Karl Marx: a complete reading list

Two centuries after Marx’s birth, his work remains the bedrock for any true understanding of our political and economic condition. Here we present our complete reading on Marx.

The best books on Marx? See what our authors think, here.

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Originally published in 1971, this is a key work by one of the most important Latin American Marxists of the twentieth century. This edition, which marks the first appearance of one of Silva’s works in English, features an introduction by Alberto Toscano.

David Harvey tackles Marx's notebooks that have spawned wide-ranging and raging controversies.

Classic study of Marx by Japan’s leading critical theorist.

An epic new biography of Karl Marx for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman employs a commanding knowledge of the nineteenth century to create a definitive portrait of Marx and his vast contribution to the way the world understands itself. He shines a light on Marx’s influences, explains his political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of his thought. Liedman shows how Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this day.

For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume—finally bringing together his guides to volumes I, II and much of III—presents this depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original, and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.

Read an excerpt here.

A major rereading of Marx’s critique of political economy.

The great French Marxist philosopher weighs up the contributions of the three major critics of modernity.

All of Marx’s essential political writing in one volume.

A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time in this beautiful design.

Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in this beautifully designed complete volume.

In these times The Communist Manifesto emerges as a work of great prescience and power despite being written over a century and a half ago. This edition includes an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm in which he highlights Marx and Engels’s enduring insights into the capitalist system: its devastating impact on all aspects of human existence; its susceptibility to enormous convulsions and crises; and its fundamental weakness.

A new beautiful edition of the Communist Manifesto, combined with Lenin’s key revolutionary tract.

Written by one of political theory’s leading thinkers, The Philosophy of Marx examines all the key areas of Marx’s writings in their wider historical and theoretical context—including the concepts of class struggle, ideology, humanism, progress, determinism, commodity fetishism, and the state. Etienne Balibar opens a gateway into the thought of one of history’s great minds.

A remarkable history of the formation of Marxist thought.

In these editions of Marx’s Political Writings (with Introductions by Tariq Ali) we are able to see the depth and range of his mature work from 1848 through to the end of his life, from The Communist Manifesto to The Class Struggles in France and The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Click on the links above to add to your cart.

Re-published to coincide with Marx's bicentenary, these books are essential reading on Marx. Includes: On Karl Marx by Ernst Bloch, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels by Erica Brenner, From Marxism to Post-Marxism? by Göran Therborn, and The Theory of Need in Marx by Agnes Heller. Click on the links above to add to your cart.

This set of Radical Thinkers focuses on economics and includes The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx: 1843 to Capital by Ernest Mandel, Marx on Money by Suzanne de Brunhoff,  and Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism edited by Diane Elson. Click on the links above to add to your cart.

A masterful survey of the history of Marxist philosophy of science.

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state.

A collection of incisive critiques of contemporary Marxism, of post-colonial development and of the Eurocentric assessment of imperialism.

Groundbreaking examination of the birth, development and impact of Feminist consciousness.

Sensitive but uncompromising socialist-feminist critique of the nuclear family.

In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art from the 1930s to the 1950s are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

The impact of the American Civil War on Karl Marx, and Karl Marx on America.

A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975.

Essays include critiques of Lukács by Gareth Stedman Jones and Michael Löwy; a survey of the Frankfurt School by Göran Therborn; an assessment of the legacy of Gramsci, by John Merrington; exposition and criticism of the work of Sartre by André Gorz and Ronald Aronson; major assessments of Althusser by Norman Geras and André Glucksmann and a wide-ranging interview with the Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti that provides an overview of Western Marxism.

“His argument ... takes on an exceptional fluency and subtlety, touching many of the key points of socialist morality, socialist history and the socialist future. Its core is a very elegant restatement of the undogmatic essence of Marx.”

– New Statesman

Shows the relevance of Marx to twenty-first century global capitalism.

Marx’s Revenge opens with a consideration of the ideas of Adam Smith and Hegel. It proceeds to look at the nuances in the work of Marx himself, and concludes with a survey of more recent economists who studied capitalism and attempted to unravel its secrets, including Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.

A critical evaluation of the course and legacy of the Analytical Marxist project.

Founder of whiteness studies surveys the race/class relationship.

Analysis of the role of ideology in political movements.

The origins of "Western Marxism".

Essential essays on key Marxist writers from a leading political thinker.

This first two volumes in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1 and Economic Writings 2 contains some of Luxemburg’s most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, and pre-capitalist economic formations. Click on the links above to add to your cart.

Value and Naturalism in Marx,the work of one of the most outstanding younger economists in Italy, reveals the classic economic theory of historical materialism in a quite new light.

Perceptive and thoughtful essays on the future of socialism and Marxism.

A classic work by the founding father of existentialism, describing his philosophy and its relationship to Marxism.

