The most recommended Marxian economics books

A People’s Guide is just a lively, accessible, and up-to-date guide to the basics of capitalism. Hadas Thier explains complex ideas in a simple and engaging way with excellent day-to-day examples. It’s economics for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%. And it’s written not from an academic but from an activist viewpoint.

This book has given an important impetus to the critical discussion of Marx's work, by criticizing the mechanistic, historicist, and economistic legacy that still weighs on Marxism.

It marks a radical new beginning of the debate on Marxism and the thereof points of contention: What, in fact, is the scientific breakthrough that Marx made with his Critique of Political Economy in the field of the sciences of history and society?

In what sense does this scientific breakthrough provide indispensable foundations for a politics of overcoming the domination of capitalist mode of production in contemporary societies?

And finally: What contribution can critical philosophizing make to the development of genuinely scientific research and revolutionary politics as such, and to their assertion against all disruptions by dominant ideologies? 

This is the first study ever of Marx on communism/socialism, a topic that is often considered something he refrained from writing about. Hudis ingeniously marshals a huge body of writings – on Proudhon, Lassalle, and others – where Marx elaborates his own concept of socialism/communism in the course of critiquing what he sees as vastly inadequate concepts. In so doing, Hudis connects these issues to dialectics and to economics, and above all to the critique of both capital and the state, here not even sparing Lenin’s classic work, State and Revolution.

Rick Kuhn’s book brings to our attention the ideas of the most important Marxist economist of the 20th century, previously forgotten and ignored. A Polish Jew and Communist, Grossman revives Marx’s economic theory in a clear fashion after the misunderstandings and distortions of Marx’s epigones. Grossman’s ideas, written in the 1920s and 1930s, are still relevant 100 years later.

For this book, the critique of political economy is a thoroughly subversive business. It rejects the appearance of economic reality as a natural thing, argues that the economy has no independent existence. Subversion focuses on human conditions. Its critical subject is society unaware of itself. This book develops Marx's critique of political economy as a negative theory of society. It does not conform to the patterns of the world and demands that society rids itself of all the muck of ages and founds itself anew.

Althusser’s (in)famous article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was the result of copy and paste edits from this much longer manuscript. An extended philosophical investigation on how the capitalist mode of production’s duration over time requires a state formation, Althusser eventually ends up elaborating on Gramsci’s conception of hegemony so as to theorize the state machine according to “repressive” and “ideological” apparatuses. The former apparatuses concern the state’s coercive aspect; the latter apparatus concerns its aspect of “consent,” i.e. the promulgation of ideological norms. Although I go back and forth on my assessment of Althusser’s philosophical project as a whole, his work continues to challenge me and has marked the way I understand philosophy as, to quote Althusser from elsewhere, “class struggle in the terrain of theory.”

This is the book I wish I could have given my younger self when I first noticed that the ecological world around me was deteriorating. Species were going extinct as the world heated up. In my education as a scientist, I learned that the physical causes of the environmental crisis are simple (burning fossil fuels, converting land to pasture, and so on), but no one seemed to have the power to do anything to fix it.

In this book, Mau brilliantly shows why we feel so unable to change the world. Everyone, including CEOs, are constrained by capitalism. People might personally care about the environment, but if the money doesn’t work out, they are forced to act otherwise. This isn’t an exclusively environmental book, but it offers a powerful perspective on the forces behind the crisis.

The book emphasizes the importance of Marx’s theory of value.

Rubin argues that Marx's mature economic writings provide an understanding of how labor is determined and limited by capitalist social relations, which appear as objective structures, that are being “reified” in the money existence of commodities.

The author further argues that the notion of simple commodity production does not characterize human societies since antiquity, as it is often argued by both Marxists and critics of Marx.

In Marx’s analysis, it constitutes the outer husk of the capitalist economy. Value and money are concepts which cannot be defined independently of the notion of capital.

They contain (and are also contained in) the concept of capital.

In a vivid and comprehensible way, Heinrich outlines the historical, economic, and social conditions for the emergence of Marx’s theory, the “Critique of Political Economy”.

He addresses its methodological foundations, and introduces the most important terms and concepts.

What actually is capitalism, and what is Marx’s dialectic all about? How is surplus value created? What is fetishism, and how does it relate to politics and the state?

Beyond that, Heinrich also asks about the topicality of Marx’s thought and the possibility of a “society beyond the commodity form”.

This new book (published in 2022) is one of the most important contributions to the ever-growing body of literature on the ecological crisis that has appeared to date.

It argues that the destruction of the natural environment is inseparable from the growth dynamic that defines capitalism’s hunger to increase economic value, money, and profit as end in itself. Breaking totally new ground, it argues that Marx’s writings on how capitalism degrades the metabolic interaction between labor and the environment illuminates the exact process we are living through today.

As against the standard narrative that Marx viewed the development of the productive forces as providing the material basis for freedom, it shows that Marx came to embrace the need to de-grow the economy in order to ensure social progress.