Size: 22x16cm./8.6×6.2inch.
Weight: 2785gr./98oz.
Year: 1922
Pages book 1: 739
Pages book 2: 500
Pages book 3: 448
Pages book 4: 422
 
Das Kapital made in Germany, 1922, Hamburg, Otto Meissners Publishing Company.
Das Kapital is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, critique of political economy and politics by Karl Marx. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book published before 1950 in the social sciences.
In Das Kapital, Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value. The owner of the means of production is able to claim the right to this surplus value because they are legally protected by the ruling regime through property rights and the legally established distribution of shares which are by law distributed only to company owners and their board members. The historical section shows how these rights were acquired in the first place chiefly through plunder and conquest and the activity of the merchant and “middle-man”.