[4] Michael Heinrich published An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital in 2004 while working as a lecturer in economics at HTW Berlin.

[5] He was the managing editor of PROKLA: Journal for Critical Social Science [de] until 2014 and was a contributor to the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA; lit.

[7] The foundations for the book were laid in his 1991[note 1] PhD thesis The Science of Value (German: Die Wissenschaft vom Wert)[7] which, along with the Introduction, was published as part of a wider discourse in Germany on the monetary character of Marx's theory of value.

'New Reading of Marx'), was based on the earlier work of Western Marxists like Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser and was initiated by West German scholars Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt during the 1960s and 1970s.

[10][12] In the book, Heinrich attributes the development of "worldview Marxism" to the contributions of Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky following Marx's death that were later incorporated into Marxism–Leninism.

[17] In the book, Heinrich argues that Capital was a fragmented and unfinished work that therefore included concepts that needed to be redesigned to be used for concrete economic analysis.

[18][19][20] Heinrich's Introduction is organised around various themes in Marx's work, and draws on his unfinished manuscripts the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value in addition to its reading of Capital.

[5] The book also incorporates an analysis of the differences between the various revisions made by Marx to Capital,[11][22] as well as a wide range of historical documents.