Marx - Das Kapital

The purpose of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) was a scientific foundation for the politics of the modern labour movement; the analyses were meant "to bring a science, by criticism, to the point where it can be dialectically represented" and so "reveal the law of motion of modern society" to describe how the capitalist mode of production was the precursor of the socialist mode of production. The argument is a critique 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 The Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit; other intellectual influences upon Capital were the French socialists Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, Sismondi and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; and the Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle.

At university, Marx wrote a dissertation comparing the philosophy of nature in the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus (ca. 460–370 BC) and Epicurus (341–270 BC). The logical architecture of Capital: Critique of Political Economy is derived in part from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, including the fundamental distinction between use value and exchange value, the "syllogisms" (C-M-C' and M-C-M') for simple commodity circulation, and the circulation of value as capital. 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. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s research of the available politico-economic literature required twelve years, usually in the British Library, London.