Karl Marx Quotations

Dr. Karl Heinrich Marx
(1818-1883)

"Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work!', they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system!'"

Value, Price and Profit

"The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery."

Critical Notes on the Article "The King of Prussia and Social Reform"

"What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of 'society' as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual."

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker."

Free Trade

"The worker does not necessarily gain when the capitalist gains, but he necessarily loses with him."

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing."

Letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer

"But those revolutions will be made by the majority. No revolution can be made by a party, but by a nation."

Chicago Tribune Interview with Karl Marx

"When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species."

Capital, Chapter 13

"Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."

Grundrisse

"An increase in wages arouses in the worker the same desire to get rich as in the capitalist, but he can only satisfy this desire by sacrificing his mind and body."

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"He can work only with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

Critique of the Gotha Programme

"It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist."

Capital, Chapter 13

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Theses on Feuerbach

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"Religious poverty is, in one, the expression of real poverty, and in another, a protest against real poverty. Religion is the sigh of a heavy laden creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right

"We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part."

Chicago Tribune Interview with Karl Marx

"Here, where the worker's life is regulated from childhood on by bureaucracy, and he himself believes in the authorities, in the bodies appointed over him, he must be taught before all else to walk by himself."

Letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer

"A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar."

Wage-Labor and Capital

"Nature is man's inorganic body -- that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power, properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in class society."

The Poverty of Philosophy

"The class domination of the workers over the resisting strata of the old world must last until the economic foundations of the existence of classes are destroyed."

Conspectus on Bakunin

"You would be altogether mistaken in fancying that the value of labor, or any other commodity whatever, is ultimately fixed by supply and demand. Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for that value itself."

Value, Price and Profit

"At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman."

Capital, Chapter 15

"If the supply greatly exceeds the demand, then one section of the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The existence of the worker is, therefore, reduced to the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and he is lucky if he can find a buyer. And the demand on which the worker's life depends is regulated by the whims of the wealthy and the capitalists."

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"But what is growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of accumulated labor over living labor; growth of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class. When wage-labor produces the alien wealth dominating it, the power hostile to it, capital, there flow back to it its means of employment -- i.e., its means of subsistence, under the condition that it again become a part of capital, that is become again the lever whereby capital is to be forced into an accelerated expansive movement."

Wage-Labor and Capital

"All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime."

The Civil War in France

"The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility."

The Civil War in France

"Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same. You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must someday appeal in order to erect the rule of labor."

Speech at the Hague on Sept. 8, 1872

"Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum."

The Poverty of Philosophy

"All combined labour on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of its separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate one."

Capital, Chapter 13

The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it.

Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843

Last page revision: errors fixed on Apr. 25, 2009