Book excerpt: Written by an international team of leading Marx scholars, this is the definitive reference guide to Marx's life and work for anyone studying, researching or working on his ideas today. The defining feature of this companion is its attention to new directions in Marxism. Gender and the growing prominence of Marxist-feminism are treated as equally important within the Marxist conceptual canon as traditional categories of critique such as class, capital, and mode of production. Similarly, it showcases the importance of Marxism to environmentalist politics and examines non-European Marxisms in detail, demonstrating the centrality of Marxist thought to political movements beyond the global North.