Das Kapital
by Karl Marx
Amid the humbling of some of the world's most illustrious banks, the unravelling of the global financial system and a long, cold winter looming for countless millions still clinging to the vacuous promises of capitalism, Das Kapital's recent comeback on assorted German best-seller charts is not greatly surprising. It's also selling rather more briskly (in translation) in other credit-crunched parts of the capitalist world, with the grimly inevitable exception of Hong Kong.
This revived interest in one of the most influential books of all time has seen a surge in tourist numbers - over 40,000 thus far this year - to Karl Marx's birthplace in the rather dull German town of Trier. And it was here, in the wine-producing Mosel Valley, that Marx's ideas for Das Kapital first took shape. Incensed in his youth by the abject poverty and apparent powerlessness of Trier's un-unionised vineyard workers, he made the quest for a fairer society his life's work, and this yearning found its fullest expression in Das Kapital.
Marx penned this monumental work in London near the end of his life, in collaboration with his ideological comrade Friedrich Engels. And Das Kapital was the sensational follow-up to the two theorists' Communist Manifesto of 1848.
As a voluminous treatise on politics, economics and society, and a lucid expose of both the self-evident failure and in-built obsolescence of capitalism, Das Kapital makes for thought-provoking reading. But it does demand the reader's concentration, as its reputation for being opaque in places is well-earned.