Marxian economics Economy") in three volumes, of which only the first volume was published in his lifetime (1867); the others were published by Friedrich Engels from Marx's notes. One of Marx's early works, "Critique of Political Economy", was mostly incorporated into "Das Kapital", especially the beginning of volume 1. Marx's notes made in preparation for writing "Das Kapital" were published in 1939 under the title "Grundrisse." Marx's economics took as its starting point the work of the best-known economists of his day, the British classical economists Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. In "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), Smith argued
The Communist Manifesto of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself". The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or "proletariat", engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the "bourgeoisie". As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending