Das Kapital sciences published before 1950. In "Das Kapital" (1867), Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value. The owner of the means of production is able to claim the right to this surplus value because he or she is legally protected by the ruling regime through property rights and the legally established distribution of shares which are by law only to be distributed to company owners and their board members. The historical section shows how these rights were acquired in the first place chiefly through
Relations of production Marx would have acknowledged that, but he would presumably have argued that ultimately, the dissynchrony or distortion between production and distribution would cause a crisis and then a readjustment of distribution to the real structure of production relations. Relations of production Relations of production (German: "Produktionsverhältnisse") is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism and in "Das Kapital". It is first explicitly used in Marx's published book "The Poverty of Philosophy", although Marx and Engels had already defined the term in "The German Ideology". Some social relations are voluntary and freely