190). Heinrich concludes that Hegel’s takedown of Romanticism in both his Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Fine Arts “so strongly unsettled [Marx] that he had to give up his notion to work on behalf of the welfare of humanity by means of art” (192). In short, while previous biographers only stated Marx’s transition from Romanticism’s “warm” enthusiasm to Hegel’s “cold” conceptualism, Heinrich argues that Marx’s embrace of Hegel’s philosophy was motivated by his painful self-recognition of having been a muddleheaded moral idealist. Unlike previous biographies, Heinrich insists on having identified a plausible cause for Marx’s transition from poetry to philosophy.

In November 1837, Marx reported his first “intellectual crisis” (196) to his father: feeling himself driven from art to philosophy, he failed to develop his own pantheistically inspired ideas about reuniting art and science, and these failures “delivered” him more firmly “into the arms of the enemy” (193), Hegel. By the time Marx started attending the Young Hegelian Doctor’s Club, he had already been reading Hegel on his own (184), and hence his turn to philosophy cannot be described as a derivative of Young Hegelianism, a motley phenomenon better characterized as a “discourse” rather than a school (272). Moreover, Marx brought to this discourse an atheism acquired during his dilettantish wrestling with poetry (283), which likely contributed to radicalizing his friend Bauer’s development from orthodox Protestantism to atheism (273).

Bauer claimed that the gospels are to be seen not as reflecting immediate knowledge of real historical events but rather as creations of the evangelists’ creative “self-consciousness,” and this contributed to Marx’s conceptualizing his dissertation as an examination of the Hellenistic schools that Hegel had described as philosophies of self-consciousness: Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. The dissertation Marx submitted had been intended as only a preliminary portion of a larger work in the mold of a Hegelian history of philosophy, but these plans became obsolete after Bauer’s professorial career prospects at Bonn University were shattered and Marx pivoted from an anticipated academic career facilitated by Bauer to the precarious work of poorly paid journalist. Marx’s “Berlin Notebooks” excerpting Leibniz, Hume, and Spinoza were not directly related to his dissertation and possibly owe their existence to Bauer’s advice that oral dissertation exams at the University of Berlin “always revolve around Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz—nothing else.”Footnote ⁸

Reminding his readers of Marx’s sarcastic analogy between the allegedly “dead dogs” Hegel and Spinoza, in the afterword to the second edition of Capital, volume 1, Heinrich notes that Marx “valued Spinoza just as highly as he did Hegel. That is remarkable, since explicit references to Spinoza in Marx’s work are rather rare, albeit consistently positive” (235).Footnote ⁹ This suggests that Marx’s interest in Spinoza was not limited to exam preparations. If Marx took from Epicurus the idea of a “radically antiteleological conception of nature,”Footnote ¹⁰ as Matysik (112) concludes, his excerpts from Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus show a structurally similar idea of the social contract as open to dissolution and renegotiation. In her reading of Marx’s three Spinoza notebooks, Matysik underscores that Marx followed along as Spinoza outlined notions of “negative” republican freedom (to be free from constraint) and “positive” democratic freedom: to persevere by joining forces with others, and hence to act for freedom out of necessity (111).Footnote ¹¹ Lucritius’s famous attribution to Epicurus of the clinamen (swerve) represents the idea of freedom not from but rather in nature and therefore the possibility of freedom in necessity. As Matysik puts it, “One could say that humans are determined in advance to swerve” (129). This is Epicureanism reinterpreted through Spinoza’s “absolute immanence” (130), which removes all need for external causality as an explanatory mechanism.

In this reinterpretation, which Matysik attributes to Marx and Engels’s joint writings on Stirner, Bauer, and Feuerbach from 1845–6, historical agents are reconceptualized as dynamically “provisional” products that are “historically determined … to effect historical change” (Matysik, 130). All history is causally driven by needing to satisfy natural needs, in turn producing new needs and capacities, thereby transforming nature, including human nature. Matysik proposes that we acknowledge the influence of Spinoza’s totalizing concept of substance in Marx and Engels’s first articulation of historical materialism, where the concept reemerges purged from its metaphysical weight and instead historicized in terms of forces and relations of production. At the same time, Matysik concedes that the Spinozist strain in Marx is too fickle to safely describe him as either “humanist” or “nonhumanist.” She sees this uncertainty reflected in the diverging paths of the two most prominent Spinozian Marxists in the twentieth century, Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri. While the former famously described Marx as having overcome his early humanist attachments with his “epistemological break” of 1845, the latter transposed humanism from the liberal individual to the proto-proletarian “multitude” (Matysik, 133).

Negri died in 2023, but scholarly traffic at the intersection of Marxism and Spinozism has continued to be brisk.Footnote ¹² At the same time, across the corpus of Marx biographies, references to Marx’s knowledge of Spinoza remain perfunctory. Spinoza finds no mention in Sperber’s biography, while Stedman Jones acknowledges that Marx, as he moved to a secular notion of “species being” in his 1844 critique of alienation, had imbibed a good portion of the popular Spinozist pantheistic “notion of immanence.” At the same time, “the source of his position seems not to have been any particular affinity to Spinoza.” Instead, Stedman Jones believes that Marx’s attacks on modern liberal individualism as alienation from human species-being derived from his adherence to the identity of “individual and citizen in Aristotle’s polity.”Footnote ¹³ That Aristotle rather than Spinoza played a decisive role in the young Marx’s understanding of how philosophical ideas become concrete when they bear on political history, Heinrich reports, was suggested by Jena philologist Ernst Günther Schmidt, who reviewed Marx’s “Berlin Notebooks” when they were first edited in MEGA ² IV/1 in 1976.

