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Primary sourceBook1847 (lectures); published 1849; this edition 1891

Wage Labour and Capital

Karl Marx · 1847 (lectures); published 1849; this edition 1891

Marx's accessible 1847 lectures on wages and exploitation, published as newspaper articles in 1849 and republished by Engels in 1891.

Marx wrote and delivered these lectures himself to explain his economic theory to workers.

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Title page of the German 1891 edition of Wage Labour and Capital by Karl Marx. Blackletter text reads 'Lohnarbeit und Kapital, Von Karl Marx, Separat-Abdruck aus der Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung vom Jahre 1849, Mit einer Einleitung von Friedrich Engels, Preis 20 Pfg., Berlin 1891'. Beige paper background.
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1891 German edition. Title page.

About this source

What it is

This text records lectures Karl Marx gave in Brussels in 1847, first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849. It was later republished as a booklet, with a widely used edition edited by Friedrich Engels in 1891.

Why it matters

The lectures explain wages, capital and exploitation in simple terms for working-class audiences, and contain early versions of ideas Marx developed fully in Das Kapital twenty years later. Engels's 1891 edition made an important change, clarifying that workers sell their labour power, not their labour itself, showing how Marx's ideas were refined after his death.

Look closer

  • Why might Marx have wanted to explain these ideas in plain language to workers rather than only in scholarly books?
  • What does it mean that Engels changed the wording decades later — whose voice are we reading?
  • How does the title page itself (price, publisher) tell you who this pamphlet was meant for?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Karl Marx on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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