- 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?
- Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) is the current President of Cuba. He led the revolution overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and shortly after was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Cuba. Castro became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965, and led the transformation of Cuba into a one-party socialist republic. In 1976 he became president of the Council of State as well as of the Council of Ministers.
- 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.
- 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.
- Robert Mugabe
Robert Gabriel Mugabe KCB (born on February 21, 1924) is the President of Zimbabwe. He has been the head of government in Zimbabwe since 1980, first as Prime Minister and later as first executive President. He rose to prominence in the 1970s when he led the Zimbabwe African National Union in guerrilla warfare against the white-dominated government of Rhodesia until the government accepted universal suffrage and black-majority rule.
- Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong (also "Mao Tse-tung" in Wade-Giles;) was a Chinese Marxist military and political leader and philosopher, who led the Communist Party of China (CPC) to victory against the Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. Mao is also recognized as a poet and calligrapher. Regarded as one of the most important figures in modern world history, …
- 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).
- 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.
- Salvador Allende
Salvador Isabelino Allende Gossens (July 26, 1908 – September 11, 1973) was President of Chile from November 1970 until his death, reportedly by suicide, during the coup d'état of September 11, 1973. Allende's career in Chilean government spanned nearly forty years. As a Socialist Party and Marxist politician, he became a senator, deputy, cabinet minister and after failing in the 1952, 1958, …
- 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, …
- Daniel Ortega
José Daniel Ortega Saavedra is the current President of Nicaragua. For much of his life, he has been an important leader in the Sandinista National Liberation Front ("Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional" or "FSLN"). After a popular rebellion resulted in the overthrow and exile of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, Ortega became a member of the ruling multipartisan junta and was later elected president, serving from 1985 to 1990.
- Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (born August 24, 1922) is an American historian, political scientist, social critic, activist and playwright, best known as author of the bestseller, "A People's History of the United States". Zinn's philosophy incorporates ideas from Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and social democracy. Since the 1960s, he has been active in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States.
- Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6 1856 - September 23 1939), was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who co-founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind, especially involving the mechanism of repression; his redefinition of sexual desire as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic techniques, …
- Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (July 19,1898 - July 29,1979) was a German-born American philosopher, sociologist and a member of the Frankfurt School.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced:), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy.
- Alan Woods
Alan Woods (born in Swansea, South Wales in 1944) is a Trotskyist politician and writer. He is the current chairman of the International Marxist Tendency and editor of "Socialist Appeal". He was born into a working-class family with a strong Communist tradition. At the age of 16 he joined the Young Socialists and became a Marxist joining the Militant Tendency within the Labour Party.
- 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.
- 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".
- Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Earnest Hobsbawm CH (born June 9, 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a British Marxist historian and author. Hobsbawm was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. He is president of Birkbeck, University of London. One of Hobsbawm's interests is the development of traditions. His work is a study of their construction in the context of the nation state.
- Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton (born 22 February, 1943 in Salford, Lancashire (now Greater Manchester), England) is a British literary critic.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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.
- Erich Fromm
Erich Pinchas Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned Jewish-German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher.
- William Morris
William Morris was an English artist, writer, socialist and activist. He was one of the principal founders of the British arts and crafts movement, best known as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics, a writer of poetry and fiction and a pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain. His family was wealthy, and he went to school at Marlborough College, but left in 1851 after a student rebellion there.
- 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.
- Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was a French author from Martinique, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.
- 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".
- Alex Callinicos
Alexander Theodore Callinicos (born 24 July 1950 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)) is a Marxist intellectual and a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers' Party. He received his BA and DPhil from the University of Oxford, and was Professor of Politics at the University of York before being appointed Professor of European Studies at King's College London in 2005.
- Lee Harvey Oswald
Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 - November 24, 1963) was, according to two United States government investigations, the assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. A former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union and later returned, Oswald was arrested later that day on suspicion of killing the president and Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald denied any responsibility for the murders.
- Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht (August 13, 1871 - January 15, 1919) was a German socialist and a co-founder of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany.
- John Bellamy Foster
John Bellamy Foster is an American journalist, sociologist, essayist and eco-socialist, as well as editor of the "Monthly Review", a prominent Marxist magazine. Foster is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as an environmental sociologist and eco-socialist.
- Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti (born 1933) is an American political scientist, historian, and media critic.
- John Reed
John "Jack" Silas Reed (October 22, 1887 - October 19, 1920) was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist, famous for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, "Ten Days that Shook the World". He was the husband of the writer and feminist Louise Bryant. Reed and Bryant were the subjects of the film "Reds" (1981), directed by Warren Beatty.
- 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.
- 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.
- Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (b. July 11 1930) is an American professor and prominent literary and cultural critic. Bloom defended 19th-century Romantic poets at a time when their reputations stood at a low ebb, has constructed controversial theories of poetic influence, and advocates an aesthetic approach to literature against Feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, Post-modernist, and other methods of academic literary criticism.
- Bhagat Singh
Bhagat Singh (Urdu-Shahmukhi:) (September 28, 1907-March 23, 1931) was an Indian freedom fighter, considered to be one of the most famous revolutionaries of the Indian independence movement. For this reason, he is often referred to as Shaheed Bhagat Singh (the word "shaheed" means "martyr"). He is also believed by many to be one of the earliest Marxists in India.
- Joel Kovel
Joel Kovel (born 27 August 1936) is an American politician, academic, writer and eco-socialist. A practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst until the mid-1980s, he has lectured in psychiatry, anthropology, political science and communication studies. He has published many books on his work in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and political activism. He is a member of the Green Party of the US (GPUS).