What are your favourite/the most important Marx and Engels texts?

[howblackisyourflag]

Im about to buy the Marx Engels Reader (Is that the best of their collected works to buy btw?) and I'd like to know which pieces of writing by Marx and Engels do you consider the most important, or simply are your favourites?

[BAM]

there's also an edition edited by David McLellan which is good, if probably more expensive than the one edited by Tucker.

The Tucker collection is good enough, though pretty much all of Marx and Engels's writing is available for free at Marxists.org.

Capital is the obvious choice to go for in terms of most important Marx text. If you buy it, get the Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes. It is tough but very rewarding at the same time.

My personal favourite is Theses on Feuerbach, which I once made myself learn by heart (yes I am that sad ...).

[core_1]

i would describe the 'economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844' as his most beautiful ideas. :blushing:

[el_chavista]

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Karl Marx
Estranged Labour

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.

The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.

Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification.

Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.

Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

[More Fire for the People]

I agree with those who praised the aforementioned Manuscripts. I would also add that Grundrisse, The Civil War in France, The 18th Brumaire, and Capital (of which, I would single out chapter one of volume one) are all great too.

You can find them free here:
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/date/index.htm

[vpmnaka]

whats i understands and percieve that marx angel struggle is for EQUALITY.Its the struggle of humility.Equality mean the resources of all world divide to all people in the world.This is their rights that every man in the world having same living standards,mean it will be justice with them.capitalists occupied the resources,become rich and superior from their people.Our struggle is to fuck up and kill up rich people and resources divide among all people.
VICE PRESIDENT,MNAKA PAKISTAN.

[Niccolò Rossi]

Capital

Nic.

[RedPaladin]

My favourite text is Ludwig Feuerbach And the End of Classical German Philosophy by Engels.

[Tablo]

The works of most value to me are the volumes of Capital. Tough reads, but quite thorough critiques of Capitalism.