Textbooks For Marxian Political Economy

Suppose you find Marx's Capital intimidating. You could start with textbooks. I confine myself to a selection in English.

I start with Soviet textbooks. I suppose the Dictionary is not really a textbook. But Apparently, it was a standard reference work. Here are some Soviet textbooks:

• N. Buharin & E. Preobrazhensky. 1922. The ABC of Communism. The Communist Party of Great Britain.
• I. Lapidus & K. Ostrovityanov. 1929. An Outline of Political Economy: Political Economy and Soviet Economics. Martin Lawrence.
• Institute of Economics of the Academy of sciences of the USSR. 1954, 1957. Political Economy. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
• I. Frolov (ed.) 1967, 1984. Dictionary of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Here are some textbooks:

• Paul M. Sweezy. 1942. The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy. Dennis Dobson Ltd.
• Meghnad Desai. 1979. Marxian Economics. Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Robert Paul Wolff. 1984. Understanding Marx: A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital. Princeton University Press.
• Duncan K. Foley. 1986. Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory. Harvard Univ ersity Press.
• Bob Milward. 2000. Marxian Political Economy: Theory, History, and Contemporary Relevance. Palgrave.
• David F. Ruccio. 2022. Marxian Economics: An Introduction. Polity.
• Deepankar Basu. 2023. The Logic of Capital: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory. Cambridge University Press.

I suppose I could expand the above list with reading guides, from David Harvey or Michael Heinrich, for example. The boundary between a textbook and an interpretation is unclear, where by the latter I mean books intendeded to argue with the literature. And I could also have introductory books that are definitely not textbooks, like Eagleton's Why Marx was Right. Even so, I expect this to only be a starting list.

Different authors have different takes. If you want to start with an introduction, I suggest you only pick one.