Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy and humanities teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People’s World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. Thomas is currently a Chief Editorial Counselor at Midwestern Marx and an editor for the Journal of American Socialist Studies. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Thomas Riggins’ Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism provides commentary and social, scientific, and philosophical contextualization to classical texts in the Marxist canon such as Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Duhring and V. I. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, State and Revolution, and Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. For the beginner to readings in the Marxist tradition, this book will help break down and explain with a plethora of rich and contextual examples even the most complex of philosophical, scientific, and economic concepts in Marxism. The seasoned reader in the Marxist tradition will find that this text provides the contextualization and critiques necessary to sustain the theoretical relevance of Marxism into the 21st century.
As more and more people are looking for alternatives to the existing order, Thomas Riggins’ Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism provides a lucid and necessary account of the Marxist ideas which have haunted capitalism for the last nearly two centuries.
