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
Capitalism and of the wealth owned by the bourgeoisie. This interpretation emphasises that capital ownership, predicated on command over labor, is a social relation: the growth of capital implies the growth of the working class (a "law of accumulation"). In the first volume of "Das Kapital", Marx had illustrated this idea with reference to Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonisation: In the third volume of "Das Kapital", Marx refers to the "fetishism of capital" reaching its highest point with interest-bearing capital because now capital seems to grow of its own accord without anybody doing anything: Wage labour refers to the sale