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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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Book strip #1

  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback

Book strip #2

  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback

Book strip #3

Book strip #4

  • 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 ...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback (2008)
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
  • 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...
    Paperback

Book strip #5

  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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 ...
    Paperback
  • 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 ...
    Paperback

Book strip #6

  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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 ...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback

Book strip #7

  • 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 ...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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, ...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback

Book strip #8

  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback

Book strip #9

Filed under: karl-marx, marxism, red-may