Michael R. Krätke

Michael R. Krätke (born 1950) has studied economics, sociology and political science at the Free University Berlin, worked as Assistant professor of sociology at the Free University Berlin and at the University of Bielefeld, in 1981 he became Associate professor of political economy at the University of Amsterdam, was professor for sociology, chair of political economy and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Lancaster University.

Since 1978, he has been an editor of the German scholarly journal spw – Zeitschrift für sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft [de].

Krätke has been working on the history of Marxism since the 1990s[1] Among other things, he has developed a periodization of Marxist intellectual history and identified four stages: (1) from 1842 until Marx' death in 1883, (2) "classical marxism" from 1883 until World War I, (3) the third stage from the Russian Revolution into the 1960s, (4) the last stage of a social-scientific Marxism following the Marx-Renaissance of the 1960s.

Since the early 1990s, he has also largely contributed to the ongoing research on the works of Marx and Engels, including their unpublished manuscripts, and became an editor of the scholarly review Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung.

He was a member of the Scientific Council of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and a member of the scientific advisory council to the German chapter of ATTAC.