Quotes from book
Das Kapital

Das Kapital

Karl MarxOriginal title Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (German, 1867)

Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy , is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics by Karl Marx. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.

“Capital is money: Capital is commodities. […] For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Source: Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867), Vol. I, Ch. 2, pg. 171.

“We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Preface to the First Edition, Capital Volume 1, Peinguin Classics edition 1976.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average, that he will wash himself.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Source: Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)

“In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. III, Ch. I, Cost Price and Profit, p. 39.
Das Kapital (Buch III) (1894)

“Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 81.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i. e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 1, pg. 41.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866.
Das Kapital (Buch III) (1894)

“Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was, thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 4(e), pg. 742.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“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.

“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)

“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)

“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)

“Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
Das Kapital (Buch III) (1894)

“But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 449.
Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)

“man's heart is a wonderful thing, especially when carried in the purse”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 9, pg. 252.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 27, pg. 803.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 7, pg. 329.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)
Source: Das Kapital/Das kommunistische Manifest
Context: In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

“The process is so complicated that it offers ever so many occasions for running abnormally.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. II, Ch. XXI, p. 500.
Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)

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