Presents the first major study of Marx and Engels in two decades and the only study since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the recognized crisis of global capitalism.

According to Nimtz, no two people contributed more to the struggle for democracy in the nineteenth century than Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Presenting the first major study of the two thinkers in the past twenty years and the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book challenges many widely held views about their democratic credentials and their attitudes and policies on the peasantry, the importance of national self-determination, the struggle for women's equality, their so-called Eurocentric bias, political and party organizing, and the possibility for socialist revolution in an overwhelmingly peasant and underdeveloped country like late-nineteenth-century Russia.