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
Influences on Karl Marx was "much more important and copious than Darwin". Although there is no mention of Darwin in "The Communist Manifesto" (published eleven years prior to "The Origin of Species"), Marx includes two explicit references to Darwin and evolution in the second edition of "Das Kapital", in two footnotes where he relates Darwin's theory to his opinion about production and technology development. In the Volume I, Chapter 14: "The Detail Labourer and his implements", Section 2, Marx referred to Darwin's "Origin of Species" as an "epoch-making work" while in Chapter 15, Section I took on the comparison of organs of plants to