The Ghost of Karl Marx

A brief and fascinating history of capitalism, Marxism, and class struggle for schoolkids.

The famous phrase “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism” from The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Brussels in 1848, inspired Sorbonne professor Ronan de Calan to write a children’s book where Marx himself appears as a ghost explaining his theory of economics and the cruelty of the market economy to schoolkids. The questions he poses to his young readers are similar to those of the recent Debt: The First 5,000 years by David Graeber: why do things have a price and what is the nature of money? But, unlike Graeber, de Calan’s protagonist believes that the evil Capital and Private Property can eventually be defeated—if the workers of the world unite, as the manifest encourages them to do.