/lit/ - Literature

>>11617778
I'm >>11616924 and I have to say that this is really just a list of what I've read or am reading at the moment, and what I'm liking. I didn't really take OP's question of "best" to heart, I just put down what I liked. I didn't want to say they're essential, though.

Heinrich definitely belongs somewhere, but I wanted to get across that some understanding of value theory after Marx would be good, especially since the appendix on value form is confusing as shit (at least to me) and in fact the whole critique seems structured around it, so Rubin was on there too (also because of his explanation of commodity fetishism). I think you could go quite far reading these before or after Capital, but maybe that's too radical of a suggestion, so I didn't put anything about that.

Lordon's book is (I'm 1/2 way through) not a bad read in terms of what you need to know, he goes into a quick overview of Spinoza (useful because I never read him) and directly addresses some of the big justifications like "people enjoy their jobs, what's wrong with that?" etc. Maybe it becomes more advanced later and I'd be out of my league.

As for Badiou, I know very little about him or his theory, but he introduces a crucial insight in the first few pages on the idea of treating Communism as a hypothesis, and provides good discussion on the actual successes of Paris and Shanghai. I think it's better for context rather than any explanation of theory, and I'm pretty argumentative so I have pulled out his explanations a few times, I thought it might be useful there.

But yeah, my list was a pot of simply things I like that aren't so tough to read. Maybe even Marcuse wasn't a great choice there. I was half-tempted to throw in Critique of Pure Tolerance but with the negative reputation I decided against that too. I haven't read anything on Althusser, Veblen, Lacan/Freud, Lenin, Stalin any serious Hegel etc. so maybe I'm not qualified in the first place. I'm the sort of person who browses the Verso "Radical Thinkers" series and just selects something and never finishes it. I rarely have the opportunity to talk about things like this anyway.