Das Kapital

Das Kapital (1867) is a political treatise by Karl Marx. The book is an attack on capitalism, which Marx held responsible for the poor working conditions of his contemporaries, and a manifesto for revolution. The central injustice of capitalism, according to Marx, was that employers made their profits by paying labourers less than the true value of their labour.

Marx died before he could finish the second and third volumes, but a version of the entire work was published posthumously, edited by his friend Friedrich Engels. The work included a three-volume appendix, The Theory of Surplus Value. The first English edition of Das Kapital, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, also edited by Engels, was published in 1887.