The Key Texts

Nine lessons have given you the framework. This one is practical: what Marx actually wrote, how the texts came into existence, which are worth your time, and in what order.

It is also a lesson about something larger than Marx — how a body of work becomes a canon, and what gets decided along the way by editors, translators, publishers and political parties rather than by the author.

A room in London, March 1883.

Marx has been dead for a few days. Engels, who has been his collaborator for forty years, sits down to sort the papers.

What he finds is not a body of work. It is a mess.

Capital Volume I was published in 1867 — the only volume Marx saw through the press, and the only major work of his maturity he completed. Volumes II and III exist as thousands of pages of manuscript in several drafts, in Marx's atrocious handwriting, in a mixture of German, English, French, Latin and Greek, with gaps, alternative versions, chapters that stop mid-sentence, and marginal notes to himself.

Engels spends the next eleven years — the rest of his own life — editing them. Volume II appears in 1885. Volume III in 1894, the year before Engels dies. A further set of manuscripts on the history of economic thought is published later still, by Kautsky, as Theories of Surplus Value.

And that is only what Engels knew about. Two of the texts we now regard as central were not published for another half-century. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — the alienation notebooks (4.1.4) — first appeared in full in 1932. The German Ideology, with the foundational statement of historical materialism and ideology, likewise 1932; Marx had left the manuscript, as he cheerfully wrote later, "to the gnawing criticism of the mice." The Grundrisse, the 1857–58 notebooks, was printed in Moscow in 1939–41 in an edition that mostly perished in the war, and did not appear in English until 1973.

So the Marx that Lenin read is not the Marx that Sartre read, and neither is the Marx you can read today. Whole schools of interpretation were built on a partial corpus, and each new publication reordered the picture.

This creates a genuine problem for anyone approaching the work, and it is worth naming rather than glossing.

Which Marx? The philosophical humanist of 1844, or the political economist of 1867? The revolutionary pamphleteer of 1848, or the cautious scholar corresponding with Russian populists in 1881?

Whose text? Volume III of Capital is Marx's material and Engels's arrangement. Recent scholarship on the manuscripts — through the ongoing complete edition, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²) — has shown Engels made substantial editorial interventions: adding headings, sharpening formulations, and in places making tentative arguments sound more settled than Marx left them. Notably, the falling rate of profit chapters (4.1.9) read more like a definite law in Engels's arrangement than in Marx's drafts. None of this is scandal — Engels said openly what he was doing — but it means "Marx says" sometimes means "Engels arranged."

And which reading? The corpus has been claimed by social democrats, Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyists, humanists, structuralists, analytical philosophers, historians and ecologists. Each has a canon within the canon.

The practical answer to all of this is: read some of it yourself. It is not as hard as its reputation, some of it is superb prose, and the entire corpus is freely available online.

The texts, by period

The young Marx (1841–1847)

"On the Jewish Question" (1843) and "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction" (1844). The second contains the most misquoted sentence he ever wrote. In full:

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

Read whole, this is far more sympathetic than the fragment suggests. Opium in 1844 was the ordinary painkiller — laudanum was in every household. The sentence says religion is relief from real suffering, and Marx's argument is that abolishing the relief without abolishing the suffering would be cruel and pointless. Compare Durkheim's very different route into religion (4.2.6).

A note on "On the Jewish Question": the essay uses antisemitic tropes of the period, equating Judaism with commerce, in the course of an argument about political versus human emancipation. Marx's own background was Jewish — his father converted for professional reasons. Scholars disagree sharply about how to read it. It should not be taught silently.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Alienation and species-being (4.1.4). Unpublished until 1932; the basis of twentieth-century Marxist humanism. Uneven, unfinished, and in places extraordinary.

Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Eleven short numbered notes, two pages total, never intended for publication. The eleventh is his epitaph, on his grave in Highgate: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." The sixth is the more sociological: "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." Start here if you want to read something by Marx today. It takes five minutes.

The German Ideology (1845–46, with Engels). Historical materialism (4.1.1) and the ruling-ideas passage (4.1.7). Published 1932. Long and polemical; the first section, on Feuerbach, is the part everyone reads.

The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). An attack on Proudhon; source of the class-in-itself / for-itself formulation (4.1.8).

