Karl Marx
Karl Marx's Capital dismantles the illusion that free markets create equitable wealth, revealing instead how capitalism masks a relentless system of exploitation driven by the extraction of surplus value from human labor.
In a capitalist society, the social relationships between people are disguised as material relationships between things, a phenomenon known as commodity fetishism that masks the human labor embedded in everyday products.
The exchange value of any commodity is fundamentally determined by the socially necessary average labor time required to produce it, rather than its mere usefulness or the subjective desires of consumers.
Profit originates not from the equal exchange of goods in the market, but from surplus value, which is the extra unpaid labor extracted from workers after they have produced enough to cover the cost of their own survival.