Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Marxwas a philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Prussia to a middle-class family, he later studied political economy and Hegelian philosophy. As an adult, Marx became stateless and spent much of his life in London, England, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and published various works, the most well-known being the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. His work has since influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth5 May 1818
CityTrier, Germany
CountryGermany
Karl Marx quotes about
Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.
So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.
An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.
It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.
But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.
There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them.
England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.
If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.
[T]he task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today's practice of life, the summit of which is the money system.
A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.
Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.
The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.
Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons.