Marx and Engels on Imperialism

Abstract

For a little over a decade after the denouement of the Revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx, together with his collaborator Friedrich Engels, worked as a professional journalist. Writing from London for newspapers in the United States and, eventually, Europe, Marx and Engels deepened their analysis of the crisis of revolution that they first began in direct engagement with revolutionary events, most notably in The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this vast body of largely neglected professional journalism, Marx and Engels elaborated the critical concept of imperialism.

This is the first book to select and bring together Marx and Engels’s journalism around a conceptual theme, rather than a mere topic. Whatever the subject—capitalist state policy making, mass democracy, the outbreak of the Second Opium War and the suppression of the 1857 Indian Revolt, the rise of credit agencies, or the global significance of the US Civil War—the journalism collected here constellates around the theme of imperialism, a concept Marx and Engels critically appropriated from the liberalism of their day.