Quotes About Marx

Cum acolo unde face ce face, el nu este: Cum atunci când face nu este: De-aici baza înstr?in?rii noastre de sine. - Marx, în 1844

This passage indicates the step that Feuerbach has taken from idealism to materialism. He formulates the new thesis with a precision that points forward to Marx, when he says that it is not thought which determines being but, on the contrary, social being which determines the consciousness of men.

The Chinese government is quickly losing its ideological legitimacy, maintain its rule with force, but cannot draw strength from the ideology of Marx and Mao.

I think a lot of Marx was quite sloppy. There was all sorts of politically aggressive language when he lacked arguments for things.

What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. Karl Marx may have gotten in backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.

During the years 1945-1965, there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.

Marx's once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact

It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, "under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.

Even a whole society," Marx comments, "a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.

Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism - to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.

In Marx's view, what was awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people... It was capitalism that standardised people, not socialism.

The work 'production' in Marx's work covers any self-fulfilling activity: playing the flute, making a speech, engaging in politics, organising a birthday party for one's children. It has no muscular, macho implications. When Marx speaks of production as the essence of humanity, he does not mean that the essence of humanity is packing sausages.

Anyone with time on their hands can hatch elaborate schemes for a better future, just as anyone can sketch endless plans for a magnificent novel they never get around to writing because they are endlessly sketching plans for it. The point for Marx is not to dream of an ideal future, but to resolve the contradictions in the present which prevent a better future from coming about. When this has been achieved, there will be no more need for people like himself.

Marx himself was a formidably cultivated man in the great central European tradition, who longed to be finished with what he scathingly called the 'economic crap' of Capital in order to write his big book on Balzac.

Capitalism has given birth to extraordinary powers and possibilities which it simultaneously stymies; and this is why Marx can be hopeful without being a bright-eyed champion of Progress, and brutally realistic without being cynical or defeatist. Il belongs to the tragic vision to stare the worst steadily in the face, but to rise above it through the very act of doing so.

Marx rejeitava era o mito sentimental do Estado como fonte de harmonia, pacificamente unindo diferentes grupos e classes. Para ele, o Estado era mais uma fonte de divisão do que de concórdia

Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something

Marx chega a afirmar que nenhuma classe social nova assume até que as forças produtivas tenham sido desenvolvidas tanto quanto possível pela classe anterior

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

in contrast to the Hegelians of the right-wing, Marx made an honest attempt to apply rational methods to the most urgent problems of social life. The value of this attempt is unimpaired by the fact that it was, as I shall try to show, largely unsuccessful. Science progresses through trial and error. Marx tried, and although he erred in his main doctrines, he did not try in vain. He opened and sharpened our eyes in many ways.

There is no law of progress, and everything will depend on ourselves. But the actual situation is briefly and fairly summed up by Parkes36 in one sentence: 'Low wages, long hours, and child labour have been characteristic of capitalism not, as Marx predicted, in its old age, but in its infancy.

When the Marxists say, as they sometimes do, that Marx has proved the uselessness of a counter cycle policy and of similar piecemeal measures, then they simply do not speak the truth; Marx investigated an unrestrained capitalism, and he never dreamt of interventionism.

If sharing meant receiving, well and good, but if it was a question of giving, then to hell with it, the Clochemerlins would cry out in chorus. Sad to relate, these bumpkins knew nothing about Hegel or Marx. They each had their little patch of ground inherited from previous generations, their trade secrets handed down from father to son, and they could see no farther.

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.