Adam Smith homely observations, making them feel comfortable all along." Classical economists presented competing theories of those of Smith, termed the "labour theory of value". Later Marxian economics descending from classical economics also use Smith's labour theories, in part. The first volume of Karl Marx's major work, "Das Kapital", was published in German in 1867. In it, Marx focused on the labour theory of value and what he considered to be the exploitation of labour by capital. The labour theory of value held that the value of a thing was determined by the labour that went into its production. This contrasts with
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