KARL MARX wanted to do two things at once: he wanted to understand how change happened in a complex, shifting world. 

He also wanted to give working people the tools to change things for themselves. 

The first meant he used an array of complicated theoretical analyses and was willing to turn existing understandings of society on their head or inside out. 

The second meant he made an effort to make his ideas easy to understand, even where those ideas, because they ran so hard against the prevailing wisdom, looked confusing: As Karl said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” 

So Marx wrote both his dense, three-volume analysis of political economy, Capital, and his popular 50-page pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.

We go through a bit of a cycle where Marx periodically gets declared “outdated” because his view of capitalism as a system riven by crisis and class conflict are “old-fashioned.”

Then capitalism has another crisis and lots of new readers get interested in old Karl. 

Since the 2008 financial crisis we have been in one of the Marx-is-interesting phases.

Marx wanted to both look deeply into the tangled way change happens and have a straightforward explanation for working people on how to make change happen. 

But another way many mainstream commentators like to divert people away from Marx is to put him in the “difficult theory” box. 

Socialist historian Manus McGrogan has done us all a service with his new book, Who the Hell is Karl Marx, which pulls Karl right out of that “difficult” box into an accessible summary of his life and ideas.

McGrogan’s 115-page book is a very economical explanation of Marx’s concepts, how he got them and what he did with them. 

It is in the new series  “Who the Hell is…” which aims to “look at the lives and cultural influences of some towering intellectuals — as well as their most groundbreaking ideas — to see how it all fits together.”  

The series aims to “deconstruct their academic jargon into plain English, so you don’t have to.” 

If you know anyone who’s off to university, this would be a great gift, because there is a strong possibility they will be taught about the “difficult” Marx, where McGrogan makes an effort to make the “difficult” understandable.

One of the features of the socialist movement is that we are all students and don’t depend on universities for our educations, so this is equally a good book for everyone interested in Marxism as a theory of change.

McGrogan opens up Marx’s more powerful analytical tools — like the “dialectic,” with its movements from “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” and explains how this is really a theory of  conflict and change, inherited from philosophy, but sharpened by his personal experience of revolution. 

He shows what “base and superstructure” mean as a way of analysing society, how “the history of class struggle” means more than just a Victorian battle between top-hatted gents and flat-capped blokes.  

The book is short and sharp, but does not oversimplify Marxism. It’s also nicely illustrated with pictures from Marx’s own time.

I’d particularly recommend the book to the very large number of people who have been pulled into politics around Jeremy Corbyn: I think there is a very popular understanding of business and politics around Corbynism which sometimes tends to the conspiratorial, to an idea of rich people buying off politics. 

McGrogan’s book is a useful reminder of how Marx saw this as a social process, driven by class interests, not an individual corruption.

McGrogan writes as somebody who is sympathetic to Marx, but unsympathetic to the (now dismantled) communist-bloc countries, so a couple of his asides might annoy those who do see them as some fulfilment of Marx’s hopes, but the overwhelming focus of the book is Marx himself, his writings and his activism, rather than subsequent debates about what is the “best” version of Marxism.  

Who the Hell is Karl Marx is available from all good bookshops for £9.99.