Marx’s dissertation(s)

Although Marx lived and studied in Berlin from October 1836 to May 1841, he received his doctoral degree from the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Jena in April 1841, “in absentia.” The reasons for this are unclear, but Heinrich speculates that Marx was eager to be done being a student, and at Jena the fees were low and processing was quick: his degree was approved within a month of receiving his thesis, based on the strength of his academic profile.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus Marx was spared the more cumbersome Berlin procedures, which included a doctoral thesis in Latin and a bilingual oral exam, in German and Latin. Nonetheless, Marx could have received his degree in Berlin had he so wanted, and Schmidt proposes that his initial plan was to write a dissertation, in Latin, on Aristotle’s De Anima. In 1840, likely inspired by his reading of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, first published in 1833, Marx produced three notebooks with excerpts from De Anima. Two of these notebooks have survived and are available in MEGA ² IV/1. Marx excerpted Aristotle by translating from the Greek, using a Portuguese edition from the early seventeenth century widely available in Berlin libraries. Compared to Marx’s other notebooks, Schmidt proposes, his Aristotle excerpts were evidence of an “intense process of intellectual appropriation” that indicates Marx’s extensive study of Aristotle’s works beyond De Anima.Footnote ¹⁵

While the MEGA ² editors understood these excerpts simply to indicate Marx’s general interest in Aristotle, Schmidt underscores that Marx’s note taking was always done for a specific work purpose. In this case, the larger but unrealized project was a reassessment of post-Aristotelian philosophy, which was to serve as a parabolic historical mirror for a reckoning with the Young Hegelians’ relationship to their latter-day Aristotle. To contribute to this ambitious plan, Marx’s original dissertation idea was to write a thesis for the University of Berlin that would compare Aristotle with one of his Hellenistic heirs, Epicurus. In his fifth notebook on Epicurean philosophy, Marx described himself as a “historian of philosophy,” proposing to read philosophy’s “curriculum vitae” backwards, from Epicurus’ “lamplight of the private individual”Footnote ¹⁶ to Aristotle’s unsurpassable “total philosophy.” Such an approach to the history of philosophy resembles the biography of a heroic figure: “from the death of a hero one can infer his life’s history.”Footnote ¹⁷

Eventually, however, Marx reined in his historiographical ambitions and paired Epicurus with the pre-Socratic atomist Democritus, and his siding with the former against the latter caused Mehring, who edited the first publication of Marx’s dissertation in 1902, to observe with some consternation that Marx was favoring the idealist and subjectivist Epicurus over the more properly materialist and scientific Democritus. For Mehring, this was a sign that Marx had yet to outgrow the idealist trappings of Hegel’s philosophy. Heinrich, on the other hand, cautions that a biographer should not judge whether Marx has “already” or “not yet” arrived at a position he will later hold; such assessments are inevitably teleological, gloss over the telling specifics of biographical conjunctures, and in this case attribute to the first half of the nineteenth century the classification of Epicurus and Hegel as “idealists” that became commonplace only with Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism, first published in 1865.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, Heinrich suggests that Marx’s dissertation was also a response to the Young Hegelian complaint that Hegel had “accommodated” himself to the repressive political conditions of post-Napoleonic Prussia. Where contemporaries like Arnold Ruge criticized the moral defects of Hegel’s accommodation, Marx cautioned that what appears to be careerist conformism is rather an intrinsic “inadequacy” in Hegel’s philosophical system itself,Footnote ¹⁹ regardless of the philosopher’s moral consciousness. Not beholden to his Young Hegelian peers, Marx separated the philosopher’s personality from his thought and formulated a methodical starting point for a nonmoral critique of Hegel’s philosophy that “approached the level that Feuerbach had already reached” (Heinrich, 313).

Whether Marx’s move of reading with Hegel against Hegel did indeed constitute a “failed parricide,” as Roberto Finelli has suggested,Footnote ²⁰ is a question Heinrich promises to address in the second volume of his biography. Unlike Hegel in his History of Philosophy, Marx found the central idea that shaped his comparison of Democritus and Epicurus in Lucretius, “the genuine Roman epic poet” and bard of “the ringing war games of the atoms,”Footnote ²¹ who added to Democritus’ “scientific” theory of atoms falling in a straight line the “lex atomi” of atom “declination,” a principle that “represents the real ‘soul’ of the atom … a principle of independence,” as Elizabeth Asmis explains.Footnote ²² In Marx’s description, the falling atoms “swerve from the straight line, and form a system of repulsion and attraction.”Footnote ²³ Whereas, for Democritus, atom repulsion was only material and compulsory motion, for Epicurus repulsion means “conceptual actualization,” and matter thus becomes thinkable and overcomes the fatefulness of “blind necessity.” Epicurus’ conceptualization of the atom as self-relating yields the “first form of self-consciousness,” synthesizing the material determination of the atom (its falling in a straight line) with is formal determination (its bending from the straight line).Footnote ²⁴ Epicurus thus turned against Democritus’ determinism and introduced the possibility of freedom into the atomistic view of the world: “only on the basis of the rejection of determinism is freedom possible” (Heinrich, 304). Extending the logic of the atomic swerve to Epicurus’ moral philosophy, Marx describes Epicurean freedom in ethical terms as an “abstracting,” a “swerving from suffering” to the serenity of “ataraxy,” a state of “self-consciousness, not … knowledge of nature in and for itself.”Footnote ²⁵

The Hegelian stratum of Marx’s dissertation, therefore, lies in making Epicurus show that it follows from atomic repulsion that atoms are different from one another, in contradiction to Democritus’ claim that atoms have no properties. At the same time, it is by drawing on Hegel’s Science of Logic that Marx can argue that Epicurus’ worldview implies a contradiction between essence (or atoms and the void) and appearance (or life),Footnote ²⁶ because for there to be appearance, the essentially propertyless atoms must assume properties that contradict their essence: “Through the qualities the atom acquires an existence which contradicts its concept; it is assumed as an externalised being different from its essence.”Footnote ²⁷ By favorably comparing Epicurus’ recognition of the swerve’s causal and “self-liberating” force to Democritus’ constrained materialism, Marx succeeded in moving from mere being to essence and thus, as Asmis puts it, “turned a materialist philosophy into a philosophy of freedom.”Footnote ²⁸ He did so, Asmis adds, “by the use of Hegelian logic, but without precedent in Hegel or any other thinker.”Footnote ²⁹

