Karl Marx

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when factory chimneys were blackening the skies of Europe and trains were stitching cities together with steel, a bearded émigré in a London reading room was trying to understand why so much new wealth seemed to bring so much new misery. Outside, the streets were full of contrasts: fine houses a carriage ride away from slums where whole families crowded into a single room; lavish shops not far from soup kitchens; workers who had left the countryside for the promise of wages now coughing themselves to death in mills and mines. Inside the British Museum’s reading room, a man in a worn coat sat hunched over economic reports, parliamentary inquiries, and statistics, his handwriting spilling across page after page as he tried to make sense of it all. His name was Karl Marx, and whatever else one says about him, his work would change the moral vocabulary of the modern world. Words like exploitation, alienation, class struggle, ideology, and revolution would never sound the same again.Selenius Media