The globalized world of the 21st century has many parallels with the one that the cataclysm of 1914 put an end to, namely the world that Marx knew and anticipated. Communications go much faster, a difference of degree, but not of type. People, messages, and ideas travel the world; money circulates incessantly, poverty coexists alongside wealth and capital exercises its impersonal power over each and every one of us. In such a world, Karl Marx is still alive.

Two hundred years after his birth, his fiery condemnation of capitalism reverberates even more strongly today. The texts that Marx bequeathed us, and that gave rise to what would come to be known as "Marxism" - a term he rejected - can be read for what they really are, freed from self-serving scholasticisms. As well as providing a dynamic picture of the Marx man, his life, and his family and friends, as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels, the pioneering historian and intellectual Sven-Eric Liedman, in this definitive biography, he shows what the Marx thinker and researcher actually wrote, proving that this 19th century giant can still exert a powerful attraction for the 21st world.