Quotes About Marx

It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his.

But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along—and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers.

Biographers who admire Marx and seek to cover for him will want to ignore his poetry among his corpus of writings. They should nonetheless bristle at what they see in Marx's poetry. They will encounter what Paul Johnson discerned: "Savagery is a characteristic note of his verse, together with the intense pessimism of the human condition, hatred, a fascination with corruption and violence, suicide pacts and pacts with the devil."82

His fellow German socialist and labor organizer Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx referred to as a "greasy Jew," "the little kike," "water-polack Jew," "Jew Braun," "Yid," "Izzy," "Wily Ephraim," "Baron Itzig," and "the Jewish Nigger.

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and a long line of implementers candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary. In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, "The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (italics added).

Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time.

In today's pick-and-mix culture, evolutionary psychology proposes itself as yet another possible opiate for the people. Freud and Marx are dead – so long live Darwin.

Capitalism continually renews and reinvents itself. This helps us to understand the fact that despite its severe internal contradictions, contradictions that Marx anticipated would bring about the ultimate collapse of capitalism, the capitalist system has managed to remain vibrant over the centuries.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.

Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.

While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distanced between Marx's predicted communist society and the form taken by 'communism' in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx's misconception of the flexibility of human nature.

The point of this, as Marx explains, is to show that according to classical economics the worker becomes a commodity, the production of which is subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. If the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labour, wages fall and some workers starve. Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive.

Marx portrays religion as a response to the oppression and heartlessness of the world; but an inadequate response because instead of challenging the oppression itself, it merely numbs the pain.

they took this as a law of nature, a self-evident necessary truth. On the contrary, says Marx, it bears the stamp of a society 'in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him'.

Marx inverted Hegel's dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.

They heard Rose Pastor Stokes quote Marx: "Workers, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains—and you have the world to gain.

Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers.

Marx's simultaneous critique of the categories of political economy, of utopian socialism and of Hegel does not aim to replace them with an improved set. He grasps them as expressions of the way that humanity is concealed within inhumanity. By tracing their logical interconnections, he finds the way to break their stranglehold on our consciousness and on our lives.

Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.

Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters.

Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly.

According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen or maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes.

According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of "order", which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.