The Cambridge Companion to MarxMarx was a highly original and polymathic thinker, unhampered by disciplinary boundaries, whose intellectual influence has been enormous. Yet in the wake of the collapse of Marxism Leninism in Eastern Europe the question arises as to how important his work really is for us now. An important dimension of this volume is to place Marx's writings in their historical context and to separate what he actually said from what others (in particular, Engels)