Interesting interview with Gareth Stedman-Jones about his new book about Marx. I was struck in particular by this Q&A.

What should we keep from Marx’s thinking then?
The one thing we should preserve from what he said is really the sense of the overpowering nature of capitalism; of its dynamism; of the way it undercuts hierarchies; something which is restless and never ceasing to ‘move’. The idea of something so volatile and unstable has been with us – and is as much with us now as it was then – that’s really something which I would want to credit him with above all.

The second point I think is where he came from in terms of an intellectual formation. He was part of the Young Hegelian movement and that involves a critique of religion, which ends up with the idea of reversal: that it’s not God who created man but man created God. Marx transfers that thought into the way we identify with commodity production, commercialist society, capitalism. Where we think of ourselves as the creatures of a system rather than those who create the system – and that I think is also an important insight.