Quotes About Capital

Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.

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.

The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.

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.

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as substance and essence of man, and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as self-consciousness and the Unique.

With a given volume of capital advanced, the scale of production grows, and hence, with a given rate of surplus-value, the absolute mass of the surplus-value produced in one turnover period also grows, and there occurs, simultaneously with this, a rise in the annual rate of surplus-value caused by the reduction in the reproduction period.

Since elements of productive capital are constantly being withdrawn from the market and all that is put into the market is an equivalent in money, the effective demand rises, without this in itself providing any element of supply.

Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.

The formula itself expresses that the money is not spent here as money, but is only advanced, and is thus simply the money form of capital, money capital. It further expresses the fact that it is the exchange-value, not the use-value, that is the decisive inherent purpose of the movement.

M–L is the characteristic moment of the transformation of money capital into productive capital, for it is the essential condition without which the value advanced in the money form cannot really be transformed into capital, into value-producing surplus-value. M–mp is necessary only in order to realize the mass of labour bought by way of M–L.

Volume 2 of Capital has indeed been not only a 'sealed book', but also a forgotten one. To a large extent, it remains so to this very day.

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.

Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating."[164] If the transformation of merchants' money into capital is to be explained otherwise than by the producers being simply cheated, a long series of intermediate steps would be necessary, which, at present, when the simple circulation of commodities forms our only assumption, are entirely wanting.

Fixed and circulating capital are now no longer distinct and independent capital investments, but rather different portions of the same productive capital, which form different shares of the total value in different spheres of investment.

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

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour and raw materials, not only of material products; it consists just as much of exchange values. All the products of which it consists are commodities. Capital is, therefore, not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values, of social magnitudes.

grands dignitaires de l'armée, de l'Université, de l'Église, du barreau, de l'Académie et de la presse étaient partagés, bien qu'en proportion inégale, entre les deux courants. Ils avaient trouvé dans la République bourgeoise, qui ne portait ni le nom de Bourbon, ni celui d'Orléans, mais celui de Capital, la forme d'État dans laquelle ils pouvaient régner en commun.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

también el proletariado, esa clase obrera moderna que sólo puede vivir encontrando trabajo y que sólo encuentra trabajo en la medida en que éste alimenta a incremento el capital. El obrero, obligado a venderse a trozos, es una mercancía como otra cualquiera, sujeta, por tanto, a todos los cambios y modalidades de la concurrencia, a todas las fluctuaciones del mercado.

If money, according to Augier, comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

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.