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
Value product only to the net output of "capitalist" production, not to the valuation of "all" production in a society, part of which may of course not be commercial production at all. The concept is formulated more precisely when Marx considers the reproduction and distribution of the national income (see e.g. his manuscript called "Results of the Immediate [or Direct] Process of Production", available in English in the Pelican edition of "Das Kapital"), and also online; and the last chapters of "Das Kapital" Volume 3). Marx wrote this in 1864, i.e. about 70 years or so before the first comprehensive Gross National