According to Heinrich’s interpretation of Marx’s dissertation project, Marx had not yet developed a theory of his own that could rival Hegel’s Logic. But he had learned enough from the latter to be able to critique classical philosophy by applying the analytic categories, such as essence/appearance, that would turn out to be indispensable for his critique of the vulgar economists’ naive empiricism. In short, Heinrich intervenes in the standard patterns of Marx’s intellectual biography by proposing that Marx’s writings around 1840 not only begin voicing the humanism on full display in the 1844 Manuscripts but rehearse the categories of Hegel’s Logic for a project that probes the contradictions of freedom and determinism that will inform Capital.

With Heinrich’s in-depth study of Marx’s dissertation and preparatory notebooks, biographical understanding has come a long way from Isaiah Berlin’s one-sentence dismissal of the dissertation as “nebulous” “idealist verbiage.”Footnote ³⁰ Heinrich’s biographical situating of Marx’s dissertation fits persuasively into the overall structuring pattern of his biography, which aims to reconstruct biographical continuities along a dotted line of twists and ruptures, foregoing the temptation to fit specific episodes into a predetermined master narrative, such as the narrative of a developmental line from idealism to materialism. Correspondingly, in her concise reading of Marx’s dissertation, Matysik emphasizes the immanentism of Epicurus’ system: the swerve is the vitalizing contingency within a world not moving towards a final cause. Beginning and end do not form the extremes of a temporal arc. Rather, every atomic swerve, in responding to its environment unpredictably, is a pure new beginning, “intrinsically free.” It is a compelling implication of Matysik’s immanentist reading of Marx’s dissertation that we rethink the method of biographical writing according to the structure of a nondeterministic encounter or “collision” of atoms (or individual consciousnesses), and that we read each meeting as much as possible on its own terms rather than within our familiar interpretive frames.

Michael Heinrich and biographical method

In his late work, Louis Althusser cited Epicurus’ swerve to argue that Marxism had been beholden to idealism disguised as “materialism of necessity and teleology” that needed to be replaced by an aleatory “materialism of the encounter.”Footnote ³¹ When Spinoza Met Marx stands out for integrating Althusser’s late-career idea of the encounter into an associative recounting of the prehistory and early history of Marxism. By contrast, Heinrich’s 1991 Science of Value,Footnote ³² a biographically informed reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy not translated into English, relied on Althusser’s earlier analytic categories of the epistemic break, the problematic, and the theoretical field. In his recent reflections on biographical method, Heinrich is aware that “a chronologically oriented presentation always runs the danger of acquir[ing] a teleological tendency” (Heinrich, 336), and it is a defining difficulty of biography as a nonfictional narrative genre to make sense of contingencies by elucidating their conditions—without letting conditions slide into determinations, which would end up reintegrating contingencies into a chain of necessity.

Subject of at least thirty biographies,Footnote ³³ a teleological development is already inherent in the topos of Marx’s epochal “greatness,” which was cultivated by his social-democratic acolytes. The first biographical account, penned in 1896 by one of the founding fathers of social democracy, Wilhelm Liebknecht, focused on the private person, but did hasten to praise Marx as the most consequential scholar of the century, next to Darwin.Footnote ³⁴ In 1908, American socialist activist (and later Hoover- and Goldwater-supporting reactionary) John Spargo published the first full-length biography embodying the standard dualism of “life and work.” Unlike Liebknecht, Spargo no longer knew Marx personally, but was aided by corresponding with Marx’s daughter Laura Lafargue, from whose acquaintance Mehring’s canonical biography, first published in 1918, likewise benefited. While Spargo’s Anglocentric great-men gallery placed Marx alongside the “three immortal world figures” of Cromwell, Wesley, and Darwin,Footnote ³⁵ Mehring summoned Engels’s installing of Marx as the discoverer of the new proletarian science of “historical materialism” in parallel to Darwin: “As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history,” Engels proclaimed, rather misleadingly, in his graveside eulogy, a speech Mehring dutifully reproduced in lieu of an ending:Footnote ³⁶ Marx is dead, long live Marxism.

Unintentionally mirroring the anticommunist condemnation of Marx as an oracle of necessity, biographies produced in state socialist countries suffered from the compulsion to conform to the rigid worldview of “diamat” and insisted on a fictitious intellectual unanimity between Marx and Engels.Footnote ³⁷ In a jointly authored biography issued by the Institute of Marxism–Leninism of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1968, the nine authors simply rehashed Engels’s reifying claim that Marx’s and Darwin’s greatness was to be found in their parallel discovery of the laws of human history and of organic nature respectively.Footnote ³⁸ Despite their commitment to the personalist category of greatness, such standardized biographical accounts were logically compelled to assign historical agency to the abstract force of technoscientific progress as the cause of discovering “laws of motion.” Put differently, the “scientific laws” allegedly discovered by Marx acted just like the mythic powers of old in pushing history ahead (and pushing human actors around), and this unwitting relapse into a mythology of history as the work of impersonal forces undermined one of the biographer’s go-to patterns, the depiction of the hero’s valiant struggle with the powers of fate.

