Karl Marx: a complete reading list
Essential Verso reading on Marx's extraordinary life and work.

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.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]David Harvey tackles Marx's notebooks that have spawned wide-ranging and raging controversies.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]Classic study of Marx by Japan’s leading critical theorist.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]A major rereading of Marx’s critique of political economy.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]The great French Marxist philosopher weighs up the contributions of the three major critics of modernity.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]All of Marx’s essential political writing in one volume.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time in this beautiful design.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in this beautifully designed complete volume.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]A new beautiful edition of the Communist Manifesto, combined with Lenin’s key revolutionary tract.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]A remarkable history of the formation of Marxist thought.
[book-strip index="15" style="display"]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.
[book-strip index="16" style="display"]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.
[book-strip index="17" style="display"]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.
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]A masterful survey of the history of Marxist philosophy of science.
[book-strip index="19" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="20" style="buy"]A collection of incisive critiques of contemporary Marxism, of post-colonial development and of the Eurocentric assessment of imperialism.
[book-strip index="21" style="buy"]Groundbreaking examination of the birth, development and impact of Feminist consciousness.
[book-strip index="22" style="buy"]Sensitive but uncompromising socialist-feminist critique of the nuclear family.
[book-strip index="23" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="24" style="buy"]The impact of the American Civil War on Karl Marx, and Karl Marx on America.
[book-strip index="25" style="buy"]A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.
[book-strip index="26" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="27" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="28" style="buy"]“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
[book-strip index="29" style="buy"]Shows the relevance of Marx to twenty-first century global capitalism.
[book-strip index="30" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="31" style="buy"]A critical evaluation of the course and legacy of the Analytical Marxist project.
[book-strip index="32" style="buy"]Founder of whiteness studies surveys the race/class relationship.
[book-strip index="33" style="buy"]Analysis of the role of ideology in political movements.
[book-strip index="34" style="buy"]The origins of "Western Marxism".
[book-strip index="35" style="buy"]Essential essays on key Marxist writers from a leading political thinker.
[book-strip index="36" style="display"]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.
[book-strip index="37" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="38" style="buy"]Perceptive and thoughtful essays on the future of socialism and Marxism.
[book-strip index="39" style="buy"]A classic work by the founding father of existentialism, describing his philosophy and its relationship to Marxism.
[book-strip index="40" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="41" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="42" style="buy"]A lively and lucid introduction to the work of Theodor Adorno.
[book-strip index="43" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="44" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="45" style="buy"]Mapping out a future for Marxist theory.
[book-strip index="46" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="47" style="buy"]Enlightenment advances towards a science of politics, and Marx's relationship to Hegel.
[book-strip index="48" style="buy"]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.