The first section is designed as a basic programme for anybody wishing to begin studying Communist theory and strategy. It is recommended to read the works of each sub-section in the order presented, though one may alternate between sub-sections after the first two. And although some parts may take a while to get through, it is designed with practicality in mind, and if you’re serious about studying Communism, you shouldn’t mind long-term study, as your study should continue for life. It is also suggested — though not entirely necessary — that you study in a group setting if possible. The second section is for those who’ve already mastered the essentials explained in the first section and are looking for independent study, and is arranged according to authors and the time each work was written.
The list as a whole represents the main theoretical positions of this initiative and will be updated continually. Included is more than enough reading for a full theoretical understanding of scientific Communism.
For those just looking for an overview and not willing or able to engage in systematic study, one of the following three may suit you:
- Something short: Scientific Socialism (1873) paired with The Principles of Communism (1847)
- The classic manifesto: Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
- Something more “up-to-date”: Marxism: Theoretical Minimum (2021)
To really benefit from reading Communist theory, aside from the obvious real-life practice, it’s important to know how to get the most out of the reading process itself. Thus, before you begin, this video is highly recommended.
Sections:
Study Programme
The basics:
K. H. Marx, F. Engels – Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) [Be sure to read the preface.]
S. K. Mammaev, V. A. Polyakov, G. R. Magomedov – Marxism: Theoretical Minimum (2021)
L. Shaoqi – How to be a Good Communist (1939)
E. H. Hoxha – Study Marxist-Leninist Theory Linking it Closely With Revolutionary Practice (1970) [Keep in mind that Enver Hoxha mistakenly characterises Marxism as a philosophy, when in reality it is scientific.]
F. Engels – Anti-Dühring (1877)
I. V. Stalin – Foundations of Leninism (1924)
Scientific method & worldview:
K. H. Marx – The Opium of the Masses (1843)
F. Engels – Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)
A. B. Razlatsky – Principles of Materialist Dialectics (1980)
P. J. Dietzgen – The Positive Outcome of Philosophy (1887)
K. H. Marx, F. Engels – The German Ideology (1845)
F. E. Mehring – On Historical Materialism (1893) [Be sure to read Friedrich Engels’ comments at the end.]
P. J. Dietzgen – The Nature of Human Brainwork (1869)
Critique of political economy:
This is where you will most clearly see the dialectical method in action. Marx’s ‘Capital’ is quite long, but absolutely necessary. If you really don’t have time for it, just read the first book listed and then move on, but you will have to read it at some point.
L. K. Segal – Basic Course in Political Economy (1934) (Machine translated) [Be sure to read the foreword.]
D. I. Rozenberg – How to Study Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ (1938)
K. H. Marx – Capital: Volume 1 (1867)
K. H. Marx – Capital: Volume 2 (1885)
K. H. Marx – Capital: Volume 3 (1894)
K. H. Marx – Capital: Volume 4 (Theories of Surplus Value) (1863)
V. I. Lenin – Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)
E. H. Hoxha – Imperialism & the Revolution (1978)
Historical materialist analyses:
K. H. Marx, F. Engels – The Revolutions of 1848 (1848-50)
F. Engels – The Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State (1884)
V. I. Lenin – Imperialism & the Split in Socialism (1916)
Y. M. Yaroslavsky – How Gods are Born, Live & Die (1923)
I. V. Stalin – Marxism & the National & Colonial Question (1913-48)
R. P. Dutt – Fascism & Social Revolution (1935)
E. H. Hoxha – Can the Chinese Revolution be Called Proletarian? (1979)
Proletarian socialism:
