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Karl Marx: a Verso Reading List

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Verso Books 2 May 2024

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.

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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.

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...

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...

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...

Spaces of Global Capitalism

by David Harvey

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

by David Harvey

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...

Works by Karl Marx

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 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...

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 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...

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...

Surveys from Exile

by Karl Marx

Foreword by Tariq Ali

Introduction by David Fernbach

Essential reading on Marx and Capitalism

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...

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...

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

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

by Beverley Best

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...

The Double Shift

by Jason Read

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

by Erik Olin Wright

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

by Nancy Fraser

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

by Nancy Fraser

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

by Erik Olin Wright

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

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...

Marxism through the lens of Literature, Culture, and Philosophy

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

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

by Raymond Williams

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

by Louis Althusser

Translated by Ben Brewster

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

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by David Fernbach

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...

Biography and History

Eleanor Marx

by Yvonne Kapp

Introduction by Sally Alexander

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

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...

Revolution

by Enzo Traverso

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

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 ...

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...

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 ...

Deeper reading on Marxist Theory

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...

Towards a New Manifesto

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

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

by Samo Tomšic

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

by Frédéric Lordon

Translated by Gabriel Ash

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

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 ...

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...

On the Reproduction of Capitalism

by Louis Althusser

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

Splinters in Your Eye

by Martin Jay

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

by Georg Lukács

Introduction by Enzo Traverso

Translated by Peter Palmer

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...

Anti-colonial Marxism

Red Africa

by Kevin Ochieng Okoth

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

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

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

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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

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...

Marxist Economics

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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