Quotes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

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

The proletariat, a class of laborers,who live only so long as they find work,and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, 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.

The proletariat is the agent of this emancipation because it is the only class whose particular interest is synonymous with he general interests of humanity. And it is charged with this supreme mission precisely because it is the most exploited and hence most dehumanized class in existing society.

It was now painfully clear to the people that equality before the law did not produce genuine, human equality

it is the universal class because its sufferings are universal. He thus defined the proletariat in the first instance not as the body of factory workers but as the metaphysical demiurge destined to liberate the species from social inequality: it was as the victim class that it became the redeemer class, the class to end all classes.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured an looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

But Lenin founded a very unorthodox Marxist party, if indeed it should be called Marxist at all. Lenin learned to be an atheist, a revolutionary, and a socialist from other native Russian revolutionaries, no from Marx. He picked up the doctrine of dialectical materialism from the Russian revolutionary N.G. Chernyshevskii, not from Marx. An observation by Francis B. Randall

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.

laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of workers.

The essential condition for the existence and sway of the bourgeoisie class,is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor.

Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor, is the minimum wage ...

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

The ruling ideas of each age have [n]ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Communists] openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.