As a counterpoint to officially sanctioned hagiographies, scholarly seriousness was not infrequently communicated by invoking one’s commitment to detach Marx from Marxism and/or from Engels and to “demythologize him,” such as in Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manele’s biography Marx without Myth: A Chronological Study of His Life and Work (1975) and, most drastically, Norman Levine’s The Tragic Deception: Marx contra Engels (1975). “Demythologizing Marx,” as Jamie Melrose observes, has long been the reflexive raison d’être of Marx biographies, often by citing Marx’s quip “I am not a Marxist.”Footnote ³⁹ Arguably, such biographical approaches risked placing Marx and his ideas in a historicist container,Footnote ⁴⁰ thus facilitating a dismissal of Marxism as a corruption of the original. This approach was reflected in David McLellan’s Marx before Marxism (1970), which argued that Marx’s oeuvre could be fully understood by studying its humanist origins, as if Marx’s thought were an Aristotelian entelechy.

Notwithstanding the methodological pitfalls of McLellan’s work, his Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973) was the lasting biography to come out of the 1970s Marx boom. McLelland’s circumspect softening of hagiographical superlatives set his biography apart from works under the full sway of psychological approaches that were bent on deducing Marx’s fate from his early experiences, according to the logic that origin determines identity, which lent itself to a tragic form, as in Jerrold Seigel’s Karl Marx: The Shape of a Life (1978). Similar but lesser works, such as Karl Padover’s Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography (1978) could legitimize their obsession with personality with their protagonist’s eminence, embracing the truism that even the greatest of men started small. We can see a remnant of this in Stedman Jones’s biography. Although he tips his hat to Marx’s greatness, the author cannot bring himself to call his subject by his last name and persistently belittles him as “Karl,” even when addressing his legacy (Padover showed better sense and dropped the moniker “Karl” as the protagonist matured).

Coming on the heels of Stedman Jones’s work, Heinrich’s Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society signals in its title a certain distance from the individualistic biographical template, and this distance is echoed in the subtitle, Biographie und Werkentwicklung (Development of His Work), which asks us to conceive of the coherence of a biographical subject in terms of oeuvre. The story of Marx’s life and work, Heinrich’s title suggests, goes beyond the biographical triviality that each life is uniquely shaped by its specific surroundings; rather, context is as much a protagonist as person. For the paucity of biographical documents that could illuminate Marx’s childhood, Heinrich compensates with a meticulous review of the Marx family genealogy and the social and cultural history of the city of Trier in a transitional period of liberalization first facilitated by Napoleonic reforms, then set back by Prussian authoritarianism.

According to Heinrich, the biographer ought to reconstruct the multidirectional complexity of Marx’s life. If there is one continuity in Marx’s life, it is the continuity of new beginnings and of returning to previously uncompleted endeavors. The biographical continuity of learning is consistent with the dual character of Marx’s writings, as Heinrich observes: “they are not merely analyses of fundamental economic or political relations, sometimes of a very high level of abstraction; they are always also direct interventions in political conflicts and debates, with which today’s readers are no longer familiar.”Footnote ⁴¹ Studying Capital alone is insufficient; Marx’s contemporaneous journalism, letters by and to him, and activism in the International Workingmen’s Association need to be considered too to paint a sufficiently multifaceted biographical picture.

Heinrich’s methodological reflections quote Quentin Skinner’s distinction between the semantic and performative dimensions of speech and are largely aligned with Stedman Jones’s description of his approach to Marx’s “writings as the interventions of an author within particular political and philosophical contexts that the historian must carefully reconstruct.”Footnote ⁴² However, while Stedman Jones underscores that the biographically relevant contexts are those of Marx’s lifetime, his analogy of the biographer as a “restorer” who shows us Marx’s interventions in their “original state” too casually sets aside the biographer’s motivational presuppositions about what constitutes such an “original state.” It has been remarked in response to reconstructive historical contextualism that the sources containing the truth about the original to be restored are not self-evident;Footnote ⁴³ they still require theoretically informed interpretation, and one can plausibly claim without venturing to the outer limits of Nietzschean perspectivism that there is no such thing as a disinterested reconstruction of historical sources. Moreover, the sources that constitute the confounding whole of Marx’s oeuvre are often works-in-progress, put aside on one occasion, recommenced on another, but never completed and published. There is, then, a significant dimension of Marx’s work that defies the category of the “original state,” and Heinrich fittingly describes Marx’s oeuvre as a “series of torsos.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Both Sperber and Stedman Jones rarely address previous biographical writing on Marx, unlike, for instance, Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win (2018; first published in Swedish in 2015), which takes note of previous biographies and new developments in academic scholarship. Heinrich, however, sets the gold standard for accountability by addressing methods and genres of biographical writing in a separate afterword and by offering targeted critiques of existing biographies. He offers two methodological principles, the first of which is source-critical: the biographer, he insists, must limit herself to original sources and dispense with the game-of-telephone-like retelling of unverified anecdotes that undermines the credibility of many biographies. Biographical source criticism includes fact-checking the claims made in previous biographies. Heinrich does so, for instance, with Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life (1999), and finds it to be more creative fiction than scholarship, “useless as a serious source for studying Marx’s life.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Even in Sperber’s richly documented biography, Heinrich notes, the sources cited do not always say what the biographer makes them say (25). The opposite of a “definitive” biography, Heinrich’s scrupulousness entails that his contribution serves as a corrective meta-critique of existing biographies and also as an ongoing self-correction of Heinrich’s work-in-progress: a second edition of Heinrich’s first volume (not available in English) adds further details to his reconstruction of Marx’s notebooks and dissertation.

