Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher, economist, and political theorist who, along with Friedrich Engels, co-authored “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) and later developed the theory of historical materialism and communism. Marx’s ideas had a profound impact on political and economic thought, and his work laid the foundation for various socialist and communist movements.
Some key aspects of Marx’s thought include:
Historical Materialism: Marx believed that the course of history is determined by the material conditions of society, particularly the mode of production. He argued that changes in economic systems and the means of production drive social change.
Class Struggle: Marx viewed history as a series of class struggles between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (working class). He predicted that this struggle would ultimately lead to a proletarian revolution.
Communism: Marx envisioned a classless and stateless society where the means of production were collectively owned by the people. In this communist society, there would be no private property, and wealth and resources would be distributed according to the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Critique of Capitalism: Marx analyzed capitalism, arguing that it was inherently exploitative. He described how capitalists profit by extracting surplus value from the labor of the working class, leading to alienation and social inequality.
Das Kapital: Marx’s major work, “Das Kapital,” is a critique of political economy. In it, he delves into the nature of capital, labor, and commodities, providing an in-depth analysis of the capitalist system.
Marx’s ideas have been interpreted and applied in various ways, leading to different schools of Marxist thought. While his theories have been influential in shaping political and economic debates, they have also been the subject of criticism and adaptation over the years.
Karl Marx Quotes
1. “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
— Karl Marx
2. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”
— Karl Marx
3. “Democracy is the road to socialism.”
— Karl Marx
4. “Follow your own path, no matter what people say.”
— Karl Marx
5. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
— Karl Marx
6. “Religion is the opium of the masses.”
— Karl Marx
7. “In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.”
— Karl Marx
8. “Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.”
— Karl Marx
9. “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
— Karl Marx
10. “I am nothing but I must be everything.”
— Karl Marx
11. “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.”
— Karl Marx
12. “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.”
— Karl Marx
13. “Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.”
— Karl Marx
14. “Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.”
— Karl Marx
15. “Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities.”
— Karl Marx
16. “Ideas do not exist separately from language.”
— Karl Marx
17. “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
— Karl Marx
18. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
— Karl Marx
19. “Communism begins where atheism begins…”
— Karl Marx
20. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
— Karl Marx
21. “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.”
— Karl Marx
22. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
— Karl Marx
23. “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
— Karl Marx
24. “There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.”
— Karl Marx
25. “To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
— Karl Marx
26. “In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.”
— Karl Marx
27. “The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.”
— Karl Marx
28. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
— Karl Marx
29. “I hate money and Jews.”
— Karl Marx
30. “Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.”
— Karl Marx
31. “The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.”
— Karl Marx
32. “Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.”
— Karl Marx
33. “The criticism of Religion is the beginning of all criticism.”
— Karl Marx
34. “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.”
— Karl Marx
35. “Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.”
— Karl Marx
36. “The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.”
— Karl Marx
37. “Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.”
— Karl Marx
38. “There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.”
— Karl Marx
39. “Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.”
— Karl Marx
40. “Music is the mirror of reality.”
— Karl Marx
41. “The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.”
— Karl Marx
42. “Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.”
— Karl Marx
43. “Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.”
— Karl Marx
44. “The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.”
— Karl Marx
45. “Go on, get out – last words are for fools who haven’t said enough. To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity.”
— Karl Marx
46. “The religious world is but a reflex of the real world.”
— Karl Marx
47. “To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.”
— Karl Marx
48. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
— Karl Marx
49. “Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.”
— Karl Marx
50. “The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons.”
— Karl Marx
51. “Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.”
— Karl Marx
52. “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
— Karl Marx
53. “I am a machine condemned to devour books.”
— Karl Marx
54. “Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”
— Karl Marx
55. “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”
— Karl Marx
56. “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
— Karl Marx
57. “They don’t know it, but they are doing it.”
— Karl Marx
58. “No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.”
— Karl Marx
59. “In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.”
— Karl Marx
60. “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
— Karl Marx
61. “All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”
— Karl Marx
62. “We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.”
— Karl Marx
63. “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.”
— Karl Marx
64. “The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value .”
— Karl Marx
65. “The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.”
— Karl Marx
66. “The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.”
— Karl Marx
67. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.”
— Karl Marx
68. “All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.”
