Karl Marx

These include his greatest work, Das Kapital (volume 1, 1867; volumes 2 and 3, edited by Engels and published posthumously in 1885 and 1894, respectively; translated 1907-1909), a systematic and historical analysis of the economy of the capitalist system of society, in which he developed the theory that the capitalist class exploits the working class by appropriating the "surplus value- produced by the working class
             See Capital.
             Marx's next work, The Civil War in France (1871), analyzed the experience of the short-lived revolutionary government established in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (see Commune of Paris, 1871). In this work Marx interpreted the formation and existence of the Commune as a historical confirmation of his theory that it is necessary for workers to seize political power by armed insurrection and then to destroy the capitalist state; he hailed the Commune as "the finally discovered political form under which the economic emancipation of labor could take place."" This theory was explicitly projected in Critique of the Gotha Program (1875; translated 1922): "Between the capitalist and communist systems of society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This corresponds to a political transition period, whose state can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."" During his residence in England Marx also contributed articles on contemporary political and social events to newspapers in Europe and the United States. He was a correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, from 1852 to 1861, and in 1857 and 1858 he wrote a number of articles for the New American Cyclopedia, edited jointly by the American writer and editor Charles Anderson Dana and American journalist and literary critic George Ripley.
             IV Later Years .
             print section .
             When the Communist League dissolved in 1852, Marx continued to correspond with hundreds of revolutionists with the aim of forming another revolutionary organization.