Skip to content

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

— Karl Marx The German Ideology (1845)

Another quote →

Topics

Communism

More quotes by Karl Marx

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

The German Ideology (1845)

The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.

Grundrisse (1857)

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

The Holy Family (1845)

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

The German Ideology (1845)

Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

All Karl Marx quotes →

You may also like

For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Bertrand Russell Unarmed Victory (1963)

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

Friedrich Engels Principles of Communism (1847)

Communism has sometimes succeeded as a scavenger, but never as a leader. It has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

John F. Kennedy

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Karl Marx (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.