We Used to Read Things in This Country

Marxist bros have long been interested in the financial press. Karl Marx first turned to The Economist to help understand the failure of the revolutions of 1848, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he directed readers to that “organ” of the “aristocracy of finance” to understand what liberalism was up to. The mid-century American cartoonist Don Wright featured in one sketch a supposed Moscow newsstand selling three papers: Pravda, Izvestia, and the Wall Street Journal.