— Karl Marx
69. “Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I’ll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”
— Karl Marx
70. “Last words are for those fools who believe they have not yet said enough…”
— Karl Marx
71. “The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman.”
— Karl Marx
72. “Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.”
— Karl Marx
73. “Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
— Karl Marx
74. “Take away a nation’s heritage and they are more easily persuaded.”
— Karl Marx
75. “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
— Karl Marx
76. “Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses.”
— Karl Marx
77. “The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.”
— Karl Marx
78. “The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.”
— Karl Marx
79. “Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.”
— Karl Marx
80. “The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.”
— Karl Marx
81. “Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value.”
— Karl Marx
82. “The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.”
— Karl Marx
83. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
— Karl Marx
84. “Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.”
— Karl Marx
85. “The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.”
— Karl Marx
86. “Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.”
— Karl Marx
87. “Democracy is the road to socialism, and writing for the Reader Weekly is the road to being an unemployed 32-year-old whose relatives still put money in his birthday cards.”
— Karl Marx
88. “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.”
— Karl Marx
89. “Moments are the elements of profit.”
— Karl Marx
90. “The capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property: in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.”
— Karl Marx
91. “The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.”
— Karl Marx
92. “Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.”
— Karl Marx
93. “All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.”
— Karl Marx
94. “In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.”
— Karl Marx
95. “The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.”
— Karl Marx
96. “Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.”
— Karl Marx
97. “The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.”
— Karl Marx
98. “It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.”
— Karl Marx
99. “The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy, world domination, is a fixed star. About Russia.”
— Karl Marx
100. “We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.”
— Karl Marx
101. “The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.”
— Karl Marx
102. “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.”
— Karl Marx
103. “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it, it would have been much better.”
— Karl Marx
104. “Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital, in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit .”
— Karl Marx
105. “The masses are the asses.”
— Karl Marx
106. “I do not like money, money is the reason we fight.”
— Karl Marx
107. “Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.”
— Karl Marx
108. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”
— Karl Marx
109. “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
— Karl Marx
110. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”
— Karl Marx
111. “The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
— Karl Marx
112. “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”
— Karl Marx
113. “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”
— Karl Marx
114. “Misery motivates, not utopia.”
— Karl Marx
115. “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”
— Karl Marx
116. “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
— Karl Marx
117. “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”
— Karl Marx
118. “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”
— Karl Marx
119. “Darwin has interested us in the history of nature’s technology.”
— Karl Marx
120. “The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.”
— Karl Marx
121. “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”
— Karl Marx
122. “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.”
— Karl Marx
123. “The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”
— Karl Marx
124. “Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.”
— Karl Marx
125. “But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply themselves to everything.”
— Karl Marx
126. “A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.”
— Karl Marx
127. “Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.”
— Karl Marx
128. “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
— Karl Marx
129. “Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.”
— Karl Marx
130. “Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
— Karl Marx
131. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it.”
— Karl Marx
132. “Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”
— Karl Marx
133. “Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.”
— Karl Marx
134. “Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.”
— Karl Marx
135. “The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.”
— Karl Marx
136. “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”
— Karl Marx
137. “Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.”
— Karl Marx
138. “The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.”
— Karl Marx
139. “Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.”
— Karl Marx
140. “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.”
— Karl Marx
141. “There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.”
— Karl Marx
142. “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”
— Karl Marx
143. “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer.”
— Karl Marx
144. “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?”
— Karl Marx
145. “In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”
— Karl Marx
146. “The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.”
— Karl Marx
147. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
— Karl Marx
148. “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.”
— Karl Marx
149. “When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.”
— Karl Marx
150. “Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.”
— Karl Marx
151. “The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.”
— Karl Marx
152. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
— Karl Marx
153. “Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.”
— Karl Marx
154. “A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains.”
— Karl Marx
155. “An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.”
— Karl Marx
156. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
— Karl Marx
157. “As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.”
— Karl Marx
158. “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.”
— Karl Marx
159. “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”
— Karl Marx
160. “Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.”
— Karl Marx
161. “The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
— Karl Marx
162. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.”
— Karl Marx
163. “Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”
— Karl Marx
164. “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.”
— Karl Marx
165. “Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.”
— Karl Marx
166. “The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man’s chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.”
— Karl Marx
167. “Be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.”
