267 quotes
This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)
On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.
The German Ideology (1845)
What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.
Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)
With money every form of intercourse, and intercourse itself, is considered fortuitous for the individuals.
So far no chemist has discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond.
As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.
Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)
On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
Das Kapital (1867)
One capitalist always kills many.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)
The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realization is its objectification.
The better shaped his product, the more mis-shapen the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbaric the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
The German Ideology (1845)
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.
The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (1841)
The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
Challenge to Karl Marx (1941)
Since that epoch there have been in reality but two powers on the continent of Europe – Russia and Absolutism, the Revolution and Democracy.
An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.
Grundrisse (1857)
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto (1848)