Socialism: Utopian and Scientific of thousands of copies. Throughout the decade of the 1860s, Karl Marx, close personal friend and political associate of Friedrich Engels, dedicated himself to the study of economics, culminating in the publication of the first volume of "Das Kapital" in 1867. Marx's lengthy and ponderous volume was extremely difficult for the average to penetrate, however, leading Engels to suggest to Marx in a letter of September 16, 1868 that a short popularized version of "Das Kapital" for a working class audience was urgently needed. "If it is not written, some Moses or other will come along and do it and
Capitalism to the 1660s; reference to "the unemployed" as a group was first made in 1782, and reference to "unemployment" as a general condition is first attested in 1888. The first recorded discussion of the reserve army of labor is in a manuscript written by Karl Marx: Marx introduced the concept in chapter 25 of the first volume of "Das Kapital", which states: His argument is that as capitalism develops, the organic composition of capital will increase, which means that the mass of constant capital grows faster than the mass of variable capital. Fewer workers can produce all that is necessary