- Karl Heinrich Marx
There are few economists who have become both so reviled, and admired as Marx. Indeed some would even question whether Marx deserves to be called an economist; others would prefer terms like 'bungling and failed revolutionary'. However, there are certainly few economists who read so widely and wrote so much as Marx. Whether you love or loathe Marx, we cannot deny his writings had profound influence on the twentieth century. What Did Marx Believe?
- Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci (January 22, 1891 - April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician and political theorist. A founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, he was imprisoned by Mussolini's Fascist regime. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership and he is notable as a highly original thinker within the Marxist tradition.
- Leon Trotsky
"' (– August 21 1940), born Leon Davidovich Bronstein"', was a Ukrainian-born Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
- Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg was a Jewish Polish-born Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a theorist of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, later becoming involved in the German SPD, followed by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. She started the journal "Die Rote Fahne" (The Red Flag).
- Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a lifelong member and sometimes strong critic of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of the communist project.
- Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German social scientist and philosopher, who developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx, co-authoring "The Communist Manifesto" (1848). Engels also edited the second and third volumes of "Das Kapital" after Marx's death.
- Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known by the alias 'Lenin', was a Russian revolutionary, a communist politician, the main leader of the October Revolution, the first head of the Soviet Union, and the primary theorist of Leninism, a variant of Marxism.
- Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (July 19,1898 - July 29,1979) was a German-born American philosopher, sociologist and a member of the Frankfurt School.
- Karl Kautsky
Karl Kautsky (October 16 1854 - October 17 1938) was a leading theoretician of social democracy. He became a significant figure in Marxist history as the editor of the fourth volume of Karl Marx's economic critique, "Das Kapital".
- Che Guevara
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che or just Che was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, political figure, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled rough throughout South America, bringing him into direct contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people lived.
- Ralph Miliband
Ralph Miliband (January 7, 1924 - May 21, 1994), was a notable left wing political theorist. He was the father of two British MPs, David and Ed Miliband.
- Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer (February 14, 1895 - July 7, 1973) was a Jewish-German philosopher and sociologist, a founder and guiding thinker of the Frankfurt School/critical theory.
- Erich Fromm
Erich Pinchas Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned Jewish-German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher.
- Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, …
- Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is a literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for the analysis of contemporary cultural trends; he described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", "The Political Unconscious", and "Marxism and Form".
- Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, (March 15, 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and intellectual, and later a Soviet politician.
- Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
- Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman (September 10 1904 - November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. During his lifetime, he evolved from being a Leninist associate of Leon Trotsky to an anti-Soviet social democrat.
- Nicos Poulantzas
Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) was a Greco-French Marxist political sociologist. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading Structural Marxist and while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of eurocommunism. He is most well-known for his theoretical work on the state. But he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, …
- Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, …
- C. L. R. James
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901-19 May 1989) was an Anglo-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer.
- Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter etc. (April 5, 1923 - July 20, 1995) was a Trotskyist theorist. Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, …
- Ted Grant
Edward (Ted) Grant was a South African Trotskyist politician who spent most of his adult life in Britain.
- Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton (born 22 February, 1943 in Salford, Lancashire (now Greater Manchester), England) is a British literary critic.
- Karl Korsch
Karl Korsch (August 15, 1886 - October 21, 1961) was a German Marxist theorist.
- Eduard Bernstein
Eduard Bernstein (January 6 1850 - December 18 1932) was a German social democratic theoretician and politician, member of the SPD, and founder of evolutionary socialism or reformism.
- Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 - 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature reflected his Marxist outlook. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone ("Politics and Letters", 1979) and there are many translations of his various work.
- Hal Draper
Hal Draper (1914-1990) was a Third Camp American socialist activist, Marxist and author, perhaps best known for his role in the Berkeley, California Free Speech Movement. His brother, Theodore Draper, is best known for his studies of the Communist Party of the United States of America and himself an activist in the socialist movement. __FORCETOC_
- James Connolly
James Connolly (June 5, 1868 - May 12, 1916) was an Irish socialist leader. He was born in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh, Scotland, to Irish immigrant parents. He left school for working life at the age of 11, but despite this he would become one of the leading Marxist theorists of his day. Though proud of his Irish background he also took a role in Scottish politics. In addition, he studied the neutral international language, Esperanto.
- Samir Amin
Samir Amin is an Egyptian political author. He currently lives in Dakar, Senegal. Amin was born in Cairo, the son of an Egyptian father and a French mother (both medical doctors). He spent his childhood and youth in Port Said; there he attended a French High School, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalauréat. From 1947 to 1957 he studied in Paris, gaining a diploma in political science (1952) before graduating in statistics (1956) and economics (1957).
- Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. Perhaps his most famous work is "Empire" written with Antonio Negri. The sequel to "Empire", called "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire", was released in August, 2004, and details the idea of the multitude (which Hardt and Negri initially elaborated in "Empire") as the potential site of a global democratic movement.
- Alexander Parvus
Alexander Parvus (in Berezin,Russian Empire (now in Belarus)- December 12, 1924 in Berlin) was a Russian revolutionary (Menshevik) and a German Social Democrat.
- David Harvey
David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from Cambridge with a PhD in Geography. He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see "Transactions of the IBG", 1991,1992), …
- Antonio Negri
Antonio "Toni" Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist political philosopher. Negri is perhaps best-known for his co-authorship of "Empire" and his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded "Potere Operaio" (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of the "Autonomia Operaia".
- Ernesto Laclau
Ernesto Laclau (b.1935 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentinian political theorist often described as post-Marxist. He is a professor at the University of Essex where he holds a chair in Political Theory and was for many years director of the doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. He has lectured extensively in many universities in North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Australia and South Africa.
- Paul Sweezy
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist and a founding editor of the magazine "Monthly Review".
- Claude Lefort
Claude Lefort is a French philosopher and activist. He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited). By 1943 he was organising a faction of the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. Lefort was impressed by Cornelius Castoriadis when he first met him. From 1946 he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu-Montal Tendency, …
- Judith Butler
Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and the present chair of the Rhetoric Department. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, …
- Perry Anderson
Perry Anderson (born 1938) is a Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson.
- Ernst Bloch
Ernst Simon Bloch (July 8, 1885 - August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher and atheist theologian. He was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Bloch, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna.