About the Author

KARL MARX was born at Trier in 1818. In Paris in 1844 Marx met Friedrich Engels, with whom he prepared the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) as a statement of the Communist League's policy. In 1849 he arrived in England as a refugee and lived in London until his death in 1883. Besides the two posthumous volumes of Capital compiled by Engels, Karl Marx's other writings include The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy and Theories of Surplus-value. Jim Ledbetter is a a senior editor at TIME Europe; he covered the California recall race for Channel 4 television in Britain. He is the author, most recently, of Starving to Death on $200 Million (Public Affairs, 2003). Francis Wheen is an author and journalist who was named Columnist of the Year for his contributions to the Guardian. He is the author of several books, including a highly acclaimed biography of Karl Marx which has been translated into twenty languages.