Page "Karl Marx" Paragraph 30

Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers ' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data.

By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, and foreign trade and the world market ; this work did not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse.

In 1859 Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work.

In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

This work is often seen as the fourth book of Capital and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought.

In 1867 the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production.

Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value ( influenced by Thomas Hodgskin ) and his conception of surplus value and exploitation, which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.

Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.