Karl Marx, a German philosopher, economist, and life-long revolutionary is perhaps the most influential political writer of the nineteenth century.  Born on 5 May, 1818, in Trier, Marx earned his Ph.D. at Jena in 1841.  Rather than enter the academy, Marx first undertook a career in journalism, ultimately joining forces with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels to publish works of criticism.  While Marx wrote on politics and philosophy, he also undertook a thorough study of political economy, including the works of English classical liberal economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, as well as French physiocrats, such as Francois Quesnay.  This research, on which Marx endeavored for more than a decade, produced Marx’s magnum opus: the first volume of Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. (also known by its German name, Das Kapital).  Volume I, first published 14 September 1867, is the first of three planned treatises that would make up the complete work. Unfortunately, it was the only piece of the full work to be published during Marx's life. It focuses on the method or mode of production of goods in capitalist society and how that mode shapes capitalist society.

Marx begins with an exploration of the commodity as an a priori foundation of production and exchange, and reviews thoroughly the precepts of classical political economy, including the nature of value and money. Marx defends and expands upon the labor theory of value as advanced by Smith and Ricardo. From this starting point, Marx explores the concept of “surplus value” (the value of a finished commodity minus the cost of production) and argues that the seemingly “pure” economic relations of capitalist production allow the owning class to benefit from investment in the productive process and the extraction of surplus value from workers. Through an exploration of the interests of workers and owners in general, as classes of society, Marx concludes that the economic relations between classes, of social production and reproduction, are in fact the source of nearly all social life under capitalism.