The course consists of a systematic and comprehensive study of the political thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from 1843 to the death of the two authors in 1883 and1895. We will examine their relation to German idealism, the Young Hegelians, French socialism, British political economy, and Russian anarchism and how they came to formulate their own theoretical and political positions on state theory, class analysis, the capitalist mode of production and its crises, colonialism, democracy and revolutionary strategy, and the communist project. The texts will be chosen with contemporary relevance in mind.