An original signed copy of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” is going under the auction hammer and could be sold for as much as $170,000.
The book is dated 18 Sept. 1867 and is inscribed to his friend Johann Georg Eccarius, a German tailor and fellow member of the League of The Just, which later morphed into the Communist League.
Marx and Eccarius didn’t remain friends and Eccarius was later accused of being a police informant, the Guardian reports. Simon Roberts of Bonhams Auction House described the copy as a “stunningly important copy of a book that changed the world.”
“Both Marx and Eccarius were major figures in the troubled birth of the communist movement and enjoyed a close personal relationship for many years until personal jealousy and political differences drove them apart,” Roberts added.
The first volume of the communist treatise is famous for laying out Marx’s theory of capitalist and political economy. Marx’s works inspired waves of tyrannical regimes from the Soviet Union to the Workers’ Party of North Korea. (RELATED: The Most Assigned Economist In American Colleges Is Karl Marx)
By the end of the 20th century, most experiments in socialism and communism in Africa, Europe, and Asia had collapsed, leaving hundreds of millions dead and even more subsisting in poverty.
Few countries in the world today adhere to Marxist doctrine, with the closest examples being Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, who all rank as some of the world’s poorest countries. (RELATED: Flashback To All The People Who Praised Chavez’s Socialism)
Bonhams estimates the book will sell for $120,000-170,000.
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