Andy Merrifield’s Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City presents Marxist urban theory as a living tradition capable of interpreting the capitalist metropolis. The book argues that Marxism and urbanism have had a difficult but productive relationship: Marx and Engels did not fully theorise “the urban,” yet their concepts of commodity fetishism, alienation, class struggle, capital accumulation, and dialectical contradiction remain essential for understanding modern city life. Merrifield traces a genealogy of urban Marxist thinkers, including Marx, Engels, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Marshall Berman, showing how each reveals a different aspect of the city as both oppressive and emancipatory. His core proposition is the metropolitan dialectic: the capitalist city is a site of poverty, exploitation, spectacle, displacement, and social domination, but also of encounter, collective organisation, pleasure, creativity, and revolutionary possibility. The case study is therefore not one single city but the Marxist city itself, moving through Manchester, Paris, New York, and other urban imaginaries. Merrifield concludes that Marxism remains indispensable because it discloses how urban life is structured by capital while preserving hope that the city’s contradictions may still generate new forms of solidarity, struggle, and liberation.