— Karl Marx
168. “In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.”
— Karl Marx
169. “Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.”
— Karl Marx
170. “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.”
— Karl Marx
171. “Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.”
— Karl Marx
172. “All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.”
— Karl Marx
173. “There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.”
— Karl Marx
174. “History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.”
— Karl Marx
175. “When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.”
— Karl Marx
176. “The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom.”
— Karl Marx
177. “The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.”
— Karl Marx
178. “An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”
— Karl Marx
179. “Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.”
— Karl Marx
180. “Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.”
— Karl Marx
181. “Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”
— Karl Marx
182. “The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.”
— Karl Marx
183. “History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.”
— Karl Marx
184. “The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.”
— Karl Marx
185. “Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.”
— Karl Marx
186. “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!”
— Karl Marx
187. “Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”
— Karl Marx
188. “Change the economic base and you will change human beings.”
— Karl Marx
189. “Without the presence of class warfare, trade unions would be hard put to justfy their existence.”
— Karl Marx
190. “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”
— Karl Marx
191. “In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”
— Karl Marx
192. “For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.”
— Karl Marx
193. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The.”
— Karl Marx
194. “It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
— Karl Marx
195. “All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.”
— Karl Marx
196. “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
— Karl Marx
197. “Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.”
— Karl Marx
198. “We cannot tell by looking at the diamond that it is a commodity. When it serves as a use-value, asthetic or mechanical, on the breast of a harlot, or in the hand of a glasscutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity.”
— Karl Marx
199. “Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.”
— Karl Marx
200. “The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.”
— Karl Marx
201. “Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.”
— Karl Marx
202. “The heart of a man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.”
— Karl Marx
203. “Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.”
— Karl Marx
204. “Advances in science help to delegitimize the rule of kings and the power of the Church.”
— Karl Marx
205. “Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.”
— Karl Marx
206. “Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.”
— Karl Marx
207. “One capitalist always kills many.”
— Karl Marx
208. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
— Karl Marx
209. “The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.”
— Karl Marx
210. “The way people get their living determines their social outlook.”
— Karl Marx
211. “A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.”
— Karl Marx
212. “The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.”
— Karl Marx
213. “In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”
— Karl Marx
214. “The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry.”
— Karl Marx
215. “The wealthy man is the man whois much, not the one who has much.”
— Karl Marx
216. “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille.”
— Karl Marx
217. “The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”
— Karl Marx
218. “In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”
— Karl Marx
219. “The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.”
— Karl Marx
220. “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”
— Karl Marx
221. “The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”
— Karl Marx
222. “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
— Karl Marx
223. “The unity is brought about by force .”
— Karl Marx
224. “Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man’s animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.”
— Karl Marx
225. “The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.”
— Karl Marx
226. “The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.”
— Karl Marx
227. “All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.”
— Karl Marx
228. “Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.”
— Karl Marx
229. “The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.”
— Karl Marx
230. “In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.”
— Karl Marx
231. “In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.”
— Karl Marx
232. “It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.”
— Karl Marx
233. “But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in union. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.”
— Karl Marx
234. “While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.”
— Karl Marx
235. “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”
— Karl Marx
236. “Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.”
— Karl Marx
237. “The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy .”
— Karl Marx
238. “Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.”
— Karl Marx
239. “Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.”
— Karl Marx
240. “And as for the Jews, who since the emancipation of their sect have everywhere put themselves, at least in the person of their eminent representatives, at the head of the counter-revolution – what awaits them?”
— Karl Marx
241. “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”
— Karl Marx
242. “We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”
— Karl Marx
243. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.”
— Karl Marx
244. “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”
— Karl Marx
245. “I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.”
— Karl Marx
246. “The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization.”
— Karl Marx
247. “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.”
— Karl Marx
248. “The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”
— Karl Marx
249. “Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.”
— Karl Marx
250. “It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.”
— Karl Marx
251. “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.”
— Karl Marx
252. “No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind.”
— Karl Marx
253. “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
— Karl Marx
254. “The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”
— Karl Marx
255. “Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.”
— Karl Marx
256. “The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.”
— Karl Marx
257. “The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity .”
— Karl Marx
258. “But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”
— Karl Marx
259. “In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.”
— Karl Marx
260. “If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.”