The revolutionary years (1848–1852)

The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels). Commissioned by the Communist League, written in weeks, published in London days before revolution broke out across Europe. About thirty pages.

It is, whatever one thinks of the politics, one of the great pieces of political writing in any language. Its first section is not a denunciation of capitalism but something closer to awe at it: the bourgeoisie "has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals," has "created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together," and has drawn every nation into a world market where "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life."

Read it for the prose, and read the ten-point programme at the end noticing how many items — progressive income tax, free public education, abolition of child factory labour — are now unremarkable features of ordinary states.

The Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Marx as working historian and political analyst. The Brumaire is the best-written thing he produced: "men make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing"; history repeating "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce"; the potatoes in the sack (4.1.8). If the Manifesto shows the rhetorician and Capital the economist, this shows the analyst — and it is the text that best refutes the charge of crude determinism.

The mature work (1857–1883)

Grundrisse (1857–58). Notebooks, not a book: Marx thinking on paper through a winter of financial crisis. Difficult, digressive, sometimes brilliant. Contains the Fragment on Machines and the general intellect (4.1.9), and the fullest treatment of pre-capitalist economic formations. First English translation 1973, by Martin Nicolaus.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). The book barely matters; the Preface is two pages and contains the entire framework — base and superstructure, forces and relations, fetters, the era of social revolution (4.1.1, 4.1.2). It is the single most-quoted passage in Marx and takes ten minutes to read.

Wage Labour and Capital (1849) and Value, Price and Profit (1865). Marx explaining his own economics in accessible form — the second was a lecture to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association. If Capital looks daunting, these are how to get the argument. Thirty to sixty pages each.

Capital, Volume I (1867). The major work. Structure, so you know what you are getting into:

Parts 1–3 (commodities, money, the transformation of money into capital, absolute surplus value) — the hard part. Chapter 1 is the hardest thing in the book and stops most readers. Marx knew: he wrote in the preface that "beginnings are always difficult in all sciences," and suggested the general reader might skip ahead.
Chapter 10, "The Working Day" — a hundred pages of factory inspectors' reports, testimony from children, and cold fury. This is where to start. It is history, it is evidence, it is devastating, and it requires no theory.
Chapters 13–15, on machinery and large-scale industry — the analysis of technology and the labour process; Braverman's foundation (4.1.4).
Chapter 25, on the general law of capitalist accumulation — the reserve army of labour.
Part 8, on so-called primitive accumulation — enclosure, colonial plunder, the slave trade, and the phrase about capital arriving "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." The most readable and most quoted section.

A practical reading order for Volume I: Chapter 10, then Part 8, then Chapters 13–15, then go back to Chapter 1 once you care enough to fight it.

Capital, Volumes II (1885) and III (1894). Edited by Engels from manuscripts. Volume II is on circulation and the reproduction schemas — technical, and the least read. Volume III is where the interesting sociological material sits: the falling rate of profit, credit and fictitious capital, ground rent, and the unfinished final chapter on classes, which breaks off after a page and a half. That fragment is one of the great teases in social theory: Marx sat down to define class systematically and the manuscript stops mid-argument.

Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). A short, sharp attack on the draft programme of the German socialists. Contains the distinction between the lower and higher phases of communism and the formula "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" — which Marx did not coin (it circulated among French socialists) but made famous. Also his clearest statement that he refused to write recipes for the kitchens of the future.

The late correspondence (1877–1882). The letters to Mikhailovsky and the drafts to Vera Zasulich, in which Marx rejects the reading of his work as a universal historical schema and considers whether Russia might bypass capitalism (4.1.1). Short, and correctives to almost everything the twentieth century made of him.

If you have one hour. Theses on Feuerbach (5 min), the 1859 Preface (10 min), the first section of the Manifesto (20 min), and the "opium of the people" passage in full (5 min). You will have read the framework in the author's own words.

If you have a weekend. Add Wage Labour and Capital, Capital Chapter 10 ("The Working Day"), and Part 8 (primitive accumulation). You will now have the economics and the history, and will have read perhaps two hundred pages of Marx without touching Chapter 1.

