Marx’s major works are all now available in English translation. An English edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels has been published in fifty volumes by Lawrence and Wishart (London), International Publishers (New York) and Progress Publishers (Moscow), in collaboration with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. I should acknowledge permission from Lawrence and Wishart to quote from these volumes. This is gradually being made freely available online – with the additional value of being fully searchable – by the excellent Marx and Engels Internet Archive:

(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm).

Perhaps the most useful edition of Marx available in English is the Pelican Marx Library, published in paperback by Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, under the general edit-orship of Quintin Hoare. It consists of new translations of three volumes of political writings, a single volume of the early writings, the massive Grundrisse, and all three volumes of Capital. Each of these is prefaced by a substantial introduction. I want to acknow-ledge permission from New Left Review to quote extensively from these eight volumes – and particularly from Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, vol. 1.

FURTHER READING

There are many anthologies of extracts from Marx (and usually Engels too). I’d particularly recommend Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan.

New readers shouldn’t delay reading Marx until they have absorbed and understood some introductory guide or commentary.

This would be a recipe for endless delay and uncertainty. The fol-lowing are a few suggestions for places to start reading Marx:

Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

Here is the young Marx pronouncing in unusually succinct form his critique of philosophy. They are to be found in the Penguin Early Writings, edited by Colletti, and elsewhere.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

A wonderful piece of contemporary history. This is to be found in the Penguin Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2, and elsewhere.

Capital, volume 1, chapter 1, section 4.

This is Marx’s most influential discussion of ‘commodity fetishism’.

Capital, volume 1, chapter 10.

This long chapter, ‘The Working Day’, is a sustained piece of argu-ment, combining both the critique of political economy and a sharp political reading of contemporary history.

Capital, volume 1, chapter 25.

An extended account of the effects of technological change on labour. The third section is the most useful discussion of the reserve army of labour.

Capital, volume 1, chapter 27

On the dispossession of the peasantry and the creation of free labour – an important section of the longer account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’.

Critique of the Gotha Programme

The late Marx dealing with specific political issues. It is brief and to the point. This is to be found in the Penguin Political Writings, vol. 3, and elsewhere.

FURTHER READING

SECONDARY READING

General

Biography can provide some useful contexts for a critical reading of Marx’s writings. Franz Mehring’s biography, first published in German in 1918, is stolid but it was written by someone who knew Engels and the world of nineteenth-century German socialism. This gives it a certain authority and an eye for detail. Francis Wheen’s recent Karl Marx is much more readable. Jerrold Seigel’s Marx’s Fate and David McLellan’s Karl Marx: His Life and Thought are much more than biographies. Yvonne Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx is a rich source for the life of the Marx family in London.

Of general commentaries on Marx there is never an end. Peter Osborne’s How to Read Marx is an excellent recent introduction.

Short and to the point, it provides thoughtful readings of a number of important extracts from Marx. Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx is a formidable work of exposition and critical commentary.

Allen Oakley’s The Making of Marx’s Critical Theory is a very handy guide to the actual texts of Marx. Anthony Brewer’s A Guide to Marx’s Capital is equally useful for navigating around this mas-sive three-volume text. For three excellent studies – thorough, lucid and thoughtful – of specific themes running through Marx’s work, see Simon Clarke’s Marx’s Theory of Crisis, Ali Rattansi’s Marx and the Division of Labour and Geoffrey Kay’s The Economic Theory of the Working Class.

1848

There is massive amount of discussion of Marx’s formative period of writing in the 1840s. A useful place to start is the typically clear and concise account of David McLellan’s The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. His Marx Before Marxism is also worth looking at. Gareth Stedman Jones’s book-length introduction to the recent (2002) Penguin edition of the Communist Manifesto is sometimes grumpy, but it is always lucid and concise. It presents a valuable overview of Marx’s complex intellectual formation. Lucio Colletti’s introduction to the Penguin Early Writings is brilliant. Several of the essays in Louis Althusser’s For Marx open up valuable critical perspectives on the early works. Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and

FURTHER READING

Revolution and Jean Hyppolite’s Studies on Marx and Hegel are still worth going back to.

History and Political Economy

This topic has generated considerable discussion, though much of it pitched at the level of philosophy without much engagement with real histories. Gerry Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History has been influential and is at least clear and focused. Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism was first published in 1946 but is still worth reading as an attempt to bring a critical political economy to bear on concrete historical material. For an example of a historian grappling with how to deploy Marx’s concepts in con-crete analysis see Gareth Stedman Jones’s essay ‘Class Struggle and Industrial Revolution’ in his Languages of Class. Perry Anderson’s Arguments within English Marxism, a fair-minded critique of Edward Thompson, demonstrates the political stakes of divergent appropriations of Marx in the 1960s and 70s.

For one of the most productive of modern readings of Capital, see Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capitalism – a sem-inal work on the labour process which generated a considerable literature in the 1970s. Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination is one of the most original and challenging interpreta-tions of the later Marx in recent years.

There are endless commentaries on Marx’s theories of ideology.

A good place to start is an excellent essay by Stuart Hall, ‘The prob-lem of ideology’. This points the way to further relevant reading.

Marxism and Literature, by Raymond Williams is a major study of every aspect of Marx’s work. The large volume Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture is a wonderful collection of essays and debates on a broad range of questions to do with ideology and cul-ture. Janet Wolff’s The Social Production of Art is an essential start-ing place for thinkstart-ing about the implications of Marx’s work for any understanding of the arts, though it ranges more widely than that. See also Margaret Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic.

Politics

There are several studies which explore relations between Marx’s political theories and his political activities. Alan Gilbert’s Marx’s

FURTHER READING

Politics is useful, though it is mostly about the revolutions of 1848.

His article ‘Salvaging Marx from Avineri’ ranges more widely. For two recent thought-provoking studies, which take opposing views of Marx’s understanding of democracy, see August Nimtz’s Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough and Allan Megill’s Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason. There is a mas-sive literature on the history of nineteenth-century socialism. An important study, providing an essential context for any understand-ing of the political activities of Marx and Engels between the 1840s and the 1890s, is Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy. The History of the Left in Europe 1850–2000, especially Part 1, ‘Making Democracy Social’.

Finally, for new work bringing Marx’s categories to bear on some dimensions of the current conjuncture see Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence, Andrew Glynn’s, Capitalism Unleashed, Saad-Filho’s Anti-Capitalism: A Marxist Introduction, Hardt and Negri’s Empire and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

In document Marx (Page 188-193)