Quotes About Marx

The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few.

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.

Acogeré con los brazos abiertos todos los juicios de la crítica científica. En cuanto a los prejuicios de la llamada opinión pública, a la que jamás he hecho concesiones, seguiré ateniéndome al lema del gran florentino: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti! (III) Londres, 25 de julio de 1867. CARLOS MARX

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

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity. - Theses On Feuerbach (1845)

En resumen, lo que en 1848 tal vez impresionara a un lector sin compromisos como retórica revolucionaria -o, a lo sumo, como una predicción creíble- puede hoy leerse como una concisa caracterización del capitalismo de fines del siglo XX.

Jews talk a lot about God. But actually their god, just like Marx said, is money. Cash!

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.

The economic answer to the world's problems is John Adams, not [Karl] Marx.

For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process—a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.

This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx's supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.

This translates into a hypothesis about actually existing capitalism: that the more it is structured and organized according to this utopian liberal or neoliberal vision, the greater the class inequalities. And there is, it goes without saying, plenty of evidence to support the view that the rhetoric of free markets and free trade and their supposed universal benefits to which we have been subjected these past thirty years have produced exactly the result that Marx would expect:

These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx's terms, it is a fetish construct.

Marx's critique of free markets and free trade can shed as much devastating light on our own actually existing capitalism as it did for the capitalism of Marx's own time and place.

Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments.

These passages on effective demand are problematic in certain respects, and Rosa Luxemburg provides a compelling challenge to Marx on this point, arguing that imperialism directed against noncapitalist social formations provided a partial answer to the effective demand problem.4 There has been debate over these issues ever since.

For this reason I get impatient with people who depict Marx's dialectic as a closed method of analysis. It is not finite; on the contrary, it is constantly expanding, and here he is explaining precisely how. We only have to review what we have already experienced in reading Capital; the movement of its argument is a perpetual reshaping, rephrasing and expansion of the field of contradictions.

This brings us back to Marx's method. One of the most important things to glean from a careful study of Volume I is how Marx's method works. I personally think this is just as important as the propositions he derives about how capitalism works, because once you have learned the method and become both practiced in its execution and confident in its power, then you can use it to understand almost anything.

Marx is engaged in a critique of classical liberal political economy. He therefore finds it necessary to accept the theses of liberalism (and, by extension to our own times, neoliberalism) in order to show that the classical political economists were profoundly wrong even in their own terms.

I'm not going to pay good money to join a club that lets in people like me.