Karl Marx In 1867, the first volume of "Das Kapital" was published, a work which analysed the capitalist process of production. Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value, which had been influenced by Thomas Hodgskin. Marx acknowledged Hodgskin's "admirable work" "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital" at more than one point in "Capital." Indeed, Marx quoted Hodgskin as recognising the alienation of labour that occurred under modern capitalist production. No longer was there any "natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part having no value or utility of itself, there is
Capitalism to the 1660s; reference to "the unemployed" as a group was first made in 1782, and reference to "unemployment" as a general condition is first attested in 1888. The first recorded discussion of the reserve army of labor is in a manuscript written by Karl Marx: Marx introduced the concept in chapter 25 of the first volume of "Das Kapital", which states: His argument is that as capitalism develops, the organic composition of capital will increase, which means that the mass of constant capital grows faster than the mass of variable capital. Fewer workers can produce all that is necessary