workingclasshistory:

On this day, 14 September 1867, volume one of Karl Marx’s Magnum Opus, Capital, first appeared in Germany. Subsequently published in all the world’s major languages and studied widely by workers, it was often referred to as “The Bible of the working class”.
Today, it is still unsurpassed as an analysis and critique of capitalism. While parts of it are quite dense and complex, notably the first three chapters, much of it is very readable. Some Capital study guides, for example, suggest skipping the first three chapters if readers find them excessively complex, and returning to them later. Some suggest beginning with chapters 26-28, where Marx emotively recounts the violent theft of common lands in Britain which laid the foundations of the capitalist system, by forcing the dispossessed to work for a wage.
For example, in 18th-century Scotland: “the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns… From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus [the Duchess of Sutherland] appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family… The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family.”
You can get it free online here: https://libcom.org/library/capital-karl-marx https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2081726142012525/?type=3