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Karl Marx: a Verso Reading List

Buy any five and save 50% during the Verso Red May sale!

Verso Books 2 May 2024

Karl Marx: a Verso Reading List

May 5th, 1818, marks the birth of Karl Marx.

From Marx's own writings to contemporary interpretations and adaptations of his ideas, this reading list offers a comprehensive exploration of the principles that have inspired generations of activists and intellectuals.

As part of our Red May sale, we're offering:

30% off all titles in our catalog
40% off if you buy 4
50% off if you buy 5
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.

As a friendly reminder: Verso Book Club members enjoy 50% off all titles year-round on purchases of any size. It's a great deal and the best way to support radical publishing!

David Harvey on Marx's Capital

No understanding of Marxist theory is complete without the work of David Harvey. 

In this video, the radical intellectual discusses becoming a Marxist, and his latest work on Marx's Grundrisse, with his Verso editor Sebastian Budgen.

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Works by Karl Marx

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Essential reading on Marx and Capitalism

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Marxism through the lens of Literature, Culture, and Philosophy

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Biography and History

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Deeper reading on Marxist Theory

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Considerations on Western Marxism

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Anti-colonial Marxism

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Marxist Economics

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A Companion To Marx's Capital
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...
A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse
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...
The Limits to Capital
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...
Spaces of Global Capitalism
Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results, from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. The extreme volatility in contemporary economic fortunes se...
Rebel Cities
Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and politica...
The Communist Manifesto / The April Theses
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 Political Writings
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...
The Communist Manifesto
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 Revolutions of 1848
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...
The First International and After
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...
Surveys from Exile

Surveys from Exile

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 Origin of Capitalism
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...
Reading Capital
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...
Mute Compulsion
Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchme...
The Automatic Fetish
The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central thr...
Old Gods, New Enigmas
Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an...
The Double Shift
Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery—working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase...
Classes
Questions of class, power and distribution have reemerged as central concerns in the public discourse. When we talk about class, we don't always know what is meant. Is class about income or affect ...
Capitalism
Capitalism, by the twenty-first century, has brought us an era of escalating, overlapping crisis - ecological, political, social - which we may not survive. In this brilliant, wide-ranging conversa...
Cannibal Capitalism
Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for e...
How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century
Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solid...
Critique of Everyday Life
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 Philosophy of Marx

The Philosophy of Marx

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 ...
Marx's Literary Style
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...
Aesthetics and Politics
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...
Literature of Revolution
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...
Between Existentialism and Marxism

Between Existentialism and Marxism

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
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...
Late Marxism
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...
Minima Moralia

Minima Moralia

Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...
Culture and Materialism
A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founde...
On Ideology

On Ideology

The publication of For Marx and Reading Capital established Louis Althusser as one of the most influential figures in the Western Marxist tradition. On Ideology charts Althusser’s critique of the t...
Metaphilosophy
In Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx’s revolutionary thought to consider philosophy’s engagement with the world. Lefebvre takes Marx’s notion of the “world becom...
Eleanor Marx
Eleanor Marx is one of the most tragically overlooked feminist intellectuals in history, usually overshadowed by her father, Karl Marx. But not only did she edit, translate, transcribe and collabor...
A World to Win

A World to Win

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...
Revolution
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”: Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s sexua...
Philosophy and Revolution

Philosophy and Revolution

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 ...
Marxism in the United States
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...
An Unfinished Revolution

An Unfinished Revolution

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 ...
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche
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...
Towards a New Manifesto
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism...
The Capitalist Unconscious
Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology—as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Žižek—there remain remarkably fe...
Willing Slaves of Capital

Willing Slaves of Capital

Why do people work for other people? This seemingly naïve question is more difficult to answer than one might at first imagine, and it lies at the heart of Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital. To ...
On Karl Marx
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
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?
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
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 ...
Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility
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...
On the Reproduction of Capitalism
Louis Althusser’s renowned short text "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks o...
Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory
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...
Reconstructing Marxism
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...
Value

Value

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 ...
Marx on Money
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...
The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx
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...
The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

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

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II

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...
Considerations on Western Marxism
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
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
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...
The Philosophy of Praxis
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...
Splinters in Your Eye
Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to ...
The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally pu...
Red Africa
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...
Decolonial Marxism

Decolonial Marxism

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...
Class, Race, and Marxism
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...

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