Marxism

Joseph Stalin

1878–1953

Joseph Stalin was the Bolshevik revolutionary who seized absolute power over the Soviet Union, forcing industrialization through collectivization, the Great Purge, and the Gulag at a cost of millions of lives

Eugene Genovese

Eugene Genovese was a Marxist historian of American slavery whose Gramscian reading of the Old South reshaped the field — before a late-life migration to conservatism, traditionalism, and Catholicism

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn was a historian of the radical left whose People's History of the United States recast the American past from the vantage of the oppressed, turning scholarship into an instrument of dissent

Domenico Losurdo

Domenico Losurdo was an Italian Marxist philosopher whose "counter-history" of liberalism exposed the tradition's entanglement with slavery, colonialism and exclusion

G.A. Cohen

G.A. Cohen was an analytical Marxist who defended Marx's theory of history with the rigor of analytic philosophy, then turned that same rigor on the moral foundations of equality

Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser was a French structural Marxist who recast Marx as science and argued that ideology works through institutions that constitute us as subjects

Deng Xiaoping

1904–1997

Deng Xiaoping was the architect of China's market reforms, pairing economic liberalization with unbending one-party rule in the century's largest political-economic experiment.

Hugo Chávez

1954–2013

Hugo Chávez was a Venezuelan president who fused Bolivarian nationalism, oil wealth, and mass mobilization into a self-styled "21st-century socialism" that reshaped Latin American politics.

Mikhail Gorbachev

1931–2022

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last Soviet leader, whose bid to reform socialism from within instead unraveled the state he set out to save.

Che Guevara

1928–1967

Che Guevara was the twentieth century’s iconic revolutionary — a theorist and practitioner of guerrilla warfare whose photogenic martyrdom made him the universal symbol of rebellion

Fidel Castro

1926–2016

Fidel Castro was the socialist revolutionary who overthrew the Batista dictatorship, aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, and ruled for nearly fifty years — liberator or dictator, depending on one's perspective

Ho Chi Minh

1890–1969

Ho Chi Minh was the communist revolutionary founder of modern Vietnam, whose synthesis of communism and nationalism defeated French colonialism and outlasted American intervention

Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member whose sweeping histories of capitalism and cool analysis of nationalism reshaped how the left understood the modern world

Mao Zedong

1893–1976

Mao Zedong was the communist revolutionary who founded the People's Republic of China, fusing Marxism-Leninism with peasant mobilization in a rule that produced both modern statehood and catastrophe on a historic scale

Pol Pot

1925–1998

Pol Pot was the communist leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge whose radical agrarian 'Year Zero' revolution killed roughly a quarter of the country's population in one of the 20th century's worst genocides

György Lukács

1885–1971

György Lukács was the Hungarian Marxist philosopher whose History and Class Consciousness supplied vanguardism with its most rigorous philosophical defense and, through the concept of reification, founded Western Marxism

Leon Trotsky

1879–1940

Leon Trotsky was a Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist who led the Bolshevik seizure of power, built the Red Army, and championed 'permanent revolution' against Stalinism.

Michael Harrington

1928–1989

Michael Harrington was a democratic socialist writer who made poverty visible to postwar America with The Other America — and spent the rest of his life arguing that the response had been far too timid

E.P. Thompson

1924–1993

E.P. Thompson was a democratic socialist historian who rescued the English working class from the 'enormous condescension of posterity' and forged a humanist New Left after breaking with Communism

Georges Sorel

1847–1922

Georges Sorel was the French theorist of revolutionary syndicalism who argued that the energizing myth of the general strike — not parliamentary gradualism — was what the labor movement needed

Rosa Luxemburg

1871–1919

Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary Marxist — the most brilliant theorist of her generation, and the one most willing to tell the left hard truths about power, democracy, and revolutionary violence

Vladimir Lenin

1870–1924

Vladimir Lenin was the Bolshevik revolutionary who transformed Marxism from a philosophy of history into an operational manual for seizing state power — and then used it

Antonio Gramsci

1891–1937

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian revolutionary Marxist whose concept of cultural hegemony transformed how the left — and, unexpectedly, the right — understands the manufacture of consent in modern societies

Karl Marx

1818–1883

Karl Marx was the German philosopher and economist whose critique of capitalism reshaped the political imagination of the modern world

Friedrich Engels

1820–1895

Friedrich Engels was a revolutionary communist and Marx's co-author, whose financial support, editing, and independent works made Marxism possible as a systematic political philosophy

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-born theorist of the British New Left who founded cultural studies and reimagined how race, class, and identity organize political power and consent

Herbert Marcuse

1898–1979

Herbert Marcuse was a Frankfurt School philosopher who became the New Left's intellectual guide, arguing that affluent consumer capitalism smothers dissent and forecloses radical alternatives.

Mark Fisher

1968–2017

Mark Fisher was a British writer whose diagnosis of "capitalist realism" named the paralysing sense that no alternative to capitalism could even be imagined.

Karl Kautsky

1854–1938

The Pope of Marxism, who wrote the SPD's program, defended orthodoxy against Bernstein's revisionism, and was then denounced by Lenin as a renegade.

Patrice Lumumba

1925–1961

Patrice Lumumba was the Congolese nationalist and Pan-Africanist whose murder as the Congo's first elected prime minister, with Western complicity, made him African independence's defining martyr

William Morris

1834–1896

William Morris was the Victorian designer and poet who became a revolutionary socialist, arguing that art is the expression of pleasure in labor and imagining, in News from Nowhere, an England where work is craft again

Thomas Sankara

1949–1987

Thomas Sankara was the revolutionary socialist leader of Burkina Faso whose four-year experiment in anti-imperialism, women's rights, and austere self-reliance earned him the title "Africa's Che Guevara"

Albert Einstein

1879–1955

Albert Einstein was a pacifist and socialist who fled Nazi Germany, championed civil rights, and after Hiroshima became an advocate for world government and international control of nuclear weapons

Salvador Allende

1908–1973

Salvador Allende was a Chilean physician and Marxist who sought to build socialism through the ballot box, and whose violent overthrow became a defining parable of democracy and revolution.

Kwame Nkrumah

1909–1972

Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana's founding leader and pan-Africanism's foremost architect, who fused anti-colonial nationalism with African socialism and continental unity.