Karl Marx

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Karl Marx (1818–1883), political philosopher, political economist, and social theorist

1 Sourced
2 Attributed
3 External links
- 3.1 Marxists.org

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Sourced

"Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the empancipation of the proletariat".
- Writing in the Chartist newspaper, 1847. (Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290).

"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism."
- Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5

"If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs."
- Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844)

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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."
- Alternative translation: "It is the opiate of the masses."
- Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

"It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. What proves beyond doubt the radicalism of German theory, and thus its practical energy, is that it begins from the resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being—conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: 'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!'"
- Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

"Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself."
- "Zur Judenfrage" ("On the Jewish Question"), in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1843)

"Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society [such as communism] which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make [this] Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement."
- "Zur Judenfrage" (1843)

"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."
- Die Heilige Familie (1845)

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
- "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), Thesis 11

"Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
- Alternative translation: "The first time as a tragedy, the second time as a comedy."
- The Eighteenth Brumiare of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

"It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom."
- Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge on 25 January 1843, after the Prussian government dissolved the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was the editor

"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."
- Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) (1845-46), Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism"

"Sprache entsteht, wie das Bewußtsein, erst aus dem Bedürfnis, der Notdurft des Verkehrs mit anderen Menschen."
- English: "The language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human."
- Die deutsche Ideologie Marx-Engels-Werke/MEW, vol. III, 30

"Die Gesellschaft besteht nicht aus Individuen, sondern drückt die Summe der Beziehungen, Verhältnisse aus, worin diese Individuen zueinander stehn."
- English: "Any society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of relationships [and] conditions that the individual actor is forming."
- "Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie/Rohentwurf" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" [draft]) (1857)

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
- The Criticism of the Gotha Program (1875)

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Die Deutsche Ideologie

    (written 1845/46), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

"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."
- Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) (1845-46), Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism"

"Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein."
- English: "It is in fact not the consciousness dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness."
- Die deutsche Ideologie, Marx-Engels-Werke/MEW, vol. III, 27

"Sprache entsteht, wie das Bewußtsein, erst aus dem Bedürfnis, der Notdurft des Verkehrs mit anderen Menschen."
- English: "The language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human."
- Die deutsche Ideologie Marx-Engels-Werke/MEW, vol. III, 30

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The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

"The proletarians of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!"

"The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones."

"It [the bourgeosie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous 'cash payment'."

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

"A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism."

"What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

"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."

"But every class struggle is a political struggle."

"Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudicies, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois intrests."

"All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives meraly to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the intrest to the ruling class requires it."

"When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created."

"The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development invloves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas."

"The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got."

"Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class."

"No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he recives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc."

"In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

"A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increase capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a comodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."

"He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistance that he requires for his maintenance."

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Grundrisse

"Die Gesellschaft besteht nicht aus Individuen, sondern drückt die Summe der Beziehungen, Verhältnisse aus, worin diese Individuen zueinander stehn."

English: "Any society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of relationships [and] conditions that the individual actor is forming."

(source: "Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie/Rohentwurf" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" [draft]) (1857)

„Die Natur baut keine Maschinen, keine Lokomotiven, Eisenbahnen, electric telegraphs, selfacting mules etc. Sie sind Produkte der menschlichen Industrie; natürliches Material, verwandelt in Organe des menschlichen Willens über die Natur oder seiner Betätigung in der Natur. Sie sind von der menschlichen Hand geschaffene Organe des menschlichen Hirns; vergegenständliche Wissenskraft. Die Entwicklung des capital fixe zeigt an, bis zu welchem Grade das allgemeine gesellschaftliche Wissen, knowledge, zur unmittelbaren Produktivkraft geworden ist und daher die Bedingungen des gesellschaftlichen Lebensprozesses selbst unter die Kontrolle des general intellect gekommen, und ihm gemäß umgeschaffen sind." (Karl Marx: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) [1857/58], Berlin (DDR): Dietz Verlag, 1974², p. 594)

>>English: "Nature does not build machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, (selfacting?) mules etc. They are products of the human industry; " (please, continue...)<<

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Das Kapital

Das Kapital (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy) (1867)

"The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production"

I, 1, 126

"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."

"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."
- Volume I, Chapter 7

"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
- Volume I, Chapter 10

"Die Technologie enthüllt das aktive Verhalten des Menschen zur Natur, den unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesss seines Lebens, damit auch seiner gesellschaftlichen Lebensverhältnisse und der ihnen entquellenden geistigen Vorstellungen."
- English: "Technology discloses the active relation of man towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, of his own mentality, and his images of society, too."
- Das Kapital Volume I, Chapter 13: "Machinery and Big Industry"

"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."
- Volume I, Chapter 13 (last sentence)

"The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities."
- Volume II, Chapter 10

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Attributed

"I am not a Marxist."

"Democracy is the road to socialism."

"Despite all its shortcomings, this Constitution looms against the background of Russian, Prussian and Austrian barbarism as the only work of liberty which Eastern Europe has ever created independently, and it emerged exclusively from the privileged class, from the nobility. The history of the world has never seen another example of such nobility of the nobility."
- on the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791

"Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
- Marx's purported last words

"I do not like money, money is the reason we fight."

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."

"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." Collected Works, Volumme 34, page 87.