Marx's Das Kapital

In September 1867 the German philosopher and journalist Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in Hamburg, after years of research in the British Museum Reading Room in London, where he lived in exile. The book argues that capitalism is a historically specific system in which workers sell their labor power to owners of capital, and that profit comes from surplus value, the difference between what workers produce and what they are paid. It describes how competition, accumulation and technological change drive the system's growth, concentration of wealth and recurring crises.¹²⁴

Marx built on the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, taking their labor theory of value and turning it into a critique, and on his own earlier work with Friedrich Engels, including The Communist Manifesto of 1848. The Industrial Revolution had given him a vast body of evidence, including Engels's account of Manchester and the British parliamentary factory inspectors' reports, which he used extensively. The first printing was only about 1,000 copies and sold slowly; a Russian translation appeared in 1872. Engels edited and published the second and third volumes after Marx died in 1883.¹³⁴

The book's influence grew when socialist parties across Europe, such as the German Social Democrats, adopted Marx's analysis. In the twentieth century it became the founding text for Lenin's Bolsheviks, whose revolution (1917) created the Soviet Union, and for Mao's China, though what those states practiced differed greatly from what Marx wrote. Economists still disagree about its labor theory of value, while historians and sociologists continue to draw on its analysis of class, commodity fetishism and capital accumulation. It is one of the most influential and contested books of the modern era.¹⁵