Workers’ Liberty has a large collection of study notes and courses, accumulated bit-by-bit over decades. These include short general introductory courses; more specialised courses with detailed coverage of a particular “classic” text; and other specialised courses designed to deal with more-or-less contemporary questions, or with general questions in the particular forms they have now.
Our wish and our hope, also, is that our current output, in newspaper articles, website articles, pamphlets, and books, also contains much of educational value for discussion of current issues.
The reading list here is offered as a supplement to the general introductory courses, and a complement to the more specialised courses and our current literature. It aims to give a minimum reading list for an activist, or an interested person, to have sufficient “points of reference” from historic Marxist texts to be able to participate as an informed Marxist in current debates. It does not substitute for those debates. It is deliberately barebones. There is no suggestion that other texts are unimportant, any more than a sketch map of the main landmarks in a city says there is nothing of interest in other streets.
Study groups are important, but so also is independent reading. No-one who wants to be an informed Marxist can afford to wait until others organise sufficient study groups in their area before they move ahead on their own, with independent reading.
The list is given in order of when the texts were written, if only because the texts document a developing tradition in which later texts build on earlier.
Pretty much all the texts listed here are now available online on the Marxist Internet Archive or via the Workers’ Liberty website. It is a long reading list, but not unmanageable: by deliberate choice, most (not all) items here are short pamphlets or extracts.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
Karl Marx, On the Question of Free Trade (1847)
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847, but read 1891 version)
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Karl Marx, Wages, Price, and Profit (1865)
Karl Marx, Capital volume one (1867)
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and Others (1879)
August Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879), chapters 27/1, 27/4, 28
Frederick Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific (1880)
Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, section II/4 (1884)
George Plekhanov, Our Differences (1885)
Frederick Engels, Critique of the Erfurt Programme (1891)
Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, chapter 4 (1892)
Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution (1899)
Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902. Of all the texts here, this one is barely comprehensible without some commentary. See here and other texts on the Workers’ Liberty website study page)
Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike (1906)
Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906)
Karl Kautsky, Socialism and Colonial Policy (1907)
Vladimir Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914)
Vladimir Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International (1914)
Leon Trotsky, War and the International (1914)
Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1915)
Vladimir Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism (1916)
Vladimir Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe (1917)
Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
Vladimir Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)
Vladimir Lenin, Left-Wing Communism (1920)
Vladimir Lenin, Theses on the National and Colonial Question (1920)
Leon Trotsky, The New Course (1923)
Leon Trotsky, Lessons of October (1924)
Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (1928)
Antonio Gramsci, Critical Notes on an Attempt at a Popular Sociology (1930)
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1930-33)
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936)
Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (1938)
Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) (1938)
Leon Trotsky, The USSR in War (1939)
Leon Trotsky, Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR (1939)
Max Shachtman, The Struggle for the New Course (1943)
Trotsky, Cannon, Shachtman and others, Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, The Fate of the Russian Revolution, volume one (collection of texts, mostly around 1940)
Cannon, Shachtman, Sedova and others, The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism, The Fate of the Russian Revolution, volume two (collection of texts, from World War 2)
Max Shachtman, In Defence of Bolshevism (published by AWL with other texts, 1949)
Michel Pablo, World Trotskyism Rearms (1951)
Natalia Sedova, Resignation from the Fourth International (1951)
Sean Matgamna, The Left in Disarray (collection of items on disputes of the years since 1951)
Sean Matgamna and Martin Thomas, The Fall of European Stalinism
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