10 books like Routledge Handbook of Marx's Capital

By Marcello Musto (editor), Babak Amini (editor),

Here are 10 books that authors have personally recommended if you like Routledge Handbook of Marx's Capital. Shepherd is a community of 7,000+ authors sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Marx's Ecology

By John Bellamy Foster,

Book cover of Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

This book rocked my theory-world when I finally settled down to read it, long after it was first published and everybody was talking about it. Besides developing Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ in the social-natural metabolism, brought on by the industrial revolution, it also traces Marx’s inspiration in the soil sciences of his day, ancient materialist philosophies of nature, and the disregard or distortion of Marx’s ecology during the Soviet era and in the West.  

Marx's Ecology

By John Bellamy Foster,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marx's Ecology as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis. Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus,…


Marx's Inferno

By William Clare Roberts,

Book cover of Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital

This really engaging book shows how Capital, Volume 1 is implicitly modelled on Dante’s Inferno, from the way Marx stages the descent (katabasis) into the hell of the 19th-century factory to the division of the French and English translations into 33 chapters, mirroring the 33 cantos of Dante’s famous poem. Roberts almost makes you forget you’re reading political theory, an effect Marx was aiming for in trying to reach his socialist and working-class audiences.

Marx's Inferno

By William Clare Roberts,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marx's Inferno as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante's Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers' emancipation to the secret depths of…


Marx's Capital Illustrated

By David Smith, Phil Evans (illustrator),

Book cover of Marx's Capital Illustrated

As an academic, I was at first skeptical about reading a comic version of Marx’s masterpiece, but Smith and Evans brilliantly manage to be both entertaining and enlightening, hilariously funny as well as dead serious. Even if you’re not familiar with any of the key concepts, you’ll get a lot out of the way they combine simple descriptions with the illustrations, and the updated edition really resonates with the financial crises we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades. 

Marx's Capital Illustrated

By David Smith, Phil Evans (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marx's Capital Illustrated as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Karl Marx did not write Das Kapital for the bookshelves of economists and philosophers. It is economics for working people, from their viewpoint and history. It is the classic masterpiece of revolutionary working-class politics. Here, David Smith and Phil Evans explode the myth of difficulty haunting Marx's Kapital.


Marx at the Margins

By Kevin B. Anderson,

Book cover of Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

Though not focusing specifically on Capital, Anderson’s book is groundbreaking for the way it brings Marx’s massive editorial writings into conversation with his economic ideas, especially around topics we’ve been grappling with in the last hundred years, such as racial conflicts in the US, Irish nationalism, Russian revolutionary movements, and the legacy of British imperialism in Asia. 

Marx at the Margins

By Kevin B. Anderson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marx at the Margins as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx's writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical…


Stalin

By Robert Service,

Book cover of Stalin: A Biography

If How to be a Dictator gives you an overview of the great tyrants of the 20th century, then Service’s biography of Joseph Stalin provides a close analysis of one of the great monsters of the 20th century. Everybody knows about Hitler’s terrible crimes, but Stalin’s are less familiar, due to a mystifying reluctance on the part of several generations of educators to teach “the youth” about the USSR. What I especially admire about Service’s book is that he really engaged with Stalin’s own writings (which are awful) and so he provides a lot of insight into the ideas that drove this ex-seminarian as he transformed himself into the supreme leader of the largest country in the world. The Stalin that ultimately emerges from this portrait is no raving lunatic but rather a highly intelligent and profoundly evil man who is completely in control of himself. Chilling.

Stalin

By Robert Service,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Stalin as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Overthrowing the conventional image of Stalin as an uneducated political administrator inexplicably transformed into a pathological killer, Robert Service reveals a more complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure. Drawing on unexplored archives and personal testimonies gathered from across Russia and Georgia, this is the first full-scale biography of the Soviet dictator in twenty years.