— Karl Marx
261. “For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”
— Karl Marx
262. “A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.”
— Karl Marx
263. “Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.”
— Karl Marx
264. “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the “value-forming substance”, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.”
— Karl Marx
265. “The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.”
— Karl Marx
266. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.”
— Karl Marx
267. “All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs.”
— Karl Marx
268. “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”
— Karl Marx
269. “The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.”
— Karl Marx
270. “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
— Karl Marx
271. “No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.”
— Karl Marx
272. “This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.”
— Karl Marx
273. “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.”
— Karl Marx
274. “An abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy .”
— Karl Marx
275. “Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list – the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.”
— Karl Marx
276. “If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.”
— Karl Marx
277. “An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.”
— Karl Marx
278. “Hazrat Mahal, Begum of Oudh, during the national liberation uprising of 1857-59 in India headed the rebels.”
— Karl Marx
279. “Imperialism is da worst thing I ever hold!”
— Karl Marx
280. “On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.”
— Karl Marx
281. “Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we’re the only chaps who haven’t been stultified by the ghastly period of peace.”
— Karl Marx
282. “Jaminan kemerdekaan bangsa ialah pada kemerdekaan jiwa.”
— Karl Marx
283. “In every stock-jobbing swindle, one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor after he has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.”
— Karl Marx
284. “If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.”
— Karl Marx
285. “Marx’s father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son’s psychology.”
— Karl Marx
286. “Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.”
— Karl Marx
287. “If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one’s back on hum suffering and look after one’s own skin.”
— Karl Marx
288. “Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.”
— Karl Marx
289. “When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.”
— Karl Marx
290. “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”
— Karl Marx
291. “Ignorance never yet helped anybody.”
— Karl Marx
292. “Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
— Karl Marx
293. “As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital .”
— Karl Marx
294. “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”
— Karl Marx
295. “Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.”
— Karl Marx
296. “Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois – for the benefit of the working class.”
— Karl Marx
297. “The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs.”
— Karl Marx
298. “Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.”
— Karl Marx
299. “Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.”
— Karl Marx
300. “It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
— Karl Marx
301. “Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.”
— Karl Marx
302. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.”
— Karl Marx
303. “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.”
— Karl Marx
304. “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.”
— Karl Marx
305. “Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.”
— Karl Marx
306. “Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.”
— Karl Marx
307. “As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.”
— Karl Marx
308. “You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.”
— Karl Marx
309. “Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.”
— Karl Marx
310. “When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”
— Karl Marx
311. “History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”
— Karl Marx
312. “All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature.”
— Karl Marx
313. “To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury.”
— Karl Marx
314. “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
— Karl Marx
315. “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
— Karl Marx
316. “This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24.”
— Karl Marx
317. “The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”
— Karl Marx
318. “The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.”
— Karl Marx
319. “Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.”
— Karl Marx
320. “Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.”
— Karl Marx
321. “Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.”
— Karl Marx
322. “Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the ‘ever needy’ man?”
— Karl Marx
323. “The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.”
— Karl Marx
324. “Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.”
— Karl Marx
325. “As capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse.”
— Karl Marx
326. “There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.”
— Karl Marx
327. “The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body.”
— Karl Marx
328. “Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an “assault upon society,” and is branded as “Socialism.”
— Karl Marx
329. “When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.”
— Karl Marx
330. “It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.”
— Karl Marx
331. “Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.”
— Karl Marx
332. “It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.”
— Karl Marx
333. “That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”
— Karl Marx
334. “As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone .”
— Karl Marx
335. “The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
— Karl Marx
336. “In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”
— Karl Marx
337. “In 1642 the modern world was born.”
— Karl Marx
338. “On the basis of capitalist production, a new swindle with the wages of management develops in connection with joint-stock companies, in that, over and above the actual managing director, a number of governing and supervisory boards arise, for which management and supervision are in fact a mere pretext for the robbery of shareholders and their own enrichment.”
— Karl Marx
339. “If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.”
— Karl Marx
340. “Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.”
— Karl Marx
341. “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.”
— Karl Marx
342. “But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.”
— Karl Marx
343. “In our reflecting and reasoning age, a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for everything, no matter how bad or crazy. Everything in the world that has been done wrong, has been done wrong for the very best of reasons.”
— Karl Marx
344. “I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.”
