To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this: I don’t paint the figures of the capitalist and landlord in rosy colors—far from it. But individual persons play a role here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, or the bearers of particular class relations and interests. My approach treats the development of society’s economic formation as part of natural history, as that type of process, and no other approach does less to make the individual responsible for conditions that he remains a creature of socially, however much he manages to transcend them subjectively.

— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Preface to the 1867 Edition (Paul Reitter translation)