Karl Marx Quotes: 290 Quotes on Communism, Religion, Love, and the Human Condition

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”

Karl Marx

Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 6-9.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 13, pg. 363.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

Motivation

“Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”

Karl Marx

Section 1, paragraph 47, lines 7-9.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Religion , Law

“Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.”

Karl Marx

Writing in the Chartist newspaper (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290.

Law

“It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.”

Karl Marx

Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 415.
(Buch II) (1893)

Appearance

“Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 85 (see Warren Buffet).
(Buch I) (1867)

“For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.”

Karl Marx book Grundrisse

Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, pp. 628–629.
Grundrisse (1857/58)
Context: The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital…
The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i. e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour...
The mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.

Way , Time , Wealth

“But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 25.

People , Nature

“Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.”

Karl Marx

Paraphrased and misattributed, actually from "Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre Pflege: Methode der Musik" ("The Music of the Nineteenth Century, and its Culture") by Adolf Bernhard Marx: "Die Kunst ist stets und überall das geheime Bekenntnis und unsterbliche Denkmal ihrer Zeit." ("Art is always and everywhere the secret confession as well as the undying monuments of its time.").
Misattributed

Secret , Art , Time

“Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 2, pg. 123.
(Buch I) (1867)

Money

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

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 1, p. 257.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

Dead

“If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 620.
(Buch I) (1867)

“Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook II, The Chapter on Money, p. 142.

Money

“If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 11, pg. 336.
(Buch I) (1867)

Time

“Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.”

Karl Marx

Said to be a quote from Das Kapital in an anonymous email, this attribution has been debunked at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/consumerdebt.asp with the earliest occurrence found being a post by Gpkkid on 23 December 2008 http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/do-bailouts-encourage-ponzi-schemes/#comment-24005; it was used as a basis of a satirical article "Americans to Undergo Preschool Reeducation in Advance of Country’s Conversion to Communism" at NewsMutiny http://www.newsmutiny.com/pages/Communist_Reeducation.html, but the author of article on the satiric website says that he is not author of the quote http://www.clockbackward.com/2009/02/04/did-karl-marx-predict-financial-collapse/
Misattributed

Communication , Housing

“The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Karl Marx

Source: The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Section 2, paragraph 13.

Communication

“A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.”

Karl Marx

Wage Labour and Capital (December 1847) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm, in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume I, p. 163.

Housing

“And his money he cannot eat.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 7, pg. 213.
(Buch I) (1867)

Money

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 91.
(Buch I) (1867)

World

“Bourgeois society continuously brings forth the Jew from its own entrails.”

Karl Marx

Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)
Source: as quoted in "Nationalism and Socialism: Marxist and Labor Theories of Nationalism to 1917", Horace B. Davis, New York: NY, Monthly Review Press (2009) p. 72. Original: Marx, “Zur Judenfrange” in "Werke", I, (1843) pp. 374-376.

“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.”

Karl Marx book On the Jewish Question

On the Jewish Question (1843)

World

“Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him.
We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”

Karl Marx

Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
(Buch I) (1867)

Drawing

“A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 31.

“So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.”

Karl Marx

Vol. II, Ch. II, p. 78.
(Buch II) (1893)

“The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 107.

Money

“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.”

Karl Marx

Source: The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).

“Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society [such as communism] which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make [this] Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.”

Karl Marx book On the Jewish Question

On the Jewish Question (1843)

Money , Communication , Nature , Time

“Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in land-division, namely, equality. In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Rent of Land, p. 65.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

Way , Personality

“The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.”

Karl Marx

Attributed to Leo Tolstoy in Romance and Reality (1912) by Holbrook Jackson.
Misattributed

“A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism.”

Karl Marx

Source: The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Preamble, paragraph 1, line 1.

Communication

“The entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy. This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i. e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i. e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins where atheism begins (Owen), but atheism is at the outset still far from being communism; indeed it is still for the most part an abstraction. The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Private Property and Communism
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

Life , People , World , Family

“We cannot always choose the vocation to which we believe we are called. Our social relations, to some extent, have already begun to form before we are in a position to determine them.”

Karl Marx

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 37
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

“The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.”

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch03.htm (1852, Chapter III)

Beauty , Imagination

“The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 4(f), pg. 774.
(Buch I) (1867)

People , Country , Wealth

“Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital, in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook V, The Chapter on Capital, p. 455.

“In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 687.
(Buch I) (1867)

Money , Drawing

“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”

Karl Marx

Section 2, paragraph 64.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Idea

“The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 7.

People

“But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty. Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i. e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i. e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.”

Karl Marx

Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, (28 December 1846), Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur, Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 38, p. 95; International Publishers (1975). First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol. III, 1912

Life , Men , Truth , World

“Ideas do not exist separately from language.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 83.

Idea

“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.”

Karl Marx

In an article written for the New York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/16.htm

History

“Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.</b”

Karl Marx

“Forced Emigration,” New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.

Life , Way , Housing

“Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook III, The Chapter on Capital, p. 259.

“We see then, commodities are in love with money, but "the course of true love never did run smooth."”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 2, pg. 121.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

Love , Money

“It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.”

Karl Marx

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843), after the Prussian government dissolved the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was the editor.

Stupidity , Freedom , Fight

“We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market, it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Source: Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893), Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 211.

Money

“Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.”

Karl Marx

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

Appearance

“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

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1.