Serious economic study....

[RadioRaheem84]

Any Marxist or Socialist books out there that deal with economics and the assumptions that most capitalists have?

I think my main problem is I still think too much like a capitalist and need a total reworking. Whenever I think of objections to Marxian or left economics, those objections usually harbor capitalist presuppositions. The Communist Manifesto, while brief, was really good at addressing some capitalist assumptions.

Are there any books that actually deal with the presupposed ideas of capitalists? There are ton of books written by capitalists on the objections to socialism.

[Spawn of Stalin]

I'm assuming you've read Das Kapital?

[which doctor]

Well of course the obvious answer would be to read Marx. The Communist Manifesto wouldn't be the best place to go to as it's more of an incendiary tract than an economic one. And Das Kapital can be intimidating, so I'll give a few other suggestions.

Wage Labour and Capital is concise, easy to read, and gives a good overview of the basics of Marxian economics.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm

Value, Price and Profit represents a slightly more mature Marx, and goes a little more in depth than Wage Labour and Capital, but it is still nowhere near as exhausting as Das Kapital can be.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm

[Spawn of Stalin]

Good suggestions, you will learn a lot from those works, and once you feel confident you might want to dip into Das Kapital, for which David Harvey will be of great help (http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/). If not, there is a very good abridgement of Das Kapital published by Oxford University.

[OrganisedRandomness]

I'd say once you've read a bit of Marx, go ahead and read Capital with David Harvey's videos if you need them.

That way you can get rid of the stupid assumptions like "If I bake a cake for a really long time and drag out the mixture of the ingredients then my cake will be worth $30,000 on the market! Marxism is a failure!"

[OrganisedRandomness]

Oh, and Critique of the Gotha Programme.

I can't post a link because I'm too new, but it's on marxists.org

[blake 3:17]

There's loads of this stuff dealing with different issues and with different methods.

I don't know what kind of access you have to libraries or where you are -- I tend to know Anglo-American-Canadian stuff.

The single book which helped me the most understand Marxist economics was John Harrison's Marxist Economics for Socialists. I was given a copy years ago and find it the most straight forward explanation of the basics.

David McNally's Against The Market is an argument against market socialism and gets into the nitty gritty of bourgeois political economy.

A Marxist classic is Harry Baverman's Wage Labor and Monopoly Capital which deals in depth with emerging management techniques and the deskilling and increased alienation of work. It has inspired a million other studies.

Kim Moody's Workers In A Lean World is pretty great. He apparently has newish book US Labor in Trouble and Transition .

One of the more important Marxist economists was Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Trotskyist. He wrote two major economic works, Marxist Economic Theory and Late Capitalism. They are both thick books. Late Capitalism is pretty dazzling, but super dense. I could get so far in either. For articles see: http://www.ernestmandel.org/en/index.html

I know some people like Left Business Observer. I'm not sure it is still publishing. Here's a link to their back issues. Some articles have been web archived. Link: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/LBO_back.html


Oh, and Susan George! She is not a Marxist -- some kind of very left social democrat. Her writing on global economics is great. A Fate Worse Than Debt is fantastic in learning about how the Third World debt did operate (things have changed a bit...) Her first book How the Other Half Dies appears to have been updated and available for free download: http://www.tni.org/en/tnibook/how-otherhalf-dies

[ZeroNowhere]

Kliman's 'Reclaiming Capital' deals with the common objection that Marx was self-contradictory.