If you have a term. Add The Eighteenth Brumaire whole, the 1844 Manuscripts on alienated labour, The German Ideology Part I, and then Capital Volume I from the beginning, slowly, ideally with others. Reading groups exist for this book for a reason — David Harvey's free lecture series and companion volume were built precisely to get people through it.

Go deeper

On editions and translations

Capital Volume I exists in two main English translations. The Moore and Aveling (1887) was supervised by Engels — Eleanor Marx's partner Edward Aveling was one of the translators — and is out of copyright and freely available. The Ben Fowkes translation (Penguin, 1976) is more accurate on key technical terms and is the scholarly standard; it is also the one with Ernest Mandel's long introduction. If you buy one, buy Fowkes.

The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²) is the ongoing complete critical edition — over a hundred volumes projected, including all drafts, marginalia and correspondence. It is what has enabled the recent scholarship on Engels's editing and on Marx's late ecological notebooks.

Everything is free online. The Marxists Internet Archive holds essentially the entire corpus in English translation. There is no financial barrier to reading any of this.

What Engels contributed, and the "Engelsism" argument

A real historiographical dispute worth knowing.

The case against Engels: that he systematised Marx into a doctrine Marx would not have recognised. Anti-Dühring (1878) and Dialectics of Nature (unfinished) extended dialectics into a general philosophy of nature, producing what became "dialectical materialism" — a term Marx never used. Engels's editing of Capital II and III shaped the received text. And his 1880s prefaces framed Marx as having discovered laws of history comparable to Darwin's laws of biology, which set up the deterministic reading that the Second International then made official. Critics — Lukács among the earliest — argue that the mechanical Marxism of the twentieth century is substantially Engels's Marx.

The case for Engels: he financed Marx for decades from the family firm in Manchester, without which none of the work exists. The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a genuine work of empirical sociology in its own right, and was written before he met Marx properly. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) is the founding text of Marxist feminism, whatever its ethnographic problems. Without his eleven years of editing there would be no Volumes II and III at all. And he repeatedly, in his late letters, tried to correct the deterministic reading — the 1890 letter to Bloch quoted in 4.1.1 and 4.1.2 is an explicit disavowal.

The balanced position: Engels is a substantial thinker in his own right, not a mere populariser; his systematisation did shape the reception in ways Marx might have resisted; and the two facts are compatible.

The other people in the room

Two names the canon has treated badly.

Jenny von Westphalen (Jenny Marx) — from a Prussian aristocratic family, married Marx in 1843 and lived the rest of her life in exile and poverty. She transcribed his manuscripts (his handwriting was famously near-illegible, and hers is what many printers actually set), managed the correspondence, wrote political journalism, and buried three of her children. The intellectual partnership was real and is documented in the correspondence.

Eleanor Marx (1855–1898) — the youngest daughter, and a significant figure independently: a leading organiser in the New Unionism of 1889 (the moment in 4.1.8's opening story), the first English translator of Madame Bovary, a socialist-feminist writer whose pamphlet The Woman Question (1886, with Aveling) is an early materialist analysis of women's oppression, and an editor of her father's unpublished work. She died by suicide at forty-three. Any account of the household that mentions only the two men is incomplete.

And the honest note on how to read a founder

A general lesson, of which this lesson is one instance.

Read the primary text, not only the summaries. Summaries of Marx — including this one — are compressions with a point of view, and every compression drops something. The texts are shorter and better written than their reputation.

Know when each was written and whether it was published. A notebook entry from 1858 and a book published in 1867 are not equivalent evidence about what someone thought.

Do not treat the canon as settled. Which texts count as central has changed twice in a century, on the accident of publication dates.

And notice who did the editing. The founder problem from 3.3.1 and 3.3.3 recurs here in a different form. Canons are assembled, and the assemblers make choices.

"Marx wrote Capital in three volumes." He completed and published Volume I. Volumes II and III were edited by Engels from unfinished manuscripts after his death.

"Religion is the opium of the people' means religion is a trick." The full passage calls religion "the heart of a heartless world" and treats it as real relief from real suffering.

"The 1844 Manuscripts are early Marx and therefore superseded." They were published in 1932 and reshaped the entire twentieth-century reading. See the Young/Old debate in 4.1.4.

