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
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