This year’s Rich List, published by the Sunday Times, shines a spotlight on the reality under capitalism: whilst millions of ordinary workers and youth face a future of austerity, the super-rich continue to see their wealth increase. Felix Lighter reports on the latest evidence for the “trickle up” economics under capitalism.

Thomas Piketty, a French economist and academic, has become an overnight sensation thanks to his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a bestseller that has sparked debate on all sides for its detailed analysis of inequality under capitalism, with elation and praise from the reformist left, and horror and fright from the free-market right. Adam Booth takes a look at the response to Piketty’s Capital.

Karl Marx’s Capital is an undeniable masterpiece of political economy. Marx’s magnum opus, however, remains a dense and difficult book to penetrate and absorb. To help guide readers through the pages of Capital we are publishing a series of articles that give a chapter by chapter analysis of this great Marxist classic. We begin with Volume One, Chapter One, in which Marx discusses the concept of the commodity and the question of value.