Heinrich’s second principle is hermeneutic: he cautions that when seeking to isolate Marx’s life from his afterlife, biographers uncritically presuppose their own neutrality. Reflecting the fact that almost all Marx biographers to this day have been men,Footnote ⁴⁶ Heinrich notes a tendency to denigrate Marx’s mother, Henriette Pressburg. Sperber, for instance, believes that she was an obstacle to her husband’s ambitions for a career in public life because of her “very household-oriented version of female Jewish piety.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Contradicting this dismissive assessment, Heinrich cautions that “the image of Henriette as an uneducated housewife should be met with considerable doubt” (58). Methodologically, Heinrich draws on Hans-Georg Gadamer to stress that all acts of interpretation are already mediated by pre-understandings we bring to the text. Primary sources are inextricably embedded in their transmission history, and the biographer’s task is to reflect on her own role in constituting meaning, both with respect to meaning handed down by tradition and with respect to future acts of reading and understanding. Understanding a historical source entails awareness of how other historians have discovered, constituted, reconstructed, and interpreted it and its context. Any historian can protest that she, truly, will restore the original, but she can do so only within an inescapable history of reception that has already preformed the historian’s epistemic objects.

Broadly agreeing with Gadamer’s notion of historical understanding as fusing “horizons supposedly existing by themselves,”Footnote ⁴⁸ Heinrich’s biography is informed by two additional skeptical hesitations about self-proclaimed “restorative” approaches: first, both Sperber’s and Stedman Jones’s reconstructions of Marx’s ideas and actions often pass judgment on Marx’s “success” without sufficiently justifying the grounds for their judgment. While Sperber faults Marx’s “ghettoized existence in a labor movement promoting a counterculture to the established bourgeois capitalist world” for making him miss the emergence of long-term phenomena such as the rise of financialization, large publicly traded corporations, and massive service sectors,Footnote ⁴⁹ Stedman Jones, who has been criticized for projecting his own intellectual journey from New Left radicalism to disillusioned reformism onto Marx’s intellectually sprawling curriculum vitae, delivers a renegade’s coup de grâce to his erstwhile idol:Footnote ⁵⁰ rehearsing arguments from his Languages of Class (1983), he judges Marx’s understanding of post-1848 Europe to be narrowly economic and hence myopic to social-democratic class politics being driven primarily by demands for political inclusion.Footnote ⁵¹ In this case, “restoring” Marx’s ideas to their “true” status as interventions in nineteenth-century political movements amounts to the biographer communicating to his readers what, from the vantage of his superior understanding of politics, Marx ought to have done differently.

Similarly, Sperber judges Marx’s era to be “one increasingly distant from our own,”Footnote ⁵² a historicist certainty bordering on tautology that warrants Heinrich’s second skeptical hesitation. He recalls how past proclamations of allegedly new eras—such as the “New Capitalism” or “Organized Capitalism” of the 1930s or the “Information Age” and the “New Economy” around the turn of the millennium—were wont to ignore how deep structural processes have continued since about 1860, and notes, “Many of the technical, economic, social, and political foundations of modern European societies and of modern capitalism were created during the phase of upheaval that occurred between 1780 and 1860” (Heinrich, 17). An educated person time traveling from 1860 to 2010 “would have far fewer problems understanding contemporary conditions” than a person time traveling from 1710 to 1860. In terms of finding one’s bearings in space and time, “steamship and telegraph” “mark a greater change than the airplane and internet do.” Compared to the distance in experience created by the birth of modern society, the early twenty-first century and the latter half of the nineteenth can be said to occupy the same historical continuum. As Heinrich notes, “It’s not an exaggeration to see in the economic and political upheavals that took place between 1780 and 1860, initially in Western Europe and North America, an epochal rupture in the history of humanity” (19).

To reconstruct Marx’s ideas within his century means doing so within the same historical rupture that still shapes our present moment. This does not imply, Heinrich points out in Science of Value, that Capital is somehow a document of timeless truth. Rather, when Marx moved to London and began his studies of classical political economy, he entered a theoretical field that was being reshaped by left Ricardian attempts to defend the labor theory of value and by marginalist redefinitions of value according to a norm of rational economic agency grounded in the harmonizing fiction of self-regulating markets. The emerging neo-classical doctrine reflected the political and moral need to justify the scandalous modern contradiction of unprecedented bourgeois profit making and mass immiseration. Marx’s critique, which originated in his breakthrough joint work with Engels, the German Ideology, dispensed with the explanatory patterns of apologetic economics and disclosed a theoretical field that causally linked profit to the inner logic of the sphere of production.

In Heinrich’s account, the so-called Marginalist Revolution was not, drawing on Kuhn’s terminology, a scientific revolution because it only shifted the problematic of the field from labor (expressed by value) to utility (expressed by price), but left the field’s overall belief in the rationality of economic decisions and relations intact. Hence the paradigm of marginal utility could assume the discursive position of neo-classical economics, which Heinrich defines by the characteristics of anthropologism or human essentialism (behavior is predicted as arising from human nature), atomized individualism or asociality (“there is no such thing as society”), ahistoricism arising from asociality (individuals are treated as timeless essences), and empiricism (human essences are immediately accessible to cognition and behavior can be known by quantitative means).Footnote ⁵³

Only Marx breaks with the theoretical field thus characterized. His critique of political economy presupposes that both the subject matter the scientist seeks to know and the scientist’s consciousness are historically conditioned. For Heinrich, who is clearly influenced by the epistemological and social-ontological concerns pursued by the New Marx Reading school, Marx’s critique is a revolution of both the subjects and the objects of historical knowledge in their interdependency.

In Heinrich’s thesis about Marx’s scientific revolution, historical and theoretical considerations bear equal weight. Because how we arrive at theoretical knowledge is historically conditioned, correct knowledge cannot be gained by simply contemplating reality as it appears. Rather, knowing it requires the conceptual labor of abstraction and construction. As Heinrich’s Science of Value explicates, Marx’s revolutionary intervention was conditioned by the historical contingency of his living in London and studying at the British Museum Library, which hastened his break with the anthropologism of his first period of political-economic studies in Paris.

