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
Karl Marx in film Marx's book "Das Kapital" was never realised, although in more recent years the German film director and author Alexander Kluge completed a lengthy homage to Eisenstein's unrealised film entitled "News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital". In the 1960s French new wave directors, notably Jean-Luc Godard, used Marxist themes in their work, including in the films "Week End", "La Chinoise" and "Tout va bien". In the 1970s the Serbian director Dušan Makavejev made films which were critical and/or satirical of Marx and Marxist ideology. The Young Karl Marx by the Haitian director Raoul Peck released in 2017