"Marx set out a blueprint for communism." He explicitly refused to, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and elsewhere; the projected society is described in a handful of scattered pages.

"Marxism is what Marx wrote." Marx reportedly remarked, of French followers in the 1880s, "what is certain is that I am not a Marxist." Marxism is a set of traditions built on the texts, and they diverge sharply.

"You need economics training to read Marx." Wage Labour and Capital, the Brumaire, "The Working Day" and Part 8 of Capital require none.

Why it matters

It converts a name into a body of work you can actually check. Everything asserted in lessons 4.1.1 to 4.1.9 has a source, and the sources are free and readable. That is the difference between learning about a thinker and being able to argue with one.

It shows a canon being made. Three of the texts now considered central were unavailable for the first fifty years of Marxism's existence. Whole political traditions were built on a partial corpus. This is the same finding as 3.3.3 on Martineau, arriving from the other direction: what counts as a thinker's work is a historical product.

It models the reading discipline for the rest of Part 4. Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and Du Bois all come with the same questions: what was published, what was assembled, what was translated when, and by whom. Ask them each time.

And it settles the question of where to start. Two pages of the 1859 Preface, or a hundred pages on the working day. Either will tell you more than any summary — including this one.

Marx completed and published only Volume I of Capital (1867). Volumes II (1885) and III (1894) were edited by Engels from unfinished manuscripts; MEGA² scholarship shows the editorial hand was substantial, particularly on the falling rate of profit.

Three central texts were unavailable for decades: the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology (both 1932) and the Grundrisse (1939–41; English 1973). The corpus changed twice in a century, and each change reordered the interpretations.

The short essentials: Theses on Feuerbach (2 pp), the 1859 Preface (2 pp, the whole framework), The Communist Manifesto (30 pp), Wage Labour and Capital, Value, Price and Profit.

The best-written: The Eighteenth Brumaire — history as analysis, and the refutation of crude determinism.

Capital Volume I: start with Chapter 10, "The Working Day", then Part 8 on primitive accumulation, then the machinery chapters. Chapter 1 last. Use the Fowkes translation.

Volume III holds the falling rate of profit, credit, rent — and the unfinished chapter on classes that breaks off after a page and a half.

"Engelsism": Engels systematised Marx into "dialectical materialism," a term Marx never used, and framed him as a discoverer of historical laws — while also financing him for decades, writing genuine sociology himself, preserving the manuscripts, and explicitly disavowing determinism in his late letters.

Jenny von Westphalen and Eleanor Marx were participants in the work, not background.

Everything is free at the Marxists Internet Archive.

MEGA² (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe) — the ongoing complete critical edition of all writings, drafts and correspondence.

Grundrisse — the 1857–58 notebooks; source of the Fragment on Machines and the general intellect.

Theses on Feuerbach — eleven notes from 1845, including the eleventh ("the point is to change it") and the sixth (the human essence as "the ensemble of the social relations").

The 1859 Preface — the two-page statement of historical materialism, base and superstructure, and fetters.

Primitive accumulation — Part 8 of Capital I: the violent historical separation of producers from the means of subsistence.

The reserve army of labour — Chapter 25: the unemployed population that disciplines wages.

Dialectical materialism — the systematised philosophy developed by Engels and codified later; a term Marx never used.

Critique of the Gotha Programme — the 1875 text containing "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

One — read the Preface. The 1859 Preface, ten minutes, free online. You now have the vocabulary for every clause. Mark the sentences you recognise from these lessons.

Two — read "The Working Day." Chapter 10 of Capital Volume I. It is evidence, not theory, and it is one of the most effective pieces of documentary writing of the nineteenth century.

Three — check a quotation. Take any famous Marx line you have heard and find it in context in the Archive. At least one will turn out to mean something different from what you assumed. The opium line usually does.

Four — compare translations. Find the opening of Capital Chapter 1 in both Moore/Aveling and Fowkes. Notice the differences on "value" and "exchange-value." Translation is interpretation, which matters for Part 6 as well.

Five — date the canon. Write out the list of central texts with two dates each: when written, when published. Then ask what a Marxist in 1910 could and could not have read. That single exercise explains a surprising amount of twentieth-century political history.