We should mention that in 1847, in conjunction with his life-long friend, Frederic Engels, he put forward the celebrated “Communist Manifesto,” which subsequently served as the basis of the International Association.
After 1849 he went to Paris again, 275 where he continued but a short time, and then left France for London, remaining there with brief intermissions till his death, which took place in the spring of 1883.
The principal part he played in political action during his sojourn in England was the organisation of the International Association.
The most important among his works, besides Das Kapital, are Die Heilige Familie, written in conjunction with Frederic Engels; the Misére de la Philosophie the answer to Proudhon mentioned in our last chapter; 18 Brumaire, an anti-Napoleonic pamphlet; and Zur Kritik der Politischer OEconomie, which laid the foundation for his great work, Das Kapital.
The importance of this latter work makes it necessary for us to indicate the contents of the principal chapters, so as to form a brief sketch of the Socialist economy.191
Part I. deals with Commodities and 233 Money. The first chapter defines a commodity. A commodity, according to Marx, is briefly expressed as a socially useful product of labour which stands in relation of exchange to other useful products of labour. The value of such a commodity is primarily the amount of necessary social labour contained in it: that is to say, the average amount of labour carried through a certain portion of time necessary to its production in a given state of society. The student must take special note that when Marx uses the word value by itself it is always employed in this sense, that is, to put it in a shorter form, as embodied average human labour. The term use-value explains itself. Exchange-value means the actual relation of one commodity to another