**’A groundbreaking work of economic analysis. It is also a literary masterpice’ Francis Wheen, *Guardian*** 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. 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’. Translated by BEN FOWKES with an Introduction by ERNEST MANDEL