Capitalism’s greatest critic is re-examined

What did Karl Marx think about Ireland? There is no simple answer. When a Fenian bomb killed 12 people in London in 1867, he condemned it as “a great folly”, and said that secret terrorist groups were “doomed to failure”.

Less than a year later, however, he was urging English workers to support Fenianism, and told his friend Friedrich Engels: “I once believed the separation of Ireland from England to be impossible. I ...