Karl Marx is my favorite anarchist, and one of the great philosophers of science in all of history. Throughout my life I have been forced to remind many people that growing up in a country that is openly hostile to Marx’s ideas, however pluralist and free it insists that it is (and it insists, despite its behavior domestically and abroad!) it’s difficult to get a handle on what he actually believed, because of everything around you. The easiest way to understand the ideas of a person who spent an entire lifetime digesting the entirety (not some, not a portion of, but all) of political economy that had been written up to that time - is by reading a little bit of what he wrote. If a person has time to read the memoir of some FOX or CNN pundit, then one has time to read merely the first chapter of Capital Vol. 1. The best (most generally correct, and very accessible) companion to Marx’s Capital is Michael Heinrich’s interpretation An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital .
Karl Marx, On Prussian Censorship (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/02/10.htm)
You admire the delightful variety, the inexhaustible riches of nature. You do not demand that the rose should smell like the violet, but must the greatest riches of all, the spirit, exist in only one variety? I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. Grey, all grey, is the sole, the rightful colour of freedom. Every drop of dew on which the sun shines glistens with an inexhaustible play of colours, but the spiritual sun, however many the persons and whatever the objects in which it is refracted, must produce only the official colour! The most essential form of the spirit is cheerfulness, light, but you make shadow the sole manifestation of the spirit; it must be clothed only in black, yet among flowers there are no black ones. The essence of the spirit is always truth itself but what do you make its essence? Modesty. Only the mean wretch is modest, says Goethe, and you want to turn the spirit into such a mean wretch? Or if modesty is to be the modesty of genius of which Schiller speaks, then first of all turn all your citizens and above all your censors into geniuses. But then the modesty of genius does not consist in what educated speech consists in, the absence of accent and dialect, but rather in speaking with the accent of the matter and in the dialect of its essence. It consists in forgetting modesty and immodesty and getting to the heart of the matter. The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature.