Socialism is back, and with it comes a renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. After the 2008 financial crash, international book sales of Capital exploded for the first time in decades. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. This book has been written to help those returning to Marx get answers to their pressing questions about the nature of wealth, ecological crisis, gender inequality, colonialism, migration, and the possibility of socialism. This book also offers ... More

Socialism is back, and with it comes a renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. After the 2008 financial crash, international book sales of Capital exploded for the first time in decades. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. This book has been written to help those returning to Marx get answers to their pressing questions about the nature of wealth, ecological crisis, gender inequality, colonialism, migration, and the possibility of socialism. This book also offers readers a new perspective on several major ideas in Marx’s work. It argues that Marx, contrary to conventional wisdom, did not think history was deterministic or that reality could be reduced to classical materialism. Marx was not an anthropocentric humanist, nor did he have a labor theory of value. The unique contribution of this book is that it begins with Marx’s earliest and most neglected book on ancient naturalism in order to show its lasting methodological effect on his “process materialism,” defined by the primacy of motion. This “kinetic Marxism” offers a new way to reread Capital that bears directly on a number of contemporary issues. This also makes Marx in Motion the first book to offer a new materialist reading of Marx. The result is a fresh new view on the important theories of primitive accumulation, metabolism, value, fetishism, dialectics, and the possibility of a kinetic communism for the twenty-first century.