Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The book was an extensive treatise on the political economy, in which Marx declared that the driving force behind capitalism was the exploitation and alienation of labor. . . . Although Marx died before subsequent volumes of Das Kapital were published in 1883 and 1885, the book can still be seen as the scientific culmination of the arguments he proposed in his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, and written with Friedrich Engels." [Furtado: 1001 Days]