K. H. Marx – Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
F. Engels – On Authority (1872)
V. I. Lenin – The State & Revolution (1917)
S. K. Mammaev – Karl Marx’s Proletarian Socialism (2021)
A. B. Razlatsky – The Second Communist Manifesto (1979) [Be sure to read the editor’s introduction.]
E. H. Hoxha – Report to the Eighth Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania (1981)
F. A. Bebel – Woman & Socialism (1879)
V. I. Lenin – The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914)
Revolutionary strategy:
R. Luxemburg – Reform or Revolution? (1900)
V. I. Lenin – What is to be Done? (1901)
S. K. Mammaev – How to Build the Party (2025)
I. V. Stalin – The Proletarian Class & the Proletarian Party (1905)
V. I. Lenin – Party Work in the Masses (1900-21)
E. Aust – Open up the Revolutionary Cultural Struggle Front! (1977)
I. V. Stalin – The October Revolution & The Tactics of the Russian Communists (1924)
V. I. Lenin – On Guerrilla Warfare (1906)
Communist self-development:
V. I. Lenin – The Tasks of the Youth Leagues (1920)
M. I. Kalinin – Develop Yourselves in Every Way (1934)
E. H. Hoxha – For the Continuous Improvement of the Composition of the Party & its Growth for the Protection of the Purity of its Ranks (1966)
Further Reading
Scientific method & worldview:
K. H. Marx – Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
K. H. Marx, F. Engels – Circular Against Kriege (1846)
F. Engels – The Dialectics of Nature (1883)
F. Engels – The Role of Force in History (1887)
F. Engels – Four Letters on Historical Materialism (1890-93)
P. J. Dietzgen – The Nature of Human Brainwork (1869)
P. J. Dietzgen – Social-Democratic Philosophy (1876)
P. J. Dietzgen – The Limits of Cognition (1877)
P. J. Dietzgen – The Inconceivable (1877)
F. E. Mehring – Philosophy & Philosophising (1909)
V. I. Lenin – Materialism & Empirio-Criticism (1908)
V. I. Lenin – Philosophical Notebooks (1895 – 1916) [Keep in mind that Vladimir Lenin made some errors inherited from Georgi Plekhanov, such as talk of the “philosophy/ideology of Marxism,” but in his case it is more a semantic issue, since he usually just means to say “worldview.”]
S. K. Minin – Throw Philosophy Overboard! (1922)
V. V. Adoratsky – On Ideology (1922)
A. S. F. Gramsci – Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1929-35)
A. A. Zhdanov – On the History of Philosophy (1947)
I. V. Stalin – Marxism & the Problem of Linguistics (1950)
P. Smith – An Introduction to Formal Logic (2003)
S. Sikder – Post-Modernism Today (2018)
J. B. Foster – Engels’ ‘Dialectics of Nature’ in the Anthropocene (2020)
Critique of political economy:
K. H. Marx – The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
K. H. Marx – Wage-Labour & Capital (1847)
K. H. Marx – Grundrisse (1857)
K. H. Marx – A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
K. H. Marx – Value, Price & Profit (1865)
K. H. Marx, F. Engels – On the Question of Free Trade (1847 – 48)
F. Engels – The Housing Question (1872)
V. I. Lenin – A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism (1897)
V. I. Lenin – A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism (1916)
F. K. Nkrumah – Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)
P. Jalée – Imperialism in the Seventies (1972)
J. Boggs – A New Outlook on Health (1975)
E. H. Hoxha – The Superpowers (1984)
A. Kliman – Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital‘ (2006)
A. Kliman – The Failure of Capitalist Production (2011)
N. Klein – This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) [Petit-bourgeois socialist literature but still of value.]
A. M. Shaikh – Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (2016)
read together with:
S. T. King – Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism Today: The Global Divide between Monopoly & Non-Monopoly Capital (2018)
M. Roberts – The Long Depression: Marxism & the Global Crisis of Capitalism (2016)
F. Moseley – Money & Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital & the End of the ‘Transformation Problem’ (2017)
K. Saito – Karl Marx’s Eco-Socialism: Capitalism, Nature & the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017)
M. Smith – Invisible Leviathan: Marx’s Law of Value in the Twilight of Capitalism (2018)
L. Phillips, N. Rozworski – The People’s Republic of Walmart (2019)
P. Jones – The Falling Rate of Profit & the Great Recession of 2007-09 (2023)
Historical materialist analyses:
K. H. Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
