"Wage Labour and Capital" (German: Lohnarbeit und Kapital) was an 1847 lecture by the critic of political economy and philosopher Karl Marx, first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849.
Previously, Marx had been studying political economy; evidence of this being his unpublished Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (eventually published in the early 1930s after his death) and The Poverty of Philosophy in France in 1847.
In 1883, a Russian translation was published as a book and included an excerpt from Capital volume 1 in the appendix, chapter 23 on Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.
[4] An 1885 pamphlet based on the newspaper articles was published in Hottingen-Zürich without Marx's knowledge and with a brief introduction by Friedrich Engels.
[6] The lecture and newspaper articles were meant to be a "popular" presentation of the economic relations under capitalism and the material basis for class struggle.