The literature on the issues touched in this book is immense. What I have tried to do in this essay is to recommend books and articles that made important contributions, and others that provide good overviews of debates, thus enabling readers to survey the field while also getting a good bibliographical source. The guide is mainly intended for study groups and the intrepid reader wishing to delve deeper, but it will not be anywhere near sufficient for readers with academic ambitions.
A terrific introduction to how capitalism originated, and what is at stake in understanding it, is Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2002). For introductions to how the capitalist economy works, a great place to start is the text written by Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt, Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book has been through several editions, and readers will benefit from reading some of the earlier editions, too, since the book has changed its emphases as wider debates have evolved. For more advanced surveys, see Paul Sweezy’s classic The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (Monthly Review, 1942), and more recently, Deepankar Basu, The Logic of Capital: An Introduction to Marxian Economic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which covers all the major debates since Sweezy’s book and also provides some novel solutions to long-standing theoretical dilemmas. For the truly ambitious, there is Anwar Shaikh’s epoch-making book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016).
To understand the principles behind the organization of work in capitalism, there is no substitute for Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review, 1974), which is proving to be just as relevant in the twenty-first century. Braverman’s book not only spawned a massive debate, but also a new field of study, “labor process studies,” the main results of which are surveyed in Paul Thompson, The Nature of Work: An Introduction to the Labour Process, 2nd ed. (Palgrave, 1989).
On the subject of the state, the most important work was written in the 1960s and 1970s. I would not recommend wading directly into it, since most of it is unnecessarily abstruse and often very pretentious. Two great introductions that can help the reader prepare for the endeavor are Clyde Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), and Paul Wetherly, Marxism and the State: An Analytical Approach (Palgrave, 2005). The work of Ralph Miliband set off the current generation of state theory, with The State in Capitalist Society (Basic Books, 1969). The other protagonist was Nicos Poulantzas, whose Political Power and Social Classes (Verso, 1973) was very influential and set off a debate between himself and Miliband, which is covered in the books by Barrow and Wetherly. These early debates were followed by some important shorter works in the 1970s, of which Fred Block’s interventions were particularly important. See in particular his essays “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” and “Beyond Relative Autonomy,” both of which are in his collection, Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Post-industrialism (Temple University Press, 1987). More ambitious readers might be interested in Claus Offe’s Contradictions of the Welfare State (MIT Press, 1984), which contains several very provocative essays, and Ian Gough’s The Political Economy of the Welfare State (Macmillan, 1979).
To understand the basic connection between class structure and class conflict, there is no better place to start than the work of Erik Olin Wright. I would recommend “Foundations of a Neo-Marxist Class Analysis,” comprising chapter 1 in Erik Olin Wright, ed., Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the earlier “Biography of a Concept: Contradictory Class Locations,” chapter 2 in Classes (Verso, 1985). The connection between class structure and class struggle is classically examined in Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, “The Two Logics of Collective Action,” in Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (MIT Press, 1985), pp. 170–220. I have also tried to present the connection between class structure and the vicissitudes of class conflict in my own book The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Harvard University Press, 2022). These books and articles explain how workers can come together to collectively defend their interests. Then there is the more specific issue of how these unions, when they have organized, are constrained by the profit-maximizing strategies of firms. A brilliant, though somewhat demanding, examination of this is Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition (Princeton University Press, 1993). These rather abstract analyses ought to be read in conjunction with some labor history, so readers can relate the general principles to real events. For the United States, a great place to start is Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (W. W. Norton, 1998). Readers should also have a look at Jeremy Brecher’s lively book Strike! (South End Press, 1997) for how and when workers came together; and Daniel J. Clark’s Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018) provides very good detail on how the wage gains of the postwar years could not resolve class antagonisms. A forgotten gem on the micro logic of union organizing is Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). Friedlander’s book is especially rewarding if read in conjunction with the more abstract arguments in Offe and Wiesenthal’s “The Two Logics …” and The Class Matrix.
The literature on planning and socialism can be very heavy going. An important overview of the Soviet experience, which is then used to draw analytical conclusions, is Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (Unwin Hyman, 1983). Nove was a sympathetic critic of full planning and his book elicited a response from Ernest Mandel, “In Defence of Socialist Planning,” New Left Review, Sept.–Oct., 1986, pp. 5–37, with Nove responding in “Markets and Socialism,” New Left Review, Jan.–Feb. 1987, pp. 98–104. The 1990s witnessed the promulgation of two important new models of market socialism. One was David Schweickart’s Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which promotes a version of workers’ control with a limited but non-trivial role for markets. That book is mainly written for philosophers and economists. A more accessible version of the argument, better for study groups and the lay reader, is his After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). I would recommend starting with the second and utilizing the first when the need arises for deeper analysis. The other model developed in the 1990s was John Roemer’s A Future for Socialism (Harvard University Press, 1994), which is also short but requires some background in economics and contemporary political economy. A recent and very accessible debate is Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright, Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy (Verso, 2016), with Hahnel arguing for a planned economy and Wright for a less ambitious market socialism. For readers just coming to the subject, I would recommend starting with Nove, then move to the Hahnel-Wright debate, and then the more advanced ones.