K. H. Marx – Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1858)
F. Engels – The Peasant War in Germany (1850)
F. Engels – Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Germany (1852)
F. Engels – Nationalism, Internationalism & the Polish Question (1882)
F. Engels – On the History of Early Christianity (1894)
V. I. Lenin – The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899)
A. M. Kollontai – The Social Basis of the Women’s Question (1909)
A. M. Gorky – Soviet Literature (1934)
A. M. Gorky – Culture & the People (1939)
Y. M. Yaroslavsky – Karl Marx on Religion (1933-41)
K. Samphan – Underdevelopment in Cambodia (1959)
A. V. Lunacharsky – On Literature & Art (1965)
W. F. Ash – Pickaxe & Rifle: The Story of the Albanian People (1974)
Revolutionary Communist Party USA – Cuba: The Evaporation of a Myth (1976)
E. H. Hoxha – Palestine Belongs to Palestinians (1970-83)
X. Dobrushi – The Titoite Revisionists’ Anti-Marxist Views on the Nation: An Expression of Their Idealist Reactionary World-Outlook (1987)
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement – The Fall of Captain Sankara: Why You Can’t Have Revolution Without the Masses (1988)
S. K. Mammaev – On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Korea (2022)
S. K. Mammaev – Revolution & Counter-Revolution in the USSR (2020-24) (Machine translated)
S. K. Mammaev – State & Counter-Revolution (2024) (Machine translated)
S. K. Mammaev – Cultural Revolution of the Future (2025)
S. Rakhmetov – On the Bourgeois Counter-Revolutions in Eastern Europe (2025)
Proletarian socialism:
K. H. Marx – The Civil War in France (1871)
V. I. Lenin – Anarchism & Socialism (1901)
V. I. Lenin – One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)
V. I. Lenin – Socialism & Religion (1905)
V. I. Lenin – The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat & the Peasantry (1905)
V. I. Lenin – Corrupting the Workers with Refined Nationalism (1914)
V. I. Lenin – The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War (1915)
V. I. Lenin – On the Slogan for a United States of Europe (1915)
V. I. Lenin – Socialism & War (1915)
V. I. Lenin – The “Disarmament” Slogan (1916)
V. I. Lenin – One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution (1917)
V. I. Lenin – The April Theses (1917)
V. I. Lenin – How to Organise Competition (1917)
V. I. Lenin – The Impending Catastrophe & How to Combat it (1927)
V. I. Lenin – The Soviets at Work (1918)
V. I. Lenin – “Left-Wing” Childishness (1918)
V. I. Lenin – Proletarian Revolution & the Renegade Kautsky (1918)
V. I. Lenin – Economics & Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1919)
V. I. Lenin – What is Soviet Power? (1919)
V. I. Lenin – On Proletarian Culture (1920)
V. I. Lenin – The New Economic Policy (1921)
V. I. Lenin – Once Again on the Trade Unions (1921)
V. I. Lenin – On Cooperation (1923)
V. I. Lenin – Women & Marxism (1870-1924)
I. V. Stalin – The Agrarian Question (1906)
I. V. Stalin – Anarchism or Socialism? (1907)
I. V. Stalin – Trotskyism or Leninism? (1924)
I. V. Stalin – Political Report of the Central Committee to the Fourteenth Congress (1925)
I. V. Stalin – Concerning Questions of Leninism (1926)
I. V. Stalin – A Year of Great Change (1929)
I. V. Stalin – The Right Deviation in the CPSU(B) (1929)
I. V. Stalin – Dizzy with Success (1930)
I. V. Stalin – Mastering Bolshevism (1937)
I. V. Stalin – On the Final Victory of Socialism in the USSR (1938)
G. M. Dimitrov – The Fascist Offensive & Unity of the Working-Class (1935)
P. Sloan – Soviet Democracy (1937)
A. S. Makarenko – Problems of Soviet School Education (1938)
M. I. Kalinin – On Communist Education (1926-45)
A. A. Zhdanov – On Literature, Music & Philosophy (1950)
L. V. Kantorovich – Mathematical Methods of Organising & Planning Production (1939)
L. V. Kantorovich – The Best Use of Economic Resources (1959)
V. S. Nemchinov – The Use of Mathematics in Economics (1964)
W. W. Leontief – Input-Output Economics (1966)
M. Zedong – Writings on Organisation & the Mass-Line (1929-63)
M. Zedong – Peaceful Coexistence: Two Diametrically Opposed Policies (1963)
Z. Chunqiao – On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie (1975)
E. H. Hoxha – On the Intellectuals (1958)
E. H. Hoxha – The Further Deepening of the Ideological & Cultural Revolution (1967)
E. H. Hoxha – Report on the Role & Tasks of the Democratic Front for the Complete Triumph of Socialism in Albania (1967)
E. H. Hoxha – The Fist of the Marxist-Leninist Communists Must Also Smash Left Adventurism (1968)