Heinrich’s Science of Value gives us an approximate idea about the direction of his biography, and it is likely that in the end the latter will be replete with examples of how seemingly isolated episodes in Marx’s work and life were pieces of a larger puzzle of multidirectional continuity. To conclude this section with an example, in his comments on Marx’s dissertation, Heinrich underscores that the language from Hegel’s Logic that Marx the student used with great sophistication to interpret Epicurus’ philosophy “makes clear that his consideration of the relation between essence and appearance, even in this early period, was considerably more complex” than assumed by critics who accuse Capital of a “relapse into pre-scientific metaphysics” (Heinrich, 306–7).

Going green in 1868

Historicist containment attempts of Marx as a thinker whose theories have validity only for the social conditions of the nineteenth century can point to the de facto nonoccurrence of terminal systemic crises predicted in theory. Having recovered from the Great Depression of the twentieth century and the Great Financial Crisis of the twenty-first, capitalist economies proved their resilience. At the same time, the rise of destabilizing financialization schemes, authoritarian state capitalisms, imperialist land grabs, and the overexploitation of natural resources suggest that capital’s elasticity is not infinite. MEGA ² co-editor Kohei Saito, who became an international celebrity with his best-selling degrowth manifesto Hitoshinsei no Shihonron (Capital in the Anthropocene), suggests that the crisis that will break capitalism has already arrived. Following the lead of self-described “second-stage eco-socialists” like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Saito argues that an economic order that places the accumulation of capital over the satisfaction of genuine human needs has led to a destabilized climate and depleted resources essential for the reproduction of life. These destructive consequences of profit making present real barriers to the future flourishing of all species on Earth. In appropriating the degrowth slogan popularized first in France, Italy, and Spain in the early 2000s, Saito not only vindicates the Club of Rome’s 1972 report on The Limits of Growth but also renews the ecological dimension of New Left theorizing, drawing on André Gorz’s theories of communally developed “open” technologies that could enable societies to enjoy more autonomy and do so with less material throughput (it was Gorz who first used the term “degrowth” in a debate on “Ecology and Revolution” sponsored by Le nouvel observateur, also in 1972).

Going beyond the recent history of degrowth discourse, Marx in the Anthropocene argues for a longer view of ecological Marxist theorizing, starting with Marx’s attempts to integrate into Capital the most cutting-edge insights about the ecological effects of industrialized agriculture. In 1866, as he was working on the theory of ground rent for volume 3 of Capital, Marx was studying the seventh edition of Justus von Liebig’s Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1862), and informed Engels that it “is more important for this matter than all the economists put together.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Marx added a footnote on Liebig at the end of the chapter on large-scale industry in volume 1 of Capital, and noted in the conclusion of the chapter that “capitalist production … disrupts the metabolizing that goes on between human beings and the earth. The natural elements that people consume as food and clothing can no longer return to the land: hence capitalist production undermines the eternal natural condition of the earth’s lasting fertility.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Following Liebig’s terminology of Raubbau, a term that could be translated as “cultivation by robbery,” Marx describes the disruption of the society–nature metabolism as “the art of stealing from [berauben] workers, but also the art of stealing from the soil.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Marx’s critique of stealing the foundation of material life—natural soil fertility and human labor power—for the sake of accumulating purely monetary wealth contains the scientific argument for degrowth, which finds its political complement in Marx’s increasing discomfort with his earlier commitments to historical progress as an unleashing of productive forces. Rejecting accounts of Marx’s later years as a period of “slow death,”Footnote ⁵⁷ Saito argues that in 1868 Marx began to embrace a multilinear theory of how societies might adopt noncapitalist modes of production. This new orientation was prompted by Marx’s reading of agronomist Carl N. Fraas’s Climate and Plant World over Time (1847), which he recommended to Engels, who summed it up as containing the “proof that civilization in its conventional forms is an antagonistic process which exhausts the soil, devastates the forest, renders the soil infertile for its original products, and worsens the climate” (cited in Saito, 63). Deforestation, Fraas had noted, increased the average temperatures in Italy and Germany by five to six degrees Rankine.

In another of Fraas’s work, Agricultural Crises and Their Remedies (1866), Marx found reference to Georg Ludwig von Maurer’s studies on communal property in premodern Teutonic cooperative communes (Markgenossenschaft). Both Fraas and Maurer, he suggested to Engels in March 1868, were driven by an “unconscious socialist tendency” to pierce through the veil of “a certain judicial blindness” covering the traces of older forms of social customs still contained in modern legal norms.Footnote ⁵⁸ Marx recalled that his father, “from a lawyer’s point of view,” had talked about remnants of the “old Germanic system” surviving in his native Hunsrück region, and he suggested that once one became aware of the latent remnants of communal forms of production, one was no longer “surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In Saito’s telling, Marx realized that communism is not the future endpoint of a period of industrial development, but rather a latent potential in the here and now that can be actualized for degrowth ways of living. What his childhood recollections revealed to him about the Hunsrück, further studies confirmed to him as a non-European reality: he found evidence of proto-communist agrarian modes of production in North America, Russia, and India. For Saito, Marx’s letters and study notes show him departing from his previous Eurocentric productivism centered on the model of British industrialization.

With this move, Saito tacitly reconnects Marx’s late thought with the tradition of decolonial Marxism, adding a critical twist to the latter’s theoretical paradigms of “accumulation by dispossession” (or “primitive accumulation”) and “equal and uneven development”: the remedy for underdevelopment cannot be more development in the mold of the carbon-fueled and resource-intensive growth model of the global North. Rather, a commitment to “degrowth communism” begins with a social reorientation towards common and communal abundance instead of private wealth, or, in technical Marxian terms, with abolishing self-valorizing value as the measure of wealth. The accumulation of capital, Saito reminds his readers, destroys planetary wealth (220).

