Quotes from Karl Marx

All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force.

Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women.

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

Die Entfremdung erscheint sowohl darin, daß mein Lebensmittel eines andern ist, daß das, was mein Wunsch, der unzugängliche Besitz eines andern ist, als daß jede Sache selbst ein andres als sie selbst, als daß meine Tätigkeit ein andres, als endlich – und das gilt auch für den Kapitalisten – daß überhaupt die unmenschliche Macht her[rscht].

Criticism has already settled all accounts with this subject. It no longer figures as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

As the reader will have recognized in dismay, the analysis of the real, inner connections of the capitalist production process is a very intricate thing

Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

Thus does the beginner, who has acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is able freely to express himself therewith when he moves in it without recollections of the old, and has forgotten in its use his own hereditary tongue.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—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. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, 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.

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. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.

The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it.

When Bauer asks Jews: Have you the right from your standpoint to crave political emancipation? we would inquire on the contrary: Has the standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand of Jews the abolition of Judaism, or from men generally the abolition of religion.

According to this, 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.

y, en términos generales, advertiréis, frente a un enorme aumento de valor no sólo de las mercancías, sino también en general de las operaciones en dinero, una tendencia a la disminución progresiva de los medios de pago.

Lorsque le véritable but fut atteint, c'est-à-dire lorsque fut réalisée la transformation bourgeoise de la société anglaise, Locke évinça Habacuc.

Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.

The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.

We know that to work well the newfangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by newfangled men — and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

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.