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Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory
by Mike Davis
(Verso, £17.99)
MIKE DAVIS started life working as a meat cutter and bus driver in California before he made his name as an urban sociologist with the groundbreaking Planet of Slums, a work that single-handedly changed the way we see our planet.
To mark the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, he explores in Old Gods, New Enigmas the historic rise of the working class and the socialist movement in Europe at the time of the great revolutionary philosopher’s emergent body of ideas.
Because Marx’s greatest work was Capital, its focus was to a greater extent on the capitalist. Davis, instead, focuses on labour and its emergence as a self-conscious historical force. In a mere 150 pages, he magisterially takes us through the component elements of this development in a series of mini chapters.
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