Diese auch als Pariser Manuskripte bekannten Notizen sind bis in die 1920er-Jahre unentdeckt geblieben. Sie skizzieren bereits - wenn auch in philosophischem Gewand - Marx' Einsichten zur Kritik der Nationalokonomie, die er spater im Kapital mit gescharftem okonomischen Blick ausarbeitete. Die Worte des jungen Marx' vermogen gerade ihren heutigen Leser tief zu erschuttern (oder peinlich zu beruhren), fuhren sie doch uber einen Vergleich mit der aktuellen Wirtschaftsordnung vor Augen, was das Proletariat nicht erreicht hat, wie sehr es sich global in dieselbe Misere verstrickt findet. Zugleich...

The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 and is written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is without doubt one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. The text was commissioned by the Communist League to explain the League's aims and ideals. It analyses the problems of capitalism and the class system throughout history. It is a philosophical text, explaining the authors' theories about the nature of society and politics. However, there are also some predictions about how capitalism would morph into socialism and then Communism.

Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation.

Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867. This was the only volume published during Marx's lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume...

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution... Workers of the World, unite " --The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto was first published in London, by two young men in their late twenties, in 1848. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognised as one of the most important political texts ever written. Maintaining that the history of all societies is a history of class struggle, the manifesto proclaims that communism is the only route to equality, and is a call to action aimed at the proletariat.
It...

The first volume of a political treatise that changed the world

One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis and create fresh insights. Arguing that capitalism would cause an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of...

The second volume of a political treatise that changed the world

A vital cornerstone to Marx's overall theory of economics, the second volume of Capital considers in depth the nature of commodity and the market-place bourgeois society. This immensely powerful work argues that prosperity in a capitalist society inevitably holds within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of...

The third volume of a political treatise that changed the world

Unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in 1894, the third volume of Capital strives to combine the theories and concepts of the two previous volumes in order to prove conclusively that capitalism is inherently unworkable as a permanent system for society. Here, Marx controversially asserts that--regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists--any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a...

Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory. A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, it both develops the arguments outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the themes and theses that were to dominate his great later work Capital. Here, for the first time, Marx set out his own version of Hegel's dialectics and developed his mature views on labour, surplus value and profit, offering many fresh insights into alienation, automation and the dangers of capitalist...

A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today

Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.

This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism,...