How the Academy Looks at Marx is all Wrong, the Point However is to Change It

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a growing respectability in the way Karl Marx is presented within the academy
In what follows, I note how two standard contemporary reference works describe Marx and contrast those to Marx’s “auto-bibliography” which presents a different set of texts as important to the author’s self-conception
I focus on one of the latter set of texts and suggest an approach to understanding Marx that emphasizes his identity as a revolutionary theorist and which, perhaps helps us better understand why he did not give priority to working out a theory of the state in a traditional theoretical manner