Each book is roughly only 80 pages long. Reading at a steady pace you could read them in around 3 to 4 hours each. Well worth the read if you’re still building your understanding of Marxism.
Value, Price, and Profit gives you slimmed down explanation of where value, price, and profits come from according to Marx and how they exist in relation to each other.
Wage Labor and Capital has some overlap with VPP, but its written as a response to the question “Should the trade unions struggle for higher wages” to which Marx explains that, yes they should, by explaining how Wage Labor lives in contradiction to Capital.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engles covers utopian Socialism, the origins of materialism, the secular nature of bourgeois society, historical materialism, and why historical materialism is the defining aspect of scientific Socialism.
These are all summations of larger texts, like Capital Vol 1 and Anti-Durhing.
It is amusing to read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific if only because of how assured Engles was that now (in the late 1800s) was the dawn of the age of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (that’s obviously not what he called it). While also interesting to read Engles describing the proletarian state as having many State Owned Enterprises (that’s not what he called them, but that’s what he described). Which we can see in China and how much of the commanding heights of their economy is comprised of State Owned Enterprises.
They’re all worth reading. You can do it! I believe in you!
Another good short and sweet theory recommendation I don’t see mentioned much in online Marxist spaces is Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Ever read Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and wish he had elaborated beyond 11 bullet-pointed theses? Some time after Marx had died, Engels went through some of Marx’s notes on Feuerbach from decades before (the 11 theses are from these notes) and fleshed it out into the linked work.
Theses on Feuerbach is also elaborated upon in The German Ideology
Putting it on the list.
I only haven’t read the last one but you have intrigued me
If you havent read it, I would recommend just going for Anti-Durhing. It’s longer, but the hardest parts to read are those also taken to ‘Socialism utopian and scientific’. The parts left out are just kinda funny polemics about how shitty Durhing was. They’re not that important in my view, but easy to just read quickly and laugh a bit
You are probably right but I’m reading capital rn and I am gonna want something shorter and simpler after that so I can read them in between my history books
Yeah no shame if you don’t, I just found the lighter aspects about Durhing useful in my recent read of it!