— Karl Marx
345. “I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.”
— Karl Marx
346. “A people which subjugates another people forges its own chains.”
— Karl Marx
347. “As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.”
— Karl Marx
348. “Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.”
— Karl Marx
349. “To say that “the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital”, means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”
— Karl Marx
350. “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.”
— Karl Marx
351. “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
— Karl Marx
352. “So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.”
— Karl Marx
353. “Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.”
— Karl Marx
354. “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.”
— Karl Marx
355. “The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the “Unique.”
— Karl Marx
356. “To discover the various use of things is the work of history.”
— Karl Marx
357. “Uno spettro si aggira per l’Europa: lo spettro del comunismo.”
— Karl Marx
358. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”
— Karl Marx
359. “From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.”
— Karl Marx
360. “Diligence in some compels idleness in others.”
— Karl Marx
361. “From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”
— Karl Marx
362. “The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.”
— Karl Marx
363. “Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.”
— Karl Marx
364. “The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few.”
— Karl Marx
365. “Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.”
— Karl Marx
366. “The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.”
— Karl Marx
367. “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: ‘Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!”
— Karl Marx
368. “Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God.”
— Karl Marx
369. “In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value;.”
— Karl Marx
370. “What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.”
— Karl Marx
371. “The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.”
— Karl Marx
372. “Marx himself makes it clear that he does not start from a basic concept – value – but from an elementary material phenomenon – the commodity – which is at the basis of capitalism, as the only economic organization based upon generalized commodity production.”
— Karl Marx
373. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
— Karl Marx
374. “Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.”
— Karl Marx
375. “The charges against communism made from a religious, philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.”
— Karl Marx
376. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.”
— Karl Marx
377. “A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.”
— Karl Marx
378. “Die Geschichte ist die wahre Naturgeschichte des Menschen.”
— Karl Marx
379. “You preach to me constantly the gospel of ‘saving’ and ‘abstinence’. Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it.”
— Karl Marx
380. “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”
— Karl Marx
381. “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”
— Karl Marx
382. “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value.4 But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.”
— Karl Marx
383. “The purchase and sale of slaves is also in its form a purchase and sale of commodities. Without the existence of slaves, however, money cannot fulfil this function. If there is slavery, then money can be spent on the acquisition of slaves. But money in the hand of the buyer is in no way a sufficient condition for the existence of slavery.”
— Karl Marx
384. “The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it.”
— Karl Marx
385. “The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.”
— Karl Marx
386. “To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.”
— Karl Marx
387. “Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.”
— Karl Marx
388. “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”
— Karl Marx
389. “One thing, however, is clear – Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.”
— Karl Marx
390. “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.”
— Karl Marx
391. “For the capitalist who has others to work for him, buying and selling is a major function. Since he appropriates the product of many people, on a larger social scale, so he has also to sell on such a scale, and later to transform money back again into the elements of production. Now, as before, the time taken up with buying and selling creates no value.”
— Karl Marx
392. “They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.”
— Karl Marx
393. “Capital Marx’s fundamental aim was to lay bare the laws of motion which govern the origins, the rise, the development, the decline and the disappearance of a given social form of economic organization: the capitalist mode of production. He was not seeking universal laws of economic organization. Indeed, one of the essential theses of Capital is that no such laws exist. For Marx, there are no economic laws valid for each and every basically different form of society.”
— Karl Marx
394. “The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.”
— Karl Marx
395. “Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.”
— Karl Marx
396. “The very nature of expanded reproduction – capitalist reproduction – under capitalism implies that production takes place not only on a broader scale, but also under changed technological conditions.”
— Karl Marx
397. “If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi: “that capacity for labour… is nothing unless it is sold.”
— Karl Marx
398. “By destroying the non-capitalist milieu on which its expansion is based, capitalism undermines the conditions of its own growth.”
— Karl Marx
399. “Since Marx wrote, capitalist technology and industry have indeed spread all over the world. As they have done so, moreover, not only have material wealth and the possibilities for freeing mankind definitively from the burden of meaningless, repetitive and mechanical work increased, but so too has the polarization of society between fewer and fewer owners of capital and more and more workers of hand and brain, forced to sell their labour-power to these owners.”
