Marx’s texts belong in the tradition because they are in asking the questions about a just social and political organization, the question of is there a pattern to history that is repeating. Marx reaches back to the Romans, is in direct conversation with Hegel, and reaches back to the classical experience of tragedies.
I want to re read, investigate, and turn them over again.
We have the form of a pamphlet. We have the question of effective writing.
With Marx we encounter the issue of reception. There have been widely different responses to Marxism and communism on different continents, and in different eras.
Political philosophy for a century and a half had to at a minimum take into account various Marxist interpretations of inequality and class struggle.
We also get to witness where the history of political thought went after Marxism or communism.
Gramsci, for example, helps us see that culture is not epiphenomena of relations of production.
The big ideas that Marx helps us understand include materialism in opposition to idealism; if there is a structure to history, how do we know when the revolution is? How does our economic life affect our social relationships?
A structuralist would be a thinker who agrees that history follows some sort of structure but may conceive of a different basis than economic relations.
And moving from Marxism to structuralism, helps us appreciate post structuralists who are no longer preoccupied with imposing a predictable structure onto historical movement.
