
His most notable works, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter of which was co-authored by his collaborator Friedrich Engels), have since become two of history’s most important political and economic works.

As he famously put it, ‘Philosophers have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it.’ĭescribed as one of the most influential figures in human history, Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist who wrote extensively on the benefits of socialism and the flaws of free-market capitalism. Marx’s critique of the capitalist system is rife with big themes: his theory of ‘surplus value’, his discussion of the exploitation of the working class, and his forecast of class conflict on a grand scale. Readers from the nineteenth century to the present have been captivated by the unmistakable power and urgency of this classic of world literature. Volume Two, which is contained in this eBook, was published in 1884, and was based on notes Marx left, but written by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). This was the only volume published during Marx’s lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867 and is available as a separate Wordsworth eBook. Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation.


Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883).
