Capital: All Volumes & The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx [Audiobook]

One of the most notorious and influential works of modern times, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. It rapidly acquired readership throughout the world when published, to become a work described by Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels as 'the Bible of the working class'.

Volume 1: 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. 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 means of production. Capital rapidly acquired readership throughout the world, to become a work described by Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels as 'the Bible of the working class'.

Volume 2: The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history. This volume also contains the vital discussion of commodity - the cornerstone of Marx's theories.

Volume 3: 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 Das Kapital strove 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 asserts that - regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists - any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a series of worsening, explosive crises leading finally to complete collapse. But he also offers an inspirational and compelling prediction: that the end of capitalism will culminate, ultimately, in the birth of a far greater form of society.

The Communist Manifesto contains the seeds of Marx's more comprehensive philosophy, which continues to inspire influential economic, political, social, and literary theories. But the Manifesto is most valuable as a historical document, one that led to the greatest political upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the establishment of the Communist governments that until recently ruled half the globe.