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Marxism: Essential Writings
Providing easy and direct access to the writings of major Marxist thinkers--including Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Marcuse, Guevara, and Cabral--this anthology provides a comprehensive view of both classical and contemporary Marxism. Accompanying each excerpt is an
introduction which puts the writer in historical and political context, and recommendations for further reading, making this book an indispensable first-hand guide to essential Marxism.
introduction which puts the writer in historical and political context, and recommendations for further reading, making this book an indispensable first-hand guide to essential Marxism.
428 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 1988
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About the author
David McLellan
51 books37 followersDavid McLellan (born 10 February 1940) is an English scholar of Karl Marx and Marxism. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College, Oxford University.
McLellan is currently visiting Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. He was previously Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent.
McLellan has also been Visiting Professor at the State University of New York, Guest Fellow in Politics at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, and has lectured widely in North America and Europe.
McLellan is currently visiting Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. He was previously Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent.
McLellan has also been Visiting Professor at the State University of New York, Guest Fellow in Politics at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, and has lectured widely in North America and Europe.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 17, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads, #Overrated Books To Roast:
Nothing against David McLellan’s erudition—he’s a serious scholar, has read more Marxist marginalia than most of us have read WhatsApp forwards—but Marxism: Essential Writings is the kind of anthology that proves the old saying: the editor always thinks he’s the real author. McLellan strolls through Marxism’s sprawling junkyard like a self-anointed curator arranging rusted metal scraps into a “modern art” exhibit, insisting the visitor admire his taste and subtlety.
The whole enterprise reeks of a man who loves Marx, but only the Marx who can be made to sit quietly on a library shelf instead of storming the Bastille.
The title is misleading from the start: Essential Writings. Essential to whom? The problem with anthologizing Marxism is that the canon itself is a hydra-headed monster, a carnival of contradictions and feuds. Lukács is gnawing one head, Althusser is strangling another in the back alley, Mao is scrawling half-legible slogans on a factory wall, while Habermas sits in the corner trying to politely explain communicative rationality over tea.
To claim “essentials” in this mess is like promising a tourist the “true” India in a two-day Delhi package tour: you’ll get the Taj Mahal, a sanitized curry, maybe a peek at a rickshaw, and you’ll go home thinking you’ve seen it all—without the chaos, filth, or soul.
McLellan’s version of Marxism feels exactly like that: bread and water reduced to an “authentic taste of world cuisine.”
Yes, Marx and Engels appear, of course—they’re unavoidable, the heavyweights. But even they are boxed into tidy compartments, framed like exhibits in a museum where explanatory placards do half the talking. McLellan wants you to see Marx not as the volcanic pamphleteer who inspired barricades, but as a rational thinker who can be presented like a policy wonk at Davos.
He practically whispers from the margins: “See, Marxism is tidy, rational, not at all messy or blood-soaked. Please, donors, keep funding our presses.” It’s the academic urge to domesticate revolution, to convert class war into course content.
The issue is never with the raw texts themselves—Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, even Trotsky, they roar on their own. The problem is McLellan’s framing, the editorial hand so visible it feels like a leash. He is that kind of anthologist who thinks putting Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks next to Kautsky’s bureaucratic drivel will create “balance.”
Balance is overrated when half your subjects were apologists for terror and the other half bureaucrats who thought dialectics could be filed under “Pending, see office hours.”
What happens instead is intellectual taxidermy: you’re shown stuffed revolutionaries arranged in glass cases, catalogued as “The Radical,” “The Bureaucrat,” “The Thinker.” You’re invited to observe, not to fight.
And then comes the editorial cowardice—an avoidance of judgment so stark it feels dishonest. Stalin makes a cameo, but carefully sanitized, as if the man who turned dialectics into a factory of purges was just another “thinker” in the tradition.
Mao gets shuffled in under the heading of “historical context,” as though the Great Leap Forward were merely an interesting footnote in the global seminar. It’s like hosting a dinner party with a serial killer and introducing him to the guests as “a complex man with some controversial hobbies.”
By pretending neutrality, McLellan flattens the stakes.
Marxism becomes not a world-shaking force that built gulags and toppled empires, but a polite sequence of debates that can be safely digested between coffee breaks.
What this amounts to is pedagogical cowardice. Instead of embracing the mess—the contradictions, the utopian delirium, the blood—McLellan trims Marxism into neat debates, sterilizing the chaos into manageable units. Rosa Luxemburg, who thundered against both capitalist exploitation and reformist timidity, gets reduced to a supplement next to some boilerplate Engels. Trotsky, whose prose drips with revolutionary venom, comes across like a slightly more exciting policy analyst.
By the time you reach the end, the reader is left thinking Marxism was never about storming the heavens but about contributing essays to The Guardian’s opinion page.
