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Most accessible of the original Marxist works?

The Good:
--I read this early on, prior to reading Marx's monumental Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Engels did his job to prepare the reader.
--“Marxism�� just points to “go read Marx��; “scientific socialism�� is more descriptive, but also potentially dogmatic as a label. “Historical materialism��, framed as an analytical tool/lens, seems most useful for today...

1) What drives history/social change?:
a) Production (of our daily material needs, along with distribution/reproduction, studied in political economy). This consists of the interactions between the material conditions (which can be scrutinized by natural sciences) and the corresponding social relations (class struggle/political bargaining powers). Thus, the "historical materialism" of "Scientific Socialism".
b) ...as opposed to culture/ideology/philosophy ("idealism", where the focus is on ideas driving social change; this is "Utopian Socialism" with its wide variety of creative yet sometimes fanciful ideas. Engels considers Saint Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen).
--Thus, historical materialism: knowing by our being, instead of being by our knowing.
--Of course, there are constant interactions between material conditions and ideas, thus "dialectical materialism". But materialism provides a foundational base to start our investigation, whereas starting with idealism can leave us untethered to reality:
-ex. Graeber/Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
-ex. Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
--For a spectacular modern introduction, see the . The entire series is foundational so watch from the start, but on this particular topic see episodes:
"7. The Origins of Male Dominance and Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson get wrong"
"7.1 Material Conditions: Why You Can't Eliminate Sexism or Patriarchy by Changing Culture"
"8. Materialism vs. Idealism: How Social Change Happens"

2) The contradiction between:
a) increasing socialization of production (a growing working class to work together to sell to the general market i.e. for society, rather than local production for local consumption), vs.
b) continued (even decreasing in ratio, given global inequality) individual ownership of the "means of production" (machinery/technology/land etc. needed to produce our material needs).

3) The above sets up the class struggle between capitalists (owners of the "means of production") and wage labour (lacking the "means of production", thus dependent on selling our labour), where machinery/technology are the capitalists�� key weapon to replace human labour, creating the “industrial reserve army�� ("structural unemployment") to enforce work discipline/prevent alternatives.
...To unpack Marx's political economy (capitalism's value system, commodity fetishism, circuit of commodity production (M-C-M'), surplus value from exploitation of wage labour, etc.), see Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.

4) The further contradiction:
a) socialized production within firms (i.e. the work actually getting done is most effectively done by cooperation, i.e. "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need", despite the dictatorship of capitalist management/ownership)
b) while outside the firm is the "anarchy of the market" (ruthless competition, lack of planning/coordination/cooperation for social needs, where volatility/crises are a feature not a bug).
...If we extend this globally, we get the "kicking away the ladder" double standard, where:
a) Rich capitalist countries have large "States" to buffer the effects of the anarchy of the market, to build the required public infrastructure (physical and social such as R&D, higher education, etc.)
b) while rich capitalist countries force poor countries to remove their own State protection in the name of "free trade"/"free market"/"Structural Adjustment"/"economic development", a continuation of colonial pillaging:
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
--On "the market", we should also consider Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (see the intro in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails): capitalism is not just the market for real commodities which long pre-dates capitalism. Capitalism features 3 peculiar markets (labour/land/money) with "fictitious commodities", i.e. humans/nature/purchasing power are not "produced" just to buy/sell in markets.
...Indeed, setting up and perpetuating such peculiar markets requires:
i) significant violence, thus the foundational role of "the State" for capitalism.
ii) constant social dislocation from volatility/crises; finance capital can not traverse the global in nanoseconds, whereas human labour struggle to keep up. So much of our social life (neighborhood, workplace) becomes more transitory, where communities become strangers ("social dislocation").

5) The rising obsolescence of capitalists, who resort more and more to:
i) dividends (passive income from ownership of shares; "passive" in the sense of no work... remember, passive income from ownership is separate from the work of management, which is paid via wage income).
ii) gambling on the stock market (short-term speculation rather than long-term investments); after all, if the game is to maximize profits, why waste all the time/risk on long-term investments when you can pillage now and use your growing wealth to bribe ("lobby") for bailouts when the crisis erupts?

6) As mentioned above regarding the violence needed by capitalism: the role of the State under capitalism in handling the anarchy of the market. Thus, once the capitalist contradictions above are resolved via socialism (resolving the class struggle and planning for social needs), the State does not need to be abolished; it will wither away.
...Of course this is a massive topic; Lenin only scratches the surface in The State and Revolution.

The Missing:
1) More practice with synthesis/"dialectics":
--To avoid dogma and excessive sectarian debates, we should see Engels and Marx as human beings of their context testing out powerful tools/lenses of social analysis, which involves making mistakes and learning from them.
...Thus, "Scientific Socialism" sounds rather dogmatic; it's convenient to forget that proper science requires publishing all your negative results, especially in "narcissism of small difference" debates between and even within the plethora of Leftist labels. The narcissism tendency is understandable given the Left's role of deconstructive critiques (opening Pandora's box), but at some point we have to be constructive which requires synthesis and diplomacy.
--So, for my part, I still find time to dive into idealism for their creativity/social imagination; one of my early influences is anarchist/anthropologist David Graeber. These days, I start with a historical materialist foundation and then let idealists like Graeber flip everything upside down to see what emerges.
...And of course materialism can be done in too rigid a manner; ex. the application of natural science to parts of economics requires careful unpacking, as the pro-capitalist market fundamentalists have demonstrated with their (mal)practice...

2) Critiquing Orthodox Marxism:
--Perhaps most importantly, we should recognize that Marxists (which itself is a massive label with numerous internal debates) do not have a monopoly on historical materialism/materialist socialism; I refer back to the materialist anarchism (which indeed is very influenced by Marx/Engels) in "What is Politics?", in particular these episodes critiquing Marxist-Leninism:
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--Every time I read Marx/Engels/orthodox Marxists, I cannot help thinking (with the ungodly power of hindsight) about their optimism towards "developed" capitalists nations (Britain/Germany... later US), and how capitalists responded with:
i) Inebriating developed nations with social democracy, i.e. capitalist reformism (fueled by imperialism), where Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism only scratches the surface.
ii) For any socialism that slips through the cracks, smashing them with perpetual war. While resisting such aggressive violence, how much creation of violent hierarchies can socialists tolerate? If we bring in morality, the cycle of violence is the greatest evil perpetrated by capitalist imperialism:
-see "siege socialism" in Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump