Marx and Das Kapital
A critique of capitalism becomes the founding text of movements that reshape the century.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Marx publishes the first volume in 1867, analysing capitalism as a historically specific system driven by the extraction of surplus value, and arguing it generates crises and its own opposition. Whatever one makes of the economics, the historical effect is not in doubt: by 1950 states claiming his authority governed a third of humanity, and his analysis of class, ideology and alienation is embedded in the social sciences.