In Marxism and Philosophy Korsch argues for a reexamination of the relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois philosophy, and insists on the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic and a commitment to revolutionary praxis.

With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism.

A lively and lucid introduction to the work of Theodor Adorno.

The Melancholy Science is Gillian Rose’s investigation into Theodor Adorno’s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernable among the many fragments of Adorno’s oeuvre, and argues that his influence has been to turn Marxism into a search for style.

Brimming over with archival finds and buoyed by the recollections of witnesses and participants in the radical movements of decades past, Marxism in the United States includes fascinating accounts of the immigrant socialism of the nineteenth century, the formation of the CPUSA in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of American communism and of the hugely influential Popular Front in the 1920s and ’30s, the crisis and split of the ’50s, and the revival of Marxism in the ’60s and ’70s.

Mapping out a future for Marxist theory.

This work ranges across five areas of debate that have remained largely unconnected until now: epistemology, with special reference to philosophy of science; Marxist theory; philosophy of history; modern historiography; and substantive Marxist interpretations of the past.

Enlightenment advances towards a science of politics, and Marx's relationship to Hegel.

Marx’s approach to the growth of “peripheral countries” has triggered contentious debate and produced a voluminous literature over the years. Presenting the drafts of Marx’s discussion on rural Russia in the late 1800s, this book offers readers a crucial primary text for deciphering Marx’s attitudes towards issues echoed in contemporary debates on development.

Marx's Literary Style

by Ludovico Silva

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expressio...

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...

Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility

by Kojin Karatani

Introduction by Gavin Walker

Edited by Gavin Walker

Translated by Gavin Walker

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political...

A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

Translated by Jeff Skinner

Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite...

A Companion To Marx's Capital

by David Harvey

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectur...

The Limits to Capital

by David Harvey

Now a classic of Marxian economics, The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this edition, Harvey updates his cla...

Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by David Fernbach

Henri Lefebvre saw Marx as an ‘unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point’, and always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. Metaphilosophy also suggested the sign...

The Political Writings

by Karl Marx

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. For the first time ever, this book brings together all of his essential political...

Reading Capital

by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière

Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

The Communist Manifesto

by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm

In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word “capitalism” itself fell out ...

The Communist Manifesto / The April Theses

by Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin and Karl Marx

Introduction by Tariq Ali

It was the 1917 Russian Revolution that transformed the scale of the Communist Manifesto, making it the key text for socialists everywhere. On the centenary of this upheaval, this volume pairs Marx...

The Philosophy of Marx

by Étienne Balibar

Translated by Gregory Elliott and Chris Turner

Written by one of political theory’s leading thinkers, The Philosophy of Marx examines all the key areas of Marx’s writings in their wider historical and theoretical context—including the concepts ...

Philosophy and Revolution

by Stathis Kouvelakis

Preface by Fredric Jameson

Translated by G. M. Goshgarian

In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He ...

The Revolutions of 1848

by Karl Marx

Foreword by Tariq Ali

Edited by David Fernbach

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism; he was above all else a revolutionary. In Paris in 1844 he made the connection between radical philosophy and the proletariat that would gui...

Surveys from Exile

by Karl Marx

Foreword by Tariq Ali

Introduction by David Fernbach

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. In these brand-new editions of Marx’s Political Writings we are able to see the d...

The First International and After

by Karl Marx

Preface by David Harvey

Foreword by Tariq Ali

Edited by David Fernbach

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. In these brand-new editions of Marx’s Political Writings we are able to see the d...

On Karl Marx

by Ernst Bloch

This study of Marx serves not only as an excellent introduction to that most influential of "worldly philosophers" but is also a significant resume of the central issues of Bloch's own profound and...

Really Existing Nationalisms

by Erica Benner

Really Existing Nationalisms challenges the conventional view that Marx and Engels lacked the theoretical resources needed to understand nationalism. It argues that the two thinkers had a much bett...

From Marxism to Post-Marxism?

by Göran Therborn

A comprehensive history of the development of Marxist theory and the parameters of 21st-century politicsIn this pithy and panoramic work - both stimulating for the specialist and the accessible to ...

The Theory of Need in Marx

by Agnes Heller

The basic discoveries underlying Marx's critique of political economy – labour power, surplus value, use value – are all in some way built upon the concept of need. From Marx's varying and passing ...

The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx

by Ernest Mandel

In this republication of the 1971 original, Ernest Mandel traces the development of Marx's economic ideas from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to the completion of the Grundrisse. In a ser...

Marx on Money

by Suzanne de Brunhoff

The republication of Suzanne de Brunhoff’s classic investigation into Karl Marx’s conception of “the money commodity” shines light on commodities and their fetishism. The investigation of money a...

Value

Edited by Diane Elson

This influential collection of essays focuses on the elusive concept of “value,” and aims to answer the question “Why is Marx’s theory of value so important?” Aboo Aumeeruddy and Ramon Tortajada ...

