Nominalized sentences were compared by means of cloze tests to their grammatical transformations using active verbs. A mean of 9.63 words per S were filled in correctly for the nominalized sentences and 10.80 for their transformations using active verbs ( p < .01). These results support previous findings that the active-verb version is more comprehensible.

‘After Marx’ or ‘According to Marx’. Thus translates the intentionally ambiguous title of ‘Nach Marx’, an international collection of twenty diverse essays in German on Marx and social philosophy today. ‘Nach Marx’ contains over five hundred pages of contributions from twelve prominent German philosophers and sociologists (Hauke Brunkhorst, Alex Demirović, Rainer Forst, Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, Daniel Loick, Andrea Maihofer, Oliver Marchart, Christoph Menke, Hartmut Rosa, Michael Quante, Titus Stahl), six American political philosophers, German idealists, and historians (Wendy Brown, Daniel Brudney, Raymond Geuss, Frederick Neuhouser, Terry Pinkard, Moishe Postone), along with a British Hegelian philosopher (Andrew Chitty) and a French political thinker (Étienne Balibar). Although the book is divided into six themed parts (I. Freedom and Community, II. Normativity and Critique, III. Truth and Ideology, IV. Right and Subjectivity, V. Critique of Capitalism and Class Struggle, VI. Political Praxis), the essays are mostly individual excurses in Marx scholarship.

The ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ is a delicious turn of phrase, one that Marx even compares to Hegel’s infamous ‘negation of the negation’. But what does it mean, and is it still relevant today? Before I analyse the content of Marx’s expression, I briefly consider contemporary legal understandings of expropriation, as well as some examples of it. In the remainder of the essay, I spell out different kinds of expropriation in Marx and focus on an ambiguity at the core of the notion of ‘expropriating the expropriators’, namely, whether it describes an immanent and objective tendency within the development of the capitalist mode of production or else actively prescribes a form of revolutionary political praxis for the working class. My answer is that it does both, though not without tension. Finally, I develop some implications of these reflections by showing how the concept of expropriation can be put to use today, in struggles around housing, climate and work.

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