History of economic thought died, Engels completed the second volume of "Das Kapital" from his notes. Marx wrote his magnum opus "Das Kapital" (1867) at the British Museum's library in London. Karl Marx begins with the concept of commodities. Before capitalism, says Marx, production was based on slavery – in ancient Rome for example – then serfdom in the feudal societies of medieval Europe. The current mode of labor exchange has produced an erratic and unstable situation allowing the conditions for revolution. People buy and sell their labor as people buy and sell goods and services. People themselves have become disposable commodities. As Marx
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