Marxism and the Philosophy of Science

by Helena Sheehan

Skillfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan retraces the development of Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that have characteriz...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, im...

Communities of Resistance

by Ambalavaner Sivanandan

Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain’s most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, rac...

Woman's Consciousness, Man's World

by Sheila Rowbotham

A groundbreaking contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness from various vantage points - ...

The Anti-Social Family

by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh

Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. T...

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...

An Unfinished Revolution

by Robin Blackburn

Contributions by Raya Dunaevskaya, Friedrich Engels, Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of “free labor” and the urgent ...

For Marx

by Louis Althusser

Translated by Ben Brewster

This is the work in which Louis Althusser formulated some of his most influential ideas. For Marx, first published in France in 1968, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of “...

Considerations on Western Marxism

by Perry Anderson

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Ru...

Western Marxism

Edited by New Left Review

This collection is designed to answer the demands of students and socialists, teachers and interested readers, for a comprehensive critique of the major schools of European Marxism since the Octobe...

Arguments Within English Marxism

by Perry Anderson

The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working...

Marx for Our Times

by Daniel Bensaïd

Translated by Gregory Elliott

The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history’s refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 200...

Marx's Revenge

by Meghnad Desai

In this provocative and enthusiastically revisionist book, the distinguished economist Meghnad Desai argues that capitalism’s recent efflorescence is something Karl Marx anticipated and indeed woul...

Analytical Marxism

by Marcus Roberts

In the 1980s, leading philosophers at Oxford, Chicago and UCLA undertook a controversial reassessment of Marxism using the techniques of analytical philosophy. The aim of these so-called “Non-Bulls...

Class, Race, and Marxism

by David R. Roediger

Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions...

Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory

by Ernesto Laclau

Ernesto Laclau is best known for co-authoring Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, with Chantal Mouffe. Politically active in the social and student movements of the 1960s, and a member of PSIN (Social...

The Philosophy of Praxis

by Andrew Feenberg

The early Marx called for the “realization of philosophy” through revolution. Revolution thus becomes a critical philosophical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis philosophie...

Literature of Revolution

by Norman Geras

This influential collection explores the pivotal texts and topics in the Marxist tradition. Ranging over questions of social theory, political theory, moral philosophy and literary criticism, it l...

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

by Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Peter Hudis

Translated by David Fernbach, Joseph Fracchia and George Shriver

This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg’s most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, ...

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II

by Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Paul Le Blanc and Peter Hudis

Translated by Nicholas Gray and George Shriver

The second volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 2, contains a new English translation of Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic The...

Value and Naturalism in Marx

by Marco Lippi

When Value and Naturalism in Marx was first published in English in 1979, recent controversies in socialist economic theory had been concentrated on the tenability or untenability of Marx's labour ...

Interrogating Inequality

by Erik Olin Wright

This lively new collection from one of America’s leading sociologists covers a wide range of theoretical problems of interest to radical social scientists and political activists.The book opens wit...

Between Existentialism and Marxism

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Translated by John Matthews

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the incep...

Marxism and Philosophy

by Karl Korsch

Translated by Fred Halliday

In Marxism and Philosophy Korsch argues for a reexamination of the relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois philosophy, and insists on the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic and a commit...

On Materialism

by Sebastiano Timpanaro

Translated by Lawrence Garner

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philo...

Late Marxism

by Fredric Jameson

In the name of an assault on “totalization” and “identity,” a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism’s dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernis...

The Melancholy Science

by Gillian Rose

The Melancholy Science is Gillian Rose’s investigation into Theodor Adorno’s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernable among the many fragments of Adorno’s oeuvre, and argues that his...

Marxism in the United States

by Paul Buhle

A crown jewel of New Left historiography, this overview of U.S. Marxism was hailed on its first publication for its nuanced storytelling, balance and incredible sweep.Brimming over with archival fi...

Reconstructing Marxism

by Andrew Levine, Elliott Sober and Erik Olin Wright

Reconstructing Marxism explores fundamental questions about the structure of Marxist theory and its prospects for the future. The authors maintain that the disintegration of the old theoretical uni...

Marxism and the Methodologies of History

by Gregor McLennan

This work ranges across five areas of debate that have remained largely unconnected until now: epistemology, with special reference to philosophy of science; Marxist theory; philosophy of history; ...

Politics and History

by Louis Althusser

Translated by Ben Brewster

In the first two essays of this book, Louis Althusser analyses the work of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment – Montesquieu and Rousseau. He shows that although they made considerabl...

Late Marx and the Russian Road

Edited by Teodor Shanin

The intensive research coupled with public silence during the last decade of Marx's life represented a new, theoretical 'post-Capital' threshold. This phase corresponded – not accidentally – with i...

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