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Author

Karl Marx

3 books in the PoliReads canon. Below: where to start, what each argues, and the traditions they anchor.

About Karl Marx

German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary (1818–1883), the most influential critic of capitalism in the modern era. Capital, Volume I (1867) is his mature analysis of the capitalist mode of production: the commodity, the labour theory of value, surplus value, and the exploitation built into the wage relation. Marx argues that capitalism's drive to accumulate generates both extraordinary productivity and recurrent crisis, immiseration, and class conflict. Written over decades in the British Library after his exile from the Continent, it remains the foundational text of the socialist tradition and of the critique of political economy.

Books by Karl Marx