Karl Marx was a revolutionary thinker and organizer whose work gave the working class a science of its own liberation. Born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818, he edited a radical newspaper until the Prussian state shut it down. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris, Brussels, and finally London, often in deep poverty. With his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels, he wrote The Communist Manifesto on the eve of the revolutions of 1848, declaring that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

In Capital, Marx laid bare how capitalism works: wealth is produced by workers and taken from them as profit. He showed that the system is driven by its own contradictions toward crisis, and that it was born in conquest, slavery, and colonial plunder rather than in thrift and enterprise. He was also an organizer. He helped lead the International Workingmen's Association, which wrote to Abraham Lincoln in support of the fight against slavery, and he defended the Paris Commune of 1871 as the first glimpse of workers holding power. His insistence that philosophers had only interpreted the world, and that the point is to change it, became a guide for generations of revolutionaries.

Marx's ideas traveled far beyond Europe. They were taken up, adapted, and transformed in the revolutions of Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, and in the anticolonial struggles of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Thinkers from Lenin and Gramsci to Cabral, Rodney, and Claudia Jones developed his method to meet the conditions of their own people. Marx's legacy is not a fixed doctrine but a living tool for understanding the world in order to change it, and for building a society free from exploitation.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*