And yet, this book remains widely assigned in classrooms.
Why?
Because professors are busy, lazy, or both. They love outsourcing messy reading lists to anthologies that promise order. Why send students into the swamp of Marxist texts, where they’ll drown in German polemics, Russian manifestos, and Italian notebook fragments, when McLellan has already paved a hedge maze with neat signboards?
It’s all here: Marxism boiled down to Reader’s Digest, with none of the dirt under your fingernails. Students are not asked to wrestle with contradictions, only to walk along the curator’s path, nodding dutifully.
This outsourcing creates a peculiar effect. The anthology markets itself as “essential,” but what it delivers is ideological decaf. It’s just strong enough to give undergraduates the thrill of saying they’ve “read Marx,” but not strong enough to leave a stain when they later apply to law school, business school, or some NGO fellowship.
It’s a revolutionary buzz without the hangover, a dose of radical chic packaged safely for consumption in neoliberal academia. McLellan knows his audience: students who want to sound dangerous in seminars, professors who want to seem rigorous without drowning in primary texts, and publishers who want a product that can be reprinted for decades.
In this way, Marxism: Essential Writings is less an anthology than a branding exercise. It trims the tree of Marxist thought not by hacking away the poisonous branches—Stalinism, Maoism, cultish authoritarianisms—but by clipping safe twigs: a bit of Engels, a dash of Lenin, a sprinkling of postwar theorists like seasoning on a bland stew. The result is neither essential nor illuminating. It’s the “greatest hits” album compiled by someone who thinks music should only be played as background noise. It’s as if someone made a punk rock anthology but left out the concerts, the riots, and the broken guitars, replacing them with sanitized lyrics printed on glossy paper.
And yet, what makes this whole project so ironic is that Marx himself railed against such sanitization. He detested anthologizers and popularizers who stripped theory of its historical teeth. To compress Marxism into something polite and palatable is to betray its very marrow.
But McLellan cannot help himself—he wants Marx to pass for respectable, a thinker suitable for university curricula, a kind of Victorian gentleman with a beard rather than the prophet of a social upheaval. In the end, his Essential Writings transforms Marxism into vegan buffet: sanitized, neatly labeled, safe for digestion, and leaving you oddly hungry afterward.
Verdict? McLellan’s anthology is not so much essential as it is antiseptic. It’s revolutionary thought shrink-wrapped for safe handling, an intellectual theme park where the barricades are made of cardboard and the guillotine is for display only.
It may be useful for skimming, for checking off reading lists, for arming oneself with just enough quotes to sound clever in a seminar. But if you’re looking for Marxism in its raw, unruly, contradictory essence—the kind that smells of sweat, ink, and blood—look elsewhere. McLellan’s version will give you the slogans without the shouting, the ideas without the fury, the canon without the revolution.
You can give this book a pass, unless of course you are a student and need to pass exams. When it comes to exams, we are all Marksists!!
Nothing against David McLellan’s erudition—he’s a serious scholar, has read more Marxist marginalia than most of us have read WhatsApp forwards—but Marxism: Essential Writings is the kind of anthology that proves the old saying: the editor always thinks he’s the real author. McLellan strolls through Marxism’s sprawling junkyard like a self-anointed curator arranging rusted metal scraps into a “modern art” exhibit, insisting the visitor admire his taste and subtlety.
The whole enterprise reeks of a man who loves Marx, but only the Marx who can be made to sit quietly on a library shelf instead of storming the Bastille.
The title is misleading from the start: Essential Writings. Essential to whom? The problem with anthologizing Marxism is that the canon itself is a hydra-headed monster, a carnival of contradictions and feuds. Lukács is gnawing one head, Althusser is strangling another in the back alley, Mao is scrawling half-legible slogans on a factory wall, while Habermas sits in the corner trying to politely explain communicative rationality over tea.
To claim “essentials” in this mess is like promising a tourist the “true” India in a two-day Delhi package tour: you’ll get the Taj Mahal, a sanitized curry, maybe a peek at a rickshaw, and you’ll go home thinking you’ve seen it all—without the chaos, filth, or soul.
McLellan’s version of Marxism feels exactly like that: bread and water reduced to an “authentic taste of world cuisine.”
Yes, Marx and Engels appear, of course—they’re unavoidable, the heavyweights. But even they are boxed into tidy compartments, framed like exhibits in a museum where explanatory placards do half the talking. McLellan wants you to see Marx not as the volcanic pamphleteer who inspired barricades, but as a rational thinker who can be presented like a policy wonk at Davos.
He practically whispers from the margins: “See, Marxism is tidy, rational, not at all messy or blood-soaked. Please, donors, keep funding our presses.” It’s the academic urge to domesticate revolution, to convert class war into course content.
