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
Das Kapital Volume II" (1885) and "Capital, Volume III" (1894), which friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels edited and published as the work of Marx. The first translated publication of "Das Kapital" was in Imperial Russia in March 1872. It was the first foreign publication and the English edition appeared in 1887. Despite Tsarist censorship proscribing "the harmful doctrines of socialism and communism", the Russian censors considered "Capital" as a "strictly scientific work" of political economy the content of which did not apply to monarchic Russia, where "capitalist exploitation" had never occurred and was officially dismissed, given "that very few people in Russia