Thomas Riggins' Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism provides commentary and social, scientific, and philosophical contextualization to classical texts in the Marxist canon such as Friedrich Engels' Anti-Dühring and V. I. Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, State and Revolution, and Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. For the beginner to readings in the Marxist tradition, this book will help break down and explain with a plethora of rich and contextual examples even the most complex of philosophical, scientific, and economic concepts in Marxism. The seasoned reader in the Marxist tradition will find that this text provides the contextualization and critiques necessary to sustain the theoretical relevance of Marxism into the 21st century.

As more and more people are looking for alternatives to the existing order, Thomas Riggins' Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism provides a lucid and necessary account of the Marxist ideas which have haunted capitalism for the last nearly two centuries.