E. H. Hoxha – The Working-Class in the Revisionist Countries Must Take the Field & Re-Establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1968)
E. H. Hoxha – Theory & Practice of the Revolution (1977)
E. H. Hoxha – Proletarian Democracy is Genuine Democracy (1978)
E. H. Hoxha – Yugoslav “Self-Management”: A Capitalist Theory & Practice (1978)
E. H. Hoxha – On Literature & Art (1949-80)
E. H. Hoxha – Euro-Communism is Anti-Communism (1980)
E. H. Hoxha – The Khruschevites (1980)
E. H. Hoxha – The Titoites (1982)
E. H. Hoxha, L. Rexha – On the Youth (1978)
State University of Tirana – Problems of the Struggle for the Complete Emancipation of Women (1973)
N. Hoxha – Some Fundamental Questions of the Revolutionary Policy of the Party of Labour of Albania on the Development of the Class Struggle (1977)
Z. Xholi – The Socialist Cultural Revolution & the People’s National Culture (1977)
N. Dumani, Z. Pepa – The Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Thinking of the Party of Labour of Albania & Comrade Enver Hoxha on the Socialist Development & Transformation of Agriculture (1984)
P. Pot – Honing the Worldview of the Proletarian Class to its Sharpest & Mightiest (1976)
P. Pot – Long Live the 17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea! (1977)
K. Samphan – Cambodia’s Economy & Industrial Development (1979)
K. Il-Sung – Theses on the Socialist Rural Question in our Country (1964)
K Il-Sung – Socialist Medical Science is Preventative Medicine (1966)
K. Il-Sung – On the Questions of the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism & the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1967)
K. Il-Sung – On the Full Implementation of the Theses on Socialist Education (1977)
K. Il-Sung – We Should Work for the People (1980-89)
K. Il-Sung – Living Standards Must be Improved to Hasten the Complete Victory of Socialism (1991)
K. Il-Sung – On Self-Reliance & the Building of an Independent National Economy (1961-93)
A. B. Razlatsky – The Lower Phase of Communism (1987)
A. Cottrell, W. P. Cockshott – Calculation, Complexity & Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again (1993) [Keep in mind the authors’ confusion of proletarian state capitalism with socialism.]
K. Jong-Il – Abuses of Socialism are Intolerable (1993)
K. Un-Chong – Modern Revisionist Theories That Distort the Essence of Socialist Ownership (2018)
K. Jong-Un – On Giving Precedence to Science & Technology (2012-19)
K. Jong-Un – Let Trade Unions Become Vanguard Organisations in Opening Up & Era of Fresh Upsurge in Socialist Construction (2021)
K. Jong-Un – Let the Union of Agricultural Workers of Korea Become the Vanguard in the Struggle for Achieving our Style of Socialist Rural Development (2022)
K. Jong-Un – Officials Should be Communist Revolutionaries for Whom the Party’s Original Ideals & Spirit are Their Mental Attributes (2024)
R. Y. Nam – Several Important Issues Arising in Ensuring Producer Masses Fulfil Their Responsibilities & Roles as Masters (2018)
H. Chol – The New-Era Rural Revolution Programme & the Victory of Socialism (2025)
Revolutionary strategy:
K. H. Marx – Political Indifferentism (1873)
K. H. Marx, F. Engels – Strategy & Tactics of the Class Struggle (1879)
F. Engels – The Bakuninists at Work (1873)
V. I. Lenin – Revolutionary Adventurism (1902)
V. I. Lenin – Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)
V. I. Lenin – The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion (1909)
V. I. Lenin – The Proletariat & the War (1914)
V. I. Lenin – A Proletarian Militia (1917)
V. I. Lenin – “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
I. V. Stalin – The International Character of the October Revolution (1927)
I. V. Stalin – Against Vulgarising the Slogan of Self-Criticism (1928)
E. C. Guevara – Guerrilla Warfare (1961)
V. N. Giáp – People’s War, People’s Army (1961)
C. Marighella – Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969)
E. H. Hoxha – The Tragic Events in Chile: A Lesson for the Revolutionaries of the Whole World (1973)
W. B. Bland – On Terrorism (1975)
W. Eggers – World Proletarian Military Science & the Art of World-Revolutionary Class War (2005)
Communist self-development:
M. Zedong – A Study of Physical Education (1917)
J. A. Mella – Towards the Creation of Professional Revolutionaries (1926)
H. C. Minh – On Revolutionary Morality (1958)
E. H. Hoxha – Intensify the Ideological Struggle Against Alien Manifestations & Liberal Attitudes Towards Them (1973)