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
Underconsumption Mehring in his biography of Karl Marx, p. 404 of the 1935 Covici, Friede edition, tr. Edward Fitzgerald]. Marx argued that the primary source of capitalist crisis was not located in the realm of consumption, but rather, in production. In general, as Anwar Shaikh has argued, production creates the basis for consumption, because it puts purchasing power into the hands of workers and fellow capitalists. To produce anything requires the individual capitalist to buy machines (capital goods) and employ workers. In Volume III, Part III of Das Kapital, Marx presents a theory of crisis which is solidly grounded in the