A little off topic, but what do you think of the four-part book series ('Empire', 'Multitude', 'Commonwealth', and 'Assembly') by post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri?
Of these I've only read Empire, and that only once. I have devoted myself to reading everything Marx himself wrote, so my knowledge of some of the tertiary literature is lacking. I'm currently undertaking a study of notions of sovereignty, reading Carl Schmitt in the light of Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, so I am fine with reading it, but I really think all you absolutely need is a line-by-line reading of Marx (I wish Lenin had read, for example, "Conspectus On Bakunin's Statism And Anarchy").
Actually read " Conspectus on Bakunin's State and Anarchy". That's exactly the point - that the Slavic nations had yet to pass through capitalist development and so could not do so.
Schoolboy stupidity! A radical social revolution depends on certain definite historical conditions of economic development as its precondition. It is also only possible where with capitalist production the industrial proletariat occupies at least an important position among the mass of the people. And if it is to have any chance of victory, it must be able to do immediately as much for the peasants as the French bourgeoisie, mutatis mutandis, did in its revolution for the French peasants of that time. A fine idea, that the rule of labour involves the subjugation of land labour! But here Mr Bakunin's innermost thoughts emerge. He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more! He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass this level [...] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution.
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