Editorial.

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A ghost haunts Brazil, the ghost of Marx. Engulfed by a conservative wave, the country witnesses the growth of ultra-liberal and fascist forces with its violent anti-communist hysteria. Born almost two hundred years ago (in 1818), Marx, in a spectral way, continues to make capital lose its sleep and torment the souls of reactionaries here and around the globe. In addition to delusional fanaticisms, the constant threat of Marx's thought is due to the constancy of capitalism itself. The continuity of bourgeois society carries with it the permanence of his work, since bourgeois society itself was precisely the object of a life he dedicated to scientific investigation.

Decrepit but resilient, imperialist capitalism keeps going on in its mercantilizing rage, turning venal everything on Earth, including bodies, tastes, water, and of course the earth itself. Blindly pursuing the valorization of value and safeguarding the dogma of private property, the irrationality of capital hinders human cooperation and stops it from assuming a humanistic rationality, developing its creative potentiality in face of nature and putting its products at humanity itself's service. The more science is apt to prolong our lives, the more science itself, tamed by capital, kills us through ultra-processed carcinogenic foods and long-range deadly bullets. Bourgeois sociability also causes an epidemic of anguish and depression, leading to the paroxysm of "mass solitude" Marx pointed out. So if capital continues to feed on the overwork of others, Marx's work will continue to inspire those who know that only a theory focused on practical transformation and a theoretically based practice--that is, a praxis--can enable us to overcome the exploitation of man by man.

Seeking to contribute to the fully fleshed out materialization of Marx, so to speak, the journal Em Pauta presents in this issue the dossier 200 years of Karl Marx: his theoretical and political legacy. Containing 12 select articles, the dossier covers some of the countless social themes that can be approached from Marxian theory, offering a varied but not eclectic reading menu.

The dossier opens with Marx's political theory: an organic totality, by Pablo Polese, who, drawing heavily on Istvan Meszaros, discusses central categories of Marxist political thinking, asserting the unbreakable articulation between them within a disruptive perspective that seeks to go beyond capital. Following, the article Democracy and dictatorship in the political theory of Marx and Engels, by Theofilo Rodrigues, supports the hypothesis that in the work of the founders of historical materialism there is a constant tension between the concepts of "democracy" and "dictatorship", which allowed (and allows) disparate interpretations on the subject by its interpreters. The third article in the dossier, Maria Ciavatta's Marx: 200 Years--Theory, Politics, and Education, seeks to rescue Marx's educational conception from a polytechnic perspective, based on overcoming the division between manual and intellectual work. Then Graca Druck, in The metamorphosis of social classes in contemporary capitalism: reflections, discusses the Marxist theory of classes in the context of flexible accumulation, neoliberalism, and financialization. Also taking into account the morphology of the working class in times of the hegemony of finance, Raquel Varela and Roberto della Santa Barros, in Marx in 20th-century Europe, address the current scenario of class struggle in Europe.

In the article titled Entrepreneurship in light of the Marxist tradition, Maria Augusta Tavares focuses on what may be one of the main neoliberal ideologies in modern times, which not only enslaves workers but also makes them the architect...

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