Karl Marx (Economist)

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…

— Karl Marx art

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 emancipation of the proletariat.

— Karl Marx self

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

— Karl Marx good

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 men

The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

— Karl Marx life

Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

— Karl Marx self

When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.

— Karl Marx courage

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.

— Karl Marx freedom

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 . 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. 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 happiness

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

— Karl Marx wit

[T]he task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today's practice of life, the summit of which is the money system.

— Karl Marx life

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

— Karl Marx change

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 emancipation of the proletariat.

— Karl Marx art

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

— Karl Marx men

[T]he very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

— Karl Marx death

Did you not read our articles about the June revolution, and was not the essence of the June revolution the essence of our paper? Why then your hypocritical phrases, your attempt to find an impossible pretext?We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, incowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

— Karl Marx war

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

— Karl Marx life

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

— Karl Marx history

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia… When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch… 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 people

— Karl Marx society

As to the Delhi affair, [i.e., the] it seems to me that the English ought to begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season has set in in real earnest. Being obliged for the present to hold the fort for you as the Tribune’s military correspondent I have taken it upon myself to put this forward. NB [nota bene; "take note"], on the supposition that the reports to date have been true. 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 war

There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them.

— Karl Marx history

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 science

The fact that 1855 years ago , and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence.

— Karl Marx change

The importunity of the fellow is also niggerlike. ~ Marx on

— Karl Marx unity

It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicate, he is descendant from the negroes who joined in the flight of Moses from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). Now this union of Jewishness to Germanness on a negro basis was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid. The importunity of the fellow is also niggerlike.

— Karl Marx light

Mit allen ihren M

— Karl Marx

Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny …Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].

— Karl Marx man

Your favourite virtue ... SimplicityYour favourite virtue in man ... StrengthYour favourite virtue in woman ... WeaknessYour chief characteristic ... Singleness of purposeYour idea of happiness ... To fightYour idea of misery ... SubmissionThe vice you excuse most ... GullibilityThe vice you detest most ... ServilityYour aversion ... Favourite occupation ... Book-wormingFavourite poet ... , , Favourite prose-writer ... Favourite hero ... , Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's ]Favourite flower ... DaphneFavourite colour ... RedFavourite name ... Laura, JennyFavourite dish ... FishFavourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].

— Karl Marx happiness

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

— Karl Marx history

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen andin his business.

— Karl Marx people

Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is for example, that, because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.

— Karl Marx courage

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist

— Karl Marx self

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

— Karl Marx art

"[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection … If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man."

— Karl Marx truth

Zur Judenfrage -

— Karl Marx age

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.

— Karl Marx relationships

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.

— Karl Marx time

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 history

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

— Karl Marx man

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. … (1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or — like— see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?.

— Karl Marx religion

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

— Karl Marx nature

Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.

— Karl Marx freedom

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.

— Karl Marx life

Die Deutsche Ideologie by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -

— Karl Marx rich

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

— Karl Marx reality

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

— Karl Marx art

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

— Karl Marx time

Nicht das Bewu

— Karl Marx

Sprache entsteht, wie das Bewu

— Karl Marx

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

— Karl Marx love

Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848) by Karl Marx and-

— Karl Marx art

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

— Karl Marx world

A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism.

— Karl Marx communism

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

— Karl Marx history

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It 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."

— Karl Marx men

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

— Karl Marx evolution

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.

— Karl Marx life

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

— Karl Marx art

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 subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.

— Karl Marx work

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 man

But every class struggle is a political struggle.

— Karl Marx struggle

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

— Karl Marx evolution

Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

— Karl Marx religion

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 victory

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

— Karl Marx sin

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

— Karl Marx character

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 power

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

— Karl Marx work

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, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

— Karl Marx people

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 men

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.

— Karl Marx society

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class;and in ordinary life, despite the high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beet-root sugar, and potato spirits.

— Karl Marx love

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

— Karl Marx world

remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

— Karl Marx time

Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon - . The title of this work relates theofto theby his uncle .

— Karl Marx work

The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.

— Karl Marx living

Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.

— Karl Marx time

" der Kritik der politischen

— Karl Marx

The object before us, to begin with,.

— Karl Marx wit

The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.

— Karl Marx people

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 nature

No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.

— Karl Marx need

The object of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

— Karl Marx art

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 men

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 them selves to everything.

— Karl Marx nature

What chance hasagainst ,against theandagainst the ? Allovercomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in theand by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

— Karl Marx nature

From another side: ispossible with powder and lead? Or thewith the , not to mention the printing machine? Do not theandof thenecessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions ofvanish?

— Karl Marx men

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

— Karl Marx man

What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.

— Karl Marx

Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.

— Karl Marx art

The unity is brought about by force.

— Karl Marx unity

Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.

— Karl Marx war

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

— Karl Marx language

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 change

Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange,because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.

— Karl Marx art

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.

— Karl Marx money

Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

— Karl Marx time

Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.

— Karl Marx change

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