Here's a list of some good leftist books I've come across over the years. Click on the titles for the PDFs. It's a somewhat arbitrary list, but I tried to keep it confined to fairly easy-to-read books, not overly theoretical or abstruse ones that might leave the beginning reader bewildered. I've been unable to find PDFs of certain excellent works, unfortunately. You can also consult the Marxists.org website, a treasure trove. Or check out the extraordinary footnotes to Chomsky's Understanding Power, which have informative excerpts from hundreds of books.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution

Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism

Chris Bambery, The Second World War: A Marxist History

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order

Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

Walden Bello, The Food Wars

Alexander Berkman, ABC of Anarchism

Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: "The People," The Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life

Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Jeremy Brecher, Strike!

Aaron Brenner et al., eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s

Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey

Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy

Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy

Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Anarchism

Michael Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich

Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph McCartin, Labor in America: A History

Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance

John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Amy Goodman and David Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing America's War Profiteers, the Media that Love Them and the Crackdown on Our Rights

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business

Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice

Daniel Guerin, ed., No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism

Robin Hahnel, The ABCs of Political Economy: A Modern Approach

Chris Harman, A People's History of the World

Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After

Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, and the Crises of Capitalism

Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Edward Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Jean Jaures, A Socialist History of the French Revolution

Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916

Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role

Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793

Jesse Lemisch, On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason

Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity while Staying Clear of the Law

Fred Magdoff and Michael Yates, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know

Errico Malatesta, At The Cafe: Conversations on Anarchism

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism

Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory

Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War

Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader

Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power

David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance

Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics

Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society

David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles

Ralph Nader, The Ralph Nader Reader

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism

David Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance

George Novack, Empiricism and Its Evolution: A Marxist View

Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future

David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965

Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History

G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World

Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States

Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States

Howard Zinn, The Politics of History

Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, eds., Voices of a People's History of the United States