100 books like On the Reproduction of Capitalism

The definitive radical materialist analysis of the state, and a book that taught me the importance of clear thinking and writing. Opposing liberal conceptions of the state as a social contract that reconciles class contradiction, Lenin elaborates upon and synthesizes Engels’ conception of the state as a machine of class dictatorship that arises due to the fundamental irreconcilability of class antagonism. Written after Lenin studied Hegel’s Logic, The State and Revolution is an elegant piece of dialectical thought. In opposition to both the social democratic and anarchist approaches to the problem of the state, Lenin argues that the bourgeois state should be smashed in order to build a proletarian state, the latter of which must be aimed at withering away along with classes and class antagonisms.

Considering the legal apparatus as part of the state, Pashukanis puts forward the “commodity-form” theory of law in order to conceptualize the apotheosis of law under and fundamental to capitalism. Following Lenin, and against the claims of many of his Soviet philosopher contemporaries, Pashukanis argues that the withering away of the state should also imply the withering away of law. In making this argument he also examines the construction of legal relations and the legal subject. Pashukanis’ analysis has been revisited and revived in critical legal studies giving rise to scholarly studies such as China Miéville’s Between Equal Rights—which is how I initially discovered it, being a fan of Miéville’s fiction!

I first read The Undercommons in a virtual reading group during the early months of the COVID pandemic and was quite taken by its poetics and unfolding conceptual terrain. Beginning with an analysis of academia as a significant ideological state apparatus, Moten and Harney also discuss multiple forms of state violence and capture in racial capitalist formations. From the notion of the settler-capitalist garrison responding to “the surround” of the colonized and marginalized, to the connection between policy and policing, to the logic of reified colonial conquest, to logistics and professionalization, The Undercommons is a meditation on methods of state repression and forms of resistance. Arguing that recognition of the “general antagonism” that underlies the state is necessary for revolutionary politics, Moten and Harney end up echoing Lenin’s insights about class antagonism and false reconciliation in The State and Revolution.

I find Puar’s work to be very useful even if the theoretical framework she uses is different from, though adjacent to, mine. Usually I find the “biopolitical” analysis cloying and idealist, but Puar has developed her own materialist use of this framework that I have learned a lot from. In The Right to Maim Puar examines the liberal state’s use of maiming and debilitation as part of the reproduction of its hegemony. Not only does she examine the way a liberal disability discourse functions to exclude marginalized and targeted populations—proposing a vector of disability, debility, and capacity—she also interrogates how maiming functions in capitalist, colonial, and imperialist state policing. Moreover, her case study of Palestine, based on her own fieldwork, makes the more abstract aspects of her theory concrete.  

This book, part polemic, part reportage, is an account of Arundhati Roy’s journey into the forests of Chattisgarh, where groups of ‘Naxalites’ or Maoists have taken up arms against the Indian state, in defence of Adivasis, the indigenous inhabitants of India, for whom the forests, rivers, and hills are sacred. Unhappily these are cover vast deposits of minerals and precious resources required as ‘raw materials’ by a rapidly industrializing India. As a result, the State, which throughout the colonial period and in the early years of Independence, had, in turn, neglected and cheated the forest-dwellers, has now turned upon them with militaristic intensity to wrest resources from them. I found this narrative so powerful because Arundhati Roy makes us understand the violence of the despairing, without overtly supporting it.

This book provides a linkage between Marx’s time and contemporary capitalism through an in-depth study of scientific management or Taylorism. Braverman shows that the essence of Taylorism, the capture, by capital, of the worker’s skills and knowledge, is a necessary precondition for automation. Automation, Braverman reveals, is not simply a technical process, but a deeply social one. 

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.

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.

Cleaver by name, cleaver by nature? Certainly, as an analyst following in Marx’s footsteps, Harry Cleaver resembles a nimble knife aspiring to a heavy-duty hatchet.

His ideas are impressive but make easy reading. So much so, he has attracted a great following since the publication of his now classic work Reading Capital Politically (1979). Rupturing the Dialectic (2017) is one of Cleaver’s most recent books. In three parts, he sings the praises of Marx’s work-oriented concept of ‘value’, delves into ‘decoding’ the financial sphere that currently mires us, and argues that "getting rid of money and markets entirely is not only a necessary condition for getting rid of capitalism but also desirable in its own right."

Observe the cleaver in action!

This book provides an essential analysis of how value functions under capital—and of what value is, from a lucid historical materialist point of view now called “value-form Marxism”. It shows how “real abstractions” arise, and how abstract entities can have material force. This theoretical perspective explains how and why capital is necessarily compelled to seek increasing automaticity—and to minimize its human component.