The culmination of his life's work, the text contains Marx's analysis of capitalism, to which he sought to apply his theory of historical materialism "to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society", following from classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

[1] Marx's theory of historical materialism posits that the economic structure of society – in particular, the forces and relations of production – are the crucial factors in shaping its nature.

Marx argues that capitalism is a form of economic organization which has arisen and developed in a specific historical context, and which contains tendencies and contradictions which will inevitably lead to its decline and collapse.

Marx considered Das Kapital a scientific work, and in it critiqued both the system and bourgeois political economists who argue that it is efficient and stable.

In Das Kapital (1867), Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value.

Marx wrote in a letter sent to Engels on 30 April 1868: "In Book 1 [...] we content ourselves with the assumption that if in the self-expansion process £100 becomes £110, the latter will find already in existence in the market the elements into which it will change once more.

[citation needed] This intertwining, conceived as a movement of commodities and of money, enabled Marx to work out at least the essential elements, if not the definitive form of a coherent theory of the trade cycle, based upon the inevitability of periodic disequilibrium between supply and demand under the capitalist mode of production (Ernest Mandel, Intro to Volume II of Capital, 1978).

[5] The third volume is highly controversial, peculiarly the tenth chapter, as some economists feel like Marx contradicted himself with the Marxian fundamental value theory while trying to tackle the transformation problem.

The argument is an analysis of the classical economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Franklin, drawing on the dialectical method that G. W. F. Hegel developed in Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit.

[9][10] Moreover, the description of machinery under capitalist relations of production as "self-acting automata" derives from Aristotle's speculations about inanimate instruments capable of obeying commands as the condition for the abolition of slavery.

[17] Marx revised, rewrote, and monitored a French translation, published in 44 installments from August 1872 through May 1875, and then as a single work with a printing of ten thousand copies, the largest up until then.

The definitive critical edition of Marx's works, known as MEGA II (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe),[18] includes Das Kapital in German (only the first volume is in French) and shows all the versions and alterations made to the text as well as a very extensive apparatus of footnotes and cross-references.

[22] The English translation of volume 1 by Samuel Moore and Eleanor Marx's partner Edward Aveling, overseen by Engels, was published in 1887 as Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production by Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, & Co.[23] This was reissued in the 1970s by Progress Publishers in Moscow, while a more recent English translation was made by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (the Penguin edition).

In 2017, the historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote in the Books and Arts section of the scientific journal Nature:[25] What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale.

In doing so, he inaugurated a debate about how best to reform or transform politics and social relations, which has gone on ever since.Positive reception also cited the soundness of the methodology used in producing the book, which is called immanent critique.

[28][29][failed verification] The existing scholarly consensus tends towards the opposite view that Marx believed that only relative immiseration would occur, that is, a fall in labor's share of output.