Quotes About Economics

Moments are the elements of profit

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.

To say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital, means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

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. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.

Pekerja tidak selalu mendapatkan apa yang dihasilkan oleh kapitalis, tetapi suah pasi akan turut jatuh ketika kapitalis mrngalami kerugian. Sehingga pekerja tidak mendapatkan apapun ketika kapitalis menjaga harga barang di atas harga alaminya baik itu melalui jasa perdagangan atau produksi rahasia, ataupun melalui monopoli

Nobody — not even "a musician of the future" — can live upon future products.

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 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.

When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any.

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.

To say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capitalmeans only this; that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs that fall down to him, the greater number of workers that can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent on capital be increased.

Marx himself makes it clear that he does not start from a basic concept – value – but from an elementary material phenomenon – the commodity – which is at the basis of capitalism, as the only economic organization based upon generalized commodity production.

Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.

In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value;

To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

Así corno en las religiones vemos al hombre esclavizado por las criaturas de su propio cerebro, en la producción capitalista le vemos esclavizado por los productos de su propio brazo.9

As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer. [6]

By contrast, under conditions of simple reproduction, there would be no surplus-value and no profit whatsoever, since all surplus-value would be unproductively consumed without entering into the reproduction process.