— Karl Marx
400. “M–L is the characteristic moment of the transformation of money capital into productive capital, for it is the essential condition without which the value advanced in the money form cannot really be transformed into capital, into value-producing surplus-value. M–mp is necessary only in order to realize the mass of labour bought by way of M–L.”
— Karl Marx
401. “For the correct Marxist classification of the proletariat-the class which is forced by socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production – implies that both variations in the level of the reserve army of labour, and the variegated relations between the ‘purely physiological’ and ‘moral-historical’ components of the value of labour-power,63 are of decisive importance for the proletarian’s immediate destiny.”
— Karl Marx
402. “By contrast, under conditions of simple reproduction, there would be no surplus-value and no profit whatsoever, since all surplus-value would be unproductively consumed without entering into the reproduction process.”
— Karl Marx
403. “Fixed and circulating capital are now no longer distinct and independent capital investments, but rather different portions of the same productive capital, which form different shares of the total value in different spheres of investment.”
— Karl Marx
404. “Volume 2 of Capital has indeed been not only a ‘sealed book’, but also a forgotten one. To a large extent, it remains so to this very day.”
— Karl Marx
405. “The irrationality consists in the fact that labour as the value-forming element cannot itself possess any value, and so a certain quantity of labour cannot have a value that is expressed in its price, in its equivalence with a certain definite quantity of money.”
— Karl Marx
406. “Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations.”
— Karl Marx
407. “Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it.”
— Karl Marx
408. “Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.”
— Karl Marx
409. “The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”
— Karl Marx
410. “Money is the universal equivalent form of all commodities, which already show in their prices that they ideally represent a specific sum of money, expect to be transformed into money, and only receive the form in which they can be converted into use-values for their possessor by changing places with money.”
— Karl Marx
411. “Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.”
— Karl Marx
412. “The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.”
— Karl Marx
413. “The interpenetration of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production, imposed upon colonies and semi-colonies by the power of capital on the world market and the violence of foreign political and military domination, has been an extremely important factor in the historical development of these twin sources of money capital accumulation.”
— Karl Marx
414. “Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.”
— Karl Marx
415. “With a given volume of capital advanced, the scale of production grows, and hence, with a given rate of surplus-value, the absolute mass of the surplus-value produced in one turnover period also grows, and there occurs, simultaneously with this, a rise in the annual rate of surplus-value caused by the reduction in the reproduction period.”
— Karl Marx
416. “How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained “poor,” only “less poor” in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class “an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” then it has remained relatively just as poor.”
— Karl Marx
417. “What is characteristic is not that the commodity labour-power can be bought, but the fact that labour-power appears as a commodity.”
— Karl Marx
418. “The formula itself expresses that the money is not spent here as money, but is only advanced, and is thus simply the money form of capital, money capital. It further expresses the fact that it is the exchange-value, not the use-value, that is the decisive inherent purpose of the movement.”
— Karl Marx
419. “The use-value of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belongs just as little to its seller, as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who has sold it.”
— Karl Marx
420. “Since elements of productive capital are constantly being withdrawn from the market and all that is put into the market is an equivalent in money, the effective demand rises, without this in itself providing any element of supply.”
— Karl Marx
421. “It firstly makes commodity production universal, and then gradually transforms all commodity production into capitalist production.”
— Karl Marx
422. “It was intended as an explanation of what would happen to labour, machinery, technology, the size of enterprises, the social structure of the population, the discontinuity of economic growth, and the relations between workers and work, as the capitalist mode of production unfolded all its terrifying potential.”
— Karl Marx
423. “This is what distinguishes the philosopher from the Christian. The Christian, in spite of logic, has only one incarnation of the Logos; the philosopher has never finished with incarnations.”
— Karl Marx
424. “The formula for the circuit of capital: M-C… P… C’-M’, is the self-evident form of the circuit of capital only on the basis of already developed capitalist production, because it presupposes the availability of the class of wage-labourers in sufficient numbers throughout society.”
— Karl Marx
425. “Hence the enigmatical character of the equivalent form which escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed, confronts him in the shape of money.”
— Karl Marx
426. “It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
— Karl Marx
427. “It is easy to imagine a society which, having reached a certain level of consumption, consciously decides to give absolute priority to a single goal: reduction of the workload.”
— Karl Marx
