Karl Marx is a man famous the world over for his ideas and advancement of the communist movement in the western world. His work Das Kapital, submitted in three volumes, is a scathing indictment of the capitalist system and the injustice inherent within its sphere of production.
In Das Kapital, Marx states that the underlying issue with the capitalist system is its insistence to treat the proletariat as a commodity used in barter for the goods they create, while the time taken to make certain commodities acts alone as a marker of its value. The ability to make a product in a certain time frame (manpower) and the value accorded it is often not equivalent and produces as a consequence a scenario ripe with the capability for exploitation. Therefore, creating a knock-on effect leading to a greater desire for profit, and thus to heavier industrialisation and mechanisation, which results in an increased reserve army for labour (unemployed) which generates greater unrest between the classes.

Marx in Das Kapital also engages in dialogue with philosophers of the past, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx challenges their arguments in order to discredit the inherent bias, inconsistencies and falsehoods of the capitalist mindset. He hopes that by highlighting the flaws in their individual arguments he will highlight at one and the same time the fleeting nature of capitalism as an economic model with something to offer the future.