Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.”

— Karl Marx

352. “As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.”

— Karl Marx

353. “To discover the various use of things is the work of history.”

— Karl Marx

354. “Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.”

— Karl Marx

355. “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.”

— Karl Marx

356. “To say that “the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital”, means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”

— Karl Marx

357. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

— Karl Marx

358. “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”

— Karl Marx

359. “The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the “Unique.”

— Karl Marx

360. “Uno spettro si aggira per l’Europa: lo spettro del comunismo.”

— Karl Marx

361. “From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

— Karl Marx

362. “Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.”

— Karl Marx

363. “From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.”

— Karl Marx

364. “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: ‘Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!”

— Karl Marx

365. “The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.”

— Karl Marx

366. “Diligence in some compels idleness in others.”

— Karl Marx

367. “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.”

— Karl Marx

368. “What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.”

— Karl Marx

369. “In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value;.”

— Karl Marx

370. “Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God.”

— Karl Marx

371. “The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.”

— Karl Marx

372. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

— Karl Marx

373. “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.”

— Karl Marx

374. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.”

— Karl Marx

375. “A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.”

— Karl Marx

376. “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”

— Karl Marx

377. “Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.”

— Karl Marx

378. “The charges against communism made from a religious, philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.”

— Karl Marx

379. “Die Geschichte ist die wahre Naturgeschichte des Menschen.”

— Karl Marx

380. “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

— Karl Marx

381. “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.”

— Karl Marx

382. “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”

— Karl Marx

383. “You preach to me constantly the gospel of ‘saving’ and ‘abstinence’. Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it.”

— Karl Marx

384. “By destroying the non-capitalist milieu on which its expansion is based, capitalism undermines the conditions of its own growth.”

— Karl Marx

385. “The purchase and sale of slaves is also in its form a purchase and sale of commodities. Without the existence of slaves, however, money cannot fulfil this function. If there is slavery, then money can be spent on the acquisition of slaves. But money in the hand of the buyer is in no way a sufficient condition for the existence of slavery.”

— Karl Marx

386. “The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

388. “Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.”

— Karl Marx

389. “The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.”

— Karl Marx

390. “The use-value of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belongs just as little to its seller, as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who has sold it.”

— Karl Marx

391. “It was intended as an explanation of what would happen to labour, machinery, technology, the size of enterprises, the social structure of the population, the discontinuity of economic growth, and the relations between workers and work, as the capitalist mode of production unfolded all its terrifying potential.”

— Karl Marx

392. “Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.”

— Karl Marx

393. “The very nature of expanded reproduction – capitalist reproduction – under capitalism implies that production takes place not only on a broader scale, but also under changed technological conditions.”

— Karl Marx

394. “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.”

— Karl Marx

395. “Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.”

— Karl Marx

396. “They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.”

— Karl Marx

397. “Capital Marx’s fundamental aim was to lay bare the laws of motion which govern the origins, the rise, the development, the decline and the disappearance of a given social form of economic organization: the capitalist mode of production. He was not seeking universal laws of economic organization. Indeed, one of the essential theses of Capital is that no such laws exist. For Marx, there are no economic laws valid for each and every basically different form of society.”

— Karl Marx

398. “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.”

— Karl Marx

399. “If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi: “that capacity for labour... is nothing unless it is sold.”

— Karl Marx

400. “One thing, however, is clear – Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.”

— Karl Marx