The issue is never with the raw texts themselves—Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, even Trotsky, they roar on their own. The problem is McLellan’s framing, the editorial hand so visible it feels like a leash. He is that kind of anthologist who thinks putting Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks next to Kautsky’s bureaucratic drivel will create “balance.”
Balance is overrated when half your subjects were apologists for terror and the other half bureaucrats who thought dialectics could be filed under “Pending, see office hours.”
What happens instead is intellectual taxidermy: you’re shown stuffed revolutionaries arranged in glass cases, catalogued as “The Radical,” “The Bureaucrat,” “The Thinker.” You’re invited to observe, not to fight.
And then comes the editorial cowardice—an avoidance of judgment so stark it feels dishonest. Stalin makes a cameo, but carefully sanitized, as if the man who turned dialectics into a factory of purges was just another “thinker” in the tradition.
Mao gets shuffled in under the heading of “historical context,” as though the Great Leap Forward were merely an interesting footnote in the global seminar. It’s like hosting a dinner party with a serial killer and introducing him to the guests as “a complex man with some controversial hobbies.”
By pretending neutrality, McLellan flattens the stakes.
Marxism becomes not a world-shaking force that built gulags and toppled empires, but a polite sequence of debates that can be safely digested between coffee breaks.
What this amounts to is pedagogical cowardice. Instead of embracing the mess—the contradictions, the utopian delirium, the blood—McLellan trims Marxism into neat debates, sterilizing the chaos into manageable units. Rosa Luxemburg, who thundered against both capitalist exploitation and reformist timidity, gets reduced to a supplement next to some boilerplate Engels. Trotsky, whose prose drips with revolutionary venom, comes across like a slightly more exciting policy analyst.
By the time you reach the end, the reader is left thinking Marxism was never about storming the heavens but about contributing essays to The Guardian’s opinion page.
And yet, this book remains widely assigned in classrooms.
Why?
Because professors are busy, lazy, or both. They love outsourcing messy reading lists to anthologies that promise order. Why send students into the swamp of Marxist texts, where they’ll drown in German polemics, Russian manifestos, and Italian notebook fragments, when McLellan has already paved a hedge maze with neat signboards?
It’s all here: Marxism boiled down to Reader’s Digest, with none of the dirt under your fingernails. Students are not asked to wrestle with contradictions, only to walk along the curator’s path, nodding dutifully.
This outsourcing creates a peculiar effect. The anthology markets itself as “essential,” but what it delivers is ideological decaf. It’s just strong enough to give undergraduates the thrill of saying they’ve “read Marx,” but not strong enough to leave a stain when they later apply to law school, business school, or some NGO fellowship.
It’s a revolutionary buzz without the hangover, a dose of radical chic packaged safely for consumption in neoliberal academia. McLellan knows his audience: students who want to sound dangerous in seminars, professors who want to seem rigorous without drowning in primary texts, and publishers who want a product that can be reprinted for decades.
In this way, Marxism: Essential Writings is less an anthology than a branding exercise. It trims the tree of Marxist thought not by hacking away the poisonous branches—Stalinism, Maoism, cultish authoritarianisms—but by clipping safe twigs: a bit of Engels, a dash of Lenin, a sprinkling of postwar theorists like seasoning on a bland stew. The result is neither essential nor illuminating. It’s the “greatest hits” album compiled by someone who thinks music should only be played as background noise. It’s as if someone made a punk rock anthology but left out the concerts, the riots, and the broken guitars, replacing them with sanitized lyrics printed on glossy paper.
And yet, what makes this whole project so ironic is that Marx himself railed against such sanitization. He detested anthologizers and popularizers who stripped theory of its historical teeth. To compress Marxism into something polite and palatable is to betray its very marrow.
But McLellan cannot help himself—he wants Marx to pass for respectable, a thinker suitable for university curricula, a kind of Victorian gentleman with a beard rather than the prophet of a social upheaval. In the end, his Essential Writings transforms Marxism into vegan buffet: sanitized, neatly labeled, safe for digestion, and leaving you oddly hungry afterward.
Verdict? McLellan’s anthology is not so much essential as it is antiseptic. It’s revolutionary thought shrink-wrapped for safe handling, an intellectual theme park where the barricades are made of cardboard and the guillotine is for display only.
It may be useful for skimming, for checking off reading lists, for arming oneself with just enough quotes to sound clever in a seminar. But if you’re looking for Marxism in its raw, unruly, contradictory essence—the kind that smells of sweat, ink, and blood—look elsewhere. McLellan’s version will give you the slogans without the shouting, the ideas without the fury, the canon without the revolution.
You can give this book a pass, unless of course you are a student and need to pass exams. When it comes to exams, we are all Marksists!!
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September 20, 2012this is a cool book
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews