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
The Communist Manifesto were Spanish editions in Latin America. This uneven geographical spread in the "Manifesto"s popularity reflected the development of socialist movements in a particular region as well as the popularity of Marxist variety of socialism there. There was not always a strong correlation between a social-democratic party's strength and the "Manifesto"s popularity in that country. For instance, the German SPD printed only a few thousand copies of the "Communist Manifesto" every year, but a few hundred thousand copies of the "Erfurt Programme". Further, the mass-based social-democratic parties of the Second International did not require their rank and file to be well-versed