Books on Marxism

I may recommend to you read The Communist Manifesto and Capital: Criticism of the Political Economy. Also there isn't bad books to called The Poverty of Philosophy and Critique of the Gotha Programme. I also recommend reading this article: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /appx1.htm - Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

 

I don't think you can read Capital if you aren't familiar with the economy. Communist Manifest, Imperialism (by Lenin, its a good critique about capitalism's progress), Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The State and The Revolution (Lenin), What Is To Be Done? (Lenin), Left Communism:An Infantile Disorder (Lenin). You can start with these to understand marxism-leninism

 

Marxism-Leninism is afore things relating to Bolshevism. Early works of Marx, which I cited above is largely related with the position of anarcho-communism. Even Bakun approved many of earlier works of Marx.

 

as linked to by SenI, anything Marx/Engels you can see here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm

They also have some good Gramsci:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/index.htm
Note his most famous work is his 'Prison Notebooks 1929-1935', that's the one where he explains his concept of hegemony.

know yr enemy.

Caps wrote:

so maybe what I write here is more for others, but

Surely Capital is designed as a text to help one understand the economy...

Inre The Communist Manifesto, its a party program and essentially a propaganda piece designed for recruitment purposes, its not really a good text to refer to to understand Marxism...
It's a great little piece but kinda relies on a prior understanding of Marxism rather than explaining what Marxism is.

Anywayz, I Lefebvre, get his book: The Production of Space

Beyond that, Negri's Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse is good.
Actually 'post-', 'autonomist-' 'etc-' Marxists are more interesting, in general, than those murderous fuckwits Trotsky and Lenin.
Read Negri, Freire, Marcuse, the Siutationists, Lefebvre, etc

p.s. Gramsci is a must

 

In such a case, reading some Lenin,Trotsky, etc is probs better than any 'overview' text I know (much like Marshall's Demanding the Impossible is to Anarchism, most of these type of books usually suffer a little bit from the author's own politics, for instance, Trots barely acknowledge the existence of ppl like the Frankfurt School, Situationists, Autonomists, etc; plus they don't understand Gramsci so good, whilst Autonomists are like us good honest anarchists in dealing with Trotsky & Lenin, ie, they'll write 'those guys are fuckwits, let's move on...' ).
Thus, read Lenin's The State & Revolution, Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution & maybe Luxemburg's The Russian Revolution.
Oh yeah, and most 'big time' Marxists have 'readers', ie 'collected works' books; most of which have a chapter or two as an overview of their thoughts, you could do worse than read these.
Otherwise maybe just turn up to some local university lectures, most first year Political Science subjects have 'Marxism' overview type lectures/courses (I'm guessing you can just go to uni lectures without being a student where you are too? Here they don't take attendance and lectures have a few hundred ppl so no one knows/cares that you ain't a student, oh, and uni libraries are the best place to find the above mentioned readers).

Alternatively, save yrself the punishment of reading Lenin & Trotsky, and go straight to Marcuse & Gramsci (and to reiterate, Lefebvre)