Service describes in unprecedented detail the first half of Stalin's life--his childhood in Georgia as the son of a violent, drunkard father and a devoted mother; his education and religious training; and his political activity as a young revolutionary. No mere messenger for…


Capitalism and Automation

By Ramin Ramtin,

Book cover of Capitalism and Automation: Revolution in Technology and Capitalist Breakdown

Ramtin’s bizarrely underread book may be read as a sequel to Braverman. This is the first Marxist text to engage directly and in a sustained manner with the concept of automation. Automation is distinguished from mechanization, a history is provided, and great attention to technical detail is evident. Ramtin also explores the (contentious) argument that automation must ultimately lead to the collapse of capitalism.

Capitalism and Automation

By Ramin Ramtin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Capitalism and Automation as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The computer has already revolutionized many aspects of our working lives. How far has this revolution yet to run? Will human labour no longer be needed in the future? And if so, what will be the effect on the development of our society? Ramin Ramtin explores these questions in his study of the computer. He considers how the micro-chip may eventually have repercussions that go beyond easing the office work-load and argues convincingly that technological change will affect our political as well as our economic systems. Marxian theory is used to explain the nature and character of technology and challenge…


The General Theory of Law and Marxism

By Evgeny Pashukanis,

Book cover of The General Theory of Law and Marxism

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!

The General Theory of Law and Marxism

By Evgeny Pashukanis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The General Theory of Law and Marxism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

E. B. Pashukanis was the most significant contemporary to develop a fresh, new Marxist perspective in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1924 he wrote what is probably his most influential work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. In the second edition, 1926, he stated that this work was not to be seen as a final product but more for "self-clarification" in hopes of adding "stimulus and material for further discussion." A third edition was printed in 1927.Pashukanis's "commodity-exchange" theory of law spearheaded a perspective that traced the form of law, not to class interests, but to capital logic itself. Until his…


Utopian Thought in the Western World

By Frank E. Manuel, Fritzie P. Manuel,

Book cover of Utopian Thought in the Western World

The Manuels give an exhaustive but very readable history of utopian thought from the Renaissance (Thomas More) to Marxism, with backward glances to ancient Judaic and Hellenic cultures. This book explains how and why utopias have been central to Western thought, showing how the utopias of one age seem dystopian in another age (or even their own), presented in wry prose that draws readers into the story.

Utopian Thought in the Western World

By Frank E. Manuel, Fritzie P. Manuel,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Utopian Thought in the Western World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times.

The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book.

Utopian writings run the…


Beautiful World, Where Are You

By Sally Rooney,

Book cover of Beautiful World, Where Are You

This is the most recent novel to make my list. As much as I relished Rooney’s earlier work, her latest is heftier, for it grapples with the genuine planetary and personal crises faced by her generation. Her characters don’t shy away from speaking openly about love, sex, and relationships—or the perverse economic system that is rapidly bringing humanity to its knees with consumer-driven smiles painted on its faces. Neither do her characters hold back from earnest discussions of Marxism. The latter note is getting wide play culturally, particularly with millennials, but mainstream media has rarely picked up on the reverberations underfoot. Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is not so reticent—and more rewarding for its brazen honesty about the personal and the political.

Beautiful World, Where Are You

By Sally Rooney,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Beautiful World, Where Are You as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get…


The Order of Forms

By Anna Kornbluh,

Book cover of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space

Kornbluh’s book is an incredible revelation. It shows that psychoanalysis provides an insistence on a formal interpretation that allows it to have a privileged critical position relative to capitalism. By showing capitalism’s formal impasses, psychoanalysis provides the perfect supplement to a Marxist critique and opens up possibilities for envisioning a non-capitalist future. The book uses realist fiction as a way to envision the formal critique of capitalism and really makes one want to read the books under discussion. I have taught this book to students, and they love it more than any other I’ve ever used. 

The Order of Forms

By Anna Kornbluh,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Order of Forms as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to--and substantially shifts--that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity.

Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state…


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