Livre d'Or

I tend to agree that the small works; not just the Manifesto are a better start if your goal is to get some grasp of the whats and whys of Marxist politics. The trouble with Kapital is that it's immensely long; 2500 pages, and not very political. It's essentially an attempt to formulate a comprehensive economic theory on a premise (the Labour Theory of Value) that doesn't hold up very well to more recent developments. 2500 pages of technical exposition on a somewhat flawed premise is pretty hard going. Even if one wanted to understand enough of the theory to grasp what critics of both right and left have said there are much easier ways than reading the source text!