Paris Commune 150 - Paperback

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany and studied in Bonn and Berlin. Influenced by Hegel, he later reacted against idealist philosophy and began to develop his own theory of historical materialism. He related the state of society to its economic foundations and mode of production, and recommended armed revolution on the part of the proletariat. Together with Engels, who he met in Paris, he wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. He lived in England as a refugee until his death in 1888, after participating in an unsuccessful revolution in Germany. Ernst Mandel was a member of the Belgian TUV from 1954 to 1963 and was chosen for the annual Alfred Marshall Lectures by Cambridge University in 1978. He died in 1995 and the Guardian described him as 'one of the most creative and independent-minded revolutionary Marxist thinkers of the post-war world.'

V.I. Lenin was a leading member of the Bolshevik party in Russia from 1912 until his death in 1924, and is widely considered to have founded a distinct tradition in the struggle for revolutionary socialism, built from below. He is the author of celebrated works of theory such as State and Revolution, as well as widely misunderstood polemics like What is to be Done? Todd Chretien is a frequent contributor to Socialist Worker and the ISR.

Bertolt Brecht wa sborn in 1898 and is acknowledged as one of the great German dramatists, poet, playwright, and theatre director whose plays, work with the Berliner Ensemble and writing have had a considerable influence on the theatre. His landmark plays include The Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.