Curated playlist
Marxist theorists
- Bertolt BrechtBertolt Brecht walked out of a Congressional hearing in Washington on the 30th of October 1947, thanked by the committee chairman for his cooperation, and boarded a plane for Europe the very next morning. He never returned to the United…
- Che GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna signed Cuba's paper currency with a single word: "Che." His long-time friend Ricardo Rojo said that the day he signed the bills, he "literally knocked the props from under the widespread belief that money…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society. Few thinkers of the twentieth century managed to shape radical politics from inside a government…
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was born on the 28th of November 1820 in Barmen, a Prussian industrial town his contemporaries called the "German Manchester". He would spend his adult life moving between factory offices, revolutionary barricades,…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin,…
- Frantz FanonFrantz Omar Fanon was born on the 20th of July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. He died on the 6th of December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 36, admitted to a hospital under the false name…
- Karl KautskyKarl Kautsky spent thirty-five years as editor of Die Neue Zeit, the most prestigious Marxist journal in the world, and in that time he became known as the "Pope of Marxism". Born in Prague on the 16th of October 1854 and educated in…
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the Moscow show trials. Of all the men Stalin defeated, Trotsky was one of the few…
- Louis AlthusserLouis Althusser was born on the 16th of October 1918 in Birmendreïs, a town near Algiers in French Algeria, and he died on the 22nd of October 1990 in a psychiatric institution. Between those two dates lies one of the most turbulent…
- Rosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg was shot in the head, her body weighted with stones and dropped into a Berlin canal. It was the night of the 15th of January 1919, and she had spent most of the preceding four years in prison. She was 47. Her killers were…
- Raymond WilliamsRaymond Henry Williams was born on the 31st of August 1921 in Pandy, a village just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny in Wales. His father worked on the railway. Every railwayman in that village voted Labour, while the…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- Wilhelm ReichWilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of November 1957 in a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Between those two dates he published…
- Richard D. WolffRichard D. Wolff grew up in New Rochelle, New York, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany. His father had been a lawyer in Cologne, Germany. In America, that credential was worthless; the man found work in a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.…
- Rudolf HilferdingRudolf Hilferding died in a Paris prison in February 1941, in the Gestapo dungeon of La Santé, after being tortured. He had, a few days earlier, been handed over by the police of Vichy France to the very regime he had spent years…