Since the late Marx’s research passions in ecology and pre-capitalist societies were viewed with skepticism by Engels and were little known to the leading figures in the Second International, they remained a private affair. As a matter of fact, as Stedman Jones points out, the same revolutionaries who had consulted Marx on his views about a specifically non-modernizing Russian path to socialism later could not recall Marx’s much-cited letter to Vera Zasulich in which he had qualified his earlier Eurocentric understanding of a necessary path to communism through full industrialization.Footnote ⁶⁰

Stedman Jones and Saito agree about the fact of Marx’s late epistemic break. However, they disagree about the repercussions of this biographical fact for the history of Marxism. Stedman Jones believes that Marx, emboldened by the comparative method first developed in the new field of philology and then adopted for the study of ancient legal and political institutions, succumbed to a specifically nineteenth-century Romantic and nationalistic obsession with discovering alternative origins and genealogies. Marx’s enthusiasm for “real German erudition”Footnote ⁶¹ convinced him of the accuracy of speculations about the existence of proto-communist forms of property that were proven wrong shortly after his death. What Marx took to be genuinely new insights into the continued historical viability of noncapitalist relations of production was merely a case of having been infected by an intellectual fad. Marx’s intellectual dead end is Stedman Jones’s final proof of illusion: the old Marx ends up where the young Marx started, in Romantic fantasy.

Saito, however, ventures more deeply into the archive, and he can show, drawing on the editorial work of his mentor Teinosuke Otani, that Stedman Jones’s claim that Marx sacrificed the completion of Capital for the pursuit of a sentimental whim is inaccurate. For example, as we can see in MEGA ² II/11, Marx did not abandon work on volume 2’s unresolved problem of theorizing accumulation “at an expanded stage,” as Stedman Jones claims.Footnote ⁶² Because Marx continued his theoretical work on Capital alongside rather than in competition with his historical research, his studies of communal property must be seen as evidence that Marx realized he could only complete the argument of Capital if he developed a historically informed understanding of “different ways of organizing metabolism between humans and nature in non-Western and pre-capitalist rural communes as the source of their vitality” (Saito, 200). At the same time, Saito underscores, this late turn in Marx’s thought can only occur because “the issues of ecology and pre-capitalist societies are connected from the very beginning” (200, original emphasis). Where Stedman Jones diagnoses a relapse into youthful enthusiasm, Saito asserts a break with Marx’s prior teleological faith in historical necessity. Only the break with historical materialism and the turn to ecology made it possible for Marx to continue his critique of political economy. In sum, Saito provides us with a dialectical argument for biographical continuity furnished by the new beginning of 1868.

Ecological freedom

In his reading of Capital as a work of natural history, Joel Wainwright suggests that Saito’s account of why Marx turned to ecology is incomplete,Footnote ⁶³ for it was Marx’s enthusiastic reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1860 that made him describe his theoretical perspective in Capital as “treat[ing] the development of society’s economic formation as part of natural history.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This implies, Wainwright argues, that the historical development of capitalist social forms is non-teleological: the interpenetration of nature and history knows no cause and no end, and hence Marx’s critique is both socioeconomic and ecological. In a similar vein, Matysik’s When Spinoza Met Marx shows that materialist conceptualizations of history in the nineteenth century sometimes took their cues from both Darwin and Spinoza in trying to understand the “natural laws” under which society could be reorganized in a cooperative fashion.

Not long after Spinoza’s death in 1677, “Spinozism” was becoming synonymous with pantheism, atheism, and, eventually, radicalism. In Germany, the scandalous fascination of Spinozism culminated in the 1780s pantheism controversy following Jacobi’s revelation that the dying Lessing had confessed to him his Spinozism. When we study the history of revolutionary ideas, Spinozism deserves a place alongside Marxism, and the nineteenth century not only gave us “red” historical materialism, but also “green” Spinozist socialisms. As Matysik emphasizes, the Spinozist identification of substance or nature with the divine thwarts humanist ideas of using nature as a means towards an end. Where Saito gives us a nonproductivist Marx, Matysik gives us an entire nonproductivist genealogy.

Matysik proposes that we disentangle two nineteenth-century German Spinozisms: a domesticated academic one and a more subterranean revolutionary one. She attributes the origins of the latter to Heinrich Heine’s surprising argument, in his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1835), that German philosophy had run its course with Schelling’s nature-philosophical repetition of Spinoza, whose teachings he declared to be essentially identical. Germany was now finally and belatedly ready for its own revolution. With this conclusion, as Stedman Jones remarks in his survey of the Vormärz period, Heine’s “narrative broke down,”Footnote ⁶⁵ and the reader was left with a series of over-the-top violent images of the coming German revolution, starting with the statement, “After philosophy has used its heads for contemplation, the revolution can cut them off for whatever purposes it wants,”Footnote ⁶⁶ and concluding with a prophetic warning about the global destructions that will be wreaked by unleashing “the demonic forces of Old Germanic pantheism”: “A play will be enacted in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like a harmless idyll.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Stedman Jones takes Heine’s conjuring of a violent future revolution as expressing the frustrating impasse in which Germany found itself under the continued yoke of petty despotisms. In 1830, Heine moved to Paris for good, temporarily joined, in 1844, by the budding Marx family, with whom he struck up a friendship. Even though Heine was afraid of mass politics, his embrace of socialist ideas and, reciprocally, Marx’s appreciation of Heine’s poetry made for an easy rapport. While most Marx biographies limit themselves to rehearsing the same anecdotes about Heine’s almost daily visits to the Marx household, Matysik proposes that we think of Spinozism as an ignored link between the young firebrand journalist and the famous poet, who was two decades older. With Heine, Matysik argues, we can think of revolution not as the realization or sublation of philosophy, as Marx did in the early 1840s, but rather as an “explicitly headless revolt” that “occurs when bodies are understood to do things, unconstrained by intellectual frameworks of philosophy or religion that might constrain them” (48). Matysik takes Heine’s Spinozism to entail “the immersion in nature and materiality in their infinite variation—pure productivity, bodies free from constraints of linear or progressive history” (48). What Matysik describes here is neither a politics nor a theory, but rather what she calls an “ethos”—the defining trait of all activity that abstains from dominating nature. This ethos is not drawn from Spinoza’s philosophical system—nor from any philosophy—but rather from a Spinozist melange of pantheism and naturalism that reaches, in her genealogy, from Heine’s Saint-Simonian sensualism to Georgi Plekhanov’s “conception of humans as part of nature that necessarily exceeds them” (218).

