Quotes About Marx

To restore America we need less Marx and more Madison.

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

Marx was concerned to change society or rather, if he adhered rigidly to his system, expected society to change in the way he wanted.

Increasing prosperity for the capitalists has everywhere brought with it increasing prosperity for the proletariat, instead of the increasing misery which Marx foretold. The most advanced capitalist countries are also those where the working class has the highest standard of life.

Apparently, Marx said that religion was the opium of the masses. It kept the oppressed from complaining or trying to change things.

Marx had famously denounced religion as the opiate of the people, now it was Fame that was the opiate of the people;

The Russians are turning east to the Chinese - to the Europeans' surprise. It always seemed to me that the relationship between Russia and China would shift from being based in Marx and Lenin to being based in oil and gas.

For Marx, history is the story of a constant dialectical struggle, not between abstract Hegelian ideas but between all too real classes and economic forces. This is why his philosophy is sometimes called Dialectical Materialism

Normalization takes place not because there is Western-ideology that normalizes third-world texts in any special way (other than the usual play with exoticism) but because this academic seeks to domesticate everything, even Marx.

Marx observed that by organizing native regiments in their Indian Army the British had unwittingly created 'the first general centre of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of'.

The fact that Hindus and Muslims had worked jointly, 'renouncing their mutual antipathies', also interested Marx.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Marx

Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people.

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.10

Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.

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.

For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.

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

Pero adviértase que aquí sólo nos referimos a las personas en cuanto personificación de categorías económicas, como representantes de determinados intereses y relaciones de clase.

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.

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

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.