APURBA CHATTERJEE explains how British artists in India used the “picturesque” to reshape colonial landscapes and celebrate imperial power
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.
Class struggle is the motor of history but the direction and detail of change at any time and place is the outcome of many factors, suggests the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
GORDON PARSONS enjoys Kant’s ‘mind-boggling’ theory of human reality: that we create the reality we experience
Humans are part of the ‘animal kingdom’ – and of nature in general – but also distinct from it and labour (work) is part of what makes us unique, declared Engels. His insights 150 years ago into how our species came to be and how we differ from the rest of nature, are as important today as they were then, says the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School