The leitmotif for Matysik’s idea of nonhumanist activity is again taken from Heine, who waxed lyrically, “When we read Spinoza, we are seized with a feeling like that of seeing nature at its grandest in most vigorous repose: a forest of thoughts, tall as the sky, whose blooming tree-tops sway back and forth, while imperturbable trunks stand rooted in the eternal soil. There is a certain soft breeze in the writings of Spinoza which is inexplicable.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Matysik rightly underscores that Heine’s description of Spinoza here is filtered through Goethean pantheism—specifically, I want to add, through Goethe’s famous “Wanderer’s Night Song,” the key words of which Heine cites in a gently mocking montage: calm, tree-tops, forest, breeze. But while Goethe’s pantheism was “regrettably removed from the historical era that had been set in motion with the Atlantic revolutions,” Heine sought “to turn Spinoza into a historical thinker” (Matysik, 40, original emphasis). He did so guided by an “ethos of vigorous repose”Footnote ⁶⁹ which Matysik defines “as a suspension of the ideological frameworks that otherwise govern [the] actions” of “finite beings” (49). This suspension is ethical, Matysik argues in her conclusion, because it was “a constant call to do less, to be less ‘human,’ or to stop trying to be agential subjects” (225). Nonetheless, she insists, this ethos is not antipolitical because to those who understand freedom only as human self-determination it serves as a warning that human bodies are always determined by the nonhuman material world. The will to overcome what Marx called “the realm of necessity” makes freedom contingent on human exceptionalism. “Nonhumanist activity” serves as the fully immanent corrective to the hubris of human agents who seek their freedom from nature by wanting to transcend it. Nineteenth-century Spinozism cautions us that commitments to freedom as human autonomy entail human domination of nature.

Intriguingly, Matysik’s concluding reappreciation of Plekhanov, a patron saint of dialectical materialism, suggests that her genealogy is ultimately more Engelsian than Marxian (221), even though Engels is not granted his own chapter. In following Plekhanov’s claim that Marxism is a form of Spinozism rather than Hegelianism, Matysik appears to propose a belated rescue mission of dialectical materialism. Historically, however, the ethos of non-domination of nature remained a merely conceptual form of freedom within natural necessity, a Spinozian idea refuted by the ecological devastations committed in the name of historical necessity. What kinds of politics, for instance, might follow from Plekhanov’s Engelsian epistemological and ethical insight that “the human and the snail inhabit a shared world, they both perceive the same objects in it” (Matysik, 217)? Recent scholarship on Marx’s republicanism has attributed to him a concept of freedom as equally distributed control of political and economic power:Footnote ⁷⁰ in the “social republic” militants called for in 1848, “I have the power to control what anyone else can do to me,” as William Clare Roberts puts it.Footnote ⁷¹ But is the social also an ecological republic? What good is liberation from the tacitly coercive power of “bosses and husbands and cops” if this liberation does not also abolish the domination of nature?Footnote ⁷²

When Matysik writes, “Spinozist Marxism today requires bringing less of nature into the realm of production—that is … extracting fewer resources from the earth (or space, for that matter) … consuming less … polluting less” (235), she proposes a concept of freedom as the non-domination of nature. Similarly, Saito states that “ecological freedom is not the freedom of the will, but rather freedom from the will.” He detects this notion of ecological freedom in Marx’s early journalism for the Rheinische Zeitung. In his 1842 article “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,”Footnote ⁷³ Marx castigated criminalizing the poor for collecting dead wood from the forest for their own needs. The abrogation of such traditional rights of use, Marx noted, corrodes the ecological freedom of all, which is the freedom to appropriate an excess provided by the forest in its natural process of growth and decay. Underscoring the “fortuitous operation of elemental forces,” Marx added to the category of necessity the category of fortuity, as Saito points out.Footnote ⁷⁴ For the poor people, the accidental provision of a broken-off tree branch communicates the “play of elemental force” and “a beneficent power more humane than human power.” Marx juxtaposed the “elemental power of nature” with the non-dominating activity of the poor, whom he described as the “elemental class.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In this rough outline of an ecological class politics,Footnote ⁷⁶ we encounter an early Marx who does not fit the cliché of the relentlessly productivist modernizer. Regardless of whether readers will be persuaded by Saito’s and Matysik’s ecological decenterings of what we thought we knew about the intellectual history of Marx and Marxism, they show that this history is very much alive.

With their shared commitments to rethinking Marxism’s relation to nature against the paradigms of control and domination, Matysik’s and Saito’s works find themselves aligned with a growing body of scholarship intended to show that the deceptively familiar Marxist categories of exploitation, alienation, and reification logically entail the political and ecological categories of domination, compulsion, subjection, and servitude.Footnote ⁷⁷ This reconfiguration of Marxism as a theory of freedom makes the master narrative of Marx’s economic reductionism and determinism increasingly look like a deflated bogeyman from the Cold War. The current rethinking of a seemingly familiar body of work, verifiably based on comprehensive biographical and historical research into all facets of Marx’s thought as new MEGA ² volumes are being published,Footnote ⁷⁸ should not be downplayed as solely an academic exercise of adding to the history of ideas. The undiminished global interest in Marx’s critique, much of it beyond the turf of Marxism’s historical origin, indicates that rereading and contextualizing Marx as a non-Eurocentric and nonproductivist thinker is a matter not only of understanding ideas but also of shifting the terms of political education and organization.Footnote ⁷⁹