Quotes from Karl Marx

The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.

El poder político es simplemente el poder organizado de una clase para oprimir a otra.

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.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.

It is unquestionable true that the £1,000 which you deposit at A today may be reissued tomorrow, and form a deposit at B. The day after that, reissued from B, it may form a deposit at C... and so on to infinitude; and that the same £1,000 in money may, thus, by a succession of transfers, multiply itself into a sum of deposits absolutely infinite.

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.

One has to 'leave philosophy aside,' one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality . . . Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.

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.

The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.

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.

Non c'è via maestra per la scienza, e solo hanno una probabilità di raggiungerne le vette luminose coloro che non temono di affaticarsi a salirne i ripidi sentieri.

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 this 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.

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

Burjuva toplumunda, her insan?n meta al?c?s? olarak meta hakk?nda ansiklopedik bilgi sahibi oldu?u fictio juris'i (varsay?m?) egemendir.

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.

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.

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.

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.

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.

Men [sic] 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. (Marx, 1963)

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

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.

after the abolition of capitalism, there will be 'constant relative over-production' of equipment, raw materials and foodstuffs. 'Over-production of this kind', he says, 'is equivalent